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14,443 | Hoosier hysteria | Hoosier Hysteria is the state of excitement surrounding basketball in Indiana or, more specifically, the Indiana high school basketball tournament. The most famous example occurred in 1954, when Milan (enrollment 161) defeated Muncie Central (enrollment over 1,600) to win the state title.
Indiana's passion for basketball was observed and written about by basketball's inventor, James Naismith, who wrote that while it was invented in Massachusetts, "basketball really had its origin in Indiana, which remains the center of the sport."
Indiana high schools boast a tradition of producing top caliber basketball players. Through the 2009-2010 NBA season, 152 Hoosier athletes have played professional basketball in the world's top league. Considering the size of the state (population 6.4 million), this makes Indiana high schools by far the most successful at developing NBA players per capita. Today there are 22 Hoosiers in the NBA - more than one for every 150,000 male residents. The state's unparalleled ability to produce NBA talent, both statewide and specifically in smaller towns, is featured in this Deadspin article. In 2017, Indiana natives won the NBA and D-league Dunk Contests, NBA and D-league 3-point contests, and won runner-up in the NBA Skills Challenge.
Historically, each of the several hundred small towns of Indiana had its own small school system. Before consolidation of many of these rural school districts in the last half of the twentieth century, Indiana high schools had fewer students than those of most other states; basketball was a natural game for these schools since it only required five starters and a few reserves. Even one or two great basketball players could make a high school team a powerhouse, and nearly every Indiana town dreamt of such glory.
The Franklin Wonder Five was the first team to win the state championship in three consecutive years, from 1920 to 1922. This accomplishment would not be matched for over six decades. The team was led by Fuzzy Vandivier.
After Milan's Miracle in the 1950s, no school with an enrollment of less than 500 won another boys' State title under the all-comers format. As school consolidation became more common and as more rural residents migrated to cities making large high schools grow even larger, smaller high schools had only a mismatch to look forward to come tournament time, as success concentrated in Indiana's large urban and suburban schools. Starting with the 1997–1998 season, Indiana established a controversial four-class system for its basketball championship, although many other sports remain single-class. The state's move to this new system has, to some extent, diminished the phenomenon and public opinion is widely split on the merits of "class basketball."
Aside from the "Milan Miracle," the story of Crispus Attucks High School ranks as one of the greatest in Indiana high school basketball tradition. In 1955, the year after Attucks had lost in the semistate final (state quarterfinals) to Milan's championship team, Attucks gained fame by winning the Indiana state championship, becoming the first all-black school in the nation to win a state title open to all schools regardless of race. Crispus Attucks repeated as champions in 1956, becoming the first Indiana high school team to complete a season undefeated. The Attucks teams of 1954 through 1956 were led by Oscar Robertson. Both stories, Milan and Crispus Attucks, are memorialized for their accomplishments and tradition at the Indiana State Museum as well as at the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in New Castle.
A highlight of the single-class tournament was the 1990 State Championship game, in which the paid attendance was over 40,000 fans. This phenomenal turnout of fans who witnessed Damon Bailey's Bedford-North Lawrence Stars win the State Championship stands as the largest crowd ever to witness a high school basketball game.
After the 1997 season (when Bloomington North won the final single-class State Championship), the IHSAA controversially did away with the single-class system, ending the run of single-class champions in Indiana. There are many in Indiana who lament this loss, and who know that Hoosier Hysteria has been dramatically and significantly lessened thereby. Hoosier Hysteria has not completely diminished however. For example, in 2003, DeKalb High School (1200 students) nearly defeated Pike High School (3000 students). Also, the Indiana tournament is still the most attended in the nation, with final four games for the two larger divisions regularly selling out Gainbridge Fieldhouse (formerly Conseco Fieldhouse and Bankers Life Fieldhouse).
Perhaps one of the more telling signs of the passion and commitment to basketball at the high school level is the number and size of large basketball gymnasiums in the state. With considerable cost and effort, Indiana boasts nine of the ten largest high school gyms in the country, and a purported eighteen of the top twenty. Seventeen venues in Indiana today boast a capacity of over 6,000, the largest being the New Castle Fieldhouse, seating 9,325.
Hoosier Hysteria may have its roots firmly planted in the high school game, but the college tradition brings its own depth to Indiana's passion. In NCAA Division I basketball, Indiana's colleges and universities have a storied past. Big Ten rivals Purdue University and Indiana University are the most notable, with national and conference championships to boast. Smaller schools such as the University of Notre Dame, Indiana State University, Ball State University, Butler University, the University of Evansville, IUPUI, Purdue Fort Wayne, the University of Southern Indiana, and Valparaiso University add to the mix. Vincennes University boasts an outstanding national tradition in the junior college ranks. And in Division II St. Joseph's and the University of Indianapolis have added their own successes to the legend of Indiana basketball. Wabash College won the Men's Division III NCAA Championship in 1982 and their 1905 24-0 team was considered World Champions; DePauw University and Manchester College were Div III National Finalists. It is safe to say that the terms "Final Four" and "March Madness" have grown out of the tradition of Hoosier Hysteria.
The Ball State Cardinals have won several conference championships and earned a number of NCAA Tournament berths over the years, including:
Indiana's collegiate basketball squad, the Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team has several championships to their credit:
The Hoosiers' five NCAA Championships are the fourth in history, tied with Duke, and trailing UCLA (11) Kentucky (8) and North Carolina (6). Their eight trips to the Final Four ranks seventh on the all-time list. The Hoosiers have made 32 appearances in the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament (fifth-most in NCAA history). In those 32 appearances, Indiana has posted 52 victories, the sixth-most in NCAA history.
With their only men's national championship coming in the days before the NCAA Tournament, the Purdue Boilermakers have a basketball history:
The Boilermaker women have one National Championship (1999), one national runner-up finish (2001 to Notre Dame), seven Big Ten Championships, and have won nine of the 25 women's Big Ten tournaments.
The Indianapolis Greyhounds, representing the University of Indianapolis (UIndy), have a storied basketball history. The Greyhounds were led by UIndy Hall of Famer Angus Nicoson throughout the 1950s and 60s, and Nicoson's teams won 8 Hoosier Conference Championships. More recent success has seen the Hounds ranked #1 in the country in Division II basketball in 2014, led by former USI standout, Stan Gouard.
They are members of the Great Lakes Valley Conference, the top Division II conference in the nation.
The Vincennes University men's basketball program is the 4th winningest junior college program in the country, with 1,470 victories. The Trailblazers trail Southeastern Iowa Community College (1,519), Moberly, Mo., (1,505) and Hutchinson, Kan., with 1,490. The Trailblazers' 4 National Titles place them tied with Moberly Area Community College and San Jacinto College - Central, which each have four titles. The Vincennes program began in 1903, however, no teams were formed from 1910 to 1912 and 1931–1950.
The Indiana Pacers are a professional basketball team that plays in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The team is based in the state's capital and largest city, Indianapolis, located in the center of the state. The Indiana Fever of the WNBA, also owned by Melvin & Herb Simon, are the Pacers' sister team and also play in the Gainbridge Fieldhouse.
The Indiana Fever is a professional women's basketball team that plays in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). The Fever are based in Indiana's capital and largest city, Indianapolis. The Fever normally play at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, located in downtown Indianapolis, but will be displaced for the entire 2020 and 2021 seasons, plus at least part of the 2022 season, by a major renovation of that venue. During that time, the Fever will play home games at the Butler Bulldogs' Hinkle Fieldhouse. The team is the sister team of the NBA's Indiana Pacers.
At the conclusion of the regular Big Ten season, a tournament is held to determine the conference winner, who receives the conference's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Indianapolis has hosted all but one of the women's tournaments since its inception in 1995, and Gainbridge Fieldhouse has hosted every tournament since 2002, as well as the 2000 edition. The Big Ten Conference men's basketball tournament began a five-year stint at the then Conseco Fieldhouse in 2008.
Indianapolis, headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and often referred to as the "Amateur Sports Capital of the World" has hosted a number of collegiate basketball events. Aside from the multitude of regional games held during the NCAA tournament, Indianapolis is tied with New York City for having hosted the second most NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championships (1980, 1991, 1997, 2000, 2006, 2010, 2015, and 2021). The city will host the men's Final Four next in 2026 and 2029. Previous events were held in the Market Square Arena or the RCA Dome, but given the new stadium built for the Indianapolis Colts, Lucas Oil Stadium began hosting Final Four events in 2010. When the NCAA Headquarters relocated to Indianapolis, it was stated that Indianapolis would then host the men's Final Four once every five years. The leading factor in the NCAA's decision to move to Indianapolis was the overwhelming amount of local athletic infrastructure, all of it world-class.
In 2002, Indianapolis hosted the FIBA World Championship (now known as the FIBA Basketball World Cup), an event that takes place on even years opposite the Olympic Games. Since inaugural event in 1950, Indianapolis is the only city in the United States to have hosted the event.
Here follows a list of notable Indiana natives, as well as non-natives who were raised in the state, who have achieved success in basketball.
Non-natives (i.e., those who did not arrive in Indiana before college) who gained basketball fame in Indiana's tradition include: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hoosier Hysteria is the state of excitement surrounding basketball in Indiana or, more specifically, the Indiana high school basketball tournament. The most famous example occurred in 1954, when Milan (enrollment 161) defeated Muncie Central (enrollment over 1,600) to win the state title.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Indiana's passion for basketball was observed and written about by basketball's inventor, James Naismith, who wrote that while it was invented in Massachusetts, \"basketball really had its origin in Indiana, which remains the center of the sport.\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Indiana high schools boast a tradition of producing top caliber basketball players. Through the 2009-2010 NBA season, 152 Hoosier athletes have played professional basketball in the world's top league. Considering the size of the state (population 6.4 million), this makes Indiana high schools by far the most successful at developing NBA players per capita. Today there are 22 Hoosiers in the NBA - more than one for every 150,000 male residents. The state's unparalleled ability to produce NBA talent, both statewide and specifically in smaller towns, is featured in this Deadspin article. In 2017, Indiana natives won the NBA and D-league Dunk Contests, NBA and D-league 3-point contests, and won runner-up in the NBA Skills Challenge.",
"title": "High school basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Historically, each of the several hundred small towns of Indiana had its own small school system. Before consolidation of many of these rural school districts in the last half of the twentieth century, Indiana high schools had fewer students than those of most other states; basketball was a natural game for these schools since it only required five starters and a few reserves. Even one or two great basketball players could make a high school team a powerhouse, and nearly every Indiana town dreamt of such glory.",
"title": "High school basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Franklin Wonder Five was the first team to win the state championship in three consecutive years, from 1920 to 1922. This accomplishment would not be matched for over six decades. The team was led by Fuzzy Vandivier.",
"title": "High school basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "After Milan's Miracle in the 1950s, no school with an enrollment of less than 500 won another boys' State title under the all-comers format. As school consolidation became more common and as more rural residents migrated to cities making large high schools grow even larger, smaller high schools had only a mismatch to look forward to come tournament time, as success concentrated in Indiana's large urban and suburban schools. Starting with the 1997–1998 season, Indiana established a controversial four-class system for its basketball championship, although many other sports remain single-class. The state's move to this new system has, to some extent, diminished the phenomenon and public opinion is widely split on the merits of \"class basketball.\"",
"title": "High school basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Aside from the \"Milan Miracle,\" the story of Crispus Attucks High School ranks as one of the greatest in Indiana high school basketball tradition. In 1955, the year after Attucks had lost in the semistate final (state quarterfinals) to Milan's championship team, Attucks gained fame by winning the Indiana state championship, becoming the first all-black school in the nation to win a state title open to all schools regardless of race. Crispus Attucks repeated as champions in 1956, becoming the first Indiana high school team to complete a season undefeated. The Attucks teams of 1954 through 1956 were led by Oscar Robertson. Both stories, Milan and Crispus Attucks, are memorialized for their accomplishments and tradition at the Indiana State Museum as well as at the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in New Castle.",
"title": "High school basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A highlight of the single-class tournament was the 1990 State Championship game, in which the paid attendance was over 40,000 fans. This phenomenal turnout of fans who witnessed Damon Bailey's Bedford-North Lawrence Stars win the State Championship stands as the largest crowd ever to witness a high school basketball game.",
"title": "High school basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "After the 1997 season (when Bloomington North won the final single-class State Championship), the IHSAA controversially did away with the single-class system, ending the run of single-class champions in Indiana. There are many in Indiana who lament this loss, and who know that Hoosier Hysteria has been dramatically and significantly lessened thereby. Hoosier Hysteria has not completely diminished however. For example, in 2003, DeKalb High School (1200 students) nearly defeated Pike High School (3000 students). Also, the Indiana tournament is still the most attended in the nation, with final four games for the two larger divisions regularly selling out Gainbridge Fieldhouse (formerly Conseco Fieldhouse and Bankers Life Fieldhouse).",
"title": "High school basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Perhaps one of the more telling signs of the passion and commitment to basketball at the high school level is the number and size of large basketball gymnasiums in the state. With considerable cost and effort, Indiana boasts nine of the ten largest high school gyms in the country, and a purported eighteen of the top twenty. Seventeen venues in Indiana today boast a capacity of over 6,000, the largest being the New Castle Fieldhouse, seating 9,325.",
"title": "High school basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Hoosier Hysteria may have its roots firmly planted in the high school game, but the college tradition brings its own depth to Indiana's passion. In NCAA Division I basketball, Indiana's colleges and universities have a storied past. Big Ten rivals Purdue University and Indiana University are the most notable, with national and conference championships to boast. Smaller schools such as the University of Notre Dame, Indiana State University, Ball State University, Butler University, the University of Evansville, IUPUI, Purdue Fort Wayne, the University of Southern Indiana, and Valparaiso University add to the mix. Vincennes University boasts an outstanding national tradition in the junior college ranks. And in Division II St. Joseph's and the University of Indianapolis have added their own successes to the legend of Indiana basketball. Wabash College won the Men's Division III NCAA Championship in 1982 and their 1905 24-0 team was considered World Champions; DePauw University and Manchester College were Div III National Finalists. It is safe to say that the terms \"Final Four\" and \"March Madness\" have grown out of the tradition of Hoosier Hysteria.",
"title": "College basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Ball State Cardinals have won several conference championships and earned a number of NCAA Tournament berths over the years, including:",
"title": "College basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Indiana's collegiate basketball squad, the Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team has several championships to their credit:",
"title": "College basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Hoosiers' five NCAA Championships are the fourth in history, tied with Duke, and trailing UCLA (11) Kentucky (8) and North Carolina (6). Their eight trips to the Final Four ranks seventh on the all-time list. The Hoosiers have made 32 appearances in the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament (fifth-most in NCAA history). In those 32 appearances, Indiana has posted 52 victories, the sixth-most in NCAA history.",
"title": "College basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "With their only men's national championship coming in the days before the NCAA Tournament, the Purdue Boilermakers have a basketball history:",
"title": "College basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Boilermaker women have one National Championship (1999), one national runner-up finish (2001 to Notre Dame), seven Big Ten Championships, and have won nine of the 25 women's Big Ten tournaments.",
"title": "College basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Indianapolis Greyhounds, representing the University of Indianapolis (UIndy), have a storied basketball history. The Greyhounds were led by UIndy Hall of Famer Angus Nicoson throughout the 1950s and 60s, and Nicoson's teams won 8 Hoosier Conference Championships. More recent success has seen the Hounds ranked #1 in the country in Division II basketball in 2014, led by former USI standout, Stan Gouard.",
"title": "College basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "They are members of the Great Lakes Valley Conference, the top Division II conference in the nation.",
"title": "College basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Vincennes University men's basketball program is the 4th winningest junior college program in the country, with 1,470 victories. The Trailblazers trail Southeastern Iowa Community College (1,519), Moberly, Mo., (1,505) and Hutchinson, Kan., with 1,490. The Trailblazers' 4 National Titles place them tied with Moberly Area Community College and San Jacinto College - Central, which each have four titles. The Vincennes program began in 1903, however, no teams were formed from 1910 to 1912 and 1931–1950.",
"title": "College basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Indiana Pacers are a professional basketball team that plays in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The team is based in the state's capital and largest city, Indianapolis, located in the center of the state. The Indiana Fever of the WNBA, also owned by Melvin & Herb Simon, are the Pacers' sister team and also play in the Gainbridge Fieldhouse.",
"title": "Professional basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Indiana Fever is a professional women's basketball team that plays in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). The Fever are based in Indiana's capital and largest city, Indianapolis. The Fever normally play at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, located in downtown Indianapolis, but will be displaced for the entire 2020 and 2021 seasons, plus at least part of the 2022 season, by a major renovation of that venue. During that time, the Fever will play home games at the Butler Bulldogs' Hinkle Fieldhouse. The team is the sister team of the NBA's Indiana Pacers.",
"title": "Professional basketball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "At the conclusion of the regular Big Ten season, a tournament is held to determine the conference winner, who receives the conference's automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Indianapolis has hosted all but one of the women's tournaments since its inception in 1995, and Gainbridge Fieldhouse has hosted every tournament since 2002, as well as the 2000 edition. The Big Ten Conference men's basketball tournament began a five-year stint at the then Conseco Fieldhouse in 2008.",
"title": "National profile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Indianapolis, headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and often referred to as the \"Amateur Sports Capital of the World\" has hosted a number of collegiate basketball events. Aside from the multitude of regional games held during the NCAA tournament, Indianapolis is tied with New York City for having hosted the second most NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championships (1980, 1991, 1997, 2000, 2006, 2010, 2015, and 2021). The city will host the men's Final Four next in 2026 and 2029. Previous events were held in the Market Square Arena or the RCA Dome, but given the new stadium built for the Indianapolis Colts, Lucas Oil Stadium began hosting Final Four events in 2010. When the NCAA Headquarters relocated to Indianapolis, it was stated that Indianapolis would then host the men's Final Four once every five years. The leading factor in the NCAA's decision to move to Indianapolis was the overwhelming amount of local athletic infrastructure, all of it world-class.",
"title": "National profile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 2002, Indianapolis hosted the FIBA World Championship (now known as the FIBA Basketball World Cup), an event that takes place on even years opposite the Olympic Games. Since inaugural event in 1950, Indianapolis is the only city in the United States to have hosted the event.",
"title": "National profile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Here follows a list of notable Indiana natives, as well as non-natives who were raised in the state, who have achieved success in basketball.",
"title": "Local basketball stars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Non-natives (i.e., those who did not arrive in Indiana before college) who gained basketball fame in Indiana's tradition include:",
"title": "Local basketball stars"
}
]
| Hoosier Hysteria is the state of excitement surrounding basketball in Indiana or, more specifically, the Indiana high school basketball tournament. The most famous example occurred in 1954, when Milan defeated Muncie Central to win the state title. Indiana's passion for basketball was observed and written about by basketball's inventor, James Naismith, who wrote that while it was invented in Massachusetts, "basketball really had its origin in Indiana, which remains the center of the sport." | 2002-01-16T19:01:32Z | 2023-12-24T20:03:16Z | [
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"Template:Cite news",
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]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoosier_hysteria |
14,445 | Hardcore | Hardcore, hard core or hard-core may refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hardcore, hard core or hard-core may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| Hardcore, hard core or hard-core may refer to: | 2002-01-17T06:47:23Z | 2023-09-09T21:28:28Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcore |
14,446 | Harold Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis | Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis KG, GCB, OM, GCMG, CSI, DSO, MC, CD, PC (Can), PC, (10 December 1891 – 16 June 1969) was a senior and highly decorated British Army officer who served in both of the world wars. In addition, following the end of his military career, he served as Governor General of Canada and became the first Lord Lieutenant of Greater London in 1965.
Alexander was born in London and was educated at Harrow before moving on to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, for training as an army officer of the Irish Guards. He rose to prominence through his service in the First World War, and continued his military career through various British campaigns across Europe and Asia during the interwar period. In the Second World War, Alexander, initially in command of a division, oversaw the final stages of the Allied evacuation from Dunkirk and subsequently held field commands in Britain, Burma, North Africa and Italy, including serving as Commander-in-Chief Middle East and commanding the 18th Army Group in Tunisia. He then commanded the 15th Army Group for the capture of Sicily and again in Italy before being promoted to field marshal and being made Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean in late 1944.
In 1946 he was appointed as Governor General of Canada by King George VI, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to replace the Earl of Athlone as viceroy, and he occupied the post until he was succeeded by Vincent Massey in 1952. Alexander proved to be enthusiastic about the Canadian wilderness and popular with Canadians. He was the last Governor General who was born in the United Kingdom as well as the last Governor General to be a peer.
After the end of his viceregal tenure, Alexander was sworn into the Queen's Privy Council for Canada and thereafter, in order to serve as the British Minister of Defence in the Cabinet of Winston Churchill, into the Imperial Privy Council. Alexander retired in 1954 and died in 1969.
Alexander was born in London into an aristocratic family from County Tyrone of Anglo-Irish descent. He was the third son of James Alexander, 4th Earl of Caledon, and Lady Elizabeth Graham-Toler, Countess of Caledon, a daughter of the 3rd Earl of Norbury. Alexander was educated at Hawtreys and Harrow School, there participating as the 11th batsman in the sensational Fowler's Match against Eton College in 1910. Though Alexander toyed with the notion of becoming an artist, he went instead on to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in 1910.
After passing out from Sandhurst he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Irish Guards on 23 September 1911. He was promoted to lieutenant on 5 December 1912.
Alexander spent most of the First World War on the Western Front. As a 22-year-old platoon commander in the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, he served with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in 1914. He took part in the retreat from Mons and was wounded at First Ypres and invalided home. He was promoted to temporary captain on 15 November 1914 and permanent captain in the newly raised 2nd Battalion on 7 February the following year.
Alexander returned to the Western Front in August 1915, fought at the Battle of Loos and was, for ten days in October 1915, an acting major and acting Commanding Officer (CO) of the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, as a "Battle Casualty Replacement". He then returned to the 2nd Battalion as a company officer and, in January 1916, received the Military Cross for his bravery at Loos. For service in the Battle of the Somme on 15 September 1916, he was, in October, appointed to the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), the citation for which read:
For conspicuous gallantry in action. He was the life and soul of the attack, and throughout the day led forward not only his own men but men of all regiments. He held the trenches gained in spite of heavy machine gun fire."
In the same month, Alexander was further honoured with induction into the French Légion d'honneur.
On 10 December 1916, his twenty-fifth birthday, Alexander became second-in-command (2-i-c) of the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, as an acting major. By May, he was briefly acting CO of the 1st Battalion, as an acting lieutenant colonel, while still only a substantive captain. He became a permanent major on 1 August 1917, and was again promoted acting lieutenant colonel, this time confirmed as CO of the 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards, on 15 October. Alexander commanded his battalion at Third Ypres, where he was slightly wounded, then at Bourlon Wood (part of the battle of Cambrai), where his battalion suffered 320 casualties out of 400 men. Alexander, between 23 and 30 March 1918, had to assume command of the 4th Guards Brigade, during the British retreat from the German Army's Spring Offensive. He once again commanded the 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards, at Hazebrouck in April 1918, where it took such severe casualties that it saw no further action. Still an acting lieutenant colonel, he then commanded a corps infantry school in October 1918, a month before the war ended on 11 November 1918.
Rudyard Kipling, who wrote a history of the Irish Guards, in which his own son, Jack Kipling, fought and was killed in action, noted that, "it is undeniable that Colonel Alexander had the gift of handling the men on the lines to which they most readily responded... His subordinates loved him, even when he fell upon them blisteringly for their shortcomings; and his men were all his own."
Alexander in 1919 served with the Allied Control Commission in Poland. As a temporary lieutenant-colonel, he led the Baltic German Landeswehr in the Latvian War of Independence, commanding units loyal to Latvia in the successful drive to eject the Bolsheviks from Latgalia. During service there, he was accidentally wounded by one of his own sentries on 9 October 1919.
Alexander returned to Britain in May 1920 as a major, second in command of the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards; in May 1922, he was promoted substantive lieutenant-colonel and appointed commanding officer. He commanded the battalion at Constantinople (a sensitive posting in the runup to the Chanak Crisis), then Gibraltar from October 1922, then in London from April 1923 until January 1926, when he was released from that role to attend the Staff College at Camberley, England, from 1926 to 1927. By now Alexander had gained an excellent reputation for himself. In addition, he was older than many of his fellow students—and even some of his instructors—at the college. Among his many fellow students were Douglas Wimberley, who would later become a major-general and command the 51st (Highland) Division from 1941—1943, including at the Second Battle of El Alamein, who formed a high opinion of Alexander, who, despite his outstanding war record, showed little sign of being overly pleased with himself. Instead, he showed "simplicity, directness and kindness" and gained the respect of all at the college, with two notable exceptions—the future field marshals Alan Brooke and Bernard Montgomery—who did not come away with a particularly favourable impression of him.
After graduating from the Staff College, Alexander was then, in February 1928, promoted to colonel (backdated to 14 May 1926) and was the next month appointed Officer Commanding the Irish Guards Regimental District and 140th (4th London) Infantry Brigade, part of the 47th (1/2nd London) Division, in the Territorial Army (TA), a post he held until January 1930, when he again returned to study, attending the Imperial Defence College in London for one year.
Alexander then held staff appointments as (from January 1931) GSO2 in the Directorate of Military Training at the War Office and (1932–1934) GSO1 at HQ Northern Command in York, before being made in October 1934 a temporary brigadier and given command of the Nowshera Brigade, on the Northwest Frontier in India. For his service there, and in particular for his actions in the Loe-Agra operations against the Pathans in Malakand between February and April 1935, Alexander was that year made a Companion of the Order of the Star of India and was mentioned in dispatches. He was mentioned once more for his service during the Second Mohmand Campaign in Northwest Frontier Province from August to October of the same year, serving under Brigadier Claude Auchinleck. Alexander had a reputation for leading from the front and for reaching mountain crests with or even ahead of his troops.
In March 1937, Alexander was appointed as one of the aides-de-camp to the recently acceded King George VI and in May returned to the United Kingdom to take part in this capacity in the state procession through London during the King's coronation. Alexander would have been seen in this event by two of his Canadian viceregal successors: Vincent Massey, who was then the Canadian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, and Massey's secretary, Georges Vanier, who watched the procession from the roof of Canada House on Trafalgar Square. Following the coronation celebration, Alexander returned to India, where he was made the honorary colonel of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Punjab Regiment, and then in October 1937 was promoted to the rank of major-general, making Alexander the youngest general in the British Army. He relinquished command of his brigade in January 1938, and in February returned to the United Kingdom to take command of the 1st Infantry Division. In June 1938 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, in September 1939, Alexander brought the 1st Division to France, where it became part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and served there for the next eight months. In May 1940, when the German Army invaded France, he successfully led the division's withdrawal to Dunkirk, where it was evacuated to England, along with the rest of the BEF. Shortly after Major-General Bernard Montgomery had been appointed to command II Corps (and before that the 3rd Division), Alexander was, while still on the beachhead, placed in command of I Corps, and left the eastern mole on the destroyer Venomous late on 2 June after ensuring that all British troops had been evacuated. In recognition of his services in the field from March to June 1940, Alexander was again mentioned in despatches.
After Dunkirk, Alexander returned to the United Kingdom and continued to command I Corps, now guarding the coasts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire as part of Northern Command. He was promoted acting lieutenant-general in July 1940, and in December 1940 he was appointed to succeed Claude Auchinleck as General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GOC-in-C) of Southern Command, which was responsible for the defence of south-west England. His rank of lieutenant-general was made permanent in December 1940. While he was here he came into contact with Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery, who was then serving under his command as GOC of V Corps. Montgomery and Auchinleck had never seen eye-to-eye on much but Alexander, believing Montgomery, who had been one of Alexander's instructors at the Staff College in the mid-1920s, knew what he was doing, simply allowed Montgomery (or "Monty") to continue with what he was doing. The two men got along well and their relationship would continue in a similar manner later on in the war.
It was during this period and most of 1941 where Alexander came to the attention of his superiors, the most notable among them being General Sir Alan Brooke, then the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces (and in December 1941 succeeding John Dill as Chief of the Imperial General Staff), and Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister. Churchill in particular became a great admirer of Alexander and visited him numerous times throughout 1941, nominating him as the commander of Force 110. Created on paper as the first expeditionary force since the BEF's evacuation from France the year before, Force 110 was considered for several projects throughout the year of 1941, such as landings in the Azores, the Canary Islands and Sicily, but these were, perhaps fortunately, all ultimately abandoned.
On 1 January 1942 he was knighted and appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, and in February, after the Japanese invasion of Burma, was sent to India to become GOC-in-C of British Forces in Burma as a full general. Alexander was unable to fulfil his orders to hold Rangoon, which was abandoned on 6–7 March. He took personal charge of some small local engagements, and was encircled by the Japanese troops in the Battle of Yenangyaung. Rescued by Chinese troops commanded by General Sun Li-jen, Alexander was able to escape. Following that, Alexander increasingly left much of the tactical conduct of the campaign to his corps commander, Lieutenant-General William Slim, while he himself handled the more political aspects of relations with Joseph Stilwell, the nominal commander of the Chinese forces. Alexander was promoted to Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of Allied Land Forces in Burma, March 1942, and ordered Slim to abandon Mandalay and retreat to India.
By July 1942, the British and Indian forces in Burma had completed their fighting retreat into India, and Alexander, having yet again been mentioned in despatches for his Burma service, was recalled to the United Kingdom. He was at first selected to command the British First Army, which was to take part in Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa. However, following a visit in early August to Egypt by the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke, Alexander flew to Cairo on 8 August to replace General Claude Auchinleck, Alexander's predecessor at Southern Command in the United Kingdom, as C-in-C of Middle East Command, the post responsible for the overall conduct of the campaign in the desert of North Africa. At the same time, Lieutenant-General Montgomery replaced Auchinleck as GOC of the British Eighth Army. Alexander presided over Montgomery's victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein and the advance of the Eighth Army to Tripoli, for which Alexander was elevated to a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, and, after the Anglo-American forces of the First Army (under Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson) from Operation Torch and the Eighth Army converged in Tunisia in February 1943, they were brought under the unified command of a newly formed 18th Army Group headquarters, commanded by Alexander and reporting to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean theatre at Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ). The American General Omar Bradley, who fought in the Tunisian campaign, then commanding the U.S. II Corps, credited Alexander's patience and experience with helping an inexperienced United States "field command mature and eventually come of age."
The Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered by May 1943, with some 250,000 Axis troops surrendering, the largest surrender yet in the war. Alexander telegraphed Churchill in response, stating:
Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over. All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.
After the Tunisian campaign, Alexander's command became the 15th Army Group, which became responsible (under General Eisenhower) for mounting the July 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily (codenamed Operation Husky). Once again, Alexander directed two field armies, both commanded by strong-willed characters who were not easy to control: General Montgomery's British Eighth Army and Lieutenant General George S. Patton's U.S. Seventh Army. The campaign did not portray Alexander at his best and he failed to grip his two commanders. Montgomery's Eighth Army found itself in a slogging match against typically skilful German opposition on the Catanian plain and on the slopes of Mount Etna. Patton, resentful in his belief that he and his Seventh Army had been given a secondary role in the campaign, confronted Alexander and successfully argued for his army to be allowed to drive to the northwest and to capture Palermo. Although initially reluctant to allow Patton such a role, Alexander eventually, but reluctantly, allowed the Seventh Army commander to have his way, although Palermo did not appear to have much strategic significance. Despite this, it turned out to be the key to unlocking the Axis forces' defences and gave the Americans an easier route towards Messina. The brief campaign in Sicily proved largely successful, but some (with Montgomery among the loudest of the critics) believed that the campaign lacked direction - and blamed Alexander. Furthermore, although the Axis forces had been forced to withdraw from Sicily, they had managed to do so in relatively good order, crossing the Straits of Messina into Italy.
After Sicily, planning began for the Allied invasion of Italy, which began on 3 September 1943 (the fourth anniversary of Britain's entry into the war). Montgomery's Eighth Army launched Operation Baytown, crossing over into Calabria but initially facing little real opposition and slowly making its way up the Italian peninsula. Six days later the U.S. Fifth Army (which, despite its name, included the British X Corps under Lieutenant-General Richard McCreery, under its command) under Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark landed at Salerno as part of Operation Avalanche, which, initially at least, started off well, before encountering heavy resistance and almost being thrown back into the sea. He supported McCreery when he refused to consider evacuation plans that Clark had been considering. Alexander was also instrumental in convincing Clark to replace the U.S. VI Corps commander, Major General Ernest J. Dawley - who had not performed well and whom Alexander described as "a broken reed" - with Major General John P. Lucas. Despite the heavy casualties sustained at Salerno, the Allies managed to force the Axis forces back and, with both the Fifth and Eighth Armies now united at last, began pursuing the retreating enemy. By December 1943 progress had virtually ground to a halt as the Axis had Alexander's 15th Army Group held up at the Winter Line (also known as the Gustav Line) and ground was gained only at the expense of heavy casualties. At around this time there were numerous Allied command changes, with Montgomery handing over the Eighth Army to Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese and departing for the United Kingdom to take up command of the 21st Army Group, which controlled all Allied land forces for the planned invasion of Normandy, whilst General Sir Henry Wilson replaced Eisenhower as the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean in January 1944.
The fighting in Italy would continue to prove even more difficult for Alexander's forces over the following few months. Between January and May 1944, numerous Allied attacks were repulsed at Monte Cassino (which was also bombed in February 1944, with Alexander taking responsibility for the decision to bomb it) and the Anzio landings of January 1944 by Lucas's U.S. VI Corps began well but did not live up to expectations and eventually ended up in a stalemate, like the rest of the Italian fighting so far. Alexander had a large part in planning the landings (code-named "Operation Shingle"), and intended to draw German strength away from the Winter Line and to cut their lines of communication. The scheme was supported by Prime Minister Churchill, who had very high expectations for Shingle. However, the operation was flawed in many ways. In particular, Alexander's plan of seizing the Alban Hills might possibly have led to the entire Allied force (comprising only two infantry divisions, elements of the U.S. 1st Armored Division, and other smaller units in support) being wiped out. Despite Churchill's and Alexander's intentions, the Allied forces at Anzio did not achieve the somewhat unrealistic expectations, and were essentially cut off from any support, although they did manage to lure German reserves from elsewhere, which might otherwise have been available for service on the Eastern Front or during the impending Allied invasion of Normandy.
When Eisenhower was appointed in December 1943 as Supreme Allied Commander for the planned Normandy landings, he suggested that Alexander become ground-forces commander, as he was popular with both British and American officers. Omar Bradley (who had commanded U.S. II Corps in Sicily, and later the U.S. First Army and then the U.S. 12th Army Group) remarked that he would have preferred to work with Alexander rather than Montgomery, as he regarded the former as "a restrained, self-effacive and punctilious soldier". Of the problems that subsequently surfaced with Montgomery's command of the Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group, Bradley suspected they would not have occurred with Alexander in command. Brooke, however, applied pressure to keep Alexander in Italy, considering him unfit for the assignment in France. Thus Alexander remained in command of the 15th Army Group, and, with the support of numerous Allied commanders, controversially authorised the bombing of the historic abbey at Monte Cassino (February 1944), which resulted in little advance on the German Winter Line defences, which had managed to halt the Allied advance in Italy. It was not until the fourth attempt that the Winter Line was breached by the Allies, and Alexander's forces moved on to capture Rome in June 1944, thereby achieving one of the strategic goals of the Italian campaign. However, the U.S. VI Corps, now under Major General Lucian Truscott, in the Anzio beachhead, under U.S. Fifth Army commander Clark's orders, failed to follow their original break-out plan that would have trapped the German 10th Army escaping northwards in the aftermath of the Battle of Monte Cassino, instead favouring an early and highly publicised entry into Rome two days before the Allied landings in Normandy. Although Alexander was angry at Clark for deliberately disobeying his specific orders in order to reach Rome first, he chose to say nothing, believing that it would do nothing for the Allied cause if he were to do so.
Alexander remained in command of the 15th Army Group, as well as of its successor, the Allied Armies in Italy (AAI), for most of the Italian campaign, until December 1944, when he relinquished his command to Clark and took over as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces Headquarters, responsible for all military operations in the Mediterranean theatre. Alexander was concurrently promoted to the rank of field marshal, though this was backdated to the fall of Rome on 4 June 1944, so that Alexander would once again be senior to Montgomery, who had himself been made a field marshal on 1 September 1944, after the end of the Battle of Normandy.
Alexander received the German surrender in Italy on 29 April 1945. As a reward for his leadership in North Africa and Italy, Alexander, along with a number of other prominent British Second World War military leaders, was elevated to the peerage on 1 March 1946 by King George VI; he was created Viscount Alexander of Tunis and of Errigal in the County of Donegal.
Brooke felt that Alexander needed an able chief of staff "to think for him", while Montgomery (Alexander's subordinate in North Africa, Sicily and Italy) claimed to think of Alexander as "incompetent" and believed that success was attained in Tunisia only because Montgomery lent Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, the commander of IX Corps of Anderson's First Army, to organise the coup de grace. However, Harold Macmillan (British Minister Resident in the Mediterranean from 1942 to 1945) was impressed by Alexander's calm and style - the general conducted dinners in his mess like those at an Oxbridge high table, discussing architecture and the campaigns of Belisarius, rather than the current war. Macmillan thought Alexander's urbane manner and willingness to discuss and compromise were a sensible way to maintain inter-Allied cooperation, but Alexander's reserve was such that some thought him empty of strategic ideas and unable to make decisions. Graham and Bidwell, however, wrote that Alexander's impenetrable reserve made it hard to judge whether or not he had any military ideas. They state that he was "unable or unwilling" to assert his will over his army commanders, and that Mark Clark, who often referred to Alexander scornfully as a "peanut" and a "feather duster", exploited this weakness.
With the cessation of hostilities, Alexander was under serious consideration for appointment to the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the British Army's most senior position beneath the sovereign. He was invited, though, by Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to be his recommendation to the King for the post of Governor General of Canada. Alexander thus chose to retire from the army and take up the new position, in anticipation of which he was on 26 January 1946 appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George and created Viscount Alexander of Tunis, of Errigal in the County of Donegal, on 1 March. On 21 March 1946, the commission under the royal sign-manual and signet appointing Alexander was issued. Alexander was subsequently sworn in during a ceremony in the Senate chamber on 12 April that year.
Alexander took his duties as the viceroy quite seriously, feeling that as governor general, he acted as a connection between Canadians and their King, and spent considerable time travelling Canada during his term; he eventually logged no less than 294,500 km (184,000 mi) during his five years as governor general. On these trips, he sought to engage with Canadians through various ceremonies and events; he was keenly interested in his role as Chief Scout of Canada and, in preparation for his kicking of the opening ball in the 1946 Grey Cup final, practised frequently on the grounds of the royal and viceregal residence, Rideau Hall. Also, in commemoration of Alexander being named the first non-aboriginal chief of the Kwakiutl tribe, he was given a totem pole on 13 July 1946; crafted by Mungo Martin, it remains on the grounds of Rideau Hall today. By the end of the year, Alexander was also distinguished with his induction as a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter.
In 1947, the King issued letters patent granting his Canadian governor general permission to exercise all those powers belonging to the monarch in respect of Canada and, at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers Conference of 1949, the decision was reached to use the term 'member of the Commonwealth' instead of 'Dominion' to refer to the non-British member states of the Commonwealth of Nations. That same year, Alexander oversaw the admission of the Newfoundland (a dominion by name but not self-governing) into the Canadian Confederation and toured the new province that summer. Then, during a later visit to Alberta, the Governor General was admitted to the Blackfoot tribe as Chief Eagle Head. However, though the post-war period saw a boom in prosperity for Canada, the country was again at war by 1950, with Alexander, in his role as acting commander-in-chief, deploying to the Korean War soldiers, sailors, and airmen, whom he would visit prior to their departure for north-east Asia. In May 1951, as Commander-in-Chief of Canada, he was deemed a fitting inaugural recipient of the Canadian Forces' Decoration, starting a long tradition of every governor general accepting the CD, usually shortly after their installation as the Sovereign's personal representative in Canada.
The Viscount travelled abroad on official trips—in 1947 visiting US president Harry S. Truman and in June 1948 Brazilian president Eurico Gaspar Dutra—as well as hosting a number of dignitaries. The visit of the Irish Taoiseach, John A. Costello, in 1948 caused Alexander some embarrassment when Costello chose the occasion to announce that most of Ireland would leave the Commonwealth (Northern Ireland would remain a constituent part of the United Kingdom). Although the decision had been taken in principle earlier, the sudden announcement caused a diplomatic storm and Costello, to deflect criticism, claimed that he had been provoked into making the announcement by a series of diplomatic snubs by Lord Alexander. In his memoirs, Costello was to admit that Alexander's behaviour had in fact been perfectly civil and could have had no bearing on a decision which had already been made to declare the Republic of Ireland.
The Alexanders' relatively informal lifestyle at Rideau Hall was demonstrated when during the Canadian tour of Princess Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Viscount and Viscountess hosted a square dance in the palace's ballroom. Alexander painted (creating a personal studio in the former dairy at Rideau Hall and mounting classes in art at the National Gallery of Canada), partook in a number of sports (including golf, ice hockey, and rugby), and enjoyed the outdoors, particularly during Ontario and Quebec's maple syrup harvest, himself overseeing the process on Rideau Hall's grounds. The Viscount was known to escape from official duties to partake in his most favourite pastime of fishing, once departing from the 1951 royal tour of Princess Elizabeth to take in a day's fishing at Griffin Island, in Georgian Bay, and granting a day off for students in the town of Drayton, Ontario, where his train briefly stopped. He presented the Alexander Cup to the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association in November 1950; the cup became the championship trophy of the Major Series of senior ice hockey.
Among Canadians, Alexander proved to be a popular viceroy, despite the calls for a Canadian-born governor general that had preceded his appointment. He not only had a much praised military reputation (he was considered to be the best military strategist since the 1st Duke of Wellington) but also was a charismatic figure, with an easy ability to communicate with people. Others, however, did not fully approve of Alexander; editor Hugh Templin, from Fergus, Ontario, met with Alexander during Templin's time as a special correspondent with the Canadian Press during the Second World War, and he said of the encounter: "Lord Alexander impressed us considerably, if not too favourably. He was an aristocratic type, who didn't like newspaper men."
Lord Alexander gave up the office of Governor General of Canada officially on 28 January 1952 after Churchill asked him to return to London to take the post of Minister of Defence in the British government. The aging Churchill had found it increasingly difficult to cope with holding that portfolio concurrently with that of prime minister, although he still took many major decisions himself, leaving Alexander with little real power. George VI died on the night of 5–6 February and Alexander, in respect of the King's mourning, departed quietly for the United Kingdom, leaving Chief Justice of Canada Thibaudeau Rinfret as administrator of the government in his place. After his return to the UK, Alexander was on 14 March 1952 elevated in the peerage by Queen Elizabeth II, becoming Earl Alexander of Tunis, Baron Rideau of Ottawa and Castle Derg. He was also appointed to the organising committee for the Queen's coronation and was charged with carrying the Sovereign's Orb in the state procession on that occasion in 1953.
The Earl served as the British defence minister until 1954, when he retired from politics. In 1959 the Queen appointed Alexander to the Order of Merit. From 1960 to 1965, he served as Constable of the Tower of London. Alexander was an active freemason.
Canada remained a favourite second home for the Alexanders and they returned frequently to visit family and friends until Alexander died on 16 June 1969 of a perforated aorta. His funeral was held on 24 June 1969, at St. George's Chapel, in Windsor Castle, and his remains are buried in the churchyard of Ridge, near Tyttenhanger, his family's Hertfordshire home.
Alexander married Lady Margaret Bingham, daughter of George Bingham, 5th Earl of Lucan, on 14 October 1931. They had three children together and adopted a fourth:
Ribbon bars of the Earl Alexander of Tunis
Appointments
Decorations
Medals
Awards
Alberta
Geographic locations
Schools | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis KG, GCB, OM, GCMG, CSI, DSO, MC, CD, PC (Can), PC, (10 December 1891 – 16 June 1969) was a senior and highly decorated British Army officer who served in both of the world wars. In addition, following the end of his military career, he served as Governor General of Canada and became the first Lord Lieutenant of Greater London in 1965.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Alexander was born in London and was educated at Harrow before moving on to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, for training as an army officer of the Irish Guards. He rose to prominence through his service in the First World War, and continued his military career through various British campaigns across Europe and Asia during the interwar period. In the Second World War, Alexander, initially in command of a division, oversaw the final stages of the Allied evacuation from Dunkirk and subsequently held field commands in Britain, Burma, North Africa and Italy, including serving as Commander-in-Chief Middle East and commanding the 18th Army Group in Tunisia. He then commanded the 15th Army Group for the capture of Sicily and again in Italy before being promoted to field marshal and being made Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean in late 1944.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1946 he was appointed as Governor General of Canada by King George VI, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to replace the Earl of Athlone as viceroy, and he occupied the post until he was succeeded by Vincent Massey in 1952. Alexander proved to be enthusiastic about the Canadian wilderness and popular with Canadians. He was the last Governor General who was born in the United Kingdom as well as the last Governor General to be a peer.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "After the end of his viceregal tenure, Alexander was sworn into the Queen's Privy Council for Canada and thereafter, in order to serve as the British Minister of Defence in the Cabinet of Winston Churchill, into the Imperial Privy Council. Alexander retired in 1954 and died in 1969.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Alexander was born in London into an aristocratic family from County Tyrone of Anglo-Irish descent. He was the third son of James Alexander, 4th Earl of Caledon, and Lady Elizabeth Graham-Toler, Countess of Caledon, a daughter of the 3rd Earl of Norbury. Alexander was educated at Hawtreys and Harrow School, there participating as the 11th batsman in the sensational Fowler's Match against Eton College in 1910. Though Alexander toyed with the notion of becoming an artist, he went instead on to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in 1910.",
"title": "Early life and military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "After passing out from Sandhurst he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Irish Guards on 23 September 1911. He was promoted to lieutenant on 5 December 1912.",
"title": "Early life and military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Alexander spent most of the First World War on the Western Front. As a 22-year-old platoon commander in the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, he served with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in 1914. He took part in the retreat from Mons and was wounded at First Ypres and invalided home. He was promoted to temporary captain on 15 November 1914 and permanent captain in the newly raised 2nd Battalion on 7 February the following year.",
"title": "First World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Alexander returned to the Western Front in August 1915, fought at the Battle of Loos and was, for ten days in October 1915, an acting major and acting Commanding Officer (CO) of the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, as a \"Battle Casualty Replacement\". He then returned to the 2nd Battalion as a company officer and, in January 1916, received the Military Cross for his bravery at Loos. For service in the Battle of the Somme on 15 September 1916, he was, in October, appointed to the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), the citation for which read:",
"title": "First World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "For conspicuous gallantry in action. He was the life and soul of the attack, and throughout the day led forward not only his own men but men of all regiments. He held the trenches gained in spite of heavy machine gun fire.\"",
"title": "First World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the same month, Alexander was further honoured with induction into the French Légion d'honneur.",
"title": "First World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "On 10 December 1916, his twenty-fifth birthday, Alexander became second-in-command (2-i-c) of the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, as an acting major. By May, he was briefly acting CO of the 1st Battalion, as an acting lieutenant colonel, while still only a substantive captain. He became a permanent major on 1 August 1917, and was again promoted acting lieutenant colonel, this time confirmed as CO of the 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards, on 15 October. Alexander commanded his battalion at Third Ypres, where he was slightly wounded, then at Bourlon Wood (part of the battle of Cambrai), where his battalion suffered 320 casualties out of 400 men. Alexander, between 23 and 30 March 1918, had to assume command of the 4th Guards Brigade, during the British retreat from the German Army's Spring Offensive. He once again commanded the 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards, at Hazebrouck in April 1918, where it took such severe casualties that it saw no further action. Still an acting lieutenant colonel, he then commanded a corps infantry school in October 1918, a month before the war ended on 11 November 1918.",
"title": "First World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Rudyard Kipling, who wrote a history of the Irish Guards, in which his own son, Jack Kipling, fought and was killed in action, noted that, \"it is undeniable that Colonel Alexander had the gift of handling the men on the lines to which they most readily responded... His subordinates loved him, even when he fell upon them blisteringly for their shortcomings; and his men were all his own.\"",
"title": "First World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Alexander in 1919 served with the Allied Control Commission in Poland. As a temporary lieutenant-colonel, he led the Baltic German Landeswehr in the Latvian War of Independence, commanding units loyal to Latvia in the successful drive to eject the Bolsheviks from Latgalia. During service there, he was accidentally wounded by one of his own sentries on 9 October 1919.",
"title": "Between the wars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Alexander returned to Britain in May 1920 as a major, second in command of the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards; in May 1922, he was promoted substantive lieutenant-colonel and appointed commanding officer. He commanded the battalion at Constantinople (a sensitive posting in the runup to the Chanak Crisis), then Gibraltar from October 1922, then in London from April 1923 until January 1926, when he was released from that role to attend the Staff College at Camberley, England, from 1926 to 1927. By now Alexander had gained an excellent reputation for himself. In addition, he was older than many of his fellow students—and even some of his instructors—at the college. Among his many fellow students were Douglas Wimberley, who would later become a major-general and command the 51st (Highland) Division from 1941—1943, including at the Second Battle of El Alamein, who formed a high opinion of Alexander, who, despite his outstanding war record, showed little sign of being overly pleased with himself. Instead, he showed \"simplicity, directness and kindness\" and gained the respect of all at the college, with two notable exceptions—the future field marshals Alan Brooke and Bernard Montgomery—who did not come away with a particularly favourable impression of him.",
"title": "Between the wars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "After graduating from the Staff College, Alexander was then, in February 1928, promoted to colonel (backdated to 14 May 1926) and was the next month appointed Officer Commanding the Irish Guards Regimental District and 140th (4th London) Infantry Brigade, part of the 47th (1/2nd London) Division, in the Territorial Army (TA), a post he held until January 1930, when he again returned to study, attending the Imperial Defence College in London for one year.",
"title": "Between the wars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Alexander then held staff appointments as (from January 1931) GSO2 in the Directorate of Military Training at the War Office and (1932–1934) GSO1 at HQ Northern Command in York, before being made in October 1934 a temporary brigadier and given command of the Nowshera Brigade, on the Northwest Frontier in India. For his service there, and in particular for his actions in the Loe-Agra operations against the Pathans in Malakand between February and April 1935, Alexander was that year made a Companion of the Order of the Star of India and was mentioned in dispatches. He was mentioned once more for his service during the Second Mohmand Campaign in Northwest Frontier Province from August to October of the same year, serving under Brigadier Claude Auchinleck. Alexander had a reputation for leading from the front and for reaching mountain crests with or even ahead of his troops.",
"title": "Between the wars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In March 1937, Alexander was appointed as one of the aides-de-camp to the recently acceded King George VI and in May returned to the United Kingdom to take part in this capacity in the state procession through London during the King's coronation. Alexander would have been seen in this event by two of his Canadian viceregal successors: Vincent Massey, who was then the Canadian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, and Massey's secretary, Georges Vanier, who watched the procession from the roof of Canada House on Trafalgar Square. Following the coronation celebration, Alexander returned to India, where he was made the honorary colonel of the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Punjab Regiment, and then in October 1937 was promoted to the rank of major-general, making Alexander the youngest general in the British Army. He relinquished command of his brigade in January 1938, and in February returned to the United Kingdom to take command of the 1st Infantry Division. In June 1938 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath.",
"title": "Between the wars"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Following the outbreak of the Second World War, in September 1939, Alexander brought the 1st Division to France, where it became part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and served there for the next eight months. In May 1940, when the German Army invaded France, he successfully led the division's withdrawal to Dunkirk, where it was evacuated to England, along with the rest of the BEF. Shortly after Major-General Bernard Montgomery had been appointed to command II Corps (and before that the 3rd Division), Alexander was, while still on the beachhead, placed in command of I Corps, and left the eastern mole on the destroyer Venomous late on 2 June after ensuring that all British troops had been evacuated. In recognition of his services in the field from March to June 1940, Alexander was again mentioned in despatches.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After Dunkirk, Alexander returned to the United Kingdom and continued to command I Corps, now guarding the coasts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire as part of Northern Command. He was promoted acting lieutenant-general in July 1940, and in December 1940 he was appointed to succeed Claude Auchinleck as General Officer Commanding-in-Chief (GOC-in-C) of Southern Command, which was responsible for the defence of south-west England. His rank of lieutenant-general was made permanent in December 1940. While he was here he came into contact with Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery, who was then serving under his command as GOC of V Corps. Montgomery and Auchinleck had never seen eye-to-eye on much but Alexander, believing Montgomery, who had been one of Alexander's instructors at the Staff College in the mid-1920s, knew what he was doing, simply allowed Montgomery (or \"Monty\") to continue with what he was doing. The two men got along well and their relationship would continue in a similar manner later on in the war.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "It was during this period and most of 1941 where Alexander came to the attention of his superiors, the most notable among them being General Sir Alan Brooke, then the Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces (and in December 1941 succeeding John Dill as Chief of the Imperial General Staff), and Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister. Churchill in particular became a great admirer of Alexander and visited him numerous times throughout 1941, nominating him as the commander of Force 110. Created on paper as the first expeditionary force since the BEF's evacuation from France the year before, Force 110 was considered for several projects throughout the year of 1941, such as landings in the Azores, the Canary Islands and Sicily, but these were, perhaps fortunately, all ultimately abandoned.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On 1 January 1942 he was knighted and appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, and in February, after the Japanese invasion of Burma, was sent to India to become GOC-in-C of British Forces in Burma as a full general. Alexander was unable to fulfil his orders to hold Rangoon, which was abandoned on 6–7 March. He took personal charge of some small local engagements, and was encircled by the Japanese troops in the Battle of Yenangyaung. Rescued by Chinese troops commanded by General Sun Li-jen, Alexander was able to escape. Following that, Alexander increasingly left much of the tactical conduct of the campaign to his corps commander, Lieutenant-General William Slim, while he himself handled the more political aspects of relations with Joseph Stilwell, the nominal commander of the Chinese forces. Alexander was promoted to Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of Allied Land Forces in Burma, March 1942, and ordered Slim to abandon Mandalay and retreat to India.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "By July 1942, the British and Indian forces in Burma had completed their fighting retreat into India, and Alexander, having yet again been mentioned in despatches for his Burma service, was recalled to the United Kingdom. He was at first selected to command the British First Army, which was to take part in Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa. However, following a visit in early August to Egypt by the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir Alan Brooke, Alexander flew to Cairo on 8 August to replace General Claude Auchinleck, Alexander's predecessor at Southern Command in the United Kingdom, as C-in-C of Middle East Command, the post responsible for the overall conduct of the campaign in the desert of North Africa. At the same time, Lieutenant-General Montgomery replaced Auchinleck as GOC of the British Eighth Army. Alexander presided over Montgomery's victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein and the advance of the Eighth Army to Tripoli, for which Alexander was elevated to a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, and, after the Anglo-American forces of the First Army (under Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson) from Operation Torch and the Eighth Army converged in Tunisia in February 1943, they were brought under the unified command of a newly formed 18th Army Group headquarters, commanded by Alexander and reporting to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean theatre at Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ). The American General Omar Bradley, who fought in the Tunisian campaign, then commanding the U.S. II Corps, credited Alexander's patience and experience with helping an inexperienced United States \"field command mature and eventually come of age.\"",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered by May 1943, with some 250,000 Axis troops surrendering, the largest surrender yet in the war. Alexander telegraphed Churchill in response, stating:",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over. All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "After the Tunisian campaign, Alexander's command became the 15th Army Group, which became responsible (under General Eisenhower) for mounting the July 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily (codenamed Operation Husky). Once again, Alexander directed two field armies, both commanded by strong-willed characters who were not easy to control: General Montgomery's British Eighth Army and Lieutenant General George S. Patton's U.S. Seventh Army. The campaign did not portray Alexander at his best and he failed to grip his two commanders. Montgomery's Eighth Army found itself in a slogging match against typically skilful German opposition on the Catanian plain and on the slopes of Mount Etna. Patton, resentful in his belief that he and his Seventh Army had been given a secondary role in the campaign, confronted Alexander and successfully argued for his army to be allowed to drive to the northwest and to capture Palermo. Although initially reluctant to allow Patton such a role, Alexander eventually, but reluctantly, allowed the Seventh Army commander to have his way, although Palermo did not appear to have much strategic significance. Despite this, it turned out to be the key to unlocking the Axis forces' defences and gave the Americans an easier route towards Messina. The brief campaign in Sicily proved largely successful, but some (with Montgomery among the loudest of the critics) believed that the campaign lacked direction - and blamed Alexander. Furthermore, although the Axis forces had been forced to withdraw from Sicily, they had managed to do so in relatively good order, crossing the Straits of Messina into Italy.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "After Sicily, planning began for the Allied invasion of Italy, which began on 3 September 1943 (the fourth anniversary of Britain's entry into the war). Montgomery's Eighth Army launched Operation Baytown, crossing over into Calabria but initially facing little real opposition and slowly making its way up the Italian peninsula. Six days later the U.S. Fifth Army (which, despite its name, included the British X Corps under Lieutenant-General Richard McCreery, under its command) under Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark landed at Salerno as part of Operation Avalanche, which, initially at least, started off well, before encountering heavy resistance and almost being thrown back into the sea. He supported McCreery when he refused to consider evacuation plans that Clark had been considering. Alexander was also instrumental in convincing Clark to replace the U.S. VI Corps commander, Major General Ernest J. Dawley - who had not performed well and whom Alexander described as \"a broken reed\" - with Major General John P. Lucas. Despite the heavy casualties sustained at Salerno, the Allies managed to force the Axis forces back and, with both the Fifth and Eighth Armies now united at last, began pursuing the retreating enemy. By December 1943 progress had virtually ground to a halt as the Axis had Alexander's 15th Army Group held up at the Winter Line (also known as the Gustav Line) and ground was gained only at the expense of heavy casualties. At around this time there were numerous Allied command changes, with Montgomery handing over the Eighth Army to Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese and departing for the United Kingdom to take up command of the 21st Army Group, which controlled all Allied land forces for the planned invasion of Normandy, whilst General Sir Henry Wilson replaced Eisenhower as the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean in January 1944.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The fighting in Italy would continue to prove even more difficult for Alexander's forces over the following few months. Between January and May 1944, numerous Allied attacks were repulsed at Monte Cassino (which was also bombed in February 1944, with Alexander taking responsibility for the decision to bomb it) and the Anzio landings of January 1944 by Lucas's U.S. VI Corps began well but did not live up to expectations and eventually ended up in a stalemate, like the rest of the Italian fighting so far. Alexander had a large part in planning the landings (code-named \"Operation Shingle\"), and intended to draw German strength away from the Winter Line and to cut their lines of communication. The scheme was supported by Prime Minister Churchill, who had very high expectations for Shingle. However, the operation was flawed in many ways. In particular, Alexander's plan of seizing the Alban Hills might possibly have led to the entire Allied force (comprising only two infantry divisions, elements of the U.S. 1st Armored Division, and other smaller units in support) being wiped out. Despite Churchill's and Alexander's intentions, the Allied forces at Anzio did not achieve the somewhat unrealistic expectations, and were essentially cut off from any support, although they did manage to lure German reserves from elsewhere, which might otherwise have been available for service on the Eastern Front or during the impending Allied invasion of Normandy.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "When Eisenhower was appointed in December 1943 as Supreme Allied Commander for the planned Normandy landings, he suggested that Alexander become ground-forces commander, as he was popular with both British and American officers. Omar Bradley (who had commanded U.S. II Corps in Sicily, and later the U.S. First Army and then the U.S. 12th Army Group) remarked that he would have preferred to work with Alexander rather than Montgomery, as he regarded the former as \"a restrained, self-effacive and punctilious soldier\". Of the problems that subsequently surfaced with Montgomery's command of the Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group, Bradley suspected they would not have occurred with Alexander in command. Brooke, however, applied pressure to keep Alexander in Italy, considering him unfit for the assignment in France. Thus Alexander remained in command of the 15th Army Group, and, with the support of numerous Allied commanders, controversially authorised the bombing of the historic abbey at Monte Cassino (February 1944), which resulted in little advance on the German Winter Line defences, which had managed to halt the Allied advance in Italy. It was not until the fourth attempt that the Winter Line was breached by the Allies, and Alexander's forces moved on to capture Rome in June 1944, thereby achieving one of the strategic goals of the Italian campaign. However, the U.S. VI Corps, now under Major General Lucian Truscott, in the Anzio beachhead, under U.S. Fifth Army commander Clark's orders, failed to follow their original break-out plan that would have trapped the German 10th Army escaping northwards in the aftermath of the Battle of Monte Cassino, instead favouring an early and highly publicised entry into Rome two days before the Allied landings in Normandy. Although Alexander was angry at Clark for deliberately disobeying his specific orders in order to reach Rome first, he chose to say nothing, believing that it would do nothing for the Allied cause if he were to do so.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Alexander remained in command of the 15th Army Group, as well as of its successor, the Allied Armies in Italy (AAI), for most of the Italian campaign, until December 1944, when he relinquished his command to Clark and took over as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces Headquarters, responsible for all military operations in the Mediterranean theatre. Alexander was concurrently promoted to the rank of field marshal, though this was backdated to the fall of Rome on 4 June 1944, so that Alexander would once again be senior to Montgomery, who had himself been made a field marshal on 1 September 1944, after the end of the Battle of Normandy.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Alexander received the German surrender in Italy on 29 April 1945. As a reward for his leadership in North Africa and Italy, Alexander, along with a number of other prominent British Second World War military leaders, was elevated to the peerage on 1 March 1946 by King George VI; he was created Viscount Alexander of Tunis and of Errigal in the County of Donegal.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Brooke felt that Alexander needed an able chief of staff \"to think for him\", while Montgomery (Alexander's subordinate in North Africa, Sicily and Italy) claimed to think of Alexander as \"incompetent\" and believed that success was attained in Tunisia only because Montgomery lent Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, the commander of IX Corps of Anderson's First Army, to organise the coup de grace. However, Harold Macmillan (British Minister Resident in the Mediterranean from 1942 to 1945) was impressed by Alexander's calm and style - the general conducted dinners in his mess like those at an Oxbridge high table, discussing architecture and the campaigns of Belisarius, rather than the current war. Macmillan thought Alexander's urbane manner and willingness to discuss and compromise were a sensible way to maintain inter-Allied cooperation, but Alexander's reserve was such that some thought him empty of strategic ideas and unable to make decisions. Graham and Bidwell, however, wrote that Alexander's impenetrable reserve made it hard to judge whether or not he had any military ideas. They state that he was \"unable or unwilling\" to assert his will over his army commanders, and that Mark Clark, who often referred to Alexander scornfully as a \"peanut\" and a \"feather duster\", exploited this weakness.",
"title": "Second World War"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "With the cessation of hostilities, Alexander was under serious consideration for appointment to the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the British Army's most senior position beneath the sovereign. He was invited, though, by Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to be his recommendation to the King for the post of Governor General of Canada. Alexander thus chose to retire from the army and take up the new position, in anticipation of which he was on 26 January 1946 appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George and created Viscount Alexander of Tunis, of Errigal in the County of Donegal, on 1 March. On 21 March 1946, the commission under the royal sign-manual and signet appointing Alexander was issued. Alexander was subsequently sworn in during a ceremony in the Senate chamber on 12 April that year.",
"title": "Governor General of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Alexander took his duties as the viceroy quite seriously, feeling that as governor general, he acted as a connection between Canadians and their King, and spent considerable time travelling Canada during his term; he eventually logged no less than 294,500 km (184,000 mi) during his five years as governor general. On these trips, he sought to engage with Canadians through various ceremonies and events; he was keenly interested in his role as Chief Scout of Canada and, in preparation for his kicking of the opening ball in the 1946 Grey Cup final, practised frequently on the grounds of the royal and viceregal residence, Rideau Hall. Also, in commemoration of Alexander being named the first non-aboriginal chief of the Kwakiutl tribe, he was given a totem pole on 13 July 1946; crafted by Mungo Martin, it remains on the grounds of Rideau Hall today. By the end of the year, Alexander was also distinguished with his induction as a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter.",
"title": "Governor General of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1947, the King issued letters patent granting his Canadian governor general permission to exercise all those powers belonging to the monarch in respect of Canada and, at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers Conference of 1949, the decision was reached to use the term 'member of the Commonwealth' instead of 'Dominion' to refer to the non-British member states of the Commonwealth of Nations. That same year, Alexander oversaw the admission of the Newfoundland (a dominion by name but not self-governing) into the Canadian Confederation and toured the new province that summer. Then, during a later visit to Alberta, the Governor General was admitted to the Blackfoot tribe as Chief Eagle Head. However, though the post-war period saw a boom in prosperity for Canada, the country was again at war by 1950, with Alexander, in his role as acting commander-in-chief, deploying to the Korean War soldiers, sailors, and airmen, whom he would visit prior to their departure for north-east Asia. In May 1951, as Commander-in-Chief of Canada, he was deemed a fitting inaugural recipient of the Canadian Forces' Decoration, starting a long tradition of every governor general accepting the CD, usually shortly after their installation as the Sovereign's personal representative in Canada.",
"title": "Governor General of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Viscount travelled abroad on official trips—in 1947 visiting US president Harry S. Truman and in June 1948 Brazilian president Eurico Gaspar Dutra—as well as hosting a number of dignitaries. The visit of the Irish Taoiseach, John A. Costello, in 1948 caused Alexander some embarrassment when Costello chose the occasion to announce that most of Ireland would leave the Commonwealth (Northern Ireland would remain a constituent part of the United Kingdom). Although the decision had been taken in principle earlier, the sudden announcement caused a diplomatic storm and Costello, to deflect criticism, claimed that he had been provoked into making the announcement by a series of diplomatic snubs by Lord Alexander. In his memoirs, Costello was to admit that Alexander's behaviour had in fact been perfectly civil and could have had no bearing on a decision which had already been made to declare the Republic of Ireland.",
"title": "Governor General of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Alexanders' relatively informal lifestyle at Rideau Hall was demonstrated when during the Canadian tour of Princess Elizabeth and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Viscount and Viscountess hosted a square dance in the palace's ballroom. Alexander painted (creating a personal studio in the former dairy at Rideau Hall and mounting classes in art at the National Gallery of Canada), partook in a number of sports (including golf, ice hockey, and rugby), and enjoyed the outdoors, particularly during Ontario and Quebec's maple syrup harvest, himself overseeing the process on Rideau Hall's grounds. The Viscount was known to escape from official duties to partake in his most favourite pastime of fishing, once departing from the 1951 royal tour of Princess Elizabeth to take in a day's fishing at Griffin Island, in Georgian Bay, and granting a day off for students in the town of Drayton, Ontario, where his train briefly stopped. He presented the Alexander Cup to the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association in November 1950; the cup became the championship trophy of the Major Series of senior ice hockey.",
"title": "Governor General of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Among Canadians, Alexander proved to be a popular viceroy, despite the calls for a Canadian-born governor general that had preceded his appointment. He not only had a much praised military reputation (he was considered to be the best military strategist since the 1st Duke of Wellington) but also was a charismatic figure, with an easy ability to communicate with people. Others, however, did not fully approve of Alexander; editor Hugh Templin, from Fergus, Ontario, met with Alexander during Templin's time as a special correspondent with the Canadian Press during the Second World War, and he said of the encounter: \"Lord Alexander impressed us considerably, if not too favourably. He was an aristocratic type, who didn't like newspaper men.\"",
"title": "Governor General of Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Lord Alexander gave up the office of Governor General of Canada officially on 28 January 1952 after Churchill asked him to return to London to take the post of Minister of Defence in the British government. The aging Churchill had found it increasingly difficult to cope with holding that portfolio concurrently with that of prime minister, although he still took many major decisions himself, leaving Alexander with little real power. George VI died on the night of 5–6 February and Alexander, in respect of the King's mourning, departed quietly for the United Kingdom, leaving Chief Justice of Canada Thibaudeau Rinfret as administrator of the government in his place. After his return to the UK, Alexander was on 14 March 1952 elevated in the peerage by Queen Elizabeth II, becoming Earl Alexander of Tunis, Baron Rideau of Ottawa and Castle Derg. He was also appointed to the organising committee for the Queen's coronation and was charged with carrying the Sovereign's Orb in the state procession on that occasion in 1953.",
"title": "British Minister of Defence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The Earl served as the British defence minister until 1954, when he retired from politics. In 1959 the Queen appointed Alexander to the Order of Merit. From 1960 to 1965, he served as Constable of the Tower of London. Alexander was an active freemason.",
"title": "Retirement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Canada remained a favourite second home for the Alexanders and they returned frequently to visit family and friends until Alexander died on 16 June 1969 of a perforated aorta. His funeral was held on 24 June 1969, at St. George's Chapel, in Windsor Castle, and his remains are buried in the churchyard of Ridge, near Tyttenhanger, his family's Hertfordshire home.",
"title": "Retirement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Alexander married Lady Margaret Bingham, daughter of George Bingham, 5th Earl of Lucan, on 14 October 1931. They had three children together and adopted a fourth:",
"title": "Marriage and children"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Ribbon bars of the Earl Alexander of Tunis",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "",
"title": "Honours"
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"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "",
"title": "Honours"
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"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "",
"title": "Honours"
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{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Appointments",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Decorations",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Medals",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Awards",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Alberta",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Geographic locations",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Schools",
"title": "Honours"
}
]
| Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis, was a senior and highly decorated British Army officer who served in both of the world wars. In addition, following the end of his military career, he served as Governor General of Canada and became the first Lord Lieutenant of Greater London in 1965. Alexander was born in London and was educated at Harrow before moving on to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, for training as an army officer of the Irish Guards. He rose to prominence through his service in the First World War, and continued his military career through various British campaigns across Europe and Asia during the interwar period. In the Second World War, Alexander, initially in command of a division, oversaw the final stages of the Allied evacuation from Dunkirk and subsequently held field commands in Britain, Burma, North Africa and Italy, including serving as Commander-in-Chief Middle East and commanding the 18th Army Group in Tunisia. He then commanded the 15th Army Group for the capture of Sicily and again in Italy before being promoted to field marshal and being made Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean in late 1944. In 1946 he was appointed as Governor General of Canada by King George VI, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to replace the Earl of Athlone as viceroy, and he occupied the post until he was succeeded by Vincent Massey in 1952. Alexander proved to be enthusiastic about the Canadian wilderness and popular with Canadians. He was the last Governor General who was born in the United Kingdom as well as the last Governor General to be a peer. After the end of his viceregal tenure, Alexander was sworn into the Queen's Privy Council for Canada and thereafter, in order to serve as the British Minister of Defence in the Cabinet of Winston Churchill, into the Imperial Privy Council. Alexander retired in 1954 and died in 1969. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-24T19:08:36Z | [
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14,454 | Henry Moseley | Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley (/ˈmoʊzli/; 23 November 1887 – 10 August 1915) was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra.
Moseley's law advanced atomic physics, nuclear physics and quantum physics by providing the first experimental evidence in favour of Niels Bohr's theory, aside from the hydrogen atom spectrum which the Bohr theory was designed to reproduce. That theory refined Ernest Rutherford's and Antonius van den Broek's model, which proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive nuclear charges that is equal to its (atomic) number in the periodic table.
When World War I broke out in Western Europe, Moseley left his research work at the University of Oxford behind to volunteer for the Royal Engineers of the British Army. Moseley was assigned to the force of British Empire soldiers that invaded the region of Gallipoli, Turkey, in April 1915, as a telecommunications officer. Moseley was shot and killed during the Battle of Gallipoli on 10 August 1915, at the age of 27. Experts have speculated that Moseley could otherwise have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1916.
Henry G. J. Moseley, known to his friends as Harry, was born in Weymouth in Dorset in 1887. His father Henry Nottidge Moseley (1844–1891), who died when Moseley was quite young, was a biologist and also a professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Oxford, who had been a member of the Challenger Expedition. Moseley's mother was Amabel Gwyn Jeffreys, the daughter of the Welsh biologist and conchologist John Gwyn Jeffreys. She was also the British women's champion of chess in 1913.
Moseley had been a very promising schoolboy at Summer Fields School (where one of the four "leagues" is named after him), and he was awarded a King's scholarship to attend Eton College. In 1906 he won the chemistry and physics prizes at Eton. In 1906, Moseley entered Trinity College of the University of Oxford, where he earned his bachelor's degree. While an undergraduate at Oxford, Moseley became a Freemason by joining the Apollo University Lodge. Immediately after graduation from Oxford in 1910, Moseley became a demonstrator in physics at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Sir Ernest Rutherford. During Moseley's first year at Manchester, he had a teaching load as a graduate teaching assistant, but following that first year, he was reassigned from his teaching duties to work as a graduate research assistant. He declined a fellowship offered by Rutherford, preferring to move back to Oxford, in November 1913, where he was given laboratory facilities but no support.
Experimenting with the energy of beta particles in 1912, Moseley showed that high potentials were attainable from a radioactive source of radium, thereby inventing the first atomic battery, though he was unable to produce the 1MV necessary to stop the particles.
In 1913, Moseley observed and measured the X-ray spectra of various chemical elements (mostly metals) that were found by the method of diffraction through crystals. This was a pioneering use of the method of X-ray spectroscopy in physics, using Bragg's diffraction law to determine the X-ray wavelengths. Moseley discovered a systematic mathematical relationship between the wavelengths of the X-rays produced and the atomic numbers of the metals that were used as the targets in X-ray tubes. This has become known as Moseley's law.
Before Moseley's discovery, the atomic numbers (or elemental number) of an element had been thought of as a semi-arbitrary sequential number, based on the sequence of atomic masses, but modified somewhat where chemists found this modification to be desirable, such as by the Russian chemist, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev. In his invention of the Periodic Table of the Elements, Mendeleev had interchanged the orders of a few pairs of elements to put them in more appropriate places in this table of the elements. For example, the metals cobalt and nickel had been assigned the atomic numbers 27 and 28, respectively, based on their known chemical and physical properties, even though they have nearly the same atomic masses. In fact, the atomic mass of cobalt is slightly larger than that of nickel, which would have placed them in backwards order if they had been placed in the Periodic Table blindly according to atomic mass. Moseley's experiments in X-ray spectroscopy showed directly from their physics that cobalt and nickel have the different atomic numbers, 27 and 28, and that they are placed in the Periodic Table correctly by Moseley's objective measurements of their atomic numbers. Hence, Moseley's discovery demonstrated that the atomic numbers of elements are not just rather arbitrary numbers based on chemistry and the intuition of chemists, but rather, they have a firm experimental basis from the physics of their X-ray spectra.
In addition, Moseley showed that there were gaps in the atomic number sequence at numbers 43, 61, 72, and 75. These spaces are now known, respectively, to be the places of the radioactive synthetic elements technetium and promethium, and also the last two quite rare naturally occurring stable elements hafnium (discovered 1923) and rhenium (discovered 1925). Nothing was known about these four elements in Moseley's lifetime, not even their very existence. Based on the intuition of a very experienced chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev had predicted the existence of a missing element in the Periodic Table, which was later found to be filled by technetium, and Bohuslav Brauner had predicted the existence of another missing element in this Table, which was later found to be filled by promethium. Henry Moseley's experiments confirmed these predictions, by showing exactly what the missing atomic numbers were, 43 and 61. In addition, Moseley predicted the existence of two more undiscovered elements, those with the atomic numbers 72 and 75, and gave very strong evidence that there were no other gaps in the Periodic Table between the elements aluminium (atomic number 13) and gold (atomic number 79).
This latter question about the possibility of more undiscovered ("missing") elements had been a standing problem among the chemists of the world, particularly given the existence of the large family of the lanthanide series of rare earth elements. Moseley was able to demonstrate that these lanthanide elements, i.e. lanthanum through lutetium, must have exactly 15 members – no more and no less. The number of elements in the lanthanides had been a question that was very far from being settled by the chemists of the early 20th Century. They could not yet produce pure samples of all the rare-earth elements, even in the form of their salts, and in some cases they were unable to distinguish between mixtures of two very similar (adjacent) rare-earth elements from the nearby pure metals in the Periodic Table. For example, there was a so-called "element" that was even given the chemical name of "didymium". "Didymium" was found some years later to be simply a mixture of two genuine rare-earth elements, and these were given the names neodymium and praseodymium, meaning "new twin" and "green twin". Also, the method of separating the rare-earth elements by the method of ion exchange had not been invented yet in Moseley's time.
Moseley's method in early X-ray spectroscopy was able to sort out the above chemical problems promptly, some of which had occupied chemists for a number of years. Moseley also predicted the existence of element 61, a lanthanide whose existence was previously unsuspected. Quite a few years later, this element 61 was created artificially in nuclear reactors and was named promethium.
Before Moseley and his law, atomic numbers had been thought of as a semi-arbitrary ordering number, vaguely increasing with atomic weight but not strictly defined by it. Moseley's discovery showed that atomic numbers were not arbitrarily assigned, but rather, they have a definite physical basis. Moseley postulated that each successive element has a nuclear charge exactly one unit greater than its predecessor. Moseley redefined the idea of atomic numbers from its previous status as an ad hoc numerical tag to help sorting the elements into an exact sequence of ascending atomic numbers that made the Periodic Table exact. (This was later to be the basis of the Aufbau principle in atomic studies.) As noted by Bohr, Moseley's law provided a reasonably complete experimental set of data that supported the (new from 1911) conception by Ernest Rutherford and Antonius van den Broek of the atom, with a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons in which the atomic number is understood to be the exact physical number of positive charges (later discovered and called protons) in the central atomic nuclei of the elements. Moseley mentioned the two scientists above in his research paper, but he did not actually mention Bohr, who was rather new on the scene then. Simple modifications of Rydberg's and Bohr's formulas were found to give a theoretical justification for Moseley's empirically derived law for determining atomic numbers.
X-ray spectrometers are the foundation-stones of X-ray crystallography. The X-ray spectrometers as Moseley knew them worked as follows. A glass-bulb electron tube was used, similar to that held by Moseley in the photo here. Inside the evacuated tube, electrons were fired at a metallic substance (i.e. a sample of pure element in Moseley's work), causing the ionization of electrons from the inner electron shells of the element. The rebound of electrons into these holes in the inner shells next causes the emission of X-ray photons that were led out of the tube in a semi-beam, through an opening in the external X-ray shielding. These are next diffracted by a standardized salt crystal, with angular results read out as photographic lines by the exposure of an X-ray film fixed at the outside the vacuum tube at a known distance. Application of Bragg's law (after some initial guesswork of the mean distances between atoms in the metallic crystal, based on its density) next allowed the wavelength of the emitted X-rays to be calculated.
Moseley participated in the design and development of early X-ray spectrometry equipment, learning some techniques from William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg at the University of Leeds, and developing others himself. Many of the techniques of X-ray spectroscopy were inspired by the methods that are used with visible light spectroscopes and spectrograms, by substituting crystals, ionization chambers, and photographic plates for their analogs in light spectroscopy. In some cases, Moseley found it necessary to modify his equipment to detect particularly soft (lower frequency) X-rays that could not penetrate either air or paper, by working with his instruments in a vacuum chamber.
Sometime in the first half of 1914, Moseley resigned from his position at Manchester, with plans to return to Oxford and continue his physics research there. However, World War I broke out in August 1914, and Moseley turned down this job offer to instead enlist with the Royal Engineers of the British Army. His family and friends tried to persuade him not to join, but he thought it was his duty. Moseley served as a technical officer in communications during the Battle of Gallipoli, in Turkey, beginning in April 1915, where he was killed by a sniper on 10 August 1915.
Only twenty-seven years old at the time of his death, Moseley could, in the opinion of some scientists, have contributed much to the knowledge of atomic structure had he survived. Niels Bohr said in 1962 that Rutherford's work "was not taken seriously at all" and that the "great change came from Moseley."
Robert Millikan wrote, "In a research which is destined to rank as one of the dozen most brilliant in conception, skillful in execution, and illuminating in results in the history of science, a young man twenty-six years old threw open the windows through which we can glimpse the sub-atomic world with a definiteness and certainty never dreamed of before. Had the European War had no other result than the snuffing out of this young life, that alone would make it one of the most hideous and most irreparable crimes in history."
George Sarton wrote, "His fame was already established on such a secure foundation that his memory will be green forever. He is one of the immortals of science, and though he would have made many other additions to our knowledge if his life had been spared, the contributions already credited to him were of such fundamental significance, that the probability of his surpassing himself was extremely small. It is very probable that however long his life, he would have been chiefly remembered because of the 'Moseley law' which he published at the age of twenty-six."
Isaac Asimov wrote, "In view of what he [Moseley] might still have accomplished … his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally." Rutherford believed that Moseley's work would have earned him the Nobel Prize (which however is never awarded posthumously).
Memorial plaques to Moseley were installed at Manchester and Eton, and a Royal Society scholarship, established by his will, had as its second recipient the physicist P. M. S. Blackett, who later became president of the Society. The Institute of Physics Henry Moseley Medal and Prize is named in his honour. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley (/ˈmoʊzli/; 23 November 1887 – 10 August 1915) was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Moseley's law advanced atomic physics, nuclear physics and quantum physics by providing the first experimental evidence in favour of Niels Bohr's theory, aside from the hydrogen atom spectrum which the Bohr theory was designed to reproduce. That theory refined Ernest Rutherford's and Antonius van den Broek's model, which proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive nuclear charges that is equal to its (atomic) number in the periodic table.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "When World War I broke out in Western Europe, Moseley left his research work at the University of Oxford behind to volunteer for the Royal Engineers of the British Army. Moseley was assigned to the force of British Empire soldiers that invaded the region of Gallipoli, Turkey, in April 1915, as a telecommunications officer. Moseley was shot and killed during the Battle of Gallipoli on 10 August 1915, at the age of 27. Experts have speculated that Moseley could otherwise have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1916.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Henry G. J. Moseley, known to his friends as Harry, was born in Weymouth in Dorset in 1887. His father Henry Nottidge Moseley (1844–1891), who died when Moseley was quite young, was a biologist and also a professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Oxford, who had been a member of the Challenger Expedition. Moseley's mother was Amabel Gwyn Jeffreys, the daughter of the Welsh biologist and conchologist John Gwyn Jeffreys. She was also the British women's champion of chess in 1913.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Moseley had been a very promising schoolboy at Summer Fields School (where one of the four \"leagues\" is named after him), and he was awarded a King's scholarship to attend Eton College. In 1906 he won the chemistry and physics prizes at Eton. In 1906, Moseley entered Trinity College of the University of Oxford, where he earned his bachelor's degree. While an undergraduate at Oxford, Moseley became a Freemason by joining the Apollo University Lodge. Immediately after graduation from Oxford in 1910, Moseley became a demonstrator in physics at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Sir Ernest Rutherford. During Moseley's first year at Manchester, he had a teaching load as a graduate teaching assistant, but following that first year, he was reassigned from his teaching duties to work as a graduate research assistant. He declined a fellowship offered by Rutherford, preferring to move back to Oxford, in November 1913, where he was given laboratory facilities but no support.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Experimenting with the energy of beta particles in 1912, Moseley showed that high potentials were attainable from a radioactive source of radium, thereby inventing the first atomic battery, though he was unable to produce the 1MV necessary to stop the particles.",
"title": "Scientific work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1913, Moseley observed and measured the X-ray spectra of various chemical elements (mostly metals) that were found by the method of diffraction through crystals. This was a pioneering use of the method of X-ray spectroscopy in physics, using Bragg's diffraction law to determine the X-ray wavelengths. Moseley discovered a systematic mathematical relationship between the wavelengths of the X-rays produced and the atomic numbers of the metals that were used as the targets in X-ray tubes. This has become known as Moseley's law.",
"title": "Scientific work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Before Moseley's discovery, the atomic numbers (or elemental number) of an element had been thought of as a semi-arbitrary sequential number, based on the sequence of atomic masses, but modified somewhat where chemists found this modification to be desirable, such as by the Russian chemist, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev. In his invention of the Periodic Table of the Elements, Mendeleev had interchanged the orders of a few pairs of elements to put them in more appropriate places in this table of the elements. For example, the metals cobalt and nickel had been assigned the atomic numbers 27 and 28, respectively, based on their known chemical and physical properties, even though they have nearly the same atomic masses. In fact, the atomic mass of cobalt is slightly larger than that of nickel, which would have placed them in backwards order if they had been placed in the Periodic Table blindly according to atomic mass. Moseley's experiments in X-ray spectroscopy showed directly from their physics that cobalt and nickel have the different atomic numbers, 27 and 28, and that they are placed in the Periodic Table correctly by Moseley's objective measurements of their atomic numbers. Hence, Moseley's discovery demonstrated that the atomic numbers of elements are not just rather arbitrary numbers based on chemistry and the intuition of chemists, but rather, they have a firm experimental basis from the physics of their X-ray spectra.",
"title": "Scientific work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In addition, Moseley showed that there were gaps in the atomic number sequence at numbers 43, 61, 72, and 75. These spaces are now known, respectively, to be the places of the radioactive synthetic elements technetium and promethium, and also the last two quite rare naturally occurring stable elements hafnium (discovered 1923) and rhenium (discovered 1925). Nothing was known about these four elements in Moseley's lifetime, not even their very existence. Based on the intuition of a very experienced chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev had predicted the existence of a missing element in the Periodic Table, which was later found to be filled by technetium, and Bohuslav Brauner had predicted the existence of another missing element in this Table, which was later found to be filled by promethium. Henry Moseley's experiments confirmed these predictions, by showing exactly what the missing atomic numbers were, 43 and 61. In addition, Moseley predicted the existence of two more undiscovered elements, those with the atomic numbers 72 and 75, and gave very strong evidence that there were no other gaps in the Periodic Table between the elements aluminium (atomic number 13) and gold (atomic number 79).",
"title": "Scientific work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "This latter question about the possibility of more undiscovered (\"missing\") elements had been a standing problem among the chemists of the world, particularly given the existence of the large family of the lanthanide series of rare earth elements. Moseley was able to demonstrate that these lanthanide elements, i.e. lanthanum through lutetium, must have exactly 15 members – no more and no less. The number of elements in the lanthanides had been a question that was very far from being settled by the chemists of the early 20th Century. They could not yet produce pure samples of all the rare-earth elements, even in the form of their salts, and in some cases they were unable to distinguish between mixtures of two very similar (adjacent) rare-earth elements from the nearby pure metals in the Periodic Table. For example, there was a so-called \"element\" that was even given the chemical name of \"didymium\". \"Didymium\" was found some years later to be simply a mixture of two genuine rare-earth elements, and these were given the names neodymium and praseodymium, meaning \"new twin\" and \"green twin\". Also, the method of separating the rare-earth elements by the method of ion exchange had not been invented yet in Moseley's time.",
"title": "Scientific work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Moseley's method in early X-ray spectroscopy was able to sort out the above chemical problems promptly, some of which had occupied chemists for a number of years. Moseley also predicted the existence of element 61, a lanthanide whose existence was previously unsuspected. Quite a few years later, this element 61 was created artificially in nuclear reactors and was named promethium.",
"title": "Scientific work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Before Moseley and his law, atomic numbers had been thought of as a semi-arbitrary ordering number, vaguely increasing with atomic weight but not strictly defined by it. Moseley's discovery showed that atomic numbers were not arbitrarily assigned, but rather, they have a definite physical basis. Moseley postulated that each successive element has a nuclear charge exactly one unit greater than its predecessor. Moseley redefined the idea of atomic numbers from its previous status as an ad hoc numerical tag to help sorting the elements into an exact sequence of ascending atomic numbers that made the Periodic Table exact. (This was later to be the basis of the Aufbau principle in atomic studies.) As noted by Bohr, Moseley's law provided a reasonably complete experimental set of data that supported the (new from 1911) conception by Ernest Rutherford and Antonius van den Broek of the atom, with a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons in which the atomic number is understood to be the exact physical number of positive charges (later discovered and called protons) in the central atomic nuclei of the elements. Moseley mentioned the two scientists above in his research paper, but he did not actually mention Bohr, who was rather new on the scene then. Simple modifications of Rydberg's and Bohr's formulas were found to give a theoretical justification for Moseley's empirically derived law for determining atomic numbers.",
"title": "Scientific work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "X-ray spectrometers are the foundation-stones of X-ray crystallography. The X-ray spectrometers as Moseley knew them worked as follows. A glass-bulb electron tube was used, similar to that held by Moseley in the photo here. Inside the evacuated tube, electrons were fired at a metallic substance (i.e. a sample of pure element in Moseley's work), causing the ionization of electrons from the inner electron shells of the element. The rebound of electrons into these holes in the inner shells next causes the emission of X-ray photons that were led out of the tube in a semi-beam, through an opening in the external X-ray shielding. These are next diffracted by a standardized salt crystal, with angular results read out as photographic lines by the exposure of an X-ray film fixed at the outside the vacuum tube at a known distance. Application of Bragg's law (after some initial guesswork of the mean distances between atoms in the metallic crystal, based on its density) next allowed the wavelength of the emitted X-rays to be calculated.",
"title": "Scientific work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Moseley participated in the design and development of early X-ray spectrometry equipment, learning some techniques from William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg at the University of Leeds, and developing others himself. Many of the techniques of X-ray spectroscopy were inspired by the methods that are used with visible light spectroscopes and spectrograms, by substituting crystals, ionization chambers, and photographic plates for their analogs in light spectroscopy. In some cases, Moseley found it necessary to modify his equipment to detect particularly soft (lower frequency) X-rays that could not penetrate either air or paper, by working with his instruments in a vacuum chamber.",
"title": "Scientific work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Sometime in the first half of 1914, Moseley resigned from his position at Manchester, with plans to return to Oxford and continue his physics research there. However, World War I broke out in August 1914, and Moseley turned down this job offer to instead enlist with the Royal Engineers of the British Army. His family and friends tried to persuade him not to join, but he thought it was his duty. Moseley served as a technical officer in communications during the Battle of Gallipoli, in Turkey, beginning in April 1915, where he was killed by a sniper on 10 August 1915.",
"title": "Death and aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Only twenty-seven years old at the time of his death, Moseley could, in the opinion of some scientists, have contributed much to the knowledge of atomic structure had he survived. Niels Bohr said in 1962 that Rutherford's work \"was not taken seriously at all\" and that the \"great change came from Moseley.\"",
"title": "Death and aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Robert Millikan wrote, \"In a research which is destined to rank as one of the dozen most brilliant in conception, skillful in execution, and illuminating in results in the history of science, a young man twenty-six years old threw open the windows through which we can glimpse the sub-atomic world with a definiteness and certainty never dreamed of before. Had the European War had no other result than the snuffing out of this young life, that alone would make it one of the most hideous and most irreparable crimes in history.\"",
"title": "Death and aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "George Sarton wrote, \"His fame was already established on such a secure foundation that his memory will be green forever. He is one of the immortals of science, and though he would have made many other additions to our knowledge if his life had been spared, the contributions already credited to him were of such fundamental significance, that the probability of his surpassing himself was extremely small. It is very probable that however long his life, he would have been chiefly remembered because of the 'Moseley law' which he published at the age of twenty-six.\"",
"title": "Death and aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Isaac Asimov wrote, \"In view of what he [Moseley] might still have accomplished … his death might well have been the most costly single death of the War to mankind generally.\" Rutherford believed that Moseley's work would have earned him the Nobel Prize (which however is never awarded posthumously).",
"title": "Death and aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Memorial plaques to Moseley were installed at Manchester and Eton, and a Royal Society scholarship, established by his will, had as its second recipient the physicist P. M. S. Blackett, who later became president of the Society. The Institute of Physics Henry Moseley Medal and Prize is named in his honour.",
"title": "Death and aftermath"
}
]
| Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley was an English physicist, whose contribution to the science of physics was the justification from physical laws of the previous empirical and chemical concept of the atomic number. This stemmed from his development of Moseley's law in X-ray spectra. Moseley's law advanced atomic physics, nuclear physics and quantum physics by providing the first experimental evidence in favour of Niels Bohr's theory, aside from the hydrogen atom spectrum which the Bohr theory was designed to reproduce. That theory refined Ernest Rutherford's and Antonius van den Broek's model, which proposed that the atom contains in its nucleus a number of positive nuclear charges that is equal to its (atomic) number in the periodic table. When World War I broke out in Western Europe, Moseley left his research work at the University of Oxford behind to volunteer for the Royal Engineers of the British Army. Moseley was assigned to the force of British Empire soldiers that invaded the region of Gallipoli, Turkey, in April 1915, as a telecommunications officer. Moseley was shot and killed during the Battle of Gallipoli on 10 August 1915, at the age of 27. Experts have speculated that Moseley could otherwise have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1916. | 2002-01-19T15:10:56Z | 2023-11-24T03:26:37Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moseley |
14,457 | Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex | Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, KCVO (Henry Charles Albert David; born 15 September 1984), is a member of the British royal family. As the younger son of King Charles III and Diana, Princess of Wales, Harry is fifth in the line of succession to the British throne.
Educated at Wetherby School, Ludgrove School, and Eton College, Harry completed army officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He was commissioned as a cornet into the Blues and Royals and served temporarily with his older brother William. Harry was separately deployed on active duty to Afghanistan on two occasions; the first was in 2007–2008 for ten weeks in Helmand Province. The second was for twenty weeks in 2012–2013 with the Army Air Corps.
Inspired by the Warrior Games in the United States, Harry launched the Invictus Games in 2014 as founding patron and now remains involved in a non-royal capacity. Two years later, alongside his brother William and sister-in-law Catherine, Harry jointly initiated the mental health awareness campaign "Heads Together".
In 2018, Harry was made Duke of Sussex prior to his wedding to American actress Meghan Markle. They have two children: Archie and Lilibet. Harry and Meghan stepped down as working royals in January 2020, moved to Meghan's native Southern California, and launched Archewell Inc., a Beverly Hills-based mix of for-profit and not-for-profit (charitable) business organisations. In March 2021, Harry sat for Oprah with Meghan and Harry, a much-publicised American television interview with his wife and Oprah Winfrey. The couple filmed Harry & Meghan, a Netflix docuseries, which was released in December 2022.
Prince Harry was born in the Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, on 15 September 1984 as the second child of Charles, Prince of Wales (later King Charles III), and his first wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, during the reign of his grandmother Queen Elizabeth II. He was christened Henry Charles Albert David on 21 December 1984 at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. Growing up, he was referred to as "Harry" by family, friends, and the public, and was nicknamed "Harold" by his brother. Harry and his elder brother, William, were raised at Kensington Palace in London, and Highgrove House in Gloucestershire. Diana wanted her sons to have a broader range of experiences and a better understanding of ordinary life than previous royal children. She took them to venues that ranged from Walt Disney World and McDonald's to AIDS clinics and homeless shelters. He began accompanying his parents on official visits at an early age; his first overseas tour was with his parents to Italy in 1985. He also travelled with his family to Canada in 1991 and 1998.
Harry's parents divorced in 1996. His mother died in a car crash in Paris the following year. Harry and William were staying with their father at Balmoral at the time, and the Prince of Wales told his sons about their mother's death. At his mother's funeral, Harry, then aged 12, accompanied his father, brother, paternal grandfather Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and maternal uncle Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, in walking behind the funeral cortège from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. Harry and his brother William inherited the "bulk" of the £12.9 million left by their mother on their respective 30th birthdays, a figure that had grown since her 1997 death to £10 million each in 2014. In 2014, Harry and William inherited their mother's wedding dress along with many of her other personal possessions, including dresses, diamond tiaras, jewels, letters, and paintings. The brothers also received the original lyrics and score of "Candle in the Wind", by Bernie Taupin and Elton John, as performed by John at Diana's funeral. In 2002, The Times reported that Harry would also share with his brother a disbursement of £4.9 million from trust funds established by their great-grandmother, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, on their respective 21st birthdays and would share a disbursement of £8 million upon their respective 40th birthdays. It was reported that Harry would inherit the bulk of the money left by the Queen Mother for the two brothers, as William is set to ascend to the throne, which will bring him additional financial benefits.
Like his father and brother, Harry was educated at private schools. He started at London's Jane Mynors' nursery school and the pre-preparatory Wetherby School. Following this, he attended Ludgrove School in Berkshire. After passing entrance exams, he was admitted to Eton College. The decision to place Harry at Eton went against the past practice of the Mountbatten-Windsors to send children to Gordonstoun, which Harry's grandfather, father, two uncles, and two cousins had attended. It did, however, see Harry follow in his older brother's footsteps and the Spencer family's, as both Diana's father and brother attended Eton. As was the case with his brother, the royal family and the tabloid press agreed Harry would be allowed to study free from intrusion in exchange for occasional photograph opportunities in what became known as the "pressure cooker agreement".
In June 2003, Harry completed his education at Eton with two A-Levels, achieving a grade B in art and D in geography, having decided to drop history of art after AS level. He has been described as "a top tier athlete", having played competitive polo and rugby union. One of his former teachers, Sarah Forsyth, has asserted that he was a "weak student" and that staff at Eton conspired to help him cheat on examinations. Both Eton and Harry denied the claims. While a tribunal made no ruling on the cheating claim, it "accepted the prince had received help in preparing his A-level 'expressive' project, which he needed to pass to secure his place at Sandhurst." Harry also joined the Combined Cadet Force while studying at Eton and was made cadet officer in his final year, leading the corps' annual parade at the Eton tattoo.
After school, Harry took a gap year, during which he spent time in Australia working as a jackaroo on a cattle station, and participating in the Young England vs Young Australia Polo Test match. He also travelled to Lesotho, where he worked with orphaned children and produced the documentary film The Forgotten Kingdom: Prince Harry in Lesotho.
Harry passed the Regular Commissions Board (RCB) in September 2004 and entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on 8 May 2005, where he was known as Officer Cadet Wales, and joined Alamein Company. His entry into the academy had to be delayed for 4 months as he recovered from an injury to his left knee. In April 2006, Harry completed his officer training and was commissioned as a Cornet (second lieutenant) in the Blues and Royals, a regiment of the Household Cavalry in the British Army. On 13 April 2008, when he reached two years' seniority, Harry was promoted to lieutenant.
In 2006, it was announced that Harry's unit was scheduled to be deployed in Iraq the following year. A public debate ensued as to whether he should serve there. In April 2006, the Ministry of Defence announced that Harry would be shielded from the front line if his unit was sent to war, with a spokeswoman stating that he was expected to "undertake the fullest range of deployments", but his role needed to be monitored as "his overt presence might attract additional attention" that would put him or those he commanded at risk. Defence Secretary John Reid said that he should be allowed to serve on the front line of battle zones. Harry agreed saying, "If they said 'no, you can't go front line' then I wouldn't drag my sorry ass through Sandhurst and I wouldn't be where I am now." Harry completed the Troop Leaders' Course in October 2006 and rejoined his regiment in Windsor, where he was put in charge of a troop of 11 soldiers and four Scimitar reconnaissance vehicles. The Ministry of Defence and Clarence House made a joint announcement on 22 February 2007 that Harry would be deployed with his regiment to Iraq, as part of the 1st Mechanised Brigade of the 3rd Mechanised Division – a move supported by Harry, who had stated that he would leave the army if he was told to remain in safety while his regiment went to war.
The head of the British army at the time, General Sir Richard Dannatt, said on 30 April 2007 that he had personally decided that Harry would serve with his unit in Iraq as a troop commander, and Harry was scheduled for deployment in May or June 2007 to patrol the Maysan Governorate. By 16 May, however, Dannatt announced that Harry would not serve in Iraq; concerns included Harry being a high-value target (as several threats by various groups had already been made against him) and the dangers the soldiers around him would face should any attempt be made on his life or if he were captured. Clarence House made public Harry's disappointment with the decision, though he said he would abide by it.
In the summer of 2007, Harry was trained as a joint terminal attack controller at RAF Leeming. In early June 2007, it was reported that Harry had arrived in Canada to train alongside soldiers of the Canadian Forces and British Army, at CFB Suffield near Medicine Hat, Alberta. It was said that this was in preparation for a tour of duty in Afghanistan, where Canadian and British forces were participating in the NATO-led Afghan War. This was confirmed in February of the following year when the British Ministry of Defence revealed that Harry had been secretly deployed as a joint terminal attack controller to Helmand Province in Afghanistan for the previous ten weeks. The revelation came after the media – notably, German newspaper Bild and Australian magazine New Idea – breached the blackout placed over the information by the Canadian and British authorities. He was immediately pulled out due to the fear that the media coverage would put his security and the security of fellow soldiers at risk. It was later reported that Harry helped Gurkha troops repel an attack from Taliban insurgents, and performed patrol duty in hostile areas while in Afghanistan.
Harry's tour made him the first member of the British royal family to serve in a war zone since his uncle Prince Andrew, who flew helicopters during the Falklands War. For Harry's service, his aunt Princess Anne presented him with an Operational Service Medal for Afghanistan at the Combermere Barracks in May 2008.
In October 2008, it was announced that Harry would follow his brother, father and uncle in learning to fly military helicopters. Harry attended the Defence Helicopter Flying School at RAF Shawbury, where he joined his brother. Prince Charles presented him with his flying brevet (wings) on 7 May 2010 at a ceremony at the Army Air Corps Base (AAC), Middle Wallop. Harry was awarded his Apache Flying Badge on 14 April 2011. On 16 April 2011, it was announced that Harry had been promoted to captain. In June 2011, Clarence House announced that Harry would be available for deployment in current operations in Afghanistan as an Apache helicopter pilot. The final decision rested with the Ministry of Defence's senior commanders, including principally the Chief of the Defence Staff in consultation with the wishes of Harry, the Prince of Wales, and the Queen. In October, he was transferred to a US military base in California to complete his helicopter gunship training. This final phase included live-fire training and "environmental and judgment training" at naval and air force facilities in California and Arizona. In the same month, it was reported that Harry was top of his class in extensive training undertaken at the Naval Air Facility, El Centro, California. While training in Southern California, he spent time in San Diego. In November 2011, Harry returned to England. He went to Wattisham Airfield in Suffolk, in the east of England, to complete his training to fly Apache helicopters.
On 7 September 2012, Harry arrived at Camp Bastion in southern Afghanistan as part of the 100-strong 662 Squadron, 3 Regiment, Army Air Corps, to begin a four-month combat tour as a co-pilot and gunner for an Apache helicopter. On 10 September, within days of arriving in Afghanistan, it was reported that the Taliban had threatened his life. On 18 September 2012, it was reported that Harry had been moved to a safe location after an attack by the Taliban on Camp Bastion that killed two US marines. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond stated that "additional security arrangements" were put in place, for Harry could be a potential target, but added that he would face "the same risk as any other Apache pilot" while in combat. In files obtained on the incident, Major General Gregg A. Sturdevant was quoted as saying "The night of the attack, he slept through the entire thing. We didn't do anything special for him. He came and went, and you never would have known he was there" and "the only thing special we did for him was we had a place identified as a safe house in case the base came under attack." On 21 January 2013, it was announced that Harry was returning from a 20-week deployment in Afghanistan. On 8 July 2013, the Ministry of Defence announced that Harry had successfully qualified as an Apache aircraft commander. Harry compared operating the Apache's weapons systems in Afghanistan to playing video games.
Harry later revealed in his 2023 memoir Spare that he flew on six missions that resulted in him killing 25 Taliban members, writing that he felt he was trained to not view them as "people" but instead as "chess pieces" that had been taken off the board. He added that "It's not a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed." Following the publishing of Harry's claims, Pen Farthing, a British former Royal Marines commando and founder of the Nowzad Dogs charity, was evacuated from Kabul on 6 January 2023 to avoid "potential reprisal attacks on ex-forces people." Harry's revelations prompted backlash from both Taliban members and British politicians and military figures.
On 17 January 2014, the Ministry of Defence announced that Harry had completed his attachment to 3 Regiment Army Air Corps, and would take up a staff officer role, SO3 (Defence Engagement) in HQ London District. His responsibilities would include helping to coordinate significant projects and commemorative events involving the Army in London. He was based at Horse Guards in central London.
On 6 March 2014, Harry launched Invictus Games, a Paralympic-style sporting event for injured servicemen and women, which was held on 10–14 September 2014. Harry met British hopefuls for the Invictus Games at Tedworth House in Wiltshire for the start of the selection process on 29 April 2014. On 15 May 2014, Harry attended a ticket sale launch for Invictus Games at BT Tower, from where he tweeted on the Invictus Games' official Twitter account as the president of the Games. To promote the Games, he was interviewed by BBC Radio 2's Chris Evans along with two Invictus Games hopefuls. He said: "[The Invictus Games] is basically my full-time job at the moment, making sure that we pull this off." The show aired on 31 July 2014. Harry later wrote an article in The Sunday Times about his experiences in Afghanistan: how they had inspired him to help injured personnel and how, after the trip to the Warrior Games, he had vowed to create the Invictus Games. Harry and officials attended the British Armed Forces Team announcement for Invictus Games at Potters Field Park in August 2014. As president of the Invictus Games, he attended all events related to the Games from 8 to 14 September 2014.
In January 2015, it was reported that Harry would take on a new role in supporting wounded service personnel by working alongside members of the London District's Personal Recovery Unit for the MOD's Defence Recovery Capability scheme to ensure that wounded personnel have adequate recovery plans. The palace confirmed weeks later that the scheme was established in partnership with Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion. In late January 2015, Harry visited The Battle Back Centre set up by the Royal British Legion, and Fisher House UK at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham. A partnership between Help for Heroes, the Fisher House Foundation and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham (QEHB) Charity created the Centre. Fisher House Foundation is one of the Invictus Games' sponsors. In February and March 2015, Harry visited Phoenix House in Catterick Garrison, North Yorkshire, a recovery centre run by Help for Heroes. He also visited Merville Barracks in Colchester, where Chavasse VC House Personnel Recovery Centre is located, run by Help for Heroes in partnership with the Ministry of Defence and Royal British Legion.
On 17 March 2015, Kensington Palace announced that Harry would leave the Armed Forces in June. Before then, he would spend four weeks throughout April and May at army barracks in Darwin, Perth and Sydney whilst seconded to the Australian Defence Force (ADF). After leaving the Army, while considering his future, he would return to work in a voluntary capacity with the Ministry of Defence, supporting Case Officers in the Ministry's Recovery Capability Programme. He would be working with both those who administer and receive physical and mental care within the London District area.
On 6 April 2015, Harry reported for duty to Australia's Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin at the Royal Military College, Duntroon in Canberra, Australia. Harry flew to Darwin later that day to begin his month-long secondment to the ADF's 1st Brigade. His visit included detachments to NORFORCE as well as to an aviation unit. While in Perth, he trained with Special Air Service Regiment (SASR), participating in the SASR selection course, including a fitness test and a physical training session with SASR selection candidates. He also joined SASR members in Perth for live-fire shooting exercises with numerous Special Forces weapons at a variety of ranges. Harry completed an insertion training exercise using a rigid-hull inflatable boat. In Sydney, he undertook urban operations training with the 2nd Commando Regiment. Training activities included remotely detonating an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) and rappelling from a building. He also spent time flying over Sydney as co-pilot of an Army Black Hawk helicopter and participated in counter-terrorism training in Sydney Harbour with Royal Australian Navy clearance divers.
Harry's attachment with the ADF ended on 8 May 2015, and on 19 June 2015 he resigned his short service commission.
In 2021, Harry described his 10 years (2005–2015) in the army as "the happiest times in my life". Since leaving the army, he has been closely involved with the armed forces through the Invictus Games, honorary military appointments and other official engagements. On 19 December 2017, he succeeded his grandfather Prince Philip as the Captain General Royal Marines. In May 2018, he was promoted to the substantive ranks of Lieutenant Commander of the Royal Navy, Major of the British Army and Squadron Leader of the Royal Air Force.
On 18 January 2020, Buckingham Palace announced that an agreement had been reached for Harry "to step back from Royal duties, including official military appointments". In February 2021, the Palace confirmed that the Duke would give up his position as Captain General Royal Marines and hand back all the other honorary military appointments.
Chelsy Davy, the daughter of Zimbabwean, South Africa-based businessman Charles Davy, was referred to as Harry's girlfriend in an interview conducted for his 21st birthday, and Harry said he "would love to tell everyone how amazing she is but once I start talking about that, I have left myself open.... There is truth and there is lies and unfortunately I cannot get the truth across." Davy was present when Harry received his Operational Service Medal for Afghanistan and also attended his graduation ceremony when he received his flying wings from his father. In early 2009, it was reported the pair had parted ways after a relationship that had lasted for five years.
In his 2023 memoir, Harry states that months after breaking up with Davy he was introduced to Caroline Flack, whom he described as "funny", "sweet", and "cool". The two saw each other for a while before press intrusion "tainted" their relationship "irredeemably" according to Harry. Flack had discussed the relationship in her own autobiography as well.
In May 2012, Harry's cousin Princess Eugenie introduced him to Cressida Bonas, an actress and model who is the granddaughter of Edward Curzon, 6th Earl Howe. On 30 April 2014, it was reported that the couple had parted amicably.
In mid-2016, Prince Harry began a relationship with American actress Meghan Markle. According to the couple, they first connected with each other via Instagram, though they have also said that they were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend in July 2016. On 8 November, eight days after the relationship was made public by the press, the prince directed his communications secretary to release a statement on his behalf to express personal concern about pejorative and false comments made about his girlfriend by mainstream media and internet trolls. In September 2017, Prince Harry and Markle first appeared together in public at the Invictus Games in Toronto. Their engagement was announced on 27 November 2017 by Harry's father. The announcement prompted generally positive comments about having a mixed-race person as a member of the royal family, especially in regard to Commonwealth countries with populations of blended or native ancestry. On 19 May 2018, the marriage ceremony was held at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. The couple later revealed in the 2021 television interview Oprah with Meghan and Harry that, three days prior to the ceremony, they had privately exchanged vows in their garden, in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. However, this earlier exchange of vows was not an official religious or legally recognised marriage.
The Duke and Duchess initially lived at Nottingham Cottage in London, on the grounds of Kensington Palace. In May 2018, it was reported that they had signed a two-year lease on WestfieldLarge, located on the Great Tew Estate in the Cotswolds. They gave up the lease after photos of the house and its interior were published by a paparazzi agency. The couple considered settling at the 21-room Apartment 1 within the grounds of Kensington Palace, but moved to Frogmore Cottage in the Home Park of Windsor Castle instead. The Crown Estate refurbished the cottage at a cost of £2.4 million, paid out of the Sovereign Grant, with the Duke later reimbursing expenses beyond restoration and ordinary maintenance, a part of which was offset against rental payments that were due at the time. On 6 May 2019, the Duke and Duchess's son, Archie, was born. Their office was moved to Buckingham Palace and officially closed on 31 March 2020 when the Sussexes ceased "undertaking official engagements in support of the Queen". After some months in Canada and the United States, the couple bought a house in June 2020 on the former estate of Riven Rock in Montecito, California. The next month, the Duchess suffered a miscarriage. On 4 June 2021, their daughter, Lilibet, was born. The Duke and Duchess own a Labrador named Pula, and two Beagles named Guy and Mamma Mia.
Harry is godfather to "five or six" children.
In May 1988, Harry underwent a surgery for a minor hernia. In November 2000, he broke his thumb while playing football at Eton and underwent a minor operation. In his memoir, Spare, Harry admits that he took cocaine at the age of 17. In 2002, it was reported that, with Charles's encouragement, Harry had paid a visit to a drug rehabilitation unit to talk to drug addicts after it had emerged that he had been smoking cannabis and drinking at his father's Highgrove House and at a local pub in the summer of 2001. He adds in his memoir that he smoked cannabis at Eton and in Kensington Palace gardens, but he later told a court that "he never smoked in [his] father's house". In the memoir, he also detailed taking magic mushrooms at a party at Courteney Cox's house in January 2016.
In 2017 and during an appearance on Bryony Gordon's podcast Mad World, Harry acknowledged that with the support of his brother he had sought counselling years after his mother's death. He added that he had struggled with aggression, had suffered from anxiety during royal engagements, and had been "very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions". He later added that he had taken up boxing as a way of coping with mental stress and "letting out aggression". In other interviews he stated that besides therapy he took alcohol to cope and used experimental drugs recreationally, including "psychedelics, Ayahuasca, psilocybin, mushrooms." He also stated that what he experienced after his mother's death "was very much" post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In his mental-health television documentary, The Me You Can't See, which premiered in 2021, he added that he had undergone four years of therapy to address his mental health issues, having been encouraged to do so by his future wife after they had started dating. He also mentioned that he had suffered from "panic attacks [and] severe anxiety" in his late 20s and that the heavy load of official visits and functions had eventually "led to burnout". In an episode of Armchair Expert, Harry attributed his mental health issues to the ineffective parenting style of previous generations and to the "genetic pain and suffering" passed down in his family, adding that he believed his issues stemmed from "the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered". In his 2023 memoir, Harry described himself as an agoraphobe. In March 2023, the Heritage Foundation sent a dossier on Harry's drug use to different government entities, asking whether he had admitted to past drug use on his U.S. visa application. The following month, they filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security demanding his immigration records.
In September 2020, Harry and his wife released a video addressing American voters to "reject hate speech, misinformation and online negativity" in the 2020 United States presidential election, which was seen by some as an implicit endorsement of Joe Biden. Harry was the subject of a prank by the Russian comedy duo Vovan and Lexus, who posed as climate activist Greta Thunberg and her father during two phone calls on New Year's Eve and 22 January 2020. During the conversations, Harry described his decision to leave the monarchy as "not easy" and criticised Donald Trump's stance on climate change and his support of the coal industry.
In May 2021, Harry was a guest on Dax Shepard and Monica Padman's podcast Armchair Expert during which he talked about the freedom of speech and laws related to it in the United States, stating "I've got so much I want to say about the First Amendment as I sort of understand it, but it is bonkers." He added that it was "a huge subject and one which [he didn't] understand", emphasising that one could "capitalise or exploit what's not said rather than uphold what is said." The comments were met by backlash from conservative Americans and Britons, prompting figures such as Ted Cruz, Dan Crenshaw, Nigel Farage, Candace Owens, Jack Posobiec, and Laura Ingraham to criticise him publicly.
In November 2021, in a panel at Wired's Re:Wired Conference, Harry claimed that a day before the January 6 United States Capitol attack he emailed Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, and 'warned' of potential civil unrest, but had not received a response. In the same month, Conservative politician and MP Johnny Mercer, who was leading the efforts to waive visa fees for foreign-born UK veterans and their families, announced in the Commons that the Duke of Sussex was supportive of their proposal and viewed it as "morally right" and not as "a political intervention".
In June 2022, in an interview with Jessica Yellin for Vogue, Meghan described Harry's reaction to the Supreme Court of the United States's decision that abortion is not a protected constitutional right as "guttural". Harry later condemned the decision as "rolling back of constitutional rights" in his address to the United Nations on Mandela Day in July 2022. Associate justice of the Supreme Court Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority decision for the case, criticised foreign figures including Harry for their comments on "American law" during a speech.
In June 2023, Harry broke royal protocol by criticising the UK government in his witness statement to a court. He argued that both the British press and the government were "at rock bottom" and instead of scrutinising the government the press got "into bed with them so they can ensure the status quo".
At the age of 21, Harry became a Counsellor of State and began his duties in that capacity. On 6 January 2009, the Queen granted Harry and William their own royal household. Previously, William and Harry's affairs had been handled by their father's office at Clarence House in central London. The new household released a statement announcing they had established their own office at nearby St James's Palace to look after their public, military and charitable activities. In March 2012, Harry led an official visit to Belize as part of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations. He continued to the Bahamas and Jamaica, where the Prime Minister, Portia Simpson-Miller, was considering initiating a process of turning Jamaica into a republic. He then visited Brazil to attend the GREAT Campaign. Harry also played tambourine and took part in the music video for the song "Sing", which was released in May 2012 to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee.
Between 9 and 15 May 2013, he made an official visit to the United States. The tour promoted the rehabilitation of injured American and UK troops, publicised his own charities and supported British interests. It included engagements in Washington, DC, Colorado, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. He met survivors of Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey. In October 2013, he undertook his first official tour of Australia, attending the International Fleet Review at Sydney Harbour. He also paid a visit to the Australian SAS HQ in Perth. In May 2014, he visited Estonia and Italy. In Estonia, he visited Freedom Square in the capital Tallinn to honour fallen Estonian soldiers. He also attended a reception at the Estonian Parliament and a NATO military exercise. In Italy, Harry attended commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the Monte Cassino battles, in which Polish, Commonwealth and British troops fought. On 6 November 2014, he opened the Field of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey, a task usually performed by Prince Philip.
Before reporting for duty to the Australian Defence Force (ADF), Harry visited the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on 6 April 2015. On 7 May 2015, he made a farewell walkabout at the Sydney Opera House and visited Macquarie University Hospital. On 24–25 April 2015, he joined his father in Turkey to attend commemorations of the centenary of the Gallipoli Campaign. On 28 October 2015, he carried out one day of engagements in the US. He launched the Invictus Games Orlando 2016 with First Lady Michelle Obama and Second Lady Jill Biden at Fort Belvoir. He later attended an Invictus Games board meeting and a reception to celebrate the launch at the British Ambassador's Residence. On 26 November 2015, as patron of Sentebale, Harry travelled to Lesotho to attend the opening of the Mamohato Children's Centre. From 30 November to 3 December 2015, he made an official visit to South Africa. He visited Cape Town, where he presented the insignia of the Order of the Companions of Honour to the Archbishop on behalf of the Queen. Harry also played the Sentebale Royal Salute Polo Cup, at Val de Vie Estate in Cape Town, fundraising for Sentebale. He visited Nepal 19–23 March 2016. He stayed until the end of March 2016 to help rebuild a secondary school with Team Rubicon UK, and visited a Hydropower Project in Central Nepal.
In April 2018, he was appointed Commonwealth youth ambassador, a position which he held until March 2020. Also in that month, Harry became a patron of Walk of America, a campaign which brings together a number of veterans who will take part in a 1,000-mile expedition across the US in mid-2018. The Prince was appointed the president of The Queen's Commonwealth Trust, which focuses on projects involving children and welfare of prisoners, in April. Periodically, online QCT chat sessions were conducted and uploaded to YouTube for general public viewing. He remained the charity's president until February 2021. In July 2018, Harry travelled to Dublin, Ireland, alongside his wife Meghan, which marked their first overseas visit as a couple. In October 2018, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex travelled to Sydney, for the 2018 Invictus Games. This formed part of a Pacific tour that included Australia, Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand.
Harry identifies as a feminist. During their visit to Morocco in February 2019, the Duke and Duchess focused on projects centred on "women's empowerment, girls' education, inclusivity and encouragement of social entrepreneurship". As part of establishing a separate office from Kensington Palace in 2019, the Duke and Duchess created an Instagram social media account, which broke the record for the fastest account at the time to reach a million followers. During his trip to Angola in 2019, the Duke visited the Born Free to Shine project in Luanda, an initiative by First Lady Ana Dias Lourenço which aims to "prevent HIV transmission from mothers to babies" through education, medical testing and treatment. He also met HIV+ youth and teenagers during his visit. During his visit to the Luengue-Luiana National Park, the Duke unveiled an initiative by the Queen's Commonwealth Canopy to help with protecting "an ancient elephant migration route" by providing safe passage for them in the forest. In September and October 2019, a Southern African tour included Malawi, Angola, South Africa and Botswana. Because infant son Archie travelled with the Sussexes, this was "their first official tour as a family". Harry completed 1,190 engagements between 2006 and 2019.
In January 2020, the Duke and Duchess announced that they were stepping back from their role as senior members of the royal family, and would balance their time between the United Kingdom and North America. A statement released by the Palace confirmed that the Duke and Duchess were to become financially independent and cease to represent the Queen. At the time of the announcement of Harry and Meghan's decision to "step back" as senior members of the royal family in 2020, 95% of the couple's income derived from the £2.3 million given to them annually by Harry's father, Charles, as part of his income from the Duchy of Cornwall. The couple retain their HRH stylings but are not permitted to use them. The formal role of the Duke and Duchess was subject to a twelve-month review period, ending in March 2021. In March 2020, Harry attended the opening of the Silverstone Experience in Silverstone Circuit together with racing driver Lewis Hamilton. Harry's appearance at the museum was his final solo engagement as a senior royal. He and Meghan attended the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey on 9 March 2020, which was their last engagement as a couple before they officially stepped down on 31 March. Harry's personal wealth was estimated at £30 million by The Daily Telegraph in 2020. Two years later, they made their first official appearance in the UK in June 2022 while attending the Platinum Jubilee National Service of Thanksgiving.
The Sussexes visited the UK and Germany in September 2022 for a number of charity events in Manchester and Düsseldorf. On 8 September 2022, while Harry and Meghan were in London preparing to attend a charity event, Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.
Harry faced difficulties with obtaining and maintaining publicly funded security, both in Canada and the United Kingdom, after he and Meghan announced their self-demotion within the royal family. While the couple resided on Vancouver Island, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation launched a petition calling for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to cease providing security to the Sussexes. The Government of Canada announced RCMP security would not be provided after March 2020 when the couple's status changed. A similar petition circulated in the UK in mid-March 2020. The backlash in the two countries led President Donald Trump to preemptively assert that the United States would not pay either; though, the couple never intended to ask for it while in the US.
In January 2022, it was reported that Harry had been in a legal fight since September 2021 over the Home Office's refusal to allow him to pay for police protection. He had made the offer to pay during the Sandringham Summit and "self-evidently believed" that it would be passed on to the government. Following the first court hearing of the case, it was revealed that Harry had 'exceptional status' and the Royal and VIP Executive Committee (RAVEC) still determined his personal protective security on a case-by-case basis. After receiving applications by the Duke and the Home Office to keep parts of the case private, the High Court ruled in March 2022 that some parts of it would remain confidential. Mr Justice Swift also reacted to the Duke's legal team sending a copy of the ruling to someone who was not a lawyer, describing it as "entirely unacceptable". In July 2022, Mr Justice Swift granted permission for part of Harry's claim to proceed for a judicial review.
Harry filed a lawsuit against the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police in August 2022, challenging the decision by RAVEC from January 2022 which stated that State security could not be made available to private individuals even if they wished to pay for it themselves. In February 2023, a judge ruled that the second case should be thrown out, however, the decision was later appealed by Harry's legal team. He lost the legal challenge in May 2023, meaning that he will not be allowed to make private payments for police protection. In June 2023, a Freedom of Information request revealed that Harry's legal fight with the Home Office had cost £502,236, with £492,000 covered by the state and the remaining £10,000 covered by Harry.
In summer 2019, before announcing their decision to step back in January 2020, Harry and his wife were involved in talks with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the founder of the now-defunct streaming platform Quibi, over a possible role in the service without gaining personal profits, but they eventually decided against joining the project. In September 2019, it was reported that the couple had hired New York-based PR firm Sunshine Sachs, which represented them until 2022. The couple has also been associated with Adam Lilling's Plus Capital, a venture capital fund designed to connect early stage companies with influencers and investors. In June 2020, they signed with the Harry Walker Agency, owned by media company Endeavor, to conduct paid public speaking engagements. In September 2020, the Sussexes signed a private commercial deal with Netflix. In December 2020, the Duke and Duchess signed a multi-year deal with Spotify to produce and host their own programs through their audio producing company, Archewell Audio. A holiday special was released by the couple on the service in December 2020. In June 2023, Spotify announced they would not proceed with the deal, cancelling Archetypes which had run for a single season of 12 episodes. Harry & Meghan, a docuseries about the Sussexes, was produced by Netflix and the couple's Archewell Productions and premiered on 8 December 2022. It is directed by Liz Garbus. The series received mixed reviews.
In March 2021, San Francisco-based mental health start-up BetterUp, a company that helps people get in contact with coaches or counsellors, said that Harry would become its first chief impact officer. In the same month, Harry was appointed as a commissioner for the Aspen Institute's Commission on Information Disorder to carry out a six-month study on the state of misinformation and disinformation in the United States. The study was published in November 2021 as a report with 15 recommendations. In the following month, in his capacity as BetterUp's chief impact officer, Harry was interviewed by Fast Company, stating that the recent trend of people leaving their jobs (known as the Great Resignation) was something that needed to be celebrated, though his remarks were criticised for coming from a position of privilege. In April 2022, reports emerged of criticism by the company's coaches over the new metrics placed for evaluating their services and over the opacity surrounding Harry's actual role in the firm.
In April 2019, it was announced that Harry was working as co-creator and executive producer on a documentary series about mental health together with Oprah Winfrey, which was initially set to air in 2020 on Apple TV+. It was later announced that the series, titled The Me You Can't See, would be released on 21 May 2021. In the following month, UCAS reported an increase in the percentage of students declaring mental health issues on their university applications, citing self-help books and Harry's statements on his struggles with "panic attacks and anxiety" as contributing factors. In October 2021, Harry and Meghan announced their partnership with Ethic, a sustainable investment firm based in New York City, which also manages the couple's investments. According to state filings from Delaware, where the couple's Archewell foundation is registered, Harry and Meghan incorporated 11 companies and a trust beginning in early 2020 which include Orinoco Publishing LLC and Peca Publishing LLC to hold the rights for their books as well as Cobblestone Lane LLC and IPHW LLC which are holders of their foundation's logos.
In July 2021, it was announced that Harry was set to publish his memoir Spare via Penguin Random House, with Harry reportedly earning an advance of at least $20 million. Spare was ghostwritten by novelist J. R. Moehringer. The memoir is reportedly the first of a four-book publishing deal that is set to include a second book by Harry and a wellness guide by Meghan. Spare was officially published on 10 January 2023 in 16 languages, and it has since become the UK's fastest selling non-fiction book with 400,000 confirmed sales in all formats on publication day. Harry announced that $1.5 million of the proceeds from the memoir were pledged to the charity Sentebale, while £300,000 would be given to WellChild.
In 2006, he was in Lesotho to visit Mants'ase Children's Home near Mohale's Hoek, which he first toured in 2004. Along with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, he launched Sentebale: The Princes' Fund for Lesotho, a charity to aid children orphaned by HIV/AIDS. He has granted his patronage to organisations including WellChild, Dolen Cymru, MapAction and the London Marathon Charitable Trust; he stepped down from MapAction in 2019 and the London Marathon Charitable Trust in 2021. In 2007, William and Harry organised the Concert for Diana, in memory of their mother, which benefited the charities and patronages of Diana, William, and Harry. In October 2008, Harry and his brother embarked on the 1,000 mile eight-day Enduro Africa motorbike ride across South Africa to raise money for Sentebale, UNICEF and the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. In September 2009, William and Harry set up The Foundation of Prince William and Prince Harry to enable them to take forward their charitable ambitions. Harry left the charity in June 2019.
After taking part in an unfinished trip to the North Pole with Walking With The Wounded in 2011, Harry joined the charity's 200-mile expedition to the South Pole in December 2013, accompanying twelve injured servicemen and women from the UK, the US and the Commonwealth. As patron of Walk of Britain, he walked with the team on 30 September and 20 October 2015. To raise awareness for HIV testing, Harry took a test live on the royal family Facebook page on 14 July 2016. He later attended the 21st International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, on 21 July 2016. On World AIDS Day, Harry and Rihanna helped publicise HIV testing by taking the test themselves. Since 2016, Harry has been working with Terrence Higgins Trust to raise awareness about HIV and sexual health. In November 2019, to mark the National HIV Testing Week, the Duke interviewed HIV+ Rugby player Gareth Thomas on behalf of the trust.
In December 2017, Harry guest edited BBC Radio 4's Today programme, conducting interviews with his father, the Prince of Wales, former US president Barack Obama, and others on issues such as youth violence, the Armed Forces, mental health, the Commonwealth, conservation and the environment. On 27 December 2017, Harry was officially appointed the new president of African Parks, a conservation NGO. He previously spent three weeks in Malawi with African Parks where he joined a team of volunteers and professionals to carry out one of the largest elephant translocations in history. The effort to repopulate areas decimated due to poaching and habitat loss moved 500 elephants from Liwonde and Majete National Parks to Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve. Harry had previously helped with relocating rhinos in the Okavango Delta and later became patron of the Rhino Conservation Botswana. In July 2018, the Elton John AIDS Foundation announced that the Duke of Sussex and British singer Elton John were about to launch a global coalition called MenStar that would focus "on treating HIV infections in men".
In May 2019, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex together with Harry's brother and sister-in-law launched Shout, the UK's first 24/7 text messaging service for those who suffer from mental issues. In September 2019, the Duke launched Travalyst during his visit to the Netherlands after two years of development. The initiative is set "to encourage sustainable practices in the travel industry" and "tackle climate change and environmental damage", in collaboration with a number of companies, including Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Ctrip, Skyscanner, and Visa Inc. The organisation later announced a partnership with Google in 2021. In October 2019, along with other members of the royal family, Harry voiced a Public Health England announcement, for the "Every Mind Matters" mental health program.
In February 2020, Harry recorded a new version of the song "Unbroken" with Jon Bon Jovi. The new version features backing vocals from members of the Invictus Choir. The song was released on 27 March 2020, the proceeds of which were donated to the Invictus Games Foundation. In April 2020, Harry launched a new initiative named HeadFIT, a platform designed to provide mental support for members of the armed forces. The initiative was developed mutually by the Royal Foundation's Heads Together campaign, the Ministry of Defence, and King's College London. In June 2020, the Duke and Duchess backed the Stop Hate for Profit campaign and encouraged CEOs of different companies to join the movement.
In April 2021, Harry and Meghan were announced as campaign chairs for Vax Live: The Concert to Reunite the World, an event organised by Global Citizen to increase access to COVID-19 vaccinations. They also announced their support for a vaccine equity fundraiser initiated by the same organisation, and penned an open letter to the pharmaceutical industry CEOs urging them to address the vaccine equity crisis. Later that month, he narrated "Hope Starts Here", a special video rereleased by African Parks to mark the Earth Day in which he urged organisations and communities to preserve biodiversity and paid tribute to his grandfather Prince Philip for his efforts as a conservationist. He helped with the establishment of Peak State, a mental fitness programme aimed at providing tools and resources for managing mental health, to which he publicly lent his support in May 2021.
Like his mother, Harry has worked with the HALO Trust, an organisation that removes debris—particularly landmines—left behind by war. He had previously visited a minefield in Mozambique with the charity and spent two days learning about their work and mine-clearing techniques. In 2013 he was named as patron of the charity's 25th Anniversary Appeal. In April 2017, he hosted the Landmine Free 2025 reception at Kensington Palace, during which the UK government announced an increase in its financial support for de-mining efforts. In September 2019, he walked through a de-mining site in Angola, the same country visited by his mother 22 years earlier. In June 2021, after ten members of the trust were killed by an armed group at a mine clearance camp in Afghanistan, Harry issued a statement saying the attack "was nothing less than an act of barbarism".
In September 2021, together with First Lady Jill Biden, he hosted a virtual event for the Warrior Games, which were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2021, he spoke against oil drilling in the Okavango River in an op-ed for The Washington Post. In the same month and ahead of the 2021 G20 Rome summit, Harry and his wife penned an open letter together with the Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom, asking the G20 leaders to expedite efforts for the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. In March 2022, they were among more than a hundred people who signed an open letter published by the People's Vaccine Alliance, asking for free global access to COVID-19 vaccines and calling out the UK, EU and Switzerland for opposing a waiver that would allow vaccine intellectual property protections to be lifted. In April 2022 and in a video featuring Rhys Darby and Dave Fane on Māori Television, Harry launched an eco-travel campaign through his non-profit Travalyst, encouraging people to travel sustainably.
Harry has enjoyed playing sports, such as competitive polo, skiing, and motocross. Like his brother and father, he has participated in polo matches to raise money for charitable causes. Harry is also a keen Rugby football fan and supported England's bid to host rugby union's 2015 Rugby World Cup, and presented the trophy at rugby league's 2019 Challenge Cup finals. In 2004, Harry trained as a Rugby Development Officer for the Rugby Football Union and coached students in schools to encourage them to learn the sport. He, along with former rugby player Brian Moore, both argued that in response to Black Lives Matter, the song "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" should no longer be sung in rugby context. Between December 2016 and February 2021, he was patron of both the Rugby Football Union (RFU) and Rugby Football League (RFL), Rugby League's governing body in England. He had served as the RFU's vice-royal patron since 2010, supporting the Queen as patron.
In 2012, Harry launched Coach Core alongside his brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The program was set up following the 2012 Olympics and provides apprenticeship opportunities for people who desire to pursue a career as a professional coach. In January 2017, Harry visited the Running Charity and its partner Depaul UK to highlight the role of sport in helping homeless and vulnerable people. In June 2019, the Duke was present at the launch of Made by Sport, a charity coalition set to raise money to boost sport in disadvantaged communities. In his statement, he lent his support to the charity by arguing that its role in bringing sport into the life of disadvantaged people would save "hundreds of millions of pounds" towards treating the issues among young people.
In June 2019, it was announced that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would split from The Royal Foundation and establish their own charity foundation by the end of 2019. Nevertheless, the couple would collaborate with Harry's brother and his wife on mutual projects, such as the mental health initiative Heads Together. In July 2019, Harry and Meghan's new charity was registered in England and Wales under the title "Sussex Royal The Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Sussex". On 21 February, it was confirmed that "Sussex Royal" would not be used as a brand name for the couple following their withdrawal from public life. On 5 August 2020, Sussex Royal Foundation was renamed "MWX Foundation" and dissolved the same day.
In March 2021, it was reported that the Charity Commission for England and Wales was conducting a review of the Sussex Royal organisation in a "regulatory and compliance case" regarding its conduct under charity law during dissolution. Representatives for the couple claimed that Sussex Royal was "managed by a board of trustees" and that "suggestion of mismanagement" directed exclusively at the Duke and Duchess would be incorrect. The commission later concluded that the foundation did not act unlawfully, but criticised the board of directors for expending a "substantial proportion of funds" to setting up and closing the charity.
In April 2020, Meghan and Harry confirmed their new foundation (in lieu of Sussex Royal) would be called "Archewell". The name stems from the Greek word "arche", which means "source of action"; the same word that inspired the name of their son. Archewell was registered in the United States. Its website was officially launched in October 2020.
In his youth, Harry earned a reputation for being rebellious, leading the tabloid press to label him a "wild child". At the age of 17, he was seen smoking cannabis, drinking underage with friends, and clashing physically with paparazzi outside nightclubs. In early 2005, he was photographed at a "Colonial and Native"-themed birthday party in Wiltshire wearing a Nazi German Afrika Korps uniform with a swastika armband. His choice sparked a backlash from the media, politicians, and religious figures. Clarence House later issued a public statement in which Harry apologised for his behaviour. In an interview for his 21st birthday he stated that it "was a very stupid thing to do and I've learnt my lesson".
In January 2005, in response to an inquiry about his Zimbabwean girlfriend Chelsy Davy, Harry responded "She's not black or anything, you know". In January 2009, the British tabloid, the News of the World, revealed a video made by Harry three years earlier in which he referred to a Pakistani fellow officer cadet as "our little Paki friend" and called a soldier wearing a camouflage hood a "raghead". These terms were described by the Leader of the Opposition at the time David Cameron as "unacceptable", and by The Daily Telegraph as "racist". A British Muslim youth organisation called Harry a "thug". Further extracts showed him telling a comrade "I love you" before giving him a kiss on the cheek and licking his face, and asking another whether he felt gay, queer, or on the side. Clarence House immediately issued an apology from Harry, who stated that no malice was intended in his remarks. Subsequently, it was reported that the military had instructed Harry to attend a diversity course. In the same year, British stand-up comedian Stephen K. Amos alleged that after a stand-up show for Charles's 60th birthday celebrations in November 2008 Harry had commented on his performance by saying, "You don't sound like a black chap", though he hoped that the remarks were made in jest.
In October 2007, a video from Harry's trip to Namibia with his friends surfaced, which showed him snorting vodka and licking a male friend's nipples. While on holiday in Las Vegas in August 2012, Harry and an unknown young woman were photographed naked in a Wynn Las Vegas hotel room, reportedly during a game of strip billiards. The pictures were leaked by American celebrity website TMZ on 21 August 2012, and reported worldwide by mainstream media on 22 August 2012. The photographs were shown by the American media, but British media were reluctant to publish them. Royal aides suggested Clarence House would contact the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) if British publications used the pictures. St James's Palace confirmed that Harry was in the photographs, saying that he was essentially a victim whose privacy had been invaded and contacted the PCC upon hearing that a number of British newspapers were considering publishing the photographs. On 24 August 2012, The Sun newspaper published the photographs.
In December 2021, reports emerged about Harry's meetings with Saudi businessman Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, whose receipt of a CBE became the subject of an investigation by the Scottish Charity Regulator. Mahfouz had met Harry in 2013 and 2014 and donated £50,000 to his charity Sentebale and £10,000 to Walking With The Wounded, of which Harry is patron. The Sunday Times claimed that the meetings with Harry opened the way for Mahfouz to get access to the Prince of Wales. Harry referred to the incident as the "CBE scandal" in December 2021 and stated that he severed ties with Mahfouz in 2015 after expressing "growing concerns" about his motives, though aides from his father's household denied having any discussions with him regarding Mahfouz. A spokesperson for Sentebale defended the meetings and added that there was not any impropriety regarding the donations.
In view of their environmental activism, Harry and Meghan were criticised in August 2019 for reportedly taking four private jet journeys in 11 days, including one to Elton John's home in Nice, France. The criticism was in line with the reactions the royal family faced in June 2019, after it was revealed that they "had doubled [their] carbon footprint from business travel". Harry received backlash again in August 2021 and 2022 for taking a two-hour flight on private jets between California and Aspen, Colorado, to participate in an annual charity polo tournament. In June 2022 and on their way to California after the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, Harry and Meghan boarded a private jet that was estimated to have emitted "ten times more carbon than flying commercial".
After his marriage, Harry's popularity skyrocketed above all the other royals as he was deemed likable by 77 per cent of respondents in a poll of 3,600 Britons conducted by statistics and polling company YouGov. However, his popularity fell after stepping back from royal duties, and it plummeted after the release of his controversial interview with Oprah Winfrey, his Netflix docuseries, and his memoir. In December 2022, Harry was found to be the 3rd most disliked member of the British royal family by YouGov, preceded by his uncle Prince Andrew and his wife Meghan. Writing for The New York Times, Sarah Lyall noted that following the release of his memoir Harry and his wife lost support within segments of the American public and press. It has been suggested by critics that this fall from public esteem is due to Harry and Meghan's frequent attempts to achieve ongoing relevancy, and their perceived hypocrisy and selfishness. Harry and Meghan's exit from the royal family was satirized in a 2023 episode of South Park.
In 2018 and 2021, Harry was selected as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time magazine. In 2019, the magazine named Harry and his wife as among the 25 Most Influential People on the Internet. In 2021, the couple was featured on one of the magazine's seven worldwide Time 100 covers. In 2023, People named him as one of the "25 Most Intriguing People of the Year".
On 30 January 2020, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) sided with the Mail on Sunday over a dispute between the Duke and the newspaper regarding an Instagram photo involving Harry in which, according to the newspaper, elephants were in fact "tranquilised" and "tethered" during a relocating process. The IPSO rejected Harry's claim that the paper's description was "inaccurate" or "misleading".
In December 2020, Harry's legal team sued Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) for publishing a story in the Mail on Sunday claiming his working relationship with the Royal Marines had suffered post-royal departure. The newspaper subsequently accepted the claims were false and issued an apology. The prince's lawyer said the "substantial damages" paid by the publisher would be donated to the Invictus Games Foundation.
In November 2021, Harry and Meghan's former communications secretary Jason Knauf gave a statement to the court following ANL's appeal against a judge's ruling that accused the media company of breaching Meghan's privacy for publishing a letter she had sent to her father. Knauf mentioned the Duchess of Sussex directly gave him briefing points to share with Finding Freedom's authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand and added that the Duke of Sussex had welcomed the suggestion that they should conceal their involvement with the process of writing the book, while they both discussed the book "on a routine basis". ANL had previously applied to use the book in their defense, arguing that the Duke and Duchess had "co-operated with the authors of the recently published book Finding Freedom to put out their version of certain events".
In February 2022, Harry filed a libel suit in the High Court against Associated Newspapers Limited for a Mail on Sunday article which alleged he was trying to keep his legal battle against the Home Office to restore his police protection secret from the public through requesting a confidentiality order on the case and that he offered to pay for police protection only after filing a lawsuit against the government. In June 2022, Mr Justice Nicklin ruled that parts of the article were potentially defamatory, though Nicklin rejected claims by Harry's lawyers that the article portrayed him as a liar. Harry attempted to have the publisher's defence thrown out, but the judge rejected his motion in December 2023 and decided that the case should proceed to trial. He later ordered Harry to pay Mail on Sunday £48,447 in legal costs.
In October 2022, the Duke of Sussex joined Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John, David Furnish, Sadie Frost, and Elizabeth Hurley in launching a legal action against Associated Newspapers Limited for their alleged "abhorrent criminal activity", which was said to involve listening to and recording people's phone calls and daily activities, obtaining sensitive information and medical records, and accessing bank accounts and financial transactions. In a statement, ANL described the allegations as "preposterous smears", and Gavin Burrows, the private investigator whose alleged 2021 statement was used as a key element in the case, said that the statement was not signed by him and was "a cut and paste from my evidence" of other publishers targeting individuals. In November 2023, Mr Justice Nicklin ruled that the case brought by Harry and the other claimants could proceed but unpublished material provided to the Leveson Inquiry was inadmissible as proof in this case.
In October 2019, it was announced that Harry had sued the Daily Mirror, The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World "in relation to alleged phone-hacking". Former News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman had previously stated that he had hacked Harry's phone on nine occasions. He sought damages in excess of £200,000 from the publisher of the News of the World and The Sun and alleged an earlier agreement between News Group Newspapers and the royal family which would see he and William not take legal action in return for an apology had not been honoured. A palace source denied the existence of any secret agreements. Both brothers brought a claim privately through their mutual attorneys, but Harry decided to pursue his case separately with a new solicitor in 2019. In April 2023, a High Court judge said there were inconsistencies in Harry's claim, including the time when he became aware of the issue's full scale and his failure to mention an alleged agreement between the publisher and the palace. In July 2023, the judge ruled that part of Harry's case involving allegations of illegal information gathering would go to trial but his phone-hacking claims were dismissed for being made too late.
Lawyers for the Mirror denied accessing Harry's voicemail messages and other allegations, but admitted to instructing "private investigators to unlawfully obtain private information" about Harry on a single occasion that involved him visiting Chinawhite. In January 2023, a High Court judge ruled that Harry's lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) as well as other similar lawsuits against the publisher would go to trial in May 2023. At the beginning of trial, MGN apologised for one instance of unlawful information gathering against Harry and added that his legal challenge "warrants compensation". In June 2023, Harry testified in the court case accusing former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan of horrific personal attacks and claimed that his phone had been hacked dating back to when he was still at Eton. His appearance marked the first time a member of the royal family had given evidence in court since Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, appeared as a witness in court in 1891. On 15 December 2023, the High Court ruled in favour of Harry for 15 of the 33 sample stories used in his claims of phone hacking against MGN and awarded him £140,600 of the £440,000 he sought in damages. Mr Justice Fancourt concluded Piers Morgan and other editors knew about the phone hacking at their publications and were involved in it. Harry called the ruling "vindicating and affirming" and urged the authorities to further investigate and prosecute the company.
In October 2013, Jo Brand appeared on Have I Got News for You and while talking about Prince George's christening she said: "George's godparents include Hugh van Cutsem ... I presume that's a nickname as in Hugh van cuts 'em and Harry then snorts 'em." Representatives of Kensington Palace contacted the BBC after the programme aired, pointing out the error and the implications of the joke. The BBC wrote to Kensington Palace apologising for the "factual inaccuracy" as George's godfather was William van Cutsem, but it did not apologise for the comment itself as it was part of the show's "irreverent humor".
In February 2014, a judge sentenced the convicted criminal Ashraf Islam to three years in prison, as he had plotted to murder Harry and had given it "considerable thought" due to his belief that Harry had "a moral guilt" since he was in the army. In June 2019, two members of the neo-Nazi group Sonnenkrieg Division were jailed for eighteen months and four years, respectively, for sharing propaganda posters among which was one that labelled Harry as a "race traitor" with a gun pointed at his head.
In May 2019, Splash News issued a formal apology to the Sussexes for sending photographers to their Cotswolds residence, which put their privacy at risk. The agency also agreed to pay damages and legal costs associated with the case. In January 2020, lawyers issued a legal warning to the press after paparazzi photographs were published in the media. In March 2020, the couple took Splash UK to court after the Duchess and their son were photographed without permission during a "private family outing" while staying in Canada. The case was settled later that year with Splash UK agreeing to no longer take unauthorised photos of the family. On 20 April 2020, the Duke and Duchess announced that they would no longer cooperate with the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Mirror and the Express. They won an apology in October from American news agency X17 for taking photographs of their son at their home using drones.
In June 2020, it was reported that Harry's lawyers had issued a 'letter before action', threatening to sue the Sun and Dan Wootton, based on the allegations that they had paid money to associates of palace officials to secure their stories. It was alleged that the Sun had made two payments amounting to £4,000 to the partner of a royal official in relation to stories published in June and July 2019 which detailed the nannying and god-parenting arrangements for Harry and Meghan's son Archie. News Group Newspapers, publisher of the Sun, emphasised that they had done nothing "unlawful" in sourcing the stories and no illegal payments were made. Wootton's lawyers denied that any payments were made unlawfully to a public official or a proxy and described the claims as "a smear campaign by unknown bad actors." Wootton has been credited with breaking the story about Megxit and Harry and Meghan's initial plans for moving to Canada in the Sun on 8 January 2020, which prompted the couple to issue an announcement within hours, confirming their plans for stepping back from their royal duties. Sources close to the couple later spoke to The New York Times, stating that they "felt forced to disclose their plans prematurely" as they learned about the Sun's intentions to publish the story. Wootton disputed the claim as "They released the statement after we had published the story and had so much notice."
A September 2020 article by The Times claiming an Invictus Games fundraiser had been cancelled due to its affiliation with a competitor of Netflix, Harry's business partner, became the subject of a legal complaint issued by the Duke. In January 2022, the couple mutually filed a legal complaint against The Times for an article reporting on Archewell raising less than $50,000 in 2020.
Despite the palace congratulating the Duke and Duchess on the birth of their daughter Lilibet in June 2021, a few days later the BBC reported that Harry and Meghan had not sought the permission of the Queen before naming their daughter with her personal family nickname. Lawyers for the couple subsequently accused the BBC of defamation and sent letters out to various media organisations saying the report was false and defamatory, and the allegations should not be repeated as Harry had spoken to the Queen before announcing their daughter's name.
Harry and his wife were interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in a television special for CBS, broadcast on 7 March 2021. Meghan spoke about marriage, motherhood, and the pressures of public life. Harry joined her later, and the pair talked about the initial difficulties associated with their move to the United States in 2020 and their plans for the future. During the interview, Harry criticised his father's parenting style, mentioned his father did not answer his calls and had cut him off financially, and he had no relationship with his brother. There was a wide and polarised reaction to the interview.
In April 2022, Harry sat down for an interview with Today's Hoda Kotb during the Invictus Games, during which he claimed that he had visited his grandmother the Queen earlier to make sure that she was "protected and got the right people around her." In January 2023 and ahead of the release of his memoir Spare, Harry sat down for a series of interviews, including an interview by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, another one by Tom Bradby titled Harry: The Interview on ITV1, and a third interview by Michael Strahan on Good Morning America, titled Prince Harry: In His Own Words. In the interview with Bradby, Harry said that he "would like to get my father back, I would like to have my brother back". Referring to the press as "the devil", he also alleged that "certain members" of his family were "in the bed" with them to "rehabilitate their image".
In a live-streamed interview in March 2023, Gabor Maté, a physician, suggested publicly that Harry could be suffering from PTSD, ADD, anxiety, and depression based on his conversation with him and having read his autobiography Spare.
In October 2021, Twitter analytics service Bot Sentinel released their analysis of more than 114,000 tweets about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, which states that 83 accounts with a combined number of 187,631 followers responsible for approximately 70% of the negative content posted about the couple. The report prompted an investigation by Twitter. Twitter stated that it found no evidence of "widespread coordination" between the accounts, and said that it had taken action against users who violated Twitter's conduct policy. Bot Sentinel also released three more reports in the following months, arguing that the accounts were part of a "bot network" and a similar network could be found on YouTube. In January 2022, the BBC named Harry and Meghan among people whose photos and videos were used in fake instant profits advertisements and bitcoin-related investment schemes.
Harry was originally styled "His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales". He used Wales as his surname for military purposes and was known as "Captain Harry Wales" in such contexts.
On the morning of his wedding, Queen Elizabeth II granted him the Dukedom of Sussex, the Earldom of Dumbarton and Barony of Kilkeel. He thus became known as "His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex". He uses the earldom in Scotland and the barony in Northern Ireland.
On 18 January 2020, Buckingham Palace announced that, following their decision to step back from royal duties, from 31 March 2020 the Duke and Duchess would not use their Royal Highness styles in practice. They are still referred to as "His/Her Royal Highness" in legal settings.
In February 2021, it was announced via written confirmation that Harry's honorary military appointments mentioned above were returned to Queen Elizabeth II.
In December 2010, the German charity Ein Herz für Kinder ("A Heart for Children") awarded him its Golden Heart Award, in recognition of his "charitable and humanitarian efforts". On 7 May 2012, the Atlantic Council awarded him its Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership Award. In August 2018, the Royal Canadian Legion granted him the 2018 Founders Award for his role in founding the Invictus Games. In October 2018, he was presented with the RSA Badge in Gold, the organisation's highest honour, for his work with injured veterans. In July 2021, Harry and Meghan were among people who were selected by UK-based charity Population Matters to receive the Change Champions Award for their decision to have only two children and help with maintaining a smaller and more sustainable population. In February 2022, Harry and Meghan were selected to receive the NAACP's President's Award for their work on causes related to social justice and equity. In October 2022, the couple were named as Ripple of Hope Award laureates for their work on racial justice, mental health, and other social initiatives through their foundation Archewell.
Agnatically, Harry is a member of the House of Glücksburg, a cadet branch of the House of Oldenburg, one of Europe's oldest royal houses. Harry's paternal grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, issued letters patent on 8 February 1960 declaring his father to be a member of the House of Windsor.
Ancestors on Harry's father's side include most of the royal families of Europe, and on his mother's side, the earls Spencer—a cadet branch of the Spencer family descended from the earls of Sunderland; the senior branch are now also dukes of Marlborough; the Barons Fermoy; and more anciently from Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Grafton, and Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond—two illegitimate sons of King Charles II.
Harry and his brother William descend matrilineally from Eliza Kewark, a housekeeper for his eighteenth-century ancestor Theodore Forbes—a Scottish merchant who worked for the East India Company in Surat. She is variously described in contemporary documents as "a dark-skinned native woman", "an Armenian woman from Bombay", and "Mrs. Forbesian". Genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner assumed Kewark was Armenian. In June 2013, BritainsDNA announced that genealogical DNA tests on two of Harry and William's distant matrilineal cousins confirm Kewark was matrilineally of Indian descent. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, KCVO (Henry Charles Albert David; born 15 September 1984), is a member of the British royal family. As the younger son of King Charles III and Diana, Princess of Wales, Harry is fifth in the line of succession to the British throne.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Educated at Wetherby School, Ludgrove School, and Eton College, Harry completed army officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He was commissioned as a cornet into the Blues and Royals and served temporarily with his older brother William. Harry was separately deployed on active duty to Afghanistan on two occasions; the first was in 2007–2008 for ten weeks in Helmand Province. The second was for twenty weeks in 2012–2013 with the Army Air Corps.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Inspired by the Warrior Games in the United States, Harry launched the Invictus Games in 2014 as founding patron and now remains involved in a non-royal capacity. Two years later, alongside his brother William and sister-in-law Catherine, Harry jointly initiated the mental health awareness campaign \"Heads Together\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 2018, Harry was made Duke of Sussex prior to his wedding to American actress Meghan Markle. They have two children: Archie and Lilibet. Harry and Meghan stepped down as working royals in January 2020, moved to Meghan's native Southern California, and launched Archewell Inc., a Beverly Hills-based mix of for-profit and not-for-profit (charitable) business organisations. In March 2021, Harry sat for Oprah with Meghan and Harry, a much-publicised American television interview with his wife and Oprah Winfrey. The couple filmed Harry & Meghan, a Netflix docuseries, which was released in December 2022.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Prince Harry was born in the Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, on 15 September 1984 as the second child of Charles, Prince of Wales (later King Charles III), and his first wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, during the reign of his grandmother Queen Elizabeth II. He was christened Henry Charles Albert David on 21 December 1984 at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. Growing up, he was referred to as \"Harry\" by family, friends, and the public, and was nicknamed \"Harold\" by his brother. Harry and his elder brother, William, were raised at Kensington Palace in London, and Highgrove House in Gloucestershire. Diana wanted her sons to have a broader range of experiences and a better understanding of ordinary life than previous royal children. She took them to venues that ranged from Walt Disney World and McDonald's to AIDS clinics and homeless shelters. He began accompanying his parents on official visits at an early age; his first overseas tour was with his parents to Italy in 1985. He also travelled with his family to Canada in 1991 and 1998.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Harry's parents divorced in 1996. His mother died in a car crash in Paris the following year. Harry and William were staying with their father at Balmoral at the time, and the Prince of Wales told his sons about their mother's death. At his mother's funeral, Harry, then aged 12, accompanied his father, brother, paternal grandfather Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and maternal uncle Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, in walking behind the funeral cortège from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. Harry and his brother William inherited the \"bulk\" of the £12.9 million left by their mother on their respective 30th birthdays, a figure that had grown since her 1997 death to £10 million each in 2014. In 2014, Harry and William inherited their mother's wedding dress along with many of her other personal possessions, including dresses, diamond tiaras, jewels, letters, and paintings. The brothers also received the original lyrics and score of \"Candle in the Wind\", by Bernie Taupin and Elton John, as performed by John at Diana's funeral. In 2002, The Times reported that Harry would also share with his brother a disbursement of £4.9 million from trust funds established by their great-grandmother, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, on their respective 21st birthdays and would share a disbursement of £8 million upon their respective 40th birthdays. It was reported that Harry would inherit the bulk of the money left by the Queen Mother for the two brothers, as William is set to ascend to the throne, which will bring him additional financial benefits.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Like his father and brother, Harry was educated at private schools. He started at London's Jane Mynors' nursery school and the pre-preparatory Wetherby School. Following this, he attended Ludgrove School in Berkshire. After passing entrance exams, he was admitted to Eton College. The decision to place Harry at Eton went against the past practice of the Mountbatten-Windsors to send children to Gordonstoun, which Harry's grandfather, father, two uncles, and two cousins had attended. It did, however, see Harry follow in his older brother's footsteps and the Spencer family's, as both Diana's father and brother attended Eton. As was the case with his brother, the royal family and the tabloid press agreed Harry would be allowed to study free from intrusion in exchange for occasional photograph opportunities in what became known as the \"pressure cooker agreement\".",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In June 2003, Harry completed his education at Eton with two A-Levels, achieving a grade B in art and D in geography, having decided to drop history of art after AS level. He has been described as \"a top tier athlete\", having played competitive polo and rugby union. One of his former teachers, Sarah Forsyth, has asserted that he was a \"weak student\" and that staff at Eton conspired to help him cheat on examinations. Both Eton and Harry denied the claims. While a tribunal made no ruling on the cheating claim, it \"accepted the prince had received help in preparing his A-level 'expressive' project, which he needed to pass to secure his place at Sandhurst.\" Harry also joined the Combined Cadet Force while studying at Eton and was made cadet officer in his final year, leading the corps' annual parade at the Eton tattoo.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "After school, Harry took a gap year, during which he spent time in Australia working as a jackaroo on a cattle station, and participating in the Young England vs Young Australia Polo Test match. He also travelled to Lesotho, where he worked with orphaned children and produced the documentary film The Forgotten Kingdom: Prince Harry in Lesotho.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Harry passed the Regular Commissions Board (RCB) in September 2004 and entered the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst on 8 May 2005, where he was known as Officer Cadet Wales, and joined Alamein Company. His entry into the academy had to be delayed for 4 months as he recovered from an injury to his left knee. In April 2006, Harry completed his officer training and was commissioned as a Cornet (second lieutenant) in the Blues and Royals, a regiment of the Household Cavalry in the British Army. On 13 April 2008, when he reached two years' seniority, Harry was promoted to lieutenant.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 2006, it was announced that Harry's unit was scheduled to be deployed in Iraq the following year. A public debate ensued as to whether he should serve there. In April 2006, the Ministry of Defence announced that Harry would be shielded from the front line if his unit was sent to war, with a spokeswoman stating that he was expected to \"undertake the fullest range of deployments\", but his role needed to be monitored as \"his overt presence might attract additional attention\" that would put him or those he commanded at risk. Defence Secretary John Reid said that he should be allowed to serve on the front line of battle zones. Harry agreed saying, \"If they said 'no, you can't go front line' then I wouldn't drag my sorry ass through Sandhurst and I wouldn't be where I am now.\" Harry completed the Troop Leaders' Course in October 2006 and rejoined his regiment in Windsor, where he was put in charge of a troop of 11 soldiers and four Scimitar reconnaissance vehicles. The Ministry of Defence and Clarence House made a joint announcement on 22 February 2007 that Harry would be deployed with his regiment to Iraq, as part of the 1st Mechanised Brigade of the 3rd Mechanised Division – a move supported by Harry, who had stated that he would leave the army if he was told to remain in safety while his regiment went to war.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The head of the British army at the time, General Sir Richard Dannatt, said on 30 April 2007 that he had personally decided that Harry would serve with his unit in Iraq as a troop commander, and Harry was scheduled for deployment in May or June 2007 to patrol the Maysan Governorate. By 16 May, however, Dannatt announced that Harry would not serve in Iraq; concerns included Harry being a high-value target (as several threats by various groups had already been made against him) and the dangers the soldiers around him would face should any attempt be made on his life or if he were captured. Clarence House made public Harry's disappointment with the decision, though he said he would abide by it.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In the summer of 2007, Harry was trained as a joint terminal attack controller at RAF Leeming. In early June 2007, it was reported that Harry had arrived in Canada to train alongside soldiers of the Canadian Forces and British Army, at CFB Suffield near Medicine Hat, Alberta. It was said that this was in preparation for a tour of duty in Afghanistan, where Canadian and British forces were participating in the NATO-led Afghan War. This was confirmed in February of the following year when the British Ministry of Defence revealed that Harry had been secretly deployed as a joint terminal attack controller to Helmand Province in Afghanistan for the previous ten weeks. The revelation came after the media – notably, German newspaper Bild and Australian magazine New Idea – breached the blackout placed over the information by the Canadian and British authorities. He was immediately pulled out due to the fear that the media coverage would put his security and the security of fellow soldiers at risk. It was later reported that Harry helped Gurkha troops repel an attack from Taliban insurgents, and performed patrol duty in hostile areas while in Afghanistan.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Harry's tour made him the first member of the British royal family to serve in a war zone since his uncle Prince Andrew, who flew helicopters during the Falklands War. For Harry's service, his aunt Princess Anne presented him with an Operational Service Medal for Afghanistan at the Combermere Barracks in May 2008.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In October 2008, it was announced that Harry would follow his brother, father and uncle in learning to fly military helicopters. Harry attended the Defence Helicopter Flying School at RAF Shawbury, where he joined his brother. Prince Charles presented him with his flying brevet (wings) on 7 May 2010 at a ceremony at the Army Air Corps Base (AAC), Middle Wallop. Harry was awarded his Apache Flying Badge on 14 April 2011. On 16 April 2011, it was announced that Harry had been promoted to captain. In June 2011, Clarence House announced that Harry would be available for deployment in current operations in Afghanistan as an Apache helicopter pilot. The final decision rested with the Ministry of Defence's senior commanders, including principally the Chief of the Defence Staff in consultation with the wishes of Harry, the Prince of Wales, and the Queen. In October, he was transferred to a US military base in California to complete his helicopter gunship training. This final phase included live-fire training and \"environmental and judgment training\" at naval and air force facilities in California and Arizona. In the same month, it was reported that Harry was top of his class in extensive training undertaken at the Naval Air Facility, El Centro, California. While training in Southern California, he spent time in San Diego. In November 2011, Harry returned to England. He went to Wattisham Airfield in Suffolk, in the east of England, to complete his training to fly Apache helicopters.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "On 7 September 2012, Harry arrived at Camp Bastion in southern Afghanistan as part of the 100-strong 662 Squadron, 3 Regiment, Army Air Corps, to begin a four-month combat tour as a co-pilot and gunner for an Apache helicopter. On 10 September, within days of arriving in Afghanistan, it was reported that the Taliban had threatened his life. On 18 September 2012, it was reported that Harry had been moved to a safe location after an attack by the Taliban on Camp Bastion that killed two US marines. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond stated that \"additional security arrangements\" were put in place, for Harry could be a potential target, but added that he would face \"the same risk as any other Apache pilot\" while in combat. In files obtained on the incident, Major General Gregg A. Sturdevant was quoted as saying \"The night of the attack, he slept through the entire thing. We didn't do anything special for him. He came and went, and you never would have known he was there\" and \"the only thing special we did for him was we had a place identified as a safe house in case the base came under attack.\" On 21 January 2013, it was announced that Harry was returning from a 20-week deployment in Afghanistan. On 8 July 2013, the Ministry of Defence announced that Harry had successfully qualified as an Apache aircraft commander. Harry compared operating the Apache's weapons systems in Afghanistan to playing video games.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Harry later revealed in his 2023 memoir Spare that he flew on six missions that resulted in him killing 25 Taliban members, writing that he felt he was trained to not view them as \"people\" but instead as \"chess pieces\" that had been taken off the board. He added that \"It's not a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed.\" Following the publishing of Harry's claims, Pen Farthing, a British former Royal Marines commando and founder of the Nowzad Dogs charity, was evacuated from Kabul on 6 January 2023 to avoid \"potential reprisal attacks on ex-forces people.\" Harry's revelations prompted backlash from both Taliban members and British politicians and military figures.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "On 17 January 2014, the Ministry of Defence announced that Harry had completed his attachment to 3 Regiment Army Air Corps, and would take up a staff officer role, SO3 (Defence Engagement) in HQ London District. His responsibilities would include helping to coordinate significant projects and commemorative events involving the Army in London. He was based at Horse Guards in central London.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "On 6 March 2014, Harry launched Invictus Games, a Paralympic-style sporting event for injured servicemen and women, which was held on 10–14 September 2014. Harry met British hopefuls for the Invictus Games at Tedworth House in Wiltshire for the start of the selection process on 29 April 2014. On 15 May 2014, Harry attended a ticket sale launch for Invictus Games at BT Tower, from where he tweeted on the Invictus Games' official Twitter account as the president of the Games. To promote the Games, he was interviewed by BBC Radio 2's Chris Evans along with two Invictus Games hopefuls. He said: \"[The Invictus Games] is basically my full-time job at the moment, making sure that we pull this off.\" The show aired on 31 July 2014. Harry later wrote an article in The Sunday Times about his experiences in Afghanistan: how they had inspired him to help injured personnel and how, after the trip to the Warrior Games, he had vowed to create the Invictus Games. Harry and officials attended the British Armed Forces Team announcement for Invictus Games at Potters Field Park in August 2014. As president of the Invictus Games, he attended all events related to the Games from 8 to 14 September 2014.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In January 2015, it was reported that Harry would take on a new role in supporting wounded service personnel by working alongside members of the London District's Personal Recovery Unit for the MOD's Defence Recovery Capability scheme to ensure that wounded personnel have adequate recovery plans. The palace confirmed weeks later that the scheme was established in partnership with Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion. In late January 2015, Harry visited The Battle Back Centre set up by the Royal British Legion, and Fisher House UK at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham. A partnership between Help for Heroes, the Fisher House Foundation and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham (QEHB) Charity created the Centre. Fisher House Foundation is one of the Invictus Games' sponsors. In February and March 2015, Harry visited Phoenix House in Catterick Garrison, North Yorkshire, a recovery centre run by Help for Heroes. He also visited Merville Barracks in Colchester, where Chavasse VC House Personnel Recovery Centre is located, run by Help for Heroes in partnership with the Ministry of Defence and Royal British Legion.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On 17 March 2015, Kensington Palace announced that Harry would leave the Armed Forces in June. Before then, he would spend four weeks throughout April and May at army barracks in Darwin, Perth and Sydney whilst seconded to the Australian Defence Force (ADF). After leaving the Army, while considering his future, he would return to work in a voluntary capacity with the Ministry of Defence, supporting Case Officers in the Ministry's Recovery Capability Programme. He would be working with both those who administer and receive physical and mental care within the London District area.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On 6 April 2015, Harry reported for duty to Australia's Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin at the Royal Military College, Duntroon in Canberra, Australia. Harry flew to Darwin later that day to begin his month-long secondment to the ADF's 1st Brigade. His visit included detachments to NORFORCE as well as to an aviation unit. While in Perth, he trained with Special Air Service Regiment (SASR), participating in the SASR selection course, including a fitness test and a physical training session with SASR selection candidates. He also joined SASR members in Perth for live-fire shooting exercises with numerous Special Forces weapons at a variety of ranges. Harry completed an insertion training exercise using a rigid-hull inflatable boat. In Sydney, he undertook urban operations training with the 2nd Commando Regiment. Training activities included remotely detonating an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) and rappelling from a building. He also spent time flying over Sydney as co-pilot of an Army Black Hawk helicopter and participated in counter-terrorism training in Sydney Harbour with Royal Australian Navy clearance divers.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Harry's attachment with the ADF ended on 8 May 2015, and on 19 June 2015 he resigned his short service commission.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 2021, Harry described his 10 years (2005–2015) in the army as \"the happiest times in my life\". Since leaving the army, he has been closely involved with the armed forces through the Invictus Games, honorary military appointments and other official engagements. On 19 December 2017, he succeeded his grandfather Prince Philip as the Captain General Royal Marines. In May 2018, he was promoted to the substantive ranks of Lieutenant Commander of the Royal Navy, Major of the British Army and Squadron Leader of the Royal Air Force.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "On 18 January 2020, Buckingham Palace announced that an agreement had been reached for Harry \"to step back from Royal duties, including official military appointments\". In February 2021, the Palace confirmed that the Duke would give up his position as Captain General Royal Marines and hand back all the other honorary military appointments.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Chelsy Davy, the daughter of Zimbabwean, South Africa-based businessman Charles Davy, was referred to as Harry's girlfriend in an interview conducted for his 21st birthday, and Harry said he \"would love to tell everyone how amazing she is but once I start talking about that, I have left myself open.... There is truth and there is lies and unfortunately I cannot get the truth across.\" Davy was present when Harry received his Operational Service Medal for Afghanistan and also attended his graduation ceremony when he received his flying wings from his father. In early 2009, it was reported the pair had parted ways after a relationship that had lasted for five years.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In his 2023 memoir, Harry states that months after breaking up with Davy he was introduced to Caroline Flack, whom he described as \"funny\", \"sweet\", and \"cool\". The two saw each other for a while before press intrusion \"tainted\" their relationship \"irredeemably\" according to Harry. Flack had discussed the relationship in her own autobiography as well.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In May 2012, Harry's cousin Princess Eugenie introduced him to Cressida Bonas, an actress and model who is the granddaughter of Edward Curzon, 6th Earl Howe. On 30 April 2014, it was reported that the couple had parted amicably.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In mid-2016, Prince Harry began a relationship with American actress Meghan Markle. According to the couple, they first connected with each other via Instagram, though they have also said that they were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend in July 2016. On 8 November, eight days after the relationship was made public by the press, the prince directed his communications secretary to release a statement on his behalf to express personal concern about pejorative and false comments made about his girlfriend by mainstream media and internet trolls. In September 2017, Prince Harry and Markle first appeared together in public at the Invictus Games in Toronto. Their engagement was announced on 27 November 2017 by Harry's father. The announcement prompted generally positive comments about having a mixed-race person as a member of the royal family, especially in regard to Commonwealth countries with populations of blended or native ancestry. On 19 May 2018, the marriage ceremony was held at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. The couple later revealed in the 2021 television interview Oprah with Meghan and Harry that, three days prior to the ceremony, they had privately exchanged vows in their garden, in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. However, this earlier exchange of vows was not an official religious or legally recognised marriage.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Duke and Duchess initially lived at Nottingham Cottage in London, on the grounds of Kensington Palace. In May 2018, it was reported that they had signed a two-year lease on WestfieldLarge, located on the Great Tew Estate in the Cotswolds. They gave up the lease after photos of the house and its interior were published by a paparazzi agency. The couple considered settling at the 21-room Apartment 1 within the grounds of Kensington Palace, but moved to Frogmore Cottage in the Home Park of Windsor Castle instead. The Crown Estate refurbished the cottage at a cost of £2.4 million, paid out of the Sovereign Grant, with the Duke later reimbursing expenses beyond restoration and ordinary maintenance, a part of which was offset against rental payments that were due at the time. On 6 May 2019, the Duke and Duchess's son, Archie, was born. Their office was moved to Buckingham Palace and officially closed on 31 March 2020 when the Sussexes ceased \"undertaking official engagements in support of the Queen\". After some months in Canada and the United States, the couple bought a house in June 2020 on the former estate of Riven Rock in Montecito, California. The next month, the Duchess suffered a miscarriage. On 4 June 2021, their daughter, Lilibet, was born. The Duke and Duchess own a Labrador named Pula, and two Beagles named Guy and Mamma Mia.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Harry is godfather to \"five or six\" children.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In May 1988, Harry underwent a surgery for a minor hernia. In November 2000, he broke his thumb while playing football at Eton and underwent a minor operation. In his memoir, Spare, Harry admits that he took cocaine at the age of 17. In 2002, it was reported that, with Charles's encouragement, Harry had paid a visit to a drug rehabilitation unit to talk to drug addicts after it had emerged that he had been smoking cannabis and drinking at his father's Highgrove House and at a local pub in the summer of 2001. He adds in his memoir that he smoked cannabis at Eton and in Kensington Palace gardens, but he later told a court that \"he never smoked in [his] father's house\". In the memoir, he also detailed taking magic mushrooms at a party at Courteney Cox's house in January 2016.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 2017 and during an appearance on Bryony Gordon's podcast Mad World, Harry acknowledged that with the support of his brother he had sought counselling years after his mother's death. He added that he had struggled with aggression, had suffered from anxiety during royal engagements, and had been \"very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions\". He later added that he had taken up boxing as a way of coping with mental stress and \"letting out aggression\". In other interviews he stated that besides therapy he took alcohol to cope and used experimental drugs recreationally, including \"psychedelics, Ayahuasca, psilocybin, mushrooms.\" He also stated that what he experienced after his mother's death \"was very much\" post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In his mental-health television documentary, The Me You Can't See, which premiered in 2021, he added that he had undergone four years of therapy to address his mental health issues, having been encouraged to do so by his future wife after they had started dating. He also mentioned that he had suffered from \"panic attacks [and] severe anxiety\" in his late 20s and that the heavy load of official visits and functions had eventually \"led to burnout\". In an episode of Armchair Expert, Harry attributed his mental health issues to the ineffective parenting style of previous generations and to the \"genetic pain and suffering\" passed down in his family, adding that he believed his issues stemmed from \"the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered\". In his 2023 memoir, Harry described himself as an agoraphobe. In March 2023, the Heritage Foundation sent a dossier on Harry's drug use to different government entities, asking whether he had admitted to past drug use on his U.S. visa application. The following month, they filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security demanding his immigration records.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In September 2020, Harry and his wife released a video addressing American voters to \"reject hate speech, misinformation and online negativity\" in the 2020 United States presidential election, which was seen by some as an implicit endorsement of Joe Biden. Harry was the subject of a prank by the Russian comedy duo Vovan and Lexus, who posed as climate activist Greta Thunberg and her father during two phone calls on New Year's Eve and 22 January 2020. During the conversations, Harry described his decision to leave the monarchy as \"not easy\" and criticised Donald Trump's stance on climate change and his support of the coal industry.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In May 2021, Harry was a guest on Dax Shepard and Monica Padman's podcast Armchair Expert during which he talked about the freedom of speech and laws related to it in the United States, stating \"I've got so much I want to say about the First Amendment as I sort of understand it, but it is bonkers.\" He added that it was \"a huge subject and one which [he didn't] understand\", emphasising that one could \"capitalise or exploit what's not said rather than uphold what is said.\" The comments were met by backlash from conservative Americans and Britons, prompting figures such as Ted Cruz, Dan Crenshaw, Nigel Farage, Candace Owens, Jack Posobiec, and Laura Ingraham to criticise him publicly.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In November 2021, in a panel at Wired's Re:Wired Conference, Harry claimed that a day before the January 6 United States Capitol attack he emailed Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, and 'warned' of potential civil unrest, but had not received a response. In the same month, Conservative politician and MP Johnny Mercer, who was leading the efforts to waive visa fees for foreign-born UK veterans and their families, announced in the Commons that the Duke of Sussex was supportive of their proposal and viewed it as \"morally right\" and not as \"a political intervention\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In June 2022, in an interview with Jessica Yellin for Vogue, Meghan described Harry's reaction to the Supreme Court of the United States's decision that abortion is not a protected constitutional right as \"guttural\". Harry later condemned the decision as \"rolling back of constitutional rights\" in his address to the United Nations on Mandela Day in July 2022. Associate justice of the Supreme Court Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority decision for the case, criticised foreign figures including Harry for their comments on \"American law\" during a speech.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In June 2023, Harry broke royal protocol by criticising the UK government in his witness statement to a court. He argued that both the British press and the government were \"at rock bottom\" and instead of scrutinising the government the press got \"into bed with them so they can ensure the status quo\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "At the age of 21, Harry became a Counsellor of State and began his duties in that capacity. On 6 January 2009, the Queen granted Harry and William their own royal household. Previously, William and Harry's affairs had been handled by their father's office at Clarence House in central London. The new household released a statement announcing they had established their own office at nearby St James's Palace to look after their public, military and charitable activities. In March 2012, Harry led an official visit to Belize as part of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations. He continued to the Bahamas and Jamaica, where the Prime Minister, Portia Simpson-Miller, was considering initiating a process of turning Jamaica into a republic. He then visited Brazil to attend the GREAT Campaign. Harry also played tambourine and took part in the music video for the song \"Sing\", which was released in May 2012 to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee.",
"title": "Public life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Between 9 and 15 May 2013, he made an official visit to the United States. The tour promoted the rehabilitation of injured American and UK troops, publicised his own charities and supported British interests. It included engagements in Washington, DC, Colorado, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. He met survivors of Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey. In October 2013, he undertook his first official tour of Australia, attending the International Fleet Review at Sydney Harbour. He also paid a visit to the Australian SAS HQ in Perth. In May 2014, he visited Estonia and Italy. In Estonia, he visited Freedom Square in the capital Tallinn to honour fallen Estonian soldiers. He also attended a reception at the Estonian Parliament and a NATO military exercise. In Italy, Harry attended commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the Monte Cassino battles, in which Polish, Commonwealth and British troops fought. On 6 November 2014, he opened the Field of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey, a task usually performed by Prince Philip.",
"title": "Public life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Before reporting for duty to the Australian Defence Force (ADF), Harry visited the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on 6 April 2015. On 7 May 2015, he made a farewell walkabout at the Sydney Opera House and visited Macquarie University Hospital. On 24–25 April 2015, he joined his father in Turkey to attend commemorations of the centenary of the Gallipoli Campaign. On 28 October 2015, he carried out one day of engagements in the US. He launched the Invictus Games Orlando 2016 with First Lady Michelle Obama and Second Lady Jill Biden at Fort Belvoir. He later attended an Invictus Games board meeting and a reception to celebrate the launch at the British Ambassador's Residence. On 26 November 2015, as patron of Sentebale, Harry travelled to Lesotho to attend the opening of the Mamohato Children's Centre. From 30 November to 3 December 2015, he made an official visit to South Africa. He visited Cape Town, where he presented the insignia of the Order of the Companions of Honour to the Archbishop on behalf of the Queen. Harry also played the Sentebale Royal Salute Polo Cup, at Val de Vie Estate in Cape Town, fundraising for Sentebale. He visited Nepal 19–23 March 2016. He stayed until the end of March 2016 to help rebuild a secondary school with Team Rubicon UK, and visited a Hydropower Project in Central Nepal.",
"title": "Public life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In April 2018, he was appointed Commonwealth youth ambassador, a position which he held until March 2020. Also in that month, Harry became a patron of Walk of America, a campaign which brings together a number of veterans who will take part in a 1,000-mile expedition across the US in mid-2018. The Prince was appointed the president of The Queen's Commonwealth Trust, which focuses on projects involving children and welfare of prisoners, in April. Periodically, online QCT chat sessions were conducted and uploaded to YouTube for general public viewing. He remained the charity's president until February 2021. In July 2018, Harry travelled to Dublin, Ireland, alongside his wife Meghan, which marked their first overseas visit as a couple. In October 2018, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex travelled to Sydney, for the 2018 Invictus Games. This formed part of a Pacific tour that included Australia, Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand.",
"title": "Public life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Harry identifies as a feminist. During their visit to Morocco in February 2019, the Duke and Duchess focused on projects centred on \"women's empowerment, girls' education, inclusivity and encouragement of social entrepreneurship\". As part of establishing a separate office from Kensington Palace in 2019, the Duke and Duchess created an Instagram social media account, which broke the record for the fastest account at the time to reach a million followers. During his trip to Angola in 2019, the Duke visited the Born Free to Shine project in Luanda, an initiative by First Lady Ana Dias Lourenço which aims to \"prevent HIV transmission from mothers to babies\" through education, medical testing and treatment. He also met HIV+ youth and teenagers during his visit. During his visit to the Luengue-Luiana National Park, the Duke unveiled an initiative by the Queen's Commonwealth Canopy to help with protecting \"an ancient elephant migration route\" by providing safe passage for them in the forest. In September and October 2019, a Southern African tour included Malawi, Angola, South Africa and Botswana. Because infant son Archie travelled with the Sussexes, this was \"their first official tour as a family\". Harry completed 1,190 engagements between 2006 and 2019.",
"title": "Public life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In January 2020, the Duke and Duchess announced that they were stepping back from their role as senior members of the royal family, and would balance their time between the United Kingdom and North America. A statement released by the Palace confirmed that the Duke and Duchess were to become financially independent and cease to represent the Queen. At the time of the announcement of Harry and Meghan's decision to \"step back\" as senior members of the royal family in 2020, 95% of the couple's income derived from the £2.3 million given to them annually by Harry's father, Charles, as part of his income from the Duchy of Cornwall. The couple retain their HRH stylings but are not permitted to use them. The formal role of the Duke and Duchess was subject to a twelve-month review period, ending in March 2021. In March 2020, Harry attended the opening of the Silverstone Experience in Silverstone Circuit together with racing driver Lewis Hamilton. Harry's appearance at the museum was his final solo engagement as a senior royal. He and Meghan attended the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey on 9 March 2020, which was their last engagement as a couple before they officially stepped down on 31 March. Harry's personal wealth was estimated at £30 million by The Daily Telegraph in 2020. Two years later, they made their first official appearance in the UK in June 2022 while attending the Platinum Jubilee National Service of Thanksgiving.",
"title": "Public life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Sussexes visited the UK and Germany in September 2022 for a number of charity events in Manchester and Düsseldorf. On 8 September 2022, while Harry and Meghan were in London preparing to attend a charity event, Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.",
"title": "Public life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Harry faced difficulties with obtaining and maintaining publicly funded security, both in Canada and the United Kingdom, after he and Meghan announced their self-demotion within the royal family. While the couple resided on Vancouver Island, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation launched a petition calling for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to cease providing security to the Sussexes. The Government of Canada announced RCMP security would not be provided after March 2020 when the couple's status changed. A similar petition circulated in the UK in mid-March 2020. The backlash in the two countries led President Donald Trump to preemptively assert that the United States would not pay either; though, the couple never intended to ask for it while in the US.",
"title": "Public life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In January 2022, it was reported that Harry had been in a legal fight since September 2021 over the Home Office's refusal to allow him to pay for police protection. He had made the offer to pay during the Sandringham Summit and \"self-evidently believed\" that it would be passed on to the government. Following the first court hearing of the case, it was revealed that Harry had 'exceptional status' and the Royal and VIP Executive Committee (RAVEC) still determined his personal protective security on a case-by-case basis. After receiving applications by the Duke and the Home Office to keep parts of the case private, the High Court ruled in March 2022 that some parts of it would remain confidential. Mr Justice Swift also reacted to the Duke's legal team sending a copy of the ruling to someone who was not a lawyer, describing it as \"entirely unacceptable\". In July 2022, Mr Justice Swift granted permission for part of Harry's claim to proceed for a judicial review.",
"title": "Public life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Harry filed a lawsuit against the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police in August 2022, challenging the decision by RAVEC from January 2022 which stated that State security could not be made available to private individuals even if they wished to pay for it themselves. In February 2023, a judge ruled that the second case should be thrown out, however, the decision was later appealed by Harry's legal team. He lost the legal challenge in May 2023, meaning that he will not be allowed to make private payments for police protection. In June 2023, a Freedom of Information request revealed that Harry's legal fight with the Home Office had cost £502,236, with £492,000 covered by the state and the remaining £10,000 covered by Harry.",
"title": "Public life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In summer 2019, before announcing their decision to step back in January 2020, Harry and his wife were involved in talks with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the founder of the now-defunct streaming platform Quibi, over a possible role in the service without gaining personal profits, but they eventually decided against joining the project. In September 2019, it was reported that the couple had hired New York-based PR firm Sunshine Sachs, which represented them until 2022. The couple has also been associated with Adam Lilling's Plus Capital, a venture capital fund designed to connect early stage companies with influencers and investors. In June 2020, they signed with the Harry Walker Agency, owned by media company Endeavor, to conduct paid public speaking engagements. In September 2020, the Sussexes signed a private commercial deal with Netflix. In December 2020, the Duke and Duchess signed a multi-year deal with Spotify to produce and host their own programs through their audio producing company, Archewell Audio. A holiday special was released by the couple on the service in December 2020. In June 2023, Spotify announced they would not proceed with the deal, cancelling Archetypes which had run for a single season of 12 episodes. Harry & Meghan, a docuseries about the Sussexes, was produced by Netflix and the couple's Archewell Productions and premiered on 8 December 2022. It is directed by Liz Garbus. The series received mixed reviews.",
"title": "Civilian career and investments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In March 2021, San Francisco-based mental health start-up BetterUp, a company that helps people get in contact with coaches or counsellors, said that Harry would become its first chief impact officer. In the same month, Harry was appointed as a commissioner for the Aspen Institute's Commission on Information Disorder to carry out a six-month study on the state of misinformation and disinformation in the United States. The study was published in November 2021 as a report with 15 recommendations. In the following month, in his capacity as BetterUp's chief impact officer, Harry was interviewed by Fast Company, stating that the recent trend of people leaving their jobs (known as the Great Resignation) was something that needed to be celebrated, though his remarks were criticised for coming from a position of privilege. In April 2022, reports emerged of criticism by the company's coaches over the new metrics placed for evaluating their services and over the opacity surrounding Harry's actual role in the firm.",
"title": "Civilian career and investments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In April 2019, it was announced that Harry was working as co-creator and executive producer on a documentary series about mental health together with Oprah Winfrey, which was initially set to air in 2020 on Apple TV+. It was later announced that the series, titled The Me You Can't See, would be released on 21 May 2021. In the following month, UCAS reported an increase in the percentage of students declaring mental health issues on their university applications, citing self-help books and Harry's statements on his struggles with \"panic attacks and anxiety\" as contributing factors. In October 2021, Harry and Meghan announced their partnership with Ethic, a sustainable investment firm based in New York City, which also manages the couple's investments. According to state filings from Delaware, where the couple's Archewell foundation is registered, Harry and Meghan incorporated 11 companies and a trust beginning in early 2020 which include Orinoco Publishing LLC and Peca Publishing LLC to hold the rights for their books as well as Cobblestone Lane LLC and IPHW LLC which are holders of their foundation's logos.",
"title": "Civilian career and investments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In July 2021, it was announced that Harry was set to publish his memoir Spare via Penguin Random House, with Harry reportedly earning an advance of at least $20 million. Spare was ghostwritten by novelist J. R. Moehringer. The memoir is reportedly the first of a four-book publishing deal that is set to include a second book by Harry and a wellness guide by Meghan. Spare was officially published on 10 January 2023 in 16 languages, and it has since become the UK's fastest selling non-fiction book with 400,000 confirmed sales in all formats on publication day. Harry announced that $1.5 million of the proceeds from the memoir were pledged to the charity Sentebale, while £300,000 would be given to WellChild.",
"title": "Civilian career and investments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In 2006, he was in Lesotho to visit Mants'ase Children's Home near Mohale's Hoek, which he first toured in 2004. Along with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, he launched Sentebale: The Princes' Fund for Lesotho, a charity to aid children orphaned by HIV/AIDS. He has granted his patronage to organisations including WellChild, Dolen Cymru, MapAction and the London Marathon Charitable Trust; he stepped down from MapAction in 2019 and the London Marathon Charitable Trust in 2021. In 2007, William and Harry organised the Concert for Diana, in memory of their mother, which benefited the charities and patronages of Diana, William, and Harry. In October 2008, Harry and his brother embarked on the 1,000 mile eight-day Enduro Africa motorbike ride across South Africa to raise money for Sentebale, UNICEF and the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund. In September 2009, William and Harry set up The Foundation of Prince William and Prince Harry to enable them to take forward their charitable ambitions. Harry left the charity in June 2019.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "After taking part in an unfinished trip to the North Pole with Walking With The Wounded in 2011, Harry joined the charity's 200-mile expedition to the South Pole in December 2013, accompanying twelve injured servicemen and women from the UK, the US and the Commonwealth. As patron of Walk of Britain, he walked with the team on 30 September and 20 October 2015. To raise awareness for HIV testing, Harry took a test live on the royal family Facebook page on 14 July 2016. He later attended the 21st International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, on 21 July 2016. On World AIDS Day, Harry and Rihanna helped publicise HIV testing by taking the test themselves. Since 2016, Harry has been working with Terrence Higgins Trust to raise awareness about HIV and sexual health. In November 2019, to mark the National HIV Testing Week, the Duke interviewed HIV+ Rugby player Gareth Thomas on behalf of the trust.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In December 2017, Harry guest edited BBC Radio 4's Today programme, conducting interviews with his father, the Prince of Wales, former US president Barack Obama, and others on issues such as youth violence, the Armed Forces, mental health, the Commonwealth, conservation and the environment. On 27 December 2017, Harry was officially appointed the new president of African Parks, a conservation NGO. He previously spent three weeks in Malawi with African Parks where he joined a team of volunteers and professionals to carry out one of the largest elephant translocations in history. The effort to repopulate areas decimated due to poaching and habitat loss moved 500 elephants from Liwonde and Majete National Parks to Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve. Harry had previously helped with relocating rhinos in the Okavango Delta and later became patron of the Rhino Conservation Botswana. In July 2018, the Elton John AIDS Foundation announced that the Duke of Sussex and British singer Elton John were about to launch a global coalition called MenStar that would focus \"on treating HIV infections in men\".",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In May 2019, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex together with Harry's brother and sister-in-law launched Shout, the UK's first 24/7 text messaging service for those who suffer from mental issues. In September 2019, the Duke launched Travalyst during his visit to the Netherlands after two years of development. The initiative is set \"to encourage sustainable practices in the travel industry\" and \"tackle climate change and environmental damage\", in collaboration with a number of companies, including Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Ctrip, Skyscanner, and Visa Inc. The organisation later announced a partnership with Google in 2021. In October 2019, along with other members of the royal family, Harry voiced a Public Health England announcement, for the \"Every Mind Matters\" mental health program.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In February 2020, Harry recorded a new version of the song \"Unbroken\" with Jon Bon Jovi. The new version features backing vocals from members of the Invictus Choir. The song was released on 27 March 2020, the proceeds of which were donated to the Invictus Games Foundation. In April 2020, Harry launched a new initiative named HeadFIT, a platform designed to provide mental support for members of the armed forces. The initiative was developed mutually by the Royal Foundation's Heads Together campaign, the Ministry of Defence, and King's College London. In June 2020, the Duke and Duchess backed the Stop Hate for Profit campaign and encouraged CEOs of different companies to join the movement.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In April 2021, Harry and Meghan were announced as campaign chairs for Vax Live: The Concert to Reunite the World, an event organised by Global Citizen to increase access to COVID-19 vaccinations. They also announced their support for a vaccine equity fundraiser initiated by the same organisation, and penned an open letter to the pharmaceutical industry CEOs urging them to address the vaccine equity crisis. Later that month, he narrated \"Hope Starts Here\", a special video rereleased by African Parks to mark the Earth Day in which he urged organisations and communities to preserve biodiversity and paid tribute to his grandfather Prince Philip for his efforts as a conservationist. He helped with the establishment of Peak State, a mental fitness programme aimed at providing tools and resources for managing mental health, to which he publicly lent his support in May 2021.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Like his mother, Harry has worked with the HALO Trust, an organisation that removes debris—particularly landmines—left behind by war. He had previously visited a minefield in Mozambique with the charity and spent two days learning about their work and mine-clearing techniques. In 2013 he was named as patron of the charity's 25th Anniversary Appeal. In April 2017, he hosted the Landmine Free 2025 reception at Kensington Palace, during which the UK government announced an increase in its financial support for de-mining efforts. In September 2019, he walked through a de-mining site in Angola, the same country visited by his mother 22 years earlier. In June 2021, after ten members of the trust were killed by an armed group at a mine clearance camp in Afghanistan, Harry issued a statement saying the attack \"was nothing less than an act of barbarism\".",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In September 2021, together with First Lady Jill Biden, he hosted a virtual event for the Warrior Games, which were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2021, he spoke against oil drilling in the Okavango River in an op-ed for The Washington Post. In the same month and ahead of the 2021 G20 Rome summit, Harry and his wife penned an open letter together with the Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom, asking the G20 leaders to expedite efforts for the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. In March 2022, they were among more than a hundred people who signed an open letter published by the People's Vaccine Alliance, asking for free global access to COVID-19 vaccines and calling out the UK, EU and Switzerland for opposing a waiver that would allow vaccine intellectual property protections to be lifted. In April 2022 and in a video featuring Rhys Darby and Dave Fane on Māori Television, Harry launched an eco-travel campaign through his non-profit Travalyst, encouraging people to travel sustainably.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Harry has enjoyed playing sports, such as competitive polo, skiing, and motocross. Like his brother and father, he has participated in polo matches to raise money for charitable causes. Harry is also a keen Rugby football fan and supported England's bid to host rugby union's 2015 Rugby World Cup, and presented the trophy at rugby league's 2019 Challenge Cup finals. In 2004, Harry trained as a Rugby Development Officer for the Rugby Football Union and coached students in schools to encourage them to learn the sport. He, along with former rugby player Brian Moore, both argued that in response to Black Lives Matter, the song \"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot\" should no longer be sung in rugby context. Between December 2016 and February 2021, he was patron of both the Rugby Football Union (RFU) and Rugby Football League (RFL), Rugby League's governing body in England. He had served as the RFU's vice-royal patron since 2010, supporting the Queen as patron.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 2012, Harry launched Coach Core alongside his brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The program was set up following the 2012 Olympics and provides apprenticeship opportunities for people who desire to pursue a career as a professional coach. In January 2017, Harry visited the Running Charity and its partner Depaul UK to highlight the role of sport in helping homeless and vulnerable people. In June 2019, the Duke was present at the launch of Made by Sport, a charity coalition set to raise money to boost sport in disadvantaged communities. In his statement, he lent his support to the charity by arguing that its role in bringing sport into the life of disadvantaged people would save \"hundreds of millions of pounds\" towards treating the issues among young people.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In June 2019, it was announced that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would split from The Royal Foundation and establish their own charity foundation by the end of 2019. Nevertheless, the couple would collaborate with Harry's brother and his wife on mutual projects, such as the mental health initiative Heads Together. In July 2019, Harry and Meghan's new charity was registered in England and Wales under the title \"Sussex Royal The Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Sussex\". On 21 February, it was confirmed that \"Sussex Royal\" would not be used as a brand name for the couple following their withdrawal from public life. On 5 August 2020, Sussex Royal Foundation was renamed \"MWX Foundation\" and dissolved the same day.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In March 2021, it was reported that the Charity Commission for England and Wales was conducting a review of the Sussex Royal organisation in a \"regulatory and compliance case\" regarding its conduct under charity law during dissolution. Representatives for the couple claimed that Sussex Royal was \"managed by a board of trustees\" and that \"suggestion of mismanagement\" directed exclusively at the Duke and Duchess would be incorrect. The commission later concluded that the foundation did not act unlawfully, but criticised the board of directors for expending a \"substantial proportion of funds\" to setting up and closing the charity.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In April 2020, Meghan and Harry confirmed their new foundation (in lieu of Sussex Royal) would be called \"Archewell\". The name stems from the Greek word \"arche\", which means \"source of action\"; the same word that inspired the name of their son. Archewell was registered in the United States. Its website was officially launched in October 2020.",
"title": "Charity work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In his youth, Harry earned a reputation for being rebellious, leading the tabloid press to label him a \"wild child\". At the age of 17, he was seen smoking cannabis, drinking underage with friends, and clashing physically with paparazzi outside nightclubs. In early 2005, he was photographed at a \"Colonial and Native\"-themed birthday party in Wiltshire wearing a Nazi German Afrika Korps uniform with a swastika armband. His choice sparked a backlash from the media, politicians, and religious figures. Clarence House later issued a public statement in which Harry apologised for his behaviour. In an interview for his 21st birthday he stated that it \"was a very stupid thing to do and I've learnt my lesson\".",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In January 2005, in response to an inquiry about his Zimbabwean girlfriend Chelsy Davy, Harry responded \"She's not black or anything, you know\". In January 2009, the British tabloid, the News of the World, revealed a video made by Harry three years earlier in which he referred to a Pakistani fellow officer cadet as \"our little Paki friend\" and called a soldier wearing a camouflage hood a \"raghead\". These terms were described by the Leader of the Opposition at the time David Cameron as \"unacceptable\", and by The Daily Telegraph as \"racist\". A British Muslim youth organisation called Harry a \"thug\". Further extracts showed him telling a comrade \"I love you\" before giving him a kiss on the cheek and licking his face, and asking another whether he felt gay, queer, or on the side. Clarence House immediately issued an apology from Harry, who stated that no malice was intended in his remarks. Subsequently, it was reported that the military had instructed Harry to attend a diversity course. In the same year, British stand-up comedian Stephen K. Amos alleged that after a stand-up show for Charles's 60th birthday celebrations in November 2008 Harry had commented on his performance by saying, \"You don't sound like a black chap\", though he hoped that the remarks were made in jest.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In October 2007, a video from Harry's trip to Namibia with his friends surfaced, which showed him snorting vodka and licking a male friend's nipples. While on holiday in Las Vegas in August 2012, Harry and an unknown young woman were photographed naked in a Wynn Las Vegas hotel room, reportedly during a game of strip billiards. The pictures were leaked by American celebrity website TMZ on 21 August 2012, and reported worldwide by mainstream media on 22 August 2012. The photographs were shown by the American media, but British media were reluctant to publish them. Royal aides suggested Clarence House would contact the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) if British publications used the pictures. St James's Palace confirmed that Harry was in the photographs, saying that he was essentially a victim whose privacy had been invaded and contacted the PCC upon hearing that a number of British newspapers were considering publishing the photographs. On 24 August 2012, The Sun newspaper published the photographs.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In December 2021, reports emerged about Harry's meetings with Saudi businessman Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, whose receipt of a CBE became the subject of an investigation by the Scottish Charity Regulator. Mahfouz had met Harry in 2013 and 2014 and donated £50,000 to his charity Sentebale and £10,000 to Walking With The Wounded, of which Harry is patron. The Sunday Times claimed that the meetings with Harry opened the way for Mahfouz to get access to the Prince of Wales. Harry referred to the incident as the \"CBE scandal\" in December 2021 and stated that he severed ties with Mahfouz in 2015 after expressing \"growing concerns\" about his motives, though aides from his father's household denied having any discussions with him regarding Mahfouz. A spokesperson for Sentebale defended the meetings and added that there was not any impropriety regarding the donations.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In view of their environmental activism, Harry and Meghan were criticised in August 2019 for reportedly taking four private jet journeys in 11 days, including one to Elton John's home in Nice, France. The criticism was in line with the reactions the royal family faced in June 2019, after it was revealed that they \"had doubled [their] carbon footprint from business travel\". Harry received backlash again in August 2021 and 2022 for taking a two-hour flight on private jets between California and Aspen, Colorado, to participate in an annual charity polo tournament. In June 2022 and on their way to California after the Queen's Platinum Jubilee, Harry and Meghan boarded a private jet that was estimated to have emitted \"ten times more carbon than flying commercial\".",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "After his marriage, Harry's popularity skyrocketed above all the other royals as he was deemed likable by 77 per cent of respondents in a poll of 3,600 Britons conducted by statistics and polling company YouGov. However, his popularity fell after stepping back from royal duties, and it plummeted after the release of his controversial interview with Oprah Winfrey, his Netflix docuseries, and his memoir. In December 2022, Harry was found to be the 3rd most disliked member of the British royal family by YouGov, preceded by his uncle Prince Andrew and his wife Meghan. Writing for The New York Times, Sarah Lyall noted that following the release of his memoir Harry and his wife lost support within segments of the American public and press. It has been suggested by critics that this fall from public esteem is due to Harry and Meghan's frequent attempts to achieve ongoing relevancy, and their perceived hypocrisy and selfishness. Harry and Meghan's exit from the royal family was satirized in a 2023 episode of South Park.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 2018 and 2021, Harry was selected as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time magazine. In 2019, the magazine named Harry and his wife as among the 25 Most Influential People on the Internet. In 2021, the couple was featured on one of the magazine's seven worldwide Time 100 covers. In 2023, People named him as one of the \"25 Most Intriguing People of the Year\".",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "On 30 January 2020, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) sided with the Mail on Sunday over a dispute between the Duke and the newspaper regarding an Instagram photo involving Harry in which, according to the newspaper, elephants were in fact \"tranquilised\" and \"tethered\" during a relocating process. The IPSO rejected Harry's claim that the paper's description was \"inaccurate\" or \"misleading\".",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In December 2020, Harry's legal team sued Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) for publishing a story in the Mail on Sunday claiming his working relationship with the Royal Marines had suffered post-royal departure. The newspaper subsequently accepted the claims were false and issued an apology. The prince's lawyer said the \"substantial damages\" paid by the publisher would be donated to the Invictus Games Foundation.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In November 2021, Harry and Meghan's former communications secretary Jason Knauf gave a statement to the court following ANL's appeal against a judge's ruling that accused the media company of breaching Meghan's privacy for publishing a letter she had sent to her father. Knauf mentioned the Duchess of Sussex directly gave him briefing points to share with Finding Freedom's authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand and added that the Duke of Sussex had welcomed the suggestion that they should conceal their involvement with the process of writing the book, while they both discussed the book \"on a routine basis\". ANL had previously applied to use the book in their defense, arguing that the Duke and Duchess had \"co-operated with the authors of the recently published book Finding Freedom to put out their version of certain events\".",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In February 2022, Harry filed a libel suit in the High Court against Associated Newspapers Limited for a Mail on Sunday article which alleged he was trying to keep his legal battle against the Home Office to restore his police protection secret from the public through requesting a confidentiality order on the case and that he offered to pay for police protection only after filing a lawsuit against the government. In June 2022, Mr Justice Nicklin ruled that parts of the article were potentially defamatory, though Nicklin rejected claims by Harry's lawyers that the article portrayed him as a liar. Harry attempted to have the publisher's defence thrown out, but the judge rejected his motion in December 2023 and decided that the case should proceed to trial. He later ordered Harry to pay Mail on Sunday £48,447 in legal costs.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In October 2022, the Duke of Sussex joined Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John, David Furnish, Sadie Frost, and Elizabeth Hurley in launching a legal action against Associated Newspapers Limited for their alleged \"abhorrent criminal activity\", which was said to involve listening to and recording people's phone calls and daily activities, obtaining sensitive information and medical records, and accessing bank accounts and financial transactions. In a statement, ANL described the allegations as \"preposterous smears\", and Gavin Burrows, the private investigator whose alleged 2021 statement was used as a key element in the case, said that the statement was not signed by him and was \"a cut and paste from my evidence\" of other publishers targeting individuals. In November 2023, Mr Justice Nicklin ruled that the case brought by Harry and the other claimants could proceed but unpublished material provided to the Leveson Inquiry was inadmissible as proof in this case.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In October 2019, it was announced that Harry had sued the Daily Mirror, The Sun and the now-defunct News of the World \"in relation to alleged phone-hacking\". Former News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman had previously stated that he had hacked Harry's phone on nine occasions. He sought damages in excess of £200,000 from the publisher of the News of the World and The Sun and alleged an earlier agreement between News Group Newspapers and the royal family which would see he and William not take legal action in return for an apology had not been honoured. A palace source denied the existence of any secret agreements. Both brothers brought a claim privately through their mutual attorneys, but Harry decided to pursue his case separately with a new solicitor in 2019. In April 2023, a High Court judge said there were inconsistencies in Harry's claim, including the time when he became aware of the issue's full scale and his failure to mention an alleged agreement between the publisher and the palace. In July 2023, the judge ruled that part of Harry's case involving allegations of illegal information gathering would go to trial but his phone-hacking claims were dismissed for being made too late.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Lawyers for the Mirror denied accessing Harry's voicemail messages and other allegations, but admitted to instructing \"private investigators to unlawfully obtain private information\" about Harry on a single occasion that involved him visiting Chinawhite. In January 2023, a High Court judge ruled that Harry's lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) as well as other similar lawsuits against the publisher would go to trial in May 2023. At the beginning of trial, MGN apologised for one instance of unlawful information gathering against Harry and added that his legal challenge \"warrants compensation\". In June 2023, Harry testified in the court case accusing former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan of horrific personal attacks and claimed that his phone had been hacked dating back to when he was still at Eton. His appearance marked the first time a member of the royal family had given evidence in court since Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, appeared as a witness in court in 1891. On 15 December 2023, the High Court ruled in favour of Harry for 15 of the 33 sample stories used in his claims of phone hacking against MGN and awarded him £140,600 of the £440,000 he sought in damages. Mr Justice Fancourt concluded Piers Morgan and other editors knew about the phone hacking at their publications and were involved in it. Harry called the ruling \"vindicating and affirming\" and urged the authorities to further investigate and prosecute the company.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In October 2013, Jo Brand appeared on Have I Got News for You and while talking about Prince George's christening she said: \"George's godparents include Hugh van Cutsem ... I presume that's a nickname as in Hugh van cuts 'em and Harry then snorts 'em.\" Representatives of Kensington Palace contacted the BBC after the programme aired, pointing out the error and the implications of the joke. The BBC wrote to Kensington Palace apologising for the \"factual inaccuracy\" as George's godfather was William van Cutsem, but it did not apologise for the comment itself as it was part of the show's \"irreverent humor\".",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "In February 2014, a judge sentenced the convicted criminal Ashraf Islam to three years in prison, as he had plotted to murder Harry and had given it \"considerable thought\" due to his belief that Harry had \"a moral guilt\" since he was in the army. In June 2019, two members of the neo-Nazi group Sonnenkrieg Division were jailed for eighteen months and four years, respectively, for sharing propaganda posters among which was one that labelled Harry as a \"race traitor\" with a gun pointed at his head.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In May 2019, Splash News issued a formal apology to the Sussexes for sending photographers to their Cotswolds residence, which put their privacy at risk. The agency also agreed to pay damages and legal costs associated with the case. In January 2020, lawyers issued a legal warning to the press after paparazzi photographs were published in the media. In March 2020, the couple took Splash UK to court after the Duchess and their son were photographed without permission during a \"private family outing\" while staying in Canada. The case was settled later that year with Splash UK agreeing to no longer take unauthorised photos of the family. On 20 April 2020, the Duke and Duchess announced that they would no longer cooperate with the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Mirror and the Express. They won an apology in October from American news agency X17 for taking photographs of their son at their home using drones.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In June 2020, it was reported that Harry's lawyers had issued a 'letter before action', threatening to sue the Sun and Dan Wootton, based on the allegations that they had paid money to associates of palace officials to secure their stories. It was alleged that the Sun had made two payments amounting to £4,000 to the partner of a royal official in relation to stories published in June and July 2019 which detailed the nannying and god-parenting arrangements for Harry and Meghan's son Archie. News Group Newspapers, publisher of the Sun, emphasised that they had done nothing \"unlawful\" in sourcing the stories and no illegal payments were made. Wootton's lawyers denied that any payments were made unlawfully to a public official or a proxy and described the claims as \"a smear campaign by unknown bad actors.\" Wootton has been credited with breaking the story about Megxit and Harry and Meghan's initial plans for moving to Canada in the Sun on 8 January 2020, which prompted the couple to issue an announcement within hours, confirming their plans for stepping back from their royal duties. Sources close to the couple later spoke to The New York Times, stating that they \"felt forced to disclose their plans prematurely\" as they learned about the Sun's intentions to publish the story. Wootton disputed the claim as \"They released the statement after we had published the story and had so much notice.\"",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "A September 2020 article by The Times claiming an Invictus Games fundraiser had been cancelled due to its affiliation with a competitor of Netflix, Harry's business partner, became the subject of a legal complaint issued by the Duke. In January 2022, the couple mutually filed a legal complaint against The Times for an article reporting on Archewell raising less than $50,000 in 2020.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Despite the palace congratulating the Duke and Duchess on the birth of their daughter Lilibet in June 2021, a few days later the BBC reported that Harry and Meghan had not sought the permission of the Queen before naming their daughter with her personal family nickname. Lawyers for the couple subsequently accused the BBC of defamation and sent letters out to various media organisations saying the report was false and defamatory, and the allegations should not be repeated as Harry had spoken to the Queen before announcing their daughter's name.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Harry and his wife were interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in a television special for CBS, broadcast on 7 March 2021. Meghan spoke about marriage, motherhood, and the pressures of public life. Harry joined her later, and the pair talked about the initial difficulties associated with their move to the United States in 2020 and their plans for the future. During the interview, Harry criticised his father's parenting style, mentioned his father did not answer his calls and had cut him off financially, and he had no relationship with his brother. There was a wide and polarised reaction to the interview.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In April 2022, Harry sat down for an interview with Today's Hoda Kotb during the Invictus Games, during which he claimed that he had visited his grandmother the Queen earlier to make sure that she was \"protected and got the right people around her.\" In January 2023 and ahead of the release of his memoir Spare, Harry sat down for a series of interviews, including an interview by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, another one by Tom Bradby titled Harry: The Interview on ITV1, and a third interview by Michael Strahan on Good Morning America, titled Prince Harry: In His Own Words. In the interview with Bradby, Harry said that he \"would like to get my father back, I would like to have my brother back\". Referring to the press as \"the devil\", he also alleged that \"certain members\" of his family were \"in the bed\" with them to \"rehabilitate their image\".",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "In a live-streamed interview in March 2023, Gabor Maté, a physician, suggested publicly that Harry could be suffering from PTSD, ADD, anxiety, and depression based on his conversation with him and having read his autobiography Spare.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "In October 2021, Twitter analytics service Bot Sentinel released their analysis of more than 114,000 tweets about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, which states that 83 accounts with a combined number of 187,631 followers responsible for approximately 70% of the negative content posted about the couple. The report prompted an investigation by Twitter. Twitter stated that it found no evidence of \"widespread coordination\" between the accounts, and said that it had taken action against users who violated Twitter's conduct policy. Bot Sentinel also released three more reports in the following months, arguing that the accounts were part of a \"bot network\" and a similar network could be found on YouTube. In January 2022, the BBC named Harry and Meghan among people whose photos and videos were used in fake instant profits advertisements and bitcoin-related investment schemes.",
"title": "Privacy and the media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Harry was originally styled \"His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales\". He used Wales as his surname for military purposes and was known as \"Captain Harry Wales\" in such contexts.",
"title": "Titles, styles, honours and arms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "On the morning of his wedding, Queen Elizabeth II granted him the Dukedom of Sussex, the Earldom of Dumbarton and Barony of Kilkeel. He thus became known as \"His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex\". He uses the earldom in Scotland and the barony in Northern Ireland.",
"title": "Titles, styles, honours and arms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "On 18 January 2020, Buckingham Palace announced that, following their decision to step back from royal duties, from 31 March 2020 the Duke and Duchess would not use their Royal Highness styles in practice. They are still referred to as \"His/Her Royal Highness\" in legal settings.",
"title": "Titles, styles, honours and arms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In February 2021, it was announced via written confirmation that Harry's honorary military appointments mentioned above were returned to Queen Elizabeth II.",
"title": "Titles, styles, honours and arms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In December 2010, the German charity Ein Herz für Kinder (\"A Heart for Children\") awarded him its Golden Heart Award, in recognition of his \"charitable and humanitarian efforts\". On 7 May 2012, the Atlantic Council awarded him its Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership Award. In August 2018, the Royal Canadian Legion granted him the 2018 Founders Award for his role in founding the Invictus Games. In October 2018, he was presented with the RSA Badge in Gold, the organisation's highest honour, for his work with injured veterans. In July 2021, Harry and Meghan were among people who were selected by UK-based charity Population Matters to receive the Change Champions Award for their decision to have only two children and help with maintaining a smaller and more sustainable population. In February 2022, Harry and Meghan were selected to receive the NAACP's President's Award for their work on causes related to social justice and equity. In October 2022, the couple were named as Ripple of Hope Award laureates for their work on racial justice, mental health, and other social initiatives through their foundation Archewell.",
"title": "Titles, styles, honours and arms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Agnatically, Harry is a member of the House of Glücksburg, a cadet branch of the House of Oldenburg, one of Europe's oldest royal houses. Harry's paternal grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, issued letters patent on 8 February 1960 declaring his father to be a member of the House of Windsor.",
"title": "Ancestry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Ancestors on Harry's father's side include most of the royal families of Europe, and on his mother's side, the earls Spencer—a cadet branch of the Spencer family descended from the earls of Sunderland; the senior branch are now also dukes of Marlborough; the Barons Fermoy; and more anciently from Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Grafton, and Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond—two illegitimate sons of King Charles II.",
"title": "Ancestry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Harry and his brother William descend matrilineally from Eliza Kewark, a housekeeper for his eighteenth-century ancestor Theodore Forbes—a Scottish merchant who worked for the East India Company in Surat. She is variously described in contemporary documents as \"a dark-skinned native woman\", \"an Armenian woman from Bombay\", and \"Mrs. Forbesian\". Genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner assumed Kewark was Armenian. In June 2013, BritainsDNA announced that genealogical DNA tests on two of Harry and William's distant matrilineal cousins confirm Kewark was matrilineally of Indian descent.",
"title": "Ancestry"
}
]
| Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex,, is a member of the British royal family. As the younger son of King Charles III and Diana, Princess of Wales, Harry is fifth in the line of succession to the British throne. Educated at Wetherby School, Ludgrove School, and Eton College, Harry completed army officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He was commissioned as a cornet into the Blues and Royals and served temporarily with his older brother William. Harry was separately deployed on active duty to Afghanistan on two occasions; the first was in 2007–2008 for ten weeks in Helmand Province. The second was for twenty weeks in 2012–2013 with the Army Air Corps. Inspired by the Warrior Games in the United States, Harry launched the Invictus Games in 2014 as founding patron and now remains involved in a non-royal capacity. Two years later, alongside his brother William and sister-in-law Catherine, Harry jointly initiated the mental health awareness campaign "Heads Together". In 2018, Harry was made Duke of Sussex prior to his wedding to American actress Meghan Markle. They have two children: Archie and Lilibet. Harry and Meghan stepped down as working royals in January 2020, moved to Meghan's native Southern California, and launched Archewell Inc., a Beverly Hills-based mix of for-profit and not-for-profit (charitable) business organisations. In March 2021, Harry sat for Oprah with Meghan and Harry, a much-publicised American television interview with his wife and Oprah Winfrey. The couple filmed Harry & Meghan, a Netflix docuseries, which was released in December 2022. | 2002-01-17T23:46:50Z | 2023-12-30T04:17:57Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Harry,_Duke_of_Sussex |
14,458 | Hail | Hail is a form of solid precipitation. It is distinct from ice pellets (American English "sleet"), though the two are often confused. It consists of balls or irregular lumps of ice, each of which is called a hailstone. Ice pellets generally fall in cold weather, while hail growth is greatly inhibited during low surface temperatures.
Unlike other forms of water ice precipitation, such as graupel (which is made of rime ice), ice pellets (which are smaller and translucent), and snow (which consists of tiny, delicately crystalline flakes or needles), hailstones usually measure between 5 mm (0.2 in) and 15 cm (6 in) in diameter. The METAR reporting code for hail 5 mm (0.20 in) or greater is GR, while smaller hailstones and graupel are coded GS.
Hail is possible within most thunderstorms (as it is produced by cumulonimbus), as well as within 2 nmi (3.7 km) of the parent storm. Hail formation requires environments of strong, upward motion of air within the parent thunderstorm (similar to tornadoes) and lowered heights of the freezing level. In the mid-latitudes, hail forms near the interiors of continents, while, in the tropics, it tends to be confined to high elevations.
There are methods available to detect hail-producing thunderstorms using weather satellites and weather radar imagery. Hailstones generally fall at higher speeds as they grow in size, though complicating factors such as melting, friction with air, wind, and interaction with rain and other hailstones can slow their descent through Earth's atmosphere. Severe weather warnings are issued for hail when the stones reach a damaging size, as it can cause serious damage to human-made structures, and, most commonly, farmers' crops.
Any thunderstorm which produces hail that reaches the ground is known as a hailstorm. An ice crystal with a diameter of >5 mm (0.20 in) is considered a hailstone. Hailstones can grow to 15 cm (6 in) and weigh more than 0.5 kg (1.1 lb).
Unlike ice pellets, hailstones are layered and can be irregular and clumped together. Hail is composed of transparent ice or alternating layers of transparent and translucent ice at least 1 mm (0.039 in) thick, which are deposited upon the hailstone as it travels through the cloud, suspended aloft by air with strong upward motion until its weight overcomes the updraft and falls to the ground. Although the diameter of hail is varied, in the United States, the average observation of damaging hail is between 2.5 cm (0.98 in) and golf-ball-sized 4.4 cm (1.75 in).
Stones larger than 2 cm (0.79 in) are usually considered large enough to cause damage. The Meteorological Service of Canada issues severe thunderstorm warnings when hail that size or above is expected. The US National Weather Service has a 2.5 cm (0.98 in) diameter threshold, effective January 2010, an increase over the previous threshold of 0.75 in (1.9 cm) hail. Other countries have different thresholds according to local sensitivity to hail; for instance, grape-growing areas could be adversely impacted by smaller hailstones. Hailstones can be very large or very small, depending on how strong the updraft is: weaker hailstorms produce smaller hailstones than stronger hailstorms (such as supercells), as the more powerful updrafts in a stronger storm can keep larger hailstones aloft.
Hail forms in strong thunderstorm clouds, particularly those with intense updrafts, high liquid-water content, great vertical extent, large water droplets, and where a good portion of the cloud layer is below freezing (0 °C; 32 °F). These types of strong updrafts can also indicate the presence of a tornado. The growth rate of hailstones is impacted by factors such as higher elevation, lower freezing zones, and wind shear.
Like other precipitation in cumulonimbus clouds, hail begins as water droplets. As the droplets rise and the temperature goes below freezing, they become supercooled water and will freeze on contact with condensation nuclei. A cross-section through a large hailstone shows an onion-like structure. This means that the hailstone is made of thick and translucent layers, alternating with layers that are thin, white and opaque. Former theory suggested that hailstones were subjected to multiple descents and ascents, falling into a zone of humidity and refreezing as they were uplifted. This up and down motion was thought to be responsible for the successive layers of the hailstone. New research, based on theory as well as field study, has shown this is not necessarily true.
The storm's updraft, with upwardly directed wind speeds as high as 110 mph (180 km/h), blows the forming hailstones up the cloud. As the hailstone ascends, it passes into areas of the cloud where the concentration of humidity and supercooled water droplets varies. The hailstone's growth rate changes depending on the variation in humidity and supercooled water droplets that it encounters. The accretion rate of these water droplets is another factor in the hailstone's growth. When the hailstone moves into an area with a high concentration of water droplets, it captures the latter and acquires a translucent layer. Should the hailstone move into an area where mostly water vapor is available, it acquires a layer of opaque white ice.
Furthermore, the hailstone's speed depends on its position in the cloud's updraft and its mass. This determines the varying thicknesses of the layers of the hailstone. The accretion rate of supercooled water droplets onto the hailstone depends on the relative velocities between these water droplets and the hailstone itself. This means that generally the larger hailstones will form some distance from the stronger updraft, where they can pass more time growing. As the hailstone grows, it releases latent heat, which keeps its exterior in a liquid phase. Because it undergoes "wet growth", the outer layer is sticky (i.e. more adhesive), so a single hailstone may grow by collision with other smaller hailstones, forming a larger entity with an irregular shape.
Hail can also undergo "dry growth", in which the latent heat release through freezing is not enough to keep the outer layer in a liquid state. Hail forming in this manner appears opaque due to small air bubbles that become trapped in the stone during rapid freezing. These bubbles coalesce and escape during the "wet growth" mode, and the hailstone is more clear. The mode of growth for a hailstone can change throughout its development, and this can result in distinct layers in a hailstone's cross-section.
The hailstone will keep rising in the thunderstorm until its mass can no longer be supported by the updraft. This may take at least 30 minutes, based on the force of the updrafts in the hail-producing thunderstorm, whose top is usually greater than 10 km high. It then falls toward the ground while continuing to grow, based on the same processes, until it leaves the cloud. It will later begin to melt as it passes into air above freezing temperature.
Thus, a unique trajectory in the thunderstorm is sufficient to explain the layer-like structure of the hailstone. The only case in which multiple trajectories can be discussed is in a multicellular thunderstorm, where the hailstone may be ejected from the top of the "mother" cell and captured in the updraft of a more intense "daughter" cell. This, however, is an exceptional case.
Hail is most common within continental interiors of the mid-latitudes, as hail formation is considerably more likely when the freezing level is below the altitude of 11,000 ft (3,400 m). Movement of dry air into strong thunderstorms over continents can increase the frequency of hail by promoting evaporational cooling, which lowers the freezing level of thunderstorm clouds, giving hail a larger volume to grow in. Accordingly, hail is less common in the tropics despite a much higher frequency of thunderstorms than in the mid-latitudes because the atmosphere over the tropics tends to be warmer over a much greater altitude. Hail in the tropics occurs mainly at higher elevations.
Hail growth becomes vanishingly small when air temperatures fall below −30 °C (−22 °F), as supercooled water droplets become rare at these temperatures. Around thunderstorms, hail is most likely within the cloud at elevations above 20,000 ft (6,100 m). Between 10,000 ft (3,000 m) and 20,000 ft (6,100 m), 60% of hail is still within the thunderstorm, though 40% now lies within the clear air under the anvil. Below 10,000 ft (3,000 m), hail is equally distributed in and around a thunderstorm to a distance of 2 nmi (3.7 km).
Hail occurs most frequently within continental interiors at mid-latitudes and is less common in the tropics, despite a much higher frequency of thunderstorms than in the mid-latitudes. Hail is also much more common along mountain ranges because mountains force horizontal winds upwards (known as orographic lifting), thereby intensifying the updrafts within thunderstorms and making hail more likely. The higher elevations also result in there being less time available for hail to melt before reaching the ground. One of the more common regions for large hail is across mountainous northern India, which reported one of the highest hail-related death tolls on record in 1888. China also experiences significant hailstorms. Central Europe and southern Australia also experience a lot of hailstorms. Regions where hailstorms frequently occur are southern and western Germany, northern and eastern France, southern and eastern Benelux, and northern Italy. In southeastern Europe, Croatia and Serbia experience frequent occurrences of hail. Some mediterranean countries register the maximum frequency of hail during the Fall season.
In North America, hail is most common in the area where Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming meet, known as "Hail Alley". Hail in this region occurs between the months of March and October during the afternoon and evening hours, with the bulk of the occurrences from May through September. Cheyenne, Wyoming is North America's most hail-prone city with an average of nine to ten hailstorms per season. To the north of this area and also just downwind of the Rocky Mountains is the Hailstorm Alley region of Alberta, which also experiences an increased incidence of significant hail events.
Weather radar is a very useful tool to detect the presence of hail-producing thunderstorms. However, radar data has to be complemented by a knowledge of current atmospheric conditions which can allow one to determine if the current atmosphere is conducive to hail development.
Modern radar scans many angles around the site. Reflectivity values at multiple angles above ground level in a storm are proportional to the precipitation rate at those levels. Summing reflectivities in the Vertically Integrated Liquid or VIL, gives the liquid water content in the cloud. Research shows that hail development in the upper levels of the storm is related to the evolution of VIL. VIL divided by the vertical extent of the storm, called VIL density, has a relationship with hail size, although this varies with atmospheric conditions and therefore is not highly accurate. Traditionally, hail size and probability can be estimated from radar data by computer using algorithms based on this research. Some algorithms include the height of the freezing level to estimate the melting of the hailstone and what would be left on the ground.
Certain patterns of reflectivity are important clues for the meteorologist as well. The three body scatter spike is an example. This is the result of energy from the radar hitting hail and being deflected to the ground, where they deflect back to the hail and then to the radar. The energy took more time to go from the hail to the ground and back, as opposed to the energy that went directly from the hail to the radar, and the echo is further away from the radar than the actual location of the hail on the same radial path, forming a cone of weaker reflectivities.
More recently, the polarization properties of weather radar returns have been analyzed to differentiate between hail and heavy rain. The use of differential reflectivity ( Z d r {\displaystyle Z_{dr}} ), in combination with horizontal reflectivity ( Z h {\displaystyle Z_{h}} ) has led to a variety of hail classification algorithms. Visible satellite imagery is beginning to be used to detect hail, but false alarm rates remain high using this method.
The size of hailstones is best determined by measuring their diameter with a ruler. In the absence of a ruler, hailstone size is often visually estimated by comparing its size to that of known objects, such as coins. Using the objects such as hen's eggs, peas, and marbles for comparing hailstone sizes is imprecise, due to their varied dimensions. The UK organisation, TORRO, also scales for both hailstones and hailstorms.
When observed at an airport, METAR code is used within a surface weather observation which relates to the size of the hailstone. Within METAR code, GR is used to indicate larger hail, of a diameter of at least 0.25 in (6.4 mm). GR is derived from the French word grêle. Smaller-sized hail, as well as snow pellets, use the coding of GS, which is short for the French word grésil.
Terminal velocity of hail, or the speed at which hail is falling when it strikes the ground, varies. It is estimated that a hailstone of 1 cm (0.39 in) in diameter falls at a rate of 9 m/s (20 mph), while stones the size of 8 cm (3.1 in) in diameter fall at a rate of 48 m/s (110 mph). Hailstone velocity is dependent on the size of the stone, its drag coefficient, the motion of wind it is falling through, collisions with raindrops or other hailstones, and melting as the stones fall through a warmer atmosphere. As hailstones are not perfect spheres, it is difficult to accurately calculate their drag coefficient - and, thus, their speed.
In the United States, the National Weather Service reports hail size as a comparison to everyday objects. Hailstones larger than 1 inch in diameter are denoted as "severe."
Megacryometeors, large rocks of ice that are not associated with thunderstorms, are not officially recognized by the World Meteorological Organization as "hail," which are aggregations of ice associated with thunderstorms, and therefore records of extreme characteristics of megacryometeors are not given as hail records.
Hail can cause serious damage, notably to automobiles, aircraft, skylights, glass-roofed structures, livestock, and most commonly, crops. Hail damage to roofs often goes unnoticed until further structural damage is seen, such as leaks or cracks. It is hardest to recognize hail damage on shingled roofs and flat roofs, but all roofs have their own hail damage detection problems. Metal roofs are fairly resistant to hail damage, but may accumulate cosmetic damage in the form of dents and damaged coatings.
Hail is one of the most significant thunderstorm hazards to aircraft. When hailstones exceed 0.5 in (13 mm) in diameter, planes can be seriously damaged within seconds. The hailstones accumulating on the ground can also be hazardous to landing aircraft. Hail is a common nuisance to drivers of automobiles, severely denting the vehicle and cracking or even shattering windshields and windows unless parked in a garage or covered with a shielding material. Wheat, corn, soybeans, and tobacco are the most sensitive crops to hail damage. Hail is one of Canada's most expensive hazards.
Rarely, massive hailstones have been known to cause concussions or fatal head trauma. Hailstorms have been the cause of costly and deadly events throughout history. One of the earliest known incidents occurred around the 9th century in Roopkund, Uttarakhand, India, where 200 to 600 nomads seem to have died of injuries from hail the size of cricket balls.
Narrow zones where hail accumulates on the ground in association with thunderstorm activity are known as hail streaks or hail swaths, which can be detectable by satellite after the storms pass by. Hailstorms normally last from a few minutes up to 15 minutes in duration. Accumulating hail storms can blanket the ground with over 2 in (5.1 cm) of hail, cause thousands to lose power, and bring down many trees. Flash flooding and mudslides within areas of steep terrain can be a concern with accumulating hail.
Depths of up to 18 in (0.46 m) have been reported. A landscape covered in accumulated hail generally resembles one covered in accumulated snow and any significant accumulation of hail has the same restrictive effects as snow accumulation, albeit over a smaller area, on transport and infrastructure. Accumulated hail can also cause flooding by blocking drains, and hail can be carried in the floodwater, turning into a snow-like slush which is deposited at lower elevations.
On somewhat rare occasions, a thunderstorm can become stationary or nearly so while prolifically producing hail and significant depths of accumulation do occur; this tends to happen in mountainous areas, such as the July 29, 2010 case of a foot of hail accumulation in Boulder County, Colorado. On June 5, 2015, hail up to four feet deep fell on one city block in Denver, Colorado. The hailstones, described as between the size of bumble bees and ping pong balls, were accompanied by rain and high winds. The hail fell in only the one area, leaving the surrounding area untouched. It fell for one and a half hours between 10:00 pm and 11:30 pm. A meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Boulder said, "It's a very interesting phenomenon. We saw the storm stall. It produced copious amounts of hail in one small area. It's a meteorological thing." Tractors used to clear the area filled more than 30 dump truck loads of hail.
Research focused on four individual days that accumulated more than 5.9 inches (15 cm) of hail in 30 minutes on the Colorado front range has shown that these events share similar patterns in observed synoptic weather, radar, and lightning characteristics, suggesting the possibility of predicting these events prior to their occurrence. A fundamental problem in continuing research in this area is that, unlike hail diameter, hail depth is not commonly reported. The lack of data leaves researchers and forecasters in the dark when trying to verify operational methods. A cooperative effort between the University of Colorado and the National Weather Service is in progress. The joint project's goal is to enlist the help of the general public to develop a database of hail accumulation depths.
During the Middle Ages, people in Europe used to ring church bells and fire cannons to try to prevent hail, and the subsequent damage to crops. Updated versions of this approach are available as modern hail cannons. Cloud seeding after World War II was done to eliminate the hail threat, particularly across the Soviet Union, where it was claimed a 70–98% reduction in crop damage from hail storms was achieved by deploying silver iodide in clouds using rockets and artillery shells. But these effects have not been replicated in randomized trials conducted in the West. Hail suppression programs have been undertaken by 15 countries between 1965 and 2005. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hail is a form of solid precipitation. It is distinct from ice pellets (American English \"sleet\"), though the two are often confused. It consists of balls or irregular lumps of ice, each of which is called a hailstone. Ice pellets generally fall in cold weather, while hail growth is greatly inhibited during low surface temperatures.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Unlike other forms of water ice precipitation, such as graupel (which is made of rime ice), ice pellets (which are smaller and translucent), and snow (which consists of tiny, delicately crystalline flakes or needles), hailstones usually measure between 5 mm (0.2 in) and 15 cm (6 in) in diameter. The METAR reporting code for hail 5 mm (0.20 in) or greater is GR, while smaller hailstones and graupel are coded GS.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Hail is possible within most thunderstorms (as it is produced by cumulonimbus), as well as within 2 nmi (3.7 km) of the parent storm. Hail formation requires environments of strong, upward motion of air within the parent thunderstorm (similar to tornadoes) and lowered heights of the freezing level. In the mid-latitudes, hail forms near the interiors of continents, while, in the tropics, it tends to be confined to high elevations.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "There are methods available to detect hail-producing thunderstorms using weather satellites and weather radar imagery. Hailstones generally fall at higher speeds as they grow in size, though complicating factors such as melting, friction with air, wind, and interaction with rain and other hailstones can slow their descent through Earth's atmosphere. Severe weather warnings are issued for hail when the stones reach a damaging size, as it can cause serious damage to human-made structures, and, most commonly, farmers' crops.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Any thunderstorm which produces hail that reaches the ground is known as a hailstorm. An ice crystal with a diameter of >5 mm (0.20 in) is considered a hailstone. Hailstones can grow to 15 cm (6 in) and weigh more than 0.5 kg (1.1 lb).",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Unlike ice pellets, hailstones are layered and can be irregular and clumped together. Hail is composed of transparent ice or alternating layers of transparent and translucent ice at least 1 mm (0.039 in) thick, which are deposited upon the hailstone as it travels through the cloud, suspended aloft by air with strong upward motion until its weight overcomes the updraft and falls to the ground. Although the diameter of hail is varied, in the United States, the average observation of damaging hail is between 2.5 cm (0.98 in) and golf-ball-sized 4.4 cm (1.75 in).",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Stones larger than 2 cm (0.79 in) are usually considered large enough to cause damage. The Meteorological Service of Canada issues severe thunderstorm warnings when hail that size or above is expected. The US National Weather Service has a 2.5 cm (0.98 in) diameter threshold, effective January 2010, an increase over the previous threshold of 0.75 in (1.9 cm) hail. Other countries have different thresholds according to local sensitivity to hail; for instance, grape-growing areas could be adversely impacted by smaller hailstones. Hailstones can be very large or very small, depending on how strong the updraft is: weaker hailstorms produce smaller hailstones than stronger hailstorms (such as supercells), as the more powerful updrafts in a stronger storm can keep larger hailstones aloft.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Hail forms in strong thunderstorm clouds, particularly those with intense updrafts, high liquid-water content, great vertical extent, large water droplets, and where a good portion of the cloud layer is below freezing (0 °C; 32 °F). These types of strong updrafts can also indicate the presence of a tornado. The growth rate of hailstones is impacted by factors such as higher elevation, lower freezing zones, and wind shear.",
"title": "Formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Like other precipitation in cumulonimbus clouds, hail begins as water droplets. As the droplets rise and the temperature goes below freezing, they become supercooled water and will freeze on contact with condensation nuclei. A cross-section through a large hailstone shows an onion-like structure. This means that the hailstone is made of thick and translucent layers, alternating with layers that are thin, white and opaque. Former theory suggested that hailstones were subjected to multiple descents and ascents, falling into a zone of humidity and refreezing as they were uplifted. This up and down motion was thought to be responsible for the successive layers of the hailstone. New research, based on theory as well as field study, has shown this is not necessarily true.",
"title": "Formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The storm's updraft, with upwardly directed wind speeds as high as 110 mph (180 km/h), blows the forming hailstones up the cloud. As the hailstone ascends, it passes into areas of the cloud where the concentration of humidity and supercooled water droplets varies. The hailstone's growth rate changes depending on the variation in humidity and supercooled water droplets that it encounters. The accretion rate of these water droplets is another factor in the hailstone's growth. When the hailstone moves into an area with a high concentration of water droplets, it captures the latter and acquires a translucent layer. Should the hailstone move into an area where mostly water vapor is available, it acquires a layer of opaque white ice.",
"title": "Formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Furthermore, the hailstone's speed depends on its position in the cloud's updraft and its mass. This determines the varying thicknesses of the layers of the hailstone. The accretion rate of supercooled water droplets onto the hailstone depends on the relative velocities between these water droplets and the hailstone itself. This means that generally the larger hailstones will form some distance from the stronger updraft, where they can pass more time growing. As the hailstone grows, it releases latent heat, which keeps its exterior in a liquid phase. Because it undergoes \"wet growth\", the outer layer is sticky (i.e. more adhesive), so a single hailstone may grow by collision with other smaller hailstones, forming a larger entity with an irregular shape.",
"title": "Formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Hail can also undergo \"dry growth\", in which the latent heat release through freezing is not enough to keep the outer layer in a liquid state. Hail forming in this manner appears opaque due to small air bubbles that become trapped in the stone during rapid freezing. These bubbles coalesce and escape during the \"wet growth\" mode, and the hailstone is more clear. The mode of growth for a hailstone can change throughout its development, and this can result in distinct layers in a hailstone's cross-section.",
"title": "Formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The hailstone will keep rising in the thunderstorm until its mass can no longer be supported by the updraft. This may take at least 30 minutes, based on the force of the updrafts in the hail-producing thunderstorm, whose top is usually greater than 10 km high. It then falls toward the ground while continuing to grow, based on the same processes, until it leaves the cloud. It will later begin to melt as it passes into air above freezing temperature.",
"title": "Formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Thus, a unique trajectory in the thunderstorm is sufficient to explain the layer-like structure of the hailstone. The only case in which multiple trajectories can be discussed is in a multicellular thunderstorm, where the hailstone may be ejected from the top of the \"mother\" cell and captured in the updraft of a more intense \"daughter\" cell. This, however, is an exceptional case.",
"title": "Formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Hail is most common within continental interiors of the mid-latitudes, as hail formation is considerably more likely when the freezing level is below the altitude of 11,000 ft (3,400 m). Movement of dry air into strong thunderstorms over continents can increase the frequency of hail by promoting evaporational cooling, which lowers the freezing level of thunderstorm clouds, giving hail a larger volume to grow in. Accordingly, hail is less common in the tropics despite a much higher frequency of thunderstorms than in the mid-latitudes because the atmosphere over the tropics tends to be warmer over a much greater altitude. Hail in the tropics occurs mainly at higher elevations.",
"title": "Formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Hail growth becomes vanishingly small when air temperatures fall below −30 °C (−22 °F), as supercooled water droplets become rare at these temperatures. Around thunderstorms, hail is most likely within the cloud at elevations above 20,000 ft (6,100 m). Between 10,000 ft (3,000 m) and 20,000 ft (6,100 m), 60% of hail is still within the thunderstorm, though 40% now lies within the clear air under the anvil. Below 10,000 ft (3,000 m), hail is equally distributed in and around a thunderstorm to a distance of 2 nmi (3.7 km).",
"title": "Formation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Hail occurs most frequently within continental interiors at mid-latitudes and is less common in the tropics, despite a much higher frequency of thunderstorms than in the mid-latitudes. Hail is also much more common along mountain ranges because mountains force horizontal winds upwards (known as orographic lifting), thereby intensifying the updrafts within thunderstorms and making hail more likely. The higher elevations also result in there being less time available for hail to melt before reaching the ground. One of the more common regions for large hail is across mountainous northern India, which reported one of the highest hail-related death tolls on record in 1888. China also experiences significant hailstorms. Central Europe and southern Australia also experience a lot of hailstorms. Regions where hailstorms frequently occur are southern and western Germany, northern and eastern France, southern and eastern Benelux, and northern Italy. In southeastern Europe, Croatia and Serbia experience frequent occurrences of hail. Some mediterranean countries register the maximum frequency of hail during the Fall season.",
"title": "Climatology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In North America, hail is most common in the area where Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming meet, known as \"Hail Alley\". Hail in this region occurs between the months of March and October during the afternoon and evening hours, with the bulk of the occurrences from May through September. Cheyenne, Wyoming is North America's most hail-prone city with an average of nine to ten hailstorms per season. To the north of this area and also just downwind of the Rocky Mountains is the Hailstorm Alley region of Alberta, which also experiences an increased incidence of significant hail events.",
"title": "Climatology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Weather radar is a very useful tool to detect the presence of hail-producing thunderstorms. However, radar data has to be complemented by a knowledge of current atmospheric conditions which can allow one to determine if the current atmosphere is conducive to hail development.",
"title": "Climatology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Modern radar scans many angles around the site. Reflectivity values at multiple angles above ground level in a storm are proportional to the precipitation rate at those levels. Summing reflectivities in the Vertically Integrated Liquid or VIL, gives the liquid water content in the cloud. Research shows that hail development in the upper levels of the storm is related to the evolution of VIL. VIL divided by the vertical extent of the storm, called VIL density, has a relationship with hail size, although this varies with atmospheric conditions and therefore is not highly accurate. Traditionally, hail size and probability can be estimated from radar data by computer using algorithms based on this research. Some algorithms include the height of the freezing level to estimate the melting of the hailstone and what would be left on the ground.",
"title": "Climatology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Certain patterns of reflectivity are important clues for the meteorologist as well. The three body scatter spike is an example. This is the result of energy from the radar hitting hail and being deflected to the ground, where they deflect back to the hail and then to the radar. The energy took more time to go from the hail to the ground and back, as opposed to the energy that went directly from the hail to the radar, and the echo is further away from the radar than the actual location of the hail on the same radial path, forming a cone of weaker reflectivities.",
"title": "Climatology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "More recently, the polarization properties of weather radar returns have been analyzed to differentiate between hail and heavy rain. The use of differential reflectivity ( Z d r {\\displaystyle Z_{dr}} ), in combination with horizontal reflectivity ( Z h {\\displaystyle Z_{h}} ) has led to a variety of hail classification algorithms. Visible satellite imagery is beginning to be used to detect hail, but false alarm rates remain high using this method.",
"title": "Climatology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The size of hailstones is best determined by measuring their diameter with a ruler. In the absence of a ruler, hailstone size is often visually estimated by comparing its size to that of known objects, such as coins. Using the objects such as hen's eggs, peas, and marbles for comparing hailstone sizes is imprecise, due to their varied dimensions. The UK organisation, TORRO, also scales for both hailstones and hailstorms.",
"title": "Size and terminal velocity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "When observed at an airport, METAR code is used within a surface weather observation which relates to the size of the hailstone. Within METAR code, GR is used to indicate larger hail, of a diameter of at least 0.25 in (6.4 mm). GR is derived from the French word grêle. Smaller-sized hail, as well as snow pellets, use the coding of GS, which is short for the French word grésil.",
"title": "Size and terminal velocity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Terminal velocity of hail, or the speed at which hail is falling when it strikes the ground, varies. It is estimated that a hailstone of 1 cm (0.39 in) in diameter falls at a rate of 9 m/s (20 mph), while stones the size of 8 cm (3.1 in) in diameter fall at a rate of 48 m/s (110 mph). Hailstone velocity is dependent on the size of the stone, its drag coefficient, the motion of wind it is falling through, collisions with raindrops or other hailstones, and melting as the stones fall through a warmer atmosphere. As hailstones are not perfect spheres, it is difficult to accurately calculate their drag coefficient - and, thus, their speed.",
"title": "Size and terminal velocity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In the United States, the National Weather Service reports hail size as a comparison to everyday objects. Hailstones larger than 1 inch in diameter are denoted as \"severe.\"",
"title": "Size and terminal velocity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Megacryometeors, large rocks of ice that are not associated with thunderstorms, are not officially recognized by the World Meteorological Organization as \"hail,\" which are aggregations of ice associated with thunderstorms, and therefore records of extreme characteristics of megacryometeors are not given as hail records.",
"title": "Size and terminal velocity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Hail can cause serious damage, notably to automobiles, aircraft, skylights, glass-roofed structures, livestock, and most commonly, crops. Hail damage to roofs often goes unnoticed until further structural damage is seen, such as leaks or cracks. It is hardest to recognize hail damage on shingled roofs and flat roofs, but all roofs have their own hail damage detection problems. Metal roofs are fairly resistant to hail damage, but may accumulate cosmetic damage in the form of dents and damaged coatings.",
"title": "Hazards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Hail is one of the most significant thunderstorm hazards to aircraft. When hailstones exceed 0.5 in (13 mm) in diameter, planes can be seriously damaged within seconds. The hailstones accumulating on the ground can also be hazardous to landing aircraft. Hail is a common nuisance to drivers of automobiles, severely denting the vehicle and cracking or even shattering windshields and windows unless parked in a garage or covered with a shielding material. Wheat, corn, soybeans, and tobacco are the most sensitive crops to hail damage. Hail is one of Canada's most expensive hazards.",
"title": "Hazards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Rarely, massive hailstones have been known to cause concussions or fatal head trauma. Hailstorms have been the cause of costly and deadly events throughout history. One of the earliest known incidents occurred around the 9th century in Roopkund, Uttarakhand, India, where 200 to 600 nomads seem to have died of injuries from hail the size of cricket balls.",
"title": "Hazards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Narrow zones where hail accumulates on the ground in association with thunderstorm activity are known as hail streaks or hail swaths, which can be detectable by satellite after the storms pass by. Hailstorms normally last from a few minutes up to 15 minutes in duration. Accumulating hail storms can blanket the ground with over 2 in (5.1 cm) of hail, cause thousands to lose power, and bring down many trees. Flash flooding and mudslides within areas of steep terrain can be a concern with accumulating hail.",
"title": "Accumulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Depths of up to 18 in (0.46 m) have been reported. A landscape covered in accumulated hail generally resembles one covered in accumulated snow and any significant accumulation of hail has the same restrictive effects as snow accumulation, albeit over a smaller area, on transport and infrastructure. Accumulated hail can also cause flooding by blocking drains, and hail can be carried in the floodwater, turning into a snow-like slush which is deposited at lower elevations.",
"title": "Accumulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On somewhat rare occasions, a thunderstorm can become stationary or nearly so while prolifically producing hail and significant depths of accumulation do occur; this tends to happen in mountainous areas, such as the July 29, 2010 case of a foot of hail accumulation in Boulder County, Colorado. On June 5, 2015, hail up to four feet deep fell on one city block in Denver, Colorado. The hailstones, described as between the size of bumble bees and ping pong balls, were accompanied by rain and high winds. The hail fell in only the one area, leaving the surrounding area untouched. It fell for one and a half hours between 10:00 pm and 11:30 pm. A meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Boulder said, \"It's a very interesting phenomenon. We saw the storm stall. It produced copious amounts of hail in one small area. It's a meteorological thing.\" Tractors used to clear the area filled more than 30 dump truck loads of hail.",
"title": "Accumulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Research focused on four individual days that accumulated more than 5.9 inches (15 cm) of hail in 30 minutes on the Colorado front range has shown that these events share similar patterns in observed synoptic weather, radar, and lightning characteristics, suggesting the possibility of predicting these events prior to their occurrence. A fundamental problem in continuing research in this area is that, unlike hail diameter, hail depth is not commonly reported. The lack of data leaves researchers and forecasters in the dark when trying to verify operational methods. A cooperative effort between the University of Colorado and the National Weather Service is in progress. The joint project's goal is to enlist the help of the general public to develop a database of hail accumulation depths.",
"title": "Accumulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "During the Middle Ages, people in Europe used to ring church bells and fire cannons to try to prevent hail, and the subsequent damage to crops. Updated versions of this approach are available as modern hail cannons. Cloud seeding after World War II was done to eliminate the hail threat, particularly across the Soviet Union, where it was claimed a 70–98% reduction in crop damage from hail storms was achieved by deploying silver iodide in clouds using rockets and artillery shells. But these effects have not been replicated in randomized trials conducted in the West. Hail suppression programs have been undertaken by 15 countries between 1965 and 2005.",
"title": "Suppression and prevention"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Hail is a form of solid precipitation. It is distinct from ice pellets, though the two are often confused. It consists of balls or irregular lumps of ice, each of which is called a hailstone. Ice pellets generally fall in cold weather, while hail growth is greatly inhibited during low surface temperatures. Unlike other forms of water ice precipitation, such as graupel, ice pellets, and snow, hailstones usually measure between 5 mm (0.2 in) and 15 cm (6 in) in diameter. The METAR reporting code for hail 5 mm (0.20 in) or greater is GR, while smaller hailstones and graupel are coded GS. Hail is possible within most thunderstorms, as well as within 2 nmi (3.7 km) of the parent storm. Hail formation requires environments of strong, upward motion of air within the parent thunderstorm and lowered heights of the freezing level. In the mid-latitudes, hail forms near the interiors of continents, while, in the tropics, it tends to be confined to high elevations. There are methods available to detect hail-producing thunderstorms using weather satellites and weather radar imagery. Hailstones generally fall at higher speeds as they grow in size, though complicating factors such as melting, friction with air, wind, and interaction with rain and other hailstones can slow their descent through Earth's atmosphere. Severe weather warnings are issued for hail when the stones reach a damaging size, as it can cause serious damage to human-made structures, and, most commonly, farmers' crops. | 2002-01-20T23:38:08Z | 2023-12-15T22:09:54Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail |
14,459 | Hypnotherapy | Hypnotherapy is a type of mind–body intervention in which hypnosis is used to create a state of focused attention and increased suggestibility in the treatment of a medical or psychological disorder or concern.
The United States Department of Labor's Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) describes the job of the hypnotherapist:
"Induces hypnotic state in client to increase motivation or alter behavior patterns: Consults with client to determine nature of problem. Prepares client to enter hypnotic state by explaining how hypnosis works and what client will experience. Tests subject to determine degree of physical and emotional suggestibility. Induces hypnotic state in client, using individualized methods and techniques of hypnosis based on interpretation of test results and analysis of client's problem. May train client in self-hypnosis conditioning."
The form of hypnotherapy practiced by most Victorian hypnotists, including James Braid and Hippolyte Bernheim, mainly employed direct suggestion of symptom removal, with some use of therapeutic relaxation and occasionally aversion to alcohol, drugs, etc.
In the 1950s, Milton H. Erickson developed a radically different approach to hypnotism, which has subsequently become known as "Ericksonian hypnotherapy" or "Neo-Ericksonian hypnotherapy." Based on his belief that dysfunctional behaviors were defined by social tension, Erickson coopted the subject's behavior to establish rapport, a strategy he termed "utilization." Once rapport was established, he made use of an informal conversational approach to direct awareness. His methods included complex language patterns and client-specific therapeutic strategies (reflecting the nature of utilization). He claimed to have developed ways to suggest behavior changes during apparently ordinary conversation.
This divergence from tradition led some, including Andre Weitzenhoffer, to dispute whether Erickson was right to label his approach "hypnosis" at all. Erickson's foundational paper, however, considers hypnosis as a mental state in which specific types of "work" may be done, rather than a technique of induction.
The founders of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a method somewhat similar in some regards to some versions of hypnotherapy, claimed that they had modelled the work of Erickson extensively and assimilated it into their approach. Weitzenhoffer disputed whether NLP bears any genuine resemblance to Erickson's work.
In the 2000s, hypnotherapists began to combine aspects of solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) with Ericksonian hypnotherapy to produce therapy that was goal-focused (what the client wanted to achieve) rather than the more traditional problem-focused approach (spending time discussing the issues that brought the client to seek help). A solution-focused hypnotherapy session may include techniques from NLP.
Cognitive behavioral hypnotherapy (CBH) is an integrated psychological therapy employing clinical hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). The use of CBT in conjunction with hypnotherapy may result in greater treatment effectiveness. A meta-analysis of eight different researches revealed "a 70% greater improvement" for patients undergoing an integrated treatment to those using CBT only.
In 1974, Theodore X. Barber and his colleagues published a review of the research which argued, following the earlier social psychology of Theodore R. Sarbin, that hypnotism was better understood not as a "special state" but as the result of normal psychological variables, such as active imagination, expectation, appropriate attitudes, and motivation. Barber introduced the term "cognitive-behavioral" to describe the nonstate theory of hypnotism, and discussed its application to behavior therapy.
The growing application of cognitive and behavioral psychological theories and concepts to the explanation of hypnosis paved the way for a closer integration of hypnotherapy with various cognitive and behavioral therapies.
Many cognitive and behavioral therapies were themselves originally influenced by older hypnotherapy techniques, e.g., the systematic desensitisation of Joseph Wolpe, the cardinal technique of early behavior therapy, was originally called "hypnotic desensitisation" and derived from the Medical Hypnosis (1948) of Lewis Wolberg.
Dr. Peter Marshall, author of A Handbook of Hypnotherapy, devised the Trance Theory of Mental Illness, which asserts that people suffering from depression, or certain other kinds of neuroses, are already living in a trance. He asserts that this means the hypnotherapist does not need to induce trance, but instead to make them understand this and lead them out of it.
Mindful hypnotherapy is therapy that incorporates mindfulness and hypnotherapy. A pilot study was made at Baylor University, Texas, and published in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. Dr. Gary Elkins, director of the Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory at Baylor University called it "a valuable option for treating anxiety and stress reduction” and "an innovative mind-body therapy". The study showed a decrease in stress and an increase in mindfulness.
Hypnotherapy practitioners occasionally attract the attention of mainstream medicine. Attempts to instill academic rigor have been frustrated by the complexity of client suggestibility, which has social and cultural aspects, including the reputation of the practitioner. Results achieved in one time and center of study have not been reliably transmitted to future generations.
In the 1700s Anton Mesmer offered pseudoscientific justification for his practices, but his rationalizations were debunked by a commission that included Benjamin Franklin.
Clinicians choose hypnotherapy to address a wide range of circumstances; however, according to Yeates (2016), people choose to have hypnotherapy for many other reasons:
There is evidence supporting the use of hypnotherapy in the treatment of menopause related symptoms, including hot flashes. The North American Menopause Society recommends hypnotherapy for the nonhormonal management of menopause-associated vasomotor symptoms, giving it the highest level of evidence.
The use of hypnotherapy in treating the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome is supported by research, including randomized controlled trials. A 2015 audit of 1000 patients undertaking gut-focused hypnotherapy in normal clinical practice found that hypnotherapy was an effective intervention for refractory IBS. Gut-directed hypnotherapy is recommended in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome by the American College of Gastroenterology clinical guideline for the management of IBS.
Hypnotherapy is often applied in the birthing process and the post-natal period, but there is insufficient evidence to determine if it alleviates pain during childbirth and no evidence that it is effective against post-natal depression.
Literature shows that a wide variety of hypnotic interventions have been investigated for the treatment of bulimia nervosa, with inconclusive effect. Similar studies have shown that groups suffering from bulimia nervosa, undergoing hypnotherapy, were more exceptional to no treatment, placebos, or other alternative treatments.
Hypnotherapy is shown to be comparable in effectiveness to other forms of therapy, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, that utilize relaxation techniques and imagery. It has also shown to be successful when used to reduce anxiety in those with dental anxiety and phobias.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and its symptoms have been shown to improve due to implementation of hypnotherapy, in both long and short term. As research continues, hypnotherapy is being more openly considered as an effective intervention for those with PTSD.
Hypnotherapy has been shown to be effective when used to treat long term depressive symptoms. It has been shown to be comparable to the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy, and when used in tandem, efficacy seems to increase.
Among its many other applications in other medical domains, hypnotism was used therapeutically, by some alienists in the Victorian era, to treat the condition then known as hysteria.
Modern hypnotherapy is widely accepted for the treatment of certain habit disorders, to control irrational fears, as well as in the treatment of conditions such as insomnia and addiction. Hypnosis has also been used to enhance recovery from non-psychological conditions such as after surgical procedures, in breast cancer care and even with gastro-intestinal problems.
The laws regarding hypnosis and hypnotherapy vary by state and municipality. Some states, like Colorado, Connecticut and Washington, have mandatory licensing and registration requirements, while many other states have no specific regulations governing the practice of hypnotherapy.
In 2002, the Department for Education and Skills developed National Occupational Standards for hypnotherapy linked to National Vocational Qualifications based on the then National Qualifications Framework under the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. NCFE, a national awarding body, issues level four national vocational qualification diploma in hypnotherapy. Currently AIM Awards offers a Level 3 Certificate in Hypnotherapy and Counselling Skills at level 3 of the Regulated Qualifications Framework.
The regulation of the hypnotherapy profession in the UK is at present the main focus of UKCHO, a non-profit umbrella body for hypnotherapy organisations. Founded in 1998 to provide a non-political arena to discuss and implement changes to the profession of hypnotherapy, UKCHO currently represents 9 of the UK's professional hypnotherapy organisations and has developed standards of training for hypnotherapists, along with codes of conduct and practice that all UKCHO registered hypnotherapists are governed by. As a step towards the regulation of the profession, UKCHO's website now includes a National Public Register of Hypnotherapists who have been registered by UKCHO's Member Organisations and are therefore subject to UKCHO's professional standards. Further steps to full regulation of the hypnotherapy profession will be taken in consultation with the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health.
The National Council for Hypnotherapy is a Professional Association, established in 1973 to create a National Membership Organisation for independent Hypnotherapy Practitioners. The organisation is not for profit, with a Board of around 12 people (this can vary slightly) composed of volunteer Directors, usually in practice Hypnotherapists and paid executives.
NCH membership meet the hypnotherapy training standards and agree to follow the CECP; the NCH’s ethical code of practice, all members are expected to be insured to practice and meet supervision requirements and annual CPD expectations.
Professional hypnotherapy and use of the occupational titles hypnotherapist or clinical hypnotherapist are not government-regulated in Australia.
In 1996, as a result of a three-year research project led by Lindsay B. Yeates, the Australian Hypnotherapists Association (founded in 1949), the oldest hypnotism-oriented professional organization in Australia, instituted a peer-group accreditation system for full-time Australian professional hypnotherapists, the first of its kind in the world, which "accredit[ed] specific individuals on the basis of their actual demonstrated knowledge and clinical performance; instead of approving particular 'courses' or approving particular 'teaching institutions'" (Yeates, 1996, p.iv; 1999, p.xiv). The system was further revised in 1999.
Australian hypnotism/hypnotherapy organizations (including the Australian Hypnotherapists Association) are seeking government regulation similar to other mental health professions. However, currently hypnotherapy is not subject to government regulation through the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hypnotherapy is a type of mind–body intervention in which hypnosis is used to create a state of focused attention and increased suggestibility in the treatment of a medical or psychological disorder or concern.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The United States Department of Labor's Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) describes the job of the hypnotherapist:",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "\"Induces hypnotic state in client to increase motivation or alter behavior patterns: Consults with client to determine nature of problem. Prepares client to enter hypnotic state by explaining how hypnosis works and what client will experience. Tests subject to determine degree of physical and emotional suggestibility. Induces hypnotic state in client, using individualized methods and techniques of hypnosis based on interpretation of test results and analysis of client's problem. May train client in self-hypnosis conditioning.\"",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The form of hypnotherapy practiced by most Victorian hypnotists, including James Braid and Hippolyte Bernheim, mainly employed direct suggestion of symptom removal, with some use of therapeutic relaxation and occasionally aversion to alcohol, drugs, etc.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the 1950s, Milton H. Erickson developed a radically different approach to hypnotism, which has subsequently become known as \"Ericksonian hypnotherapy\" or \"Neo-Ericksonian hypnotherapy.\" Based on his belief that dysfunctional behaviors were defined by social tension, Erickson coopted the subject's behavior to establish rapport, a strategy he termed \"utilization.\" Once rapport was established, he made use of an informal conversational approach to direct awareness. His methods included complex language patterns and client-specific therapeutic strategies (reflecting the nature of utilization). He claimed to have developed ways to suggest behavior changes during apparently ordinary conversation.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "This divergence from tradition led some, including Andre Weitzenhoffer, to dispute whether Erickson was right to label his approach \"hypnosis\" at all. Erickson's foundational paper, however, considers hypnosis as a mental state in which specific types of \"work\" may be done, rather than a technique of induction.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The founders of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a method somewhat similar in some regards to some versions of hypnotherapy, claimed that they had modelled the work of Erickson extensively and assimilated it into their approach. Weitzenhoffer disputed whether NLP bears any genuine resemblance to Erickson's work.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the 2000s, hypnotherapists began to combine aspects of solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) with Ericksonian hypnotherapy to produce therapy that was goal-focused (what the client wanted to achieve) rather than the more traditional problem-focused approach (spending time discussing the issues that brought the client to seek help). A solution-focused hypnotherapy session may include techniques from NLP.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Cognitive behavioral hypnotherapy (CBH) is an integrated psychological therapy employing clinical hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). The use of CBT in conjunction with hypnotherapy may result in greater treatment effectiveness. A meta-analysis of eight different researches revealed \"a 70% greater improvement\" for patients undergoing an integrated treatment to those using CBT only.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1974, Theodore X. Barber and his colleagues published a review of the research which argued, following the earlier social psychology of Theodore R. Sarbin, that hypnotism was better understood not as a \"special state\" but as the result of normal psychological variables, such as active imagination, expectation, appropriate attitudes, and motivation. Barber introduced the term \"cognitive-behavioral\" to describe the nonstate theory of hypnotism, and discussed its application to behavior therapy.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The growing application of cognitive and behavioral psychological theories and concepts to the explanation of hypnosis paved the way for a closer integration of hypnotherapy with various cognitive and behavioral therapies.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Many cognitive and behavioral therapies were themselves originally influenced by older hypnotherapy techniques, e.g., the systematic desensitisation of Joseph Wolpe, the cardinal technique of early behavior therapy, was originally called \"hypnotic desensitisation\" and derived from the Medical Hypnosis (1948) of Lewis Wolberg.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Dr. Peter Marshall, author of A Handbook of Hypnotherapy, devised the Trance Theory of Mental Illness, which asserts that people suffering from depression, or certain other kinds of neuroses, are already living in a trance. He asserts that this means the hypnotherapist does not need to induce trance, but instead to make them understand this and lead them out of it.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Mindful hypnotherapy is therapy that incorporates mindfulness and hypnotherapy. A pilot study was made at Baylor University, Texas, and published in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. Dr. Gary Elkins, director of the Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory at Baylor University called it \"a valuable option for treating anxiety and stress reduction” and \"an innovative mind-body therapy\". The study showed a decrease in stress and an increase in mindfulness.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Hypnotherapy practitioners occasionally attract the attention of mainstream medicine. Attempts to instill academic rigor have been frustrated by the complexity of client suggestibility, which has social and cultural aspects, including the reputation of the practitioner. Results achieved in one time and center of study have not been reliably transmitted to future generations.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the 1700s Anton Mesmer offered pseudoscientific justification for his practices, but his rationalizations were debunked by a commission that included Benjamin Franklin.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Clinicians choose hypnotherapy to address a wide range of circumstances; however, according to Yeates (2016), people choose to have hypnotherapy for many other reasons:",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "There is evidence supporting the use of hypnotherapy in the treatment of menopause related symptoms, including hot flashes. The North American Menopause Society recommends hypnotherapy for the nonhormonal management of menopause-associated vasomotor symptoms, giving it the highest level of evidence.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The use of hypnotherapy in treating the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome is supported by research, including randomized controlled trials. A 2015 audit of 1000 patients undertaking gut-focused hypnotherapy in normal clinical practice found that hypnotherapy was an effective intervention for refractory IBS. Gut-directed hypnotherapy is recommended in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome by the American College of Gastroenterology clinical guideline for the management of IBS.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Hypnotherapy is often applied in the birthing process and the post-natal period, but there is insufficient evidence to determine if it alleviates pain during childbirth and no evidence that it is effective against post-natal depression.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Literature shows that a wide variety of hypnotic interventions have been investigated for the treatment of bulimia nervosa, with inconclusive effect. Similar studies have shown that groups suffering from bulimia nervosa, undergoing hypnotherapy, were more exceptional to no treatment, placebos, or other alternative treatments.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Hypnotherapy is shown to be comparable in effectiveness to other forms of therapy, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, that utilize relaxation techniques and imagery. It has also shown to be successful when used to reduce anxiety in those with dental anxiety and phobias.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and its symptoms have been shown to improve due to implementation of hypnotherapy, in both long and short term. As research continues, hypnotherapy is being more openly considered as an effective intervention for those with PTSD.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Hypnotherapy has been shown to be effective when used to treat long term depressive symptoms. It has been shown to be comparable to the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy, and when used in tandem, efficacy seems to increase.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Among its many other applications in other medical domains, hypnotism was used therapeutically, by some alienists in the Victorian era, to treat the condition then known as hysteria.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Modern hypnotherapy is widely accepted for the treatment of certain habit disorders, to control irrational fears, as well as in the treatment of conditions such as insomnia and addiction. Hypnosis has also been used to enhance recovery from non-psychological conditions such as after surgical procedures, in breast cancer care and even with gastro-intestinal problems.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The laws regarding hypnosis and hypnotherapy vary by state and municipality. Some states, like Colorado, Connecticut and Washington, have mandatory licensing and registration requirements, while many other states have no specific regulations governing the practice of hypnotherapy.",
"title": "Occupational accreditation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 2002, the Department for Education and Skills developed National Occupational Standards for hypnotherapy linked to National Vocational Qualifications based on the then National Qualifications Framework under the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. NCFE, a national awarding body, issues level four national vocational qualification diploma in hypnotherapy. Currently AIM Awards offers a Level 3 Certificate in Hypnotherapy and Counselling Skills at level 3 of the Regulated Qualifications Framework.",
"title": "Occupational accreditation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The regulation of the hypnotherapy profession in the UK is at present the main focus of UKCHO, a non-profit umbrella body for hypnotherapy organisations. Founded in 1998 to provide a non-political arena to discuss and implement changes to the profession of hypnotherapy, UKCHO currently represents 9 of the UK's professional hypnotherapy organisations and has developed standards of training for hypnotherapists, along with codes of conduct and practice that all UKCHO registered hypnotherapists are governed by. As a step towards the regulation of the profession, UKCHO's website now includes a National Public Register of Hypnotherapists who have been registered by UKCHO's Member Organisations and are therefore subject to UKCHO's professional standards. Further steps to full regulation of the hypnotherapy profession will be taken in consultation with the Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health.",
"title": "Occupational accreditation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The National Council for Hypnotherapy is a Professional Association, established in 1973 to create a National Membership Organisation for independent Hypnotherapy Practitioners. The organisation is not for profit, with a Board of around 12 people (this can vary slightly) composed of volunteer Directors, usually in practice Hypnotherapists and paid executives.",
"title": "Occupational accreditation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "NCH membership meet the hypnotherapy training standards and agree to follow the CECP; the NCH’s ethical code of practice, all members are expected to be insured to practice and meet supervision requirements and annual CPD expectations.",
"title": "Occupational accreditation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Professional hypnotherapy and use of the occupational titles hypnotherapist or clinical hypnotherapist are not government-regulated in Australia.",
"title": "Occupational accreditation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 1996, as a result of a three-year research project led by Lindsay B. Yeates, the Australian Hypnotherapists Association (founded in 1949), the oldest hypnotism-oriented professional organization in Australia, instituted a peer-group accreditation system for full-time Australian professional hypnotherapists, the first of its kind in the world, which \"accredit[ed] specific individuals on the basis of their actual demonstrated knowledge and clinical performance; instead of approving particular 'courses' or approving particular 'teaching institutions'\" (Yeates, 1996, p.iv; 1999, p.xiv). The system was further revised in 1999.",
"title": "Occupational accreditation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Australian hypnotism/hypnotherapy organizations (including the Australian Hypnotherapists Association) are seeking government regulation similar to other mental health professions. However, currently hypnotherapy is not subject to government regulation through the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA).",
"title": "Occupational accreditation"
}
]
| Hypnotherapy is a type of mind–body intervention in which hypnosis is used to create a state of focused attention and increased suggestibility in the treatment of a medical or psychological disorder or concern. | 2002-01-21T03:27:42Z | 2023-09-11T03:19:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnotherapy |
14,462 | Hangman (game) | Hangman is a guessing game for two or more players. One player thinks of a word, phrase, or sentence and the other(s) tries to guess it by suggesting letters or numbers within a certain number of guesses. Originally a paper-and-pencil game, there are now electronic versions.
Though the origins of the game are unknown, a variant is mentioned in a book of children's games assembled by Alice Gomme in 1894 called Birds, Beasts, and Fishes. This version lacks the image of a hanged man, instead relying on keeping score as to the number of attempts it took each player to fill in the blanks.
A version which incorporated hanging imagery was described in a 1902 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, which stated that it was popular at "White Cap" parties hosted by Vigilance Committees where guests would wear "white peaked caps with masks".
The word to guess is represented by a row of dashes representing each letter or number of the word. Rules may permit or forbid proper nouns, such as names, places, brands, or slang. If the guessing player suggests a letter which occurs in the word, the other player writes it in all its correct positions. If the suggested letter does not occur in the word, the other player removes (or alternatively, adds) one element of a hanged stick figure as a tally mark. Generally, the game ends once the word is guessed, or if the stick figure is complete — signifying that all guesses have been used.
The player guessing the word may, at any time, attempt to guess the whole word. If the word is correct, the game is over and the guesser wins. Otherwise, the other player may choose to penalize the guesser by adding an element to the diagram. On the other hand, if the guesser makes enough incorrect guesses to allow the other player to complete the diagram, the guesser loses. However, the guesser can also win by guessing all the letters that appear in the word, thereby completing the word, before the diagram is completed.
As the name of the game suggests, the diagram is designed to look like a hanging man. This has led to some controversy. An alternative for teachers is to draw an apple tree with ten apples, erasing or crossing out the apples as the guesses are used up.
Some modifications to game play (house rules) to increase the difficulty level are sometimes implemented, such as limiting guesses on high-frequency consonants and vowels. Another alternative is to give the definition of the word; this can be used to facilitate the learning of a foreign language.
How many incorrect guesses are allowed in the game can also be modified. This can be done by adding extra elements to the stick figure, like a face or shoes, or by first drawing elements of the gallows for every mistake before starting to draw the stick figure.
The fact that the twelve most commonly occurring letters in the English language are e-t-a-o-i-n-s-h-r-d-l-u (from most to least), along with other letter-frequency lists, are used by the guessing player to increase the odds when it is their turn to guess. On the other hand, the same lists can be used by the puzzle setter to stump their opponent by choosing a word that deliberately avoids common letters (e.g. rhythm or zephyr) or one that contains rare letters (e.g. jazz).
Another common strategy is to guess vowels first, as English only has five vowels (a, e, i, o, and u, while y may sometimes, but rarely, be used as a vowel) and almost every word has at least one.
According to a 2010 study conducted by Jon McLoone for Wolfram Research, the most difficult words to guess include jazz, buzz, hajj, faff, fizz, fuzz and variations of these. In speaking with Dr. Richard Davis, his favorite winning word is syzygy.
The American game show Wheel of Fortune was inspired by hangman. Merv Griffin conceived of the show after recalling long car trips as a child, on which he and his sister played the game.
Brazil also had a show in the 1960s and again from 2012–2013 called 'Let's Play Hangman', hosted by Silvio Santos. Brazil would later get its own version of Wheel of Fortune, running from 1980 to 1993, again from 2003 to 2012 (during which the new Let's Play Hangman aired), and again since 2013 to the present. These shows were also hosted by Santos.
In July 2017, the BBC introduced a game show of its own called Letterbox, which is also based on hangman. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hangman is a guessing game for two or more players. One player thinks of a word, phrase, or sentence and the other(s) tries to guess it by suggesting letters or numbers within a certain number of guesses. Originally a paper-and-pencil game, there are now electronic versions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Though the origins of the game are unknown, a variant is mentioned in a book of children's games assembled by Alice Gomme in 1894 called Birds, Beasts, and Fishes. This version lacks the image of a hanged man, instead relying on keeping score as to the number of attempts it took each player to fill in the blanks.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "A version which incorporated hanging imagery was described in a 1902 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, which stated that it was popular at \"White Cap\" parties hosted by Vigilance Committees where guests would wear \"white peaked caps with masks\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The word to guess is represented by a row of dashes representing each letter or number of the word. Rules may permit or forbid proper nouns, such as names, places, brands, or slang. If the guessing player suggests a letter which occurs in the word, the other player writes it in all its correct positions. If the suggested letter does not occur in the word, the other player removes (or alternatively, adds) one element of a hanged stick figure as a tally mark. Generally, the game ends once the word is guessed, or if the stick figure is complete — signifying that all guesses have been used.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The player guessing the word may, at any time, attempt to guess the whole word. If the word is correct, the game is over and the guesser wins. Otherwise, the other player may choose to penalize the guesser by adding an element to the diagram. On the other hand, if the guesser makes enough incorrect guesses to allow the other player to complete the diagram, the guesser loses. However, the guesser can also win by guessing all the letters that appear in the word, thereby completing the word, before the diagram is completed.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "As the name of the game suggests, the diagram is designed to look like a hanging man. This has led to some controversy. An alternative for teachers is to draw an apple tree with ten apples, erasing or crossing out the apples as the guesses are used up.",
"title": "Variants"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Some modifications to game play (house rules) to increase the difficulty level are sometimes implemented, such as limiting guesses on high-frequency consonants and vowels. Another alternative is to give the definition of the word; this can be used to facilitate the learning of a foreign language.",
"title": "Variants"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "How many incorrect guesses are allowed in the game can also be modified. This can be done by adding extra elements to the stick figure, like a face or shoes, or by first drawing elements of the gallows for every mistake before starting to draw the stick figure.",
"title": "Variants"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The fact that the twelve most commonly occurring letters in the English language are e-t-a-o-i-n-s-h-r-d-l-u (from most to least), along with other letter-frequency lists, are used by the guessing player to increase the odds when it is their turn to guess. On the other hand, the same lists can be used by the puzzle setter to stump their opponent by choosing a word that deliberately avoids common letters (e.g. rhythm or zephyr) or one that contains rare letters (e.g. jazz).",
"title": "Strategy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Another common strategy is to guess vowels first, as English only has five vowels (a, e, i, o, and u, while y may sometimes, but rarely, be used as a vowel) and almost every word has at least one.",
"title": "Strategy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "According to a 2010 study conducted by Jon McLoone for Wolfram Research, the most difficult words to guess include jazz, buzz, hajj, faff, fizz, fuzz and variations of these. In speaking with Dr. Richard Davis, his favorite winning word is syzygy.",
"title": "Strategy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The American game show Wheel of Fortune was inspired by hangman. Merv Griffin conceived of the show after recalling long car trips as a child, on which he and his sister played the game.",
"title": "Derivations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Brazil also had a show in the 1960s and again from 2012–2013 called 'Let's Play Hangman', hosted by Silvio Santos. Brazil would later get its own version of Wheel of Fortune, running from 1980 to 1993, again from 2003 to 2012 (during which the new Let's Play Hangman aired), and again since 2013 to the present. These shows were also hosted by Santos.",
"title": "Derivations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In July 2017, the BBC introduced a game show of its own called Letterbox, which is also based on hangman.",
"title": "Derivations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Hangman is a guessing game for two or more players. One player thinks of a word, phrase, or sentence and the other(s) tries to guess it by suggesting letters or numbers within a certain number of guesses. Originally a paper-and-pencil game, there are now electronic versions. | 2002-01-21T13:49:04Z | 2023-12-25T00:51:18Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangman_(game) |
14,463 | Harmonic mean | In mathematics, the harmonic mean is one of several kinds of average, and in particular, one of the Pythagorean means. It is sometimes appropriate for situations when the average rate is desired.
The harmonic mean can be expressed as the reciprocal of the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals of the given set of observations. As a simple example, the harmonic mean of 1, 4, and 4 is
The harmonic mean H of the positive real numbers x 1 , x 2 , … , x n {\displaystyle x_{1},x_{2},\ldots ,x_{n}} is defined to be
It is the reciprocal of the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals, and vice versa:
where the arithmetic mean is defined as A ( x 1 , x 2 , … , x n ) = 1 n ∑ i = 1 n x i . {\textstyle A(x_{1},x_{2},\ldots ,x_{n})={\tfrac {1}{n}}\sum _{i=1}^{n}x_{i}.}
The harmonic mean is a Schur-concave function, and dominated by the minimum of its arguments, in the sense that for any positive set of arguments, min ( x 1 … x n ) ≤ H ( x 1 … x n ) ≤ n min ( x 1 … x n ) {\displaystyle \min(x_{1}\ldots x_{n})\leq H(x_{1}\ldots x_{n})\leq n\min(x_{1}\ldots x_{n})} . Thus, the harmonic mean cannot be made arbitrarily large by changing some values to bigger ones (while having at least one value unchanged).
The harmonic mean is also concave, which is an even stronger property than Schur-concavity. One has to take care to only use positive numbers though, since the mean fails to be concave if negative values are used.
The harmonic mean is one of the three Pythagorean means. For all positive data sets containing at least one pair of nonequal values, the harmonic mean is always the least of the three means, while the arithmetic mean is always the greatest of the three and the geometric mean is always in between. (If all values in a nonempty dataset are equal, the three means are always equal to one another; e.g., the harmonic, geometric, and arithmetic means of {2, 2, 2} are all 2.)
It is the special case M−1 of the power mean:
Since the harmonic mean of a list of numbers tends strongly toward the least elements of the list, it tends (compared to the arithmetic mean) to mitigate the impact of large outliers and aggravate the impact of small ones.
The arithmetic mean is often mistakenly used in places calling for the harmonic mean. In the speed example below for instance, the arithmetic mean of 40 is incorrect, and too big.
The harmonic mean is related to the other Pythagorean means, as seen in the equation below. This can be seen by interpreting the denominator to be the arithmetic mean of the product of numbers n times but each time omitting the j-th term. That is, for the first term, we multiply all n numbers except the first; for the second, we multiply all n numbers except the second; and so on. The numerator, excluding the n, which goes with the arithmetic mean, is the geometric mean to the power n. Thus the n-th harmonic mean is related to the n-th geometric and arithmetic means. The general formula is
If a set of non-identical numbers is subjected to a mean-preserving spread — that is, two or more elements of the set are "spread apart" from each other while leaving the arithmetic mean unchanged — then the harmonic mean always decreases.
For the special case of just two numbers, x 1 {\displaystyle x_{1}} and x 2 {\displaystyle x_{2}} , the harmonic mean can be written
In this special case, the harmonic mean is related to the arithmetic mean A = x 1 + x 2 2 {\displaystyle A={\frac {x_{1}+x_{2}}{2}}} and the geometric mean G = x 1 x 2 , {\displaystyle G={\sqrt {x_{1}x_{2}}},} by
Since G A ≤ 1 {\displaystyle {\tfrac {G}{A}}\leq 1} by the inequality of arithmetic and geometric means, this shows for the n = 2 case that H ≤ G (a property that in fact holds for all n). It also follows that G = A H {\displaystyle G={\sqrt {AH}}} , meaning the two numbers' geometric mean equals the geometric mean of their arithmetic and harmonic means.
For the special case of three numbers, x 1 {\displaystyle x_{1}} , x 2 {\displaystyle x_{2}} and x 3 {\displaystyle x_{3}} , the harmonic mean can be written
Three positive numbers H, G, and A are respectively the harmonic, geometric, and arithmetic means of three positive numbers if and only if the following inequality holds
If a set of weights w 1 {\displaystyle w_{1}} , ..., w n {\displaystyle w_{n}} is associated to the dataset x 1 {\displaystyle x_{1}} , ..., x n {\displaystyle x_{n}} , the weighted harmonic mean is defined by
The unweighted harmonic mean can be regarded as the special case where all of the weights are equal.
In many situations involving rates and ratios, the harmonic mean provides the correct average. For instance, if a vehicle travels a certain distance d outbound at a speed x (e.g. 60 km/h) and returns the same distance at a speed y (e.g. 20 km/h), then its average speed is the harmonic mean of x and y (30 km/h), not the arithmetic mean (40 km/h). The total travel time is the same as if it had traveled the whole distance at that average speed. This can be proven as follows:
Average speed for the entire journey = Total distance traveled/Sum of time for each segment = 2d/d/x + d/y = 2/1/x+1/y
However, if the vehicle travels for a certain amount of time at a speed x and then the same amount of time at a speed y, then its average speed is the arithmetic mean of x and y, which in the above example is 40 km/h.
Average speed for the entire journey = Total distance traveled/Sum of time for each segment = xt+yt/2t = x+y/2
The same principle applies to more than two segments: given a series of sub-trips at different speeds, if each sub-trip covers the same distance, then the average speed is the harmonic mean of all the sub-trip speeds; and if each sub-trip takes the same amount of time, then the average speed is the arithmetic mean of all the sub-trip speeds. (If neither is the case, then a weighted harmonic mean or weighted arithmetic mean is needed. For the arithmetic mean, the speed of each portion of the trip is weighted by the duration of that portion, while for the harmonic mean, the corresponding weight is the distance. In both cases, the resulting formula reduces to dividing the total distance by the total time.)
However, one may avoid the use of the harmonic mean for the case of "weighting by distance". Pose the problem as finding "slowness" of the trip where "slowness" (in hours per kilometre) is the inverse of speed. When trip slowness is found, invert it so as to find the "true" average trip speed. For each trip segment i, the slowness si = 1/speedi. Then take the weighted arithmetic mean of the si's weighted by their respective distances (optionally with the weights normalized so they sum to 1 by dividing them by trip length). This gives the true average slowness (in time per kilometre). It turns out that this procedure, which can be done with no knowledge of the harmonic mean, amounts to the same mathematical operations as one would use in solving this problem by using the harmonic mean. Thus it illustrates why the harmonic mean works in this case.
Similarly, if one wishes to estimate the density of an alloy given the densities of its constituent elements and their mass fractions (or, equivalently, percentages by mass), then the predicted density of the alloy (exclusive of typically minor volume changes due to atom packing effects) is the weighted harmonic mean of the individual densities, weighted by mass, rather than the weighted arithmetic mean as one might at first expect. To use the weighted arithmetic mean, the densities would have to be weighted by volume. Applying dimensional analysis to the problem while labeling the mass units by element and making sure that only like element-masses cancel makes this clear.
If one connects two electrical resistors in parallel, one having resistance x (e.g., 60 Ω) and one having resistance y (e.g., 40 Ω), then the effect is the same as if one had used two resistors with the same resistance, both equal to the harmonic mean of x and y (48 Ω): the equivalent resistance, in either case, is 24 Ω (one-half of the harmonic mean). This same principle applies to capacitors in series or to inductors in parallel.
However, if one connects the resistors in series, then the average resistance is the arithmetic mean of x and y (50 Ω), with total resistance equal to twice this, the sum of x and y (100 Ω). This principle applies to capacitors in parallel or to inductors in series.
As with the previous example, the same principle applies when more than two resistors, capacitors or inductors are connected, provided that all are in parallel or all are in series.
The "conductivity effective mass" of a semiconductor is also defined as the harmonic mean of the effective masses along the three crystallographic directions.
As for other optic equations, the thin lens equation 1/f = 1/u + 1/v can be rewritten such that the focal length f is one-half of the harmonic mean of the distances of the subject u and object v from the lens.
The weighted harmonic mean is the preferable method for averaging multiples, such as the price–earnings ratio (P/E). If these ratios are averaged using a weighted arithmetic mean, high data points are given greater weights than low data points. The weighted harmonic mean, on the other hand, correctly weights each data point. The simple weighted arithmetic mean when applied to non-price normalized ratios such as the P/E is biased upwards and cannot be numerically justified, since it is based on equalized earnings; just as vehicles speeds cannot be averaged for a roundtrip journey (see above).
For example, consider two firms, one with a market capitalization of $150 billion and earnings of $5 billion (P/E of 30) and one with a market capitalization of $1 billion and earnings of $1 million (P/E of 1000). Consider an index made of the two stocks, with 30% invested in the first and 70% invested in the second. We want to calculate the P/E ratio of this index.
Using the weighted arithmetic mean (incorrect):
Using the weighted harmonic mean (correct):
Thus, the correct P/E of 93.46 of this index can only be found using the weighted harmonic mean, while the weighted arithmetic mean will significantly overestimate it.
In any triangle, the radius of the incircle is one-third of the harmonic mean of the altitudes.
For any point P on the minor arc BC of the circumcircle of an equilateral triangle ABC, with distances q and t from B and C respectively, and with the intersection of PA and BC being at a distance y from point P, we have that y is half the harmonic mean of q and t.
In a right triangle with legs a and b and altitude h from the hypotenuse to the right angle, h² is half the harmonic mean of a² and b².
Let t and s (t > s) be the sides of the two inscribed squares in a right triangle with hypotenuse c. Then s² equals half the harmonic mean of c² and t².
Let a trapezoid have vertices A, B, C, and D in sequence and have parallel sides AB and CD. Let E be the intersection of the diagonals, and let F be on side DA and G be on side BC such that FEG is parallel to AB and CD. Then FG is the harmonic mean of AB and DC. (This is provable using similar triangles.)
One application of this trapezoid result is in the crossed ladders problem, where two ladders lie oppositely across an alley, each with feet at the base of one sidewall, with one leaning against a wall at height A and the other leaning against the opposite wall at height B, as shown. The ladders cross at a height of h above the alley floor. Then h is half the harmonic mean of A and B. This result still holds if the walls are slanted but still parallel and the "heights" A, B, and h are measured as distances from the floor along lines parallel to the walls. This can be proved easily using the area formula of a trapezoid and area addition formula.
In an ellipse, the semi-latus rectum (the distance from a focus to the ellipse along a line parallel to the minor axis) is the harmonic mean of the maximum and minimum distances of the ellipse from a focus.
In computer science, specifically information retrieval and machine learning, the harmonic mean of the precision (true positives per predicted positive) and the recall (true positives per real positive) is often used as an aggregated performance score for the evaluation of algorithms and systems: the F-score (or F-measure). This is used in information retrieval because only the positive class is of relevance, while number of negatives, in general, is large and unknown. It is thus a trade-off as to whether the correct positive predictions should be measured in relation to the number of predicted positives or the number of real positives, so it is measured versus a putative number of positives that is an arithmetic mean of the two possible denominators.
A consequence arises from basic algebra in problems where people or systems work together. As an example, if a gas-powered pump can drain a pool in 4 hours and a battery-powered pump can drain the same pool in 6 hours, then it will take both pumps 6·4/6 + 4, which is equal to 2.4 hours, to drain the pool together. This is one-half of the harmonic mean of 6 and 4: 2·6·4/6 + 4 = 4.8. That is, the appropriate average for the two types of pump is the harmonic mean, and with one pair of pumps (two pumps), it takes half this harmonic mean time, while with two pairs of pumps (four pumps) it would take a quarter of this harmonic mean time.
In hydrology, the harmonic mean is similarly used to average hydraulic conductivity values for a flow that is perpendicular to layers (e.g., geologic or soil) - flow parallel to layers uses the arithmetic mean. This apparent difference in averaging is explained by the fact that hydrology uses conductivity, which is the inverse of resistivity.
In sabermetrics, a baseball player's Power–speed number is the harmonic mean of their home run and stolen base totals.
In population genetics, the harmonic mean is used when calculating the effects of fluctuations in the census population size on the effective population size. The harmonic mean takes into account the fact that events such as population bottleneck increase the rate genetic drift and reduce the amount of genetic variation in the population. This is a result of the fact that following a bottleneck very few individuals contribute to the gene pool limiting the genetic variation present in the population for many generations to come.
When considering fuel economy in automobiles two measures are commonly used – miles per gallon (mpg), and litres per 100 km. As the dimensions of these quantities are the inverse of each other (one is distance per volume, the other volume per distance) when taking the mean value of the fuel economy of a range of cars one measure will produce the harmonic mean of the other – i.e., converting the mean value of fuel economy expressed in litres per 100 km to miles per gallon will produce the harmonic mean of the fuel economy expressed in miles per gallon. For calculating the average fuel consumption of a fleet of vehicles from the individual fuel consumptions, the harmonic mean should be used if the fleet uses miles per gallon, whereas the arithmetic mean should be used if the fleet uses litres per 100 km. In the USA the CAFE standards (the federal automobile fuel consumption standards) make use of the harmonic mean.
In chemistry and nuclear physics the average mass per particle of a mixture consisting of different species (e.g., molecules or isotopes) is given by the harmonic mean of the individual species' masses weighted by their respective mass fraction.
The harmonic mean of a beta distribution with shape parameters α and β is:
The harmonic mean with α < 1 is undefined because its defining expression is not bounded in [0, 1].
Letting α = β
showing that for α = β the harmonic mean ranges from 0 for α = β = 1, to 1/2 for α = β → ∞.
The following are the limits with one parameter finite (non-zero) and the other parameter approaching these limits:
With the geometric mean the harmonic mean may be useful in maximum likelihood estimation in the four parameter case.
A second harmonic mean (H1 − X) also exists for this distribution
This harmonic mean with β < 1 is undefined because its defining expression is not bounded in [ 0, 1 ].
Letting α = β in the above expression
showing that for α = β the harmonic mean ranges from 0, for α = β = 1, to 1/2, for α = β → ∞.
The following are the limits with one parameter finite (non zero) and the other approaching these limits:
Although both harmonic means are asymmetric, when α = β the two means are equal.
The harmonic mean ( H ) of the lognormal distribution of a random variable X is
where μ and σ are the parameters of the distribution, i.e. the mean and variance of the distribution of the natural logarithm of X.
The harmonic and arithmetic means of the distribution are related by
where Cv and μ are the coefficient of variation and the mean of the distribution respectively..
The geometric (G), arithmetic and harmonic means of the distribution are related by
The harmonic mean of type 1 Pareto distribution is
where k is the scale parameter and α is the shape parameter.
For a random sample, the harmonic mean is calculated as above. Both the mean and the variance may be infinite (if it includes at least one term of the form 1/0).
The mean of the sample m is asymptotically distributed normally with variance s.
The variance of the mean itself is
where m is the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals, x are the variates, n is the population size and E is the expectation operator.
Assuming that the variance is not infinite and that the central limit theorem applies to the sample then using the delta method, the variance is
where H is the harmonic mean, m is the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals
s is the variance of the reciprocals of the data
and n is the number of data points in the sample.
A jackknife method of estimating the variance is possible if the mean is known. This method is the usual 'delete 1' rather than the 'delete m' version.
This method first requires the computation of the mean of the sample (m)
where x are the sample values.
A series of value wi is then computed where
The mean (h) of the wi is then taken:
The variance of the mean is
Significance testing and confidence intervals for the mean can then be estimated with the t test.
Assume a random variate has a distribution f( x ). Assume also that the likelihood of a variate being chosen is proportional to its value. This is known as length based or size biased sampling.
Let μ be the mean of the population. Then the probability density function f*( x ) of the size biased population is
The expectation of this length biased distribution E( x ) is
where σ is the variance.
The expectation of the harmonic mean is the same as the non-length biased version E( x )
The problem of length biased sampling arises in a number of areas including textile manufacture pedigree analysis and survival analysis
Akman et al. have developed a test for the detection of length based bias in samples.
If X is a positive random variable and q > 0 then for all ε > 0
Assuming that X and E(X) are > 0 then
This follows from Jensen's inequality.
Gurland has shown that for a distribution that takes only positive values, for any n > 0
Under some conditions
where ~ means approximately equal to.
Assuming that the variates (x) are drawn from a lognormal distribution there are several possible estimators for H:
where
Of these H3 is probably the best estimator for samples of 25 or more.
A first order approximation to the bias and variance of H1 are
where Cv is the coefficient of variation.
Similarly a first order approximation to the bias and variance of H3 are
In numerical experiments H3 is generally a superior estimator of the harmonic mean than H1. H2 produces estimates that are largely similar to H1.
The Environmental Protection Agency recommends the use of the harmonic mean in setting maximum toxin levels in water.
In geophysical reservoir engineering studies, the harmonic mean is widely used. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In mathematics, the harmonic mean is one of several kinds of average, and in particular, one of the Pythagorean means. It is sometimes appropriate for situations when the average rate is desired.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The harmonic mean can be expressed as the reciprocal of the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals of the given set of observations. As a simple example, the harmonic mean of 1, 4, and 4 is",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The harmonic mean H of the positive real numbers x 1 , x 2 , … , x n {\\displaystyle x_{1},x_{2},\\ldots ,x_{n}} is defined to be",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "It is the reciprocal of the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals, and vice versa:",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "where the arithmetic mean is defined as A ( x 1 , x 2 , … , x n ) = 1 n ∑ i = 1 n x i . {\\textstyle A(x_{1},x_{2},\\ldots ,x_{n})={\\tfrac {1}{n}}\\sum _{i=1}^{n}x_{i}.}",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The harmonic mean is a Schur-concave function, and dominated by the minimum of its arguments, in the sense that for any positive set of arguments, min ( x 1 … x n ) ≤ H ( x 1 … x n ) ≤ n min ( x 1 … x n ) {\\displaystyle \\min(x_{1}\\ldots x_{n})\\leq H(x_{1}\\ldots x_{n})\\leq n\\min(x_{1}\\ldots x_{n})} . Thus, the harmonic mean cannot be made arbitrarily large by changing some values to bigger ones (while having at least one value unchanged).",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The harmonic mean is also concave, which is an even stronger property than Schur-concavity. One has to take care to only use positive numbers though, since the mean fails to be concave if negative values are used.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The harmonic mean is one of the three Pythagorean means. For all positive data sets containing at least one pair of nonequal values, the harmonic mean is always the least of the three means, while the arithmetic mean is always the greatest of the three and the geometric mean is always in between. (If all values in a nonempty dataset are equal, the three means are always equal to one another; e.g., the harmonic, geometric, and arithmetic means of {2, 2, 2} are all 2.)",
"title": "Relationship with other means"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "It is the special case M−1 of the power mean:",
"title": "Relationship with other means"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Since the harmonic mean of a list of numbers tends strongly toward the least elements of the list, it tends (compared to the arithmetic mean) to mitigate the impact of large outliers and aggravate the impact of small ones.",
"title": "Relationship with other means"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The arithmetic mean is often mistakenly used in places calling for the harmonic mean. In the speed example below for instance, the arithmetic mean of 40 is incorrect, and too big.",
"title": "Relationship with other means"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The harmonic mean is related to the other Pythagorean means, as seen in the equation below. This can be seen by interpreting the denominator to be the arithmetic mean of the product of numbers n times but each time omitting the j-th term. That is, for the first term, we multiply all n numbers except the first; for the second, we multiply all n numbers except the second; and so on. The numerator, excluding the n, which goes with the arithmetic mean, is the geometric mean to the power n. Thus the n-th harmonic mean is related to the n-th geometric and arithmetic means. The general formula is",
"title": "Relationship with other means"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "If a set of non-identical numbers is subjected to a mean-preserving spread — that is, two or more elements of the set are \"spread apart\" from each other while leaving the arithmetic mean unchanged — then the harmonic mean always decreases.",
"title": "Relationship with other means"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "For the special case of just two numbers, x 1 {\\displaystyle x_{1}} and x 2 {\\displaystyle x_{2}} , the harmonic mean can be written",
"title": "Harmonic mean of two or three numbers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In this special case, the harmonic mean is related to the arithmetic mean A = x 1 + x 2 2 {\\displaystyle A={\\frac {x_{1}+x_{2}}{2}}} and the geometric mean G = x 1 x 2 , {\\displaystyle G={\\sqrt {x_{1}x_{2}}},} by",
"title": "Harmonic mean of two or three numbers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Since G A ≤ 1 {\\displaystyle {\\tfrac {G}{A}}\\leq 1} by the inequality of arithmetic and geometric means, this shows for the n = 2 case that H ≤ G (a property that in fact holds for all n). It also follows that G = A H {\\displaystyle G={\\sqrt {AH}}} , meaning the two numbers' geometric mean equals the geometric mean of their arithmetic and harmonic means.",
"title": "Harmonic mean of two or three numbers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "For the special case of three numbers, x 1 {\\displaystyle x_{1}} , x 2 {\\displaystyle x_{2}} and x 3 {\\displaystyle x_{3}} , the harmonic mean can be written",
"title": "Harmonic mean of two or three numbers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Three positive numbers H, G, and A are respectively the harmonic, geometric, and arithmetic means of three positive numbers if and only if the following inequality holds",
"title": "Harmonic mean of two or three numbers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "If a set of weights w 1 {\\displaystyle w_{1}} , ..., w n {\\displaystyle w_{n}} is associated to the dataset x 1 {\\displaystyle x_{1}} , ..., x n {\\displaystyle x_{n}} , the weighted harmonic mean is defined by",
"title": "Weighted harmonic mean"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The unweighted harmonic mean can be regarded as the special case where all of the weights are equal.",
"title": "Weighted harmonic mean"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In many situations involving rates and ratios, the harmonic mean provides the correct average. For instance, if a vehicle travels a certain distance d outbound at a speed x (e.g. 60 km/h) and returns the same distance at a speed y (e.g. 20 km/h), then its average speed is the harmonic mean of x and y (30 km/h), not the arithmetic mean (40 km/h). The total travel time is the same as if it had traveled the whole distance at that average speed. This can be proven as follows:",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Average speed for the entire journey = Total distance traveled/Sum of time for each segment = 2d/d/x + d/y = 2/1/x+1/y",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "However, if the vehicle travels for a certain amount of time at a speed x and then the same amount of time at a speed y, then its average speed is the arithmetic mean of x and y, which in the above example is 40 km/h.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Average speed for the entire journey = Total distance traveled/Sum of time for each segment = xt+yt/2t = x+y/2",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The same principle applies to more than two segments: given a series of sub-trips at different speeds, if each sub-trip covers the same distance, then the average speed is the harmonic mean of all the sub-trip speeds; and if each sub-trip takes the same amount of time, then the average speed is the arithmetic mean of all the sub-trip speeds. (If neither is the case, then a weighted harmonic mean or weighted arithmetic mean is needed. For the arithmetic mean, the speed of each portion of the trip is weighted by the duration of that portion, while for the harmonic mean, the corresponding weight is the distance. In both cases, the resulting formula reduces to dividing the total distance by the total time.)",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "However, one may avoid the use of the harmonic mean for the case of \"weighting by distance\". Pose the problem as finding \"slowness\" of the trip where \"slowness\" (in hours per kilometre) is the inverse of speed. When trip slowness is found, invert it so as to find the \"true\" average trip speed. For each trip segment i, the slowness si = 1/speedi. Then take the weighted arithmetic mean of the si's weighted by their respective distances (optionally with the weights normalized so they sum to 1 by dividing them by trip length). This gives the true average slowness (in time per kilometre). It turns out that this procedure, which can be done with no knowledge of the harmonic mean, amounts to the same mathematical operations as one would use in solving this problem by using the harmonic mean. Thus it illustrates why the harmonic mean works in this case.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Similarly, if one wishes to estimate the density of an alloy given the densities of its constituent elements and their mass fractions (or, equivalently, percentages by mass), then the predicted density of the alloy (exclusive of typically minor volume changes due to atom packing effects) is the weighted harmonic mean of the individual densities, weighted by mass, rather than the weighted arithmetic mean as one might at first expect. To use the weighted arithmetic mean, the densities would have to be weighted by volume. Applying dimensional analysis to the problem while labeling the mass units by element and making sure that only like element-masses cancel makes this clear.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "If one connects two electrical resistors in parallel, one having resistance x (e.g., 60 Ω) and one having resistance y (e.g., 40 Ω), then the effect is the same as if one had used two resistors with the same resistance, both equal to the harmonic mean of x and y (48 Ω): the equivalent resistance, in either case, is 24 Ω (one-half of the harmonic mean). This same principle applies to capacitors in series or to inductors in parallel.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "However, if one connects the resistors in series, then the average resistance is the arithmetic mean of x and y (50 Ω), with total resistance equal to twice this, the sum of x and y (100 Ω). This principle applies to capacitors in parallel or to inductors in series.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "As with the previous example, the same principle applies when more than two resistors, capacitors or inductors are connected, provided that all are in parallel or all are in series.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The \"conductivity effective mass\" of a semiconductor is also defined as the harmonic mean of the effective masses along the three crystallographic directions.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "As for other optic equations, the thin lens equation 1/f = 1/u + 1/v can be rewritten such that the focal length f is one-half of the harmonic mean of the distances of the subject u and object v from the lens.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The weighted harmonic mean is the preferable method for averaging multiples, such as the price–earnings ratio (P/E). If these ratios are averaged using a weighted arithmetic mean, high data points are given greater weights than low data points. The weighted harmonic mean, on the other hand, correctly weights each data point. The simple weighted arithmetic mean when applied to non-price normalized ratios such as the P/E is biased upwards and cannot be numerically justified, since it is based on equalized earnings; just as vehicles speeds cannot be averaged for a roundtrip journey (see above).",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "For example, consider two firms, one with a market capitalization of $150 billion and earnings of $5 billion (P/E of 30) and one with a market capitalization of $1 billion and earnings of $1 million (P/E of 1000). Consider an index made of the two stocks, with 30% invested in the first and 70% invested in the second. We want to calculate the P/E ratio of this index.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Using the weighted arithmetic mean (incorrect):",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Using the weighted harmonic mean (correct):",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Thus, the correct P/E of 93.46 of this index can only be found using the weighted harmonic mean, while the weighted arithmetic mean will significantly overestimate it.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In any triangle, the radius of the incircle is one-third of the harmonic mean of the altitudes.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "For any point P on the minor arc BC of the circumcircle of an equilateral triangle ABC, with distances q and t from B and C respectively, and with the intersection of PA and BC being at a distance y from point P, we have that y is half the harmonic mean of q and t.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In a right triangle with legs a and b and altitude h from the hypotenuse to the right angle, h² is half the harmonic mean of a² and b².",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Let t and s (t > s) be the sides of the two inscribed squares in a right triangle with hypotenuse c. Then s² equals half the harmonic mean of c² and t².",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Let a trapezoid have vertices A, B, C, and D in sequence and have parallel sides AB and CD. Let E be the intersection of the diagonals, and let F be on side DA and G be on side BC such that FEG is parallel to AB and CD. Then FG is the harmonic mean of AB and DC. (This is provable using similar triangles.)",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "One application of this trapezoid result is in the crossed ladders problem, where two ladders lie oppositely across an alley, each with feet at the base of one sidewall, with one leaning against a wall at height A and the other leaning against the opposite wall at height B, as shown. The ladders cross at a height of h above the alley floor. Then h is half the harmonic mean of A and B. This result still holds if the walls are slanted but still parallel and the \"heights\" A, B, and h are measured as distances from the floor along lines parallel to the walls. This can be proved easily using the area formula of a trapezoid and area addition formula.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In an ellipse, the semi-latus rectum (the distance from a focus to the ellipse along a line parallel to the minor axis) is the harmonic mean of the maximum and minimum distances of the ellipse from a focus.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In computer science, specifically information retrieval and machine learning, the harmonic mean of the precision (true positives per predicted positive) and the recall (true positives per real positive) is often used as an aggregated performance score for the evaluation of algorithms and systems: the F-score (or F-measure). This is used in information retrieval because only the positive class is of relevance, while number of negatives, in general, is large and unknown. It is thus a trade-off as to whether the correct positive predictions should be measured in relation to the number of predicted positives or the number of real positives, so it is measured versus a putative number of positives that is an arithmetic mean of the two possible denominators.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "A consequence arises from basic algebra in problems where people or systems work together. As an example, if a gas-powered pump can drain a pool in 4 hours and a battery-powered pump can drain the same pool in 6 hours, then it will take both pumps 6·4/6 + 4, which is equal to 2.4 hours, to drain the pool together. This is one-half of the harmonic mean of 6 and 4: 2·6·4/6 + 4 = 4.8. That is, the appropriate average for the two types of pump is the harmonic mean, and with one pair of pumps (two pumps), it takes half this harmonic mean time, while with two pairs of pumps (four pumps) it would take a quarter of this harmonic mean time.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In hydrology, the harmonic mean is similarly used to average hydraulic conductivity values for a flow that is perpendicular to layers (e.g., geologic or soil) - flow parallel to layers uses the arithmetic mean. This apparent difference in averaging is explained by the fact that hydrology uses conductivity, which is the inverse of resistivity.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In sabermetrics, a baseball player's Power–speed number is the harmonic mean of their home run and stolen base totals.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In population genetics, the harmonic mean is used when calculating the effects of fluctuations in the census population size on the effective population size. The harmonic mean takes into account the fact that events such as population bottleneck increase the rate genetic drift and reduce the amount of genetic variation in the population. This is a result of the fact that following a bottleneck very few individuals contribute to the gene pool limiting the genetic variation present in the population for many generations to come.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "When considering fuel economy in automobiles two measures are commonly used – miles per gallon (mpg), and litres per 100 km. As the dimensions of these quantities are the inverse of each other (one is distance per volume, the other volume per distance) when taking the mean value of the fuel economy of a range of cars one measure will produce the harmonic mean of the other – i.e., converting the mean value of fuel economy expressed in litres per 100 km to miles per gallon will produce the harmonic mean of the fuel economy expressed in miles per gallon. For calculating the average fuel consumption of a fleet of vehicles from the individual fuel consumptions, the harmonic mean should be used if the fleet uses miles per gallon, whereas the arithmetic mean should be used if the fleet uses litres per 100 km. In the USA the CAFE standards (the federal automobile fuel consumption standards) make use of the harmonic mean.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In chemistry and nuclear physics the average mass per particle of a mixture consisting of different species (e.g., molecules or isotopes) is given by the harmonic mean of the individual species' masses weighted by their respective mass fraction.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The harmonic mean of a beta distribution with shape parameters α and β is:",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The harmonic mean with α < 1 is undefined because its defining expression is not bounded in [0, 1].",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Letting α = β",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "showing that for α = β the harmonic mean ranges from 0 for α = β = 1, to 1/2 for α = β → ∞.",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The following are the limits with one parameter finite (non-zero) and the other parameter approaching these limits:",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "With the geometric mean the harmonic mean may be useful in maximum likelihood estimation in the four parameter case.",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "A second harmonic mean (H1 − X) also exists for this distribution",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "This harmonic mean with β < 1 is undefined because its defining expression is not bounded in [ 0, 1 ].",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Letting α = β in the above expression",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "showing that for α = β the harmonic mean ranges from 0, for α = β = 1, to 1/2, for α = β → ∞.",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The following are the limits with one parameter finite (non zero) and the other approaching these limits:",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Although both harmonic means are asymmetric, when α = β the two means are equal.",
"title": "Beta distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The harmonic mean ( H ) of the lognormal distribution of a random variable X is",
"title": "Lognormal distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "where μ and σ are the parameters of the distribution, i.e. the mean and variance of the distribution of the natural logarithm of X.",
"title": "Lognormal distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The harmonic and arithmetic means of the distribution are related by",
"title": "Lognormal distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "where Cv and μ are the coefficient of variation and the mean of the distribution respectively..",
"title": "Lognormal distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The geometric (G), arithmetic and harmonic means of the distribution are related by",
"title": "Lognormal distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The harmonic mean of type 1 Pareto distribution is",
"title": "Pareto distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "where k is the scale parameter and α is the shape parameter.",
"title": "Pareto distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "For a random sample, the harmonic mean is calculated as above. Both the mean and the variance may be infinite (if it includes at least one term of the form 1/0).",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The mean of the sample m is asymptotically distributed normally with variance s.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The variance of the mean itself is",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "where m is the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals, x are the variates, n is the population size and E is the expectation operator.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Assuming that the variance is not infinite and that the central limit theorem applies to the sample then using the delta method, the variance is",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "where H is the harmonic mean, m is the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "s is the variance of the reciprocals of the data",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "and n is the number of data points in the sample.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "A jackknife method of estimating the variance is possible if the mean is known. This method is the usual 'delete 1' rather than the 'delete m' version.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "This method first requires the computation of the mean of the sample (m)",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "where x are the sample values.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "A series of value wi is then computed where",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The mean (h) of the wi is then taken:",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The variance of the mean is",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Significance testing and confidence intervals for the mean can then be estimated with the t test.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Assume a random variate has a distribution f( x ). Assume also that the likelihood of a variate being chosen is proportional to its value. This is known as length based or size biased sampling.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Let μ be the mean of the population. Then the probability density function f*( x ) of the size biased population is",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The expectation of this length biased distribution E( x ) is",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "where σ is the variance.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The expectation of the harmonic mean is the same as the non-length biased version E( x )",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The problem of length biased sampling arises in a number of areas including textile manufacture pedigree analysis and survival analysis",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Akman et al. have developed a test for the detection of length based bias in samples.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "If X is a positive random variable and q > 0 then for all ε > 0",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Assuming that X and E(X) are > 0 then",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "This follows from Jensen's inequality.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Gurland has shown that for a distribution that takes only positive values, for any n > 0",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Under some conditions",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "where ~ means approximately equal to.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Assuming that the variates (x) are drawn from a lognormal distribution there are several possible estimators for H:",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "where",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Of these H3 is probably the best estimator for samples of 25 or more.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "A first order approximation to the bias and variance of H1 are",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "where Cv is the coefficient of variation.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Similarly a first order approximation to the bias and variance of H3 are",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "In numerical experiments H3 is generally a superior estimator of the harmonic mean than H1. H2 produces estimates that are largely similar to H1.",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "The Environmental Protection Agency recommends the use of the harmonic mean in setting maximum toxin levels in water.",
"title": "Notes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "In geophysical reservoir engineering studies, the harmonic mean is widely used.",
"title": "Notes"
}
]
| In mathematics, the harmonic mean is one of several kinds of average, and in particular, one of the Pythagorean means. It is sometimes appropriate for situations when the average rate is desired. The harmonic mean can be expressed as the reciprocal of the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals of the given set of observations. As a simple example, the harmonic mean of 1, 4, and 4 is | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-10-07T01:53:27Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_mean |
14,465 | Hellbender | The hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis), also known as the hellbender salamander, is a species of aquatic giant salamander endemic to the eastern and central United States. It is the largest salamander in North America. A member of the family Cryptobranchidae, the hellbender is the only extant member of the genus Cryptobranchus. Other closely related salamanders in the same family are in the genus Andrias, which contains the Japanese and Chinese giant salamanders. The hellbender, which is much larger than all other salamanders in its geographic range, employs an unusual means of respiration (which involves cutaneous gas exchange through capillaries found in its lateral skin folds), and fills a particular niche—both as a predator and prey—in its ecosystem, which either it or its ancestors have occupied for around 65 million years. The species is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species due to the impacts of disease and widespread habitat loss and degradation throughout much of its range.
The origin of the name "hellbender" is unclear. The Missouri Department of Conservation says:
The name 'hellbender' probably comes from the animal's odd look. One theory claims the hellbender was named by settlers who thought "it was a creature from hell where it's bent on returning." Another rendition says the undulating skin of a hellbender reminded observers of "horrible tortures of the infernal regions." In reality, it's a harmless aquatic salamander.
In a study conducted in Indiana, informing the public about the rarity and locality of the hellbender resulted in more positive attitudes toward this species than were previously held. Other vernacular names include snot otter, lasagna lizard, devil dog, mud-devil, mud dog, water dog, grampus, Allegheny alligator, and leverian water newt.
The generic name, Cryptobranchus, is derived from the Ancient Greek kryptos (hidden) and branchion (gill). The subspecific name bishopi is in honor of American herpetologist Sherman C. Bishop.
C. alleganiensis has a flat body and head, with beady dorsal eyes and slimy skin. Like most salamanders, it has short legs with four toes on the front legs and five on its back limbs, and its tail is keeled for propulsion. Their tail is shaped like a rudder, but it is rarely used for swimming; these salamanders use pads on their toes instead to grip rocks and walk up and down streams instead of swimming. The hellbender has working lungs, but gill slits are often retained, although only immature specimens have true gills; the hellbender absorbs oxygen from the water through capillaries of its side frills. Only occasionally leaving the water, the hellbender makes little use of these lungs and the juveniles lose their external gills after around 18 months Hellbenders use their lungs for buoyancy more than breathing. It is blotchy brown or red-brown in color, with a paler underbelly.
Both males and females grow to an adult length of 24 to 40 cm (9.4 to 15.7 in) from snout to vent, with a total length of 30 to 74 cm (12 to 29 in), making them the fourth-largest aquatic salamander species in the world (after the South China giant salamander, the Chinese giant salamander and the Japanese giant salamander, respectively) and the largest amphibian in North America, although this length is rivaled by the reticulated siren of the southeastern United States (although the siren is much leaner in build). An adult weighs 1.5 to 2.5 kg (3.3 to 5.5 lb), making them the fifth heaviest living amphibian in the world after their South China, Chinese and Japanese cousins and the goliath frog, while the largest cane toads may also weigh as much as a hellbender. Hellbenders reach sexual maturity at about five years of age, and may live 30 years in captivity.
The hellbender has a few characteristics that make it distinguishable from other native salamanders, including a gigantic, dorsoventrally flattened body with thick folds travelling down the sides, a single open gill slit on each side, and hind feet with five toes each. Easily distinguished from most other endemic salamander species simply by their size, hellbenders average up to 60 cm or about 2 ft in length; the only species requiring further distinction (due to an overlap in distribution and size range) is the common mudpuppy (Necturus maculosus). This demarcation can be made by noting the presence of external gills in the mudpuppy, which are lacking in the hellbender, as well as the presence of four toes on each hind foot of the mudpuppy (in contrast with the hellbender's five). Furthermore, the average size of C. a. alleganiensis has been reported to be 45–60 cm (with some reported as reaching up to 74 cm or 30 in), while N. m. maculosus has a reported average size of 28 to 40 cm (11 to 16 in) in length, which means that hellbender adults will still generally be notably larger than even the biggest mudpuppies.
The genus Cryptobranchus has historically only been considered to contain one species, C. alleganiensis, with two subspecies, C. a. alleganiensis and C. a. bishopi. A recent decline in population size of the Ozark subspecies C. a. bishopi has led to further research into populations of this subspecies, including genetic analysis to determine the best method for conservation. Crowhurst et al., for instance, found that the "Ozark subspecies" denomination is insufficient for describing genetic (and therefore evolutionary) divergence within the genus Cryptobranchus in the Ozark region. They found three equally divergent genetic units within the genus: C. a. alleganiensis, and two distinct eastern and western populations of C. a. bishopi. These three groups were shown to be isolated, and are considered to most likely be "diverging on different evolutionary paths".
Hellbenders are present in a number of Eastern US states, from southern New York to northern Georgia, including parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, and extending into Oklahoma and Kansas. The subspecies (or species, depending on the source) C. a. bishopi is confined to the Ozarks of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, while C. a. alleganiensis is found in the rest of these states.
Some hellbender populations—namely a few in Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee—have historically been noted to be quite abundant, but several man-made threats have converged on the species such that it has seen a serious population decline throughout its range. In Missouri, it is estimated that the populations have declined by 77% since the 1980s. Hellbender populations were listed in 1981 as already extinct or endangered in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Maryland, decreasing in Arkansas and Kentucky, and generally threatened as a species throughout their range by various human activities and developments.
The hellbender salamander, considered a "habitat specialist", has adapted to fill a specific niche within a very specific environment, and is labeled as such "because its success is dependent on a constancy of dissolved oxygen, temperature and flow found in swift water areas", which in turn limits it to a narrow spectrum of stream/river choices. As a result of this specialization, hellbenders are generally found in areas with large, irregularly shaped, and intermittent rocks and swiftly moving water, while they tend to avoid wider, slow-moving waters with muddy banks and/or slab rock bottoms. This specialization likely contributed to the decline in their populations, as collectors could easily identify their specific habitats. One collector noted, at one time, "one could find a specimen under almost every suitable rock", but after years of collecting, the population had declined significantly. The same collector noted, he "never found two specimens under the same rock", corroborating the account given by other researchers that hellbenders are generally solitary; they are thought to gather only during the mating season. On average, their home range is estimated to be 198 square meters as of 2005.
Both subspecies, C. a. alleganiensis and C. a. bishopi undergo a metamorphosis after around a year and a half of life. At this point, when they are roughly 13.5 cm (5.3 in) long, they lose the gills present during their larval stage. Until then, they are easily confused with mudpuppies, and can be differentiated often only through toe number. After this metamorphosis, hellbenders must be able to absorb oxygen through the folds in their skin, which is largely behind the need for fast-moving, oxygenated water. If a hellbender ends up in an area of slow-moving water, not enough of it will pass over its skin in a given time, making it difficult to garner enough oxygen to support necessary respiratory functions. A below-favorable oxygen content can make life equally difficult.
Hellbenders are preyed upon by diverse predators, including various fish and reptiles (including both snakes and turtles). Cannibalism of eggs is also considered a common occurrence.
Once a hellbender finds a favorable location, it generally does not stray too far from it—except occasionally for breeding and hunting—and will protect it from other hellbenders both in and out of the breeding season. While the range of two hellbenders may overlap, they are noted as rarely being present in the overlapping area when the other salamander is in the area. The species is at least somewhat nocturnal, with peak activity being reported by one source as occurring around "two hours after dark" and again at dawn (although the dawn peak was recorded in the lab and could be misleading as a result). Nocturnal activity has been found to be most prevalent in early summer, perhaps coinciding with highest water depths.
C. alleganiensis feeds primarily on crayfish and small fish, but also insects, worms, molluscs, tadpoles and smaller salamanders. A study conducted in 2017 found that larval hellbenders eat mayfly and caddisfly nymphs. One report, written by a commercial collector in the 1940s, noted a trend of more crayfish predation in the summer during times of higher prey activity, whereas fish made up a larger part of the winter diet, when crayfish are less active. There seems to be a specific temperature range in which hellbenders feed, as well: between 45 and 80 °F (7 and 27 °C). Cannibalism—mainly on eggs—has been known to occur within hellbender populations. One researcher claimed perhaps density is maintained, and density dependence in turn created, in part by intraspecific predation.
The hellbenders' breeding season begins in late August or early- to mid-September and can continue as late as the end of November, depending on region. They exhibit no sexual dimorphism, except during the fall mating season, when males have a bulging ring around their cloacal glands. Unlike most salamanders, the hellbender performs external fertilization. Before mating, each male excavates a brood site, a saucer-shaped depression under a rock or log, with its entrance positioned out of the direct current, usually pointing downstream. The male remains in the brood site awaiting a female. When a female approaches, the male guides or drives her into his burrow and prevents her from leaving until she oviposits.
Female hellbenders lay 150–200 eggs over a two- to three-day period; the eggs are 18–20 mm (0.71–0.79 in) in diameter, connected by five to ten cords. As the female lays eggs, the male positions himself alongside or slightly above them, spraying the eggs with sperm while swaying his tail and moving his hind limbs, which disperses the sperm uniformly. The male often tempts other females to lay eggs in his nest, and as many as 1,946 eggs have been counted in a single nest. Males also exhibit mate and shelter guarding. Studies have found that until the female successfully reproduces, the male hellbender will guard her in his territory until the reproduction is complete. Cannibalism, however, leads to a much lower number of eggs in hellbender nests than would be predicted by egg counts.
After oviposition, the male drives the female away from the nest and guards the eggs. Incubating males rock back and forth and undulate their lateral skin folds, which circulates the water, increasing oxygen supply to both eggs and adult. Incubation lasts from 45 to 75 days, depending on region.
Hatchling hellbenders are 25–33 mm (0.98–1.30 in) long, have a yolk sac as a source of energy for the first few months of life, and lack functional limbs.
Hellbenders are superbly adapted to the shallow, fast-flowing, rocky streams in which they live. Their flattened shape offers little resistance to the flowing water, allowing them to work their way upstream and also to crawl into narrow spaces under rocks. The wrinkles and folds along their skin are used to expand surface area for cutaneous respiration. Their skin also has a secretion that is important for innate immunity against chytrid activity. Although their eyesight is relatively poor, they have light-sensitive cells all over their bodies. Those on their tails are especially finely tuned and may help them position safely under rocks without their tails poking out to give themselves away. They have a good sense of smell and move upstream in search of food such as dead fish, following the trail of scent molecules. Smell is possibly their most important sense when hunting. They also have a lateral line similar to those of fish, with which they can detect vibrations in the water.
Research throughout the range of the hellbender has shown a dramatic decline in populations in the majority of locations. As of 2022, the species is classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN. Many different anthropogenic sources have contributed to this decline, including the siltation and sedimentation, blocking of dispersal/migration routes, and destruction of riverine habitats created by dams and other development, as well as pollution, disease and overharvesting for commercial and scientific purposes. As many of these detrimental effects have irreversibly damaged hellbender populations, it is important to conserve the remaining populations through protecting habitats and—perhaps in places where the species was once endemic and has been extirpated—by augmenting numbers through reintroduction.
Due to sharp decreases seen in the Ozark subspecies, researchers have been trying to differentiate C. a. alleganiensis and C. a. bishopi into two management units. Indeed, researchers found significant genetic divergence between the two groups, as well as between them and another isolated population of C. a. alleganiensis. This could be reason enough to ensure work is done on both subspecies, as preserving extant genetic diversity is of crucial ecological importance.
The Ozark hellbender has been listed as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act by the US Fish and Wildlife Service since October 5, 2011. This hellbender subspecies inhabits the White River and Spring River systems in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, and its population has declined an estimated 75% since the 1980s, with only about 590 individuals remaining in the wild. Degraded water quality, habitat loss resulting from impoundments, ore and gravel mining, sedimentation, and collection for the pet trade are thought to be the main factors resulting in the amphibian's decline. When chytridiomycosis killed 75% of the St. Louis Zoo's captive hellbender population between March 2006 and April 2007, tests began to be conducted on wild populations. The disease has been detected in all Missouri populations of the Ozark hellbender. NatureServe treats C. a. alleganiensis as an Imperiled Subspecies, C. a. bishopi as a Critically Imperiled Subspecies, and the species as a whole as Vulnerable.
The Ozark hellbender was successfully bred in captivity for the first time at the St. Louis Zoo, in a joint project with the Missouri Department of Conservation, hatching on November 15, 2011.
Apart from the Ozark efforts, head-starting programs, in which eggs are collected from the wild and raised in captivity for re-release at a less vulnerable stage, have been initiated in Indiana, New York, and Ohio.
Members of the Pennsylvania State Senate have voted to approve the eastern hellbender as the official state amphibian in an effort to raise awareness about its endangered status. The legislation has been mired in controversy due to a dispute by House members who argue that Wehrle's salamander should be given the honor. The legislation did not pass in 2018, but was reintroduced in 2019. On April 23, 2019, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf signed legislation making the eastern hellbender Pennsylvania's official state amphibian. Youth members of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Pennsylvania Student Leadership Council were heavily involved writing and advocating on behalf of this legislation. They hope that the success of the hellbender bill in the Pennsylvania Senate will contribute to clean water efforts and raise awareness for the hellbender's struggling population.
The hellbender faces an array of challenges that jeopardize its habitat and overall well-being. These challenges include habitat degradation, habitat modifications, pollution, and the looming threat of emerging diseases. The conservation of this species is of paramount importance to ensure its continued existence in the wild.
The hellbender faces a significant threat due to habitat degradation, primarily caused by activities like dam construction, which disrupts water flow and submerges vital riffle habitats. Logging, mining, and road construction contribute to sedimentation, covering essential nesting and shelter sites. Chemical pollutants and misconceptions about the species have led to declines. Over-collection for sale and deliberate eradication efforts have also been detrimental.
The salamander's habitat is further jeopardized by habitat modifications stemming from industrialization and urbanization, including increased stream channelization and pollution from agricultural runoff, mining, and thermal pollution. Diseases, like Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and Ranavirus infections, have been detected in hellbender populations, contributing to population declines.
An emerging disease threat is the salamander chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, or "Bsal"), which has caused severe declines in other salamander species. Although not confirmed in the Americas, Bsal's potential introduction poses a substantial risk. If introduced, the impacts on hellbender populations could be swift and severe, necessitating immediate mitigation measures.
Karel Čapek War with the Newts (Válka s Mloky in the original Czech), also translated as Salamander Wars, is a 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Čapek | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis), also known as the hellbender salamander, is a species of aquatic giant salamander endemic to the eastern and central United States. It is the largest salamander in North America. A member of the family Cryptobranchidae, the hellbender is the only extant member of the genus Cryptobranchus. Other closely related salamanders in the same family are in the genus Andrias, which contains the Japanese and Chinese giant salamanders. The hellbender, which is much larger than all other salamanders in its geographic range, employs an unusual means of respiration (which involves cutaneous gas exchange through capillaries found in its lateral skin folds), and fills a particular niche—both as a predator and prey—in its ecosystem, which either it or its ancestors have occupied for around 65 million years. The species is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species due to the impacts of disease and widespread habitat loss and degradation throughout much of its range.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The origin of the name \"hellbender\" is unclear. The Missouri Department of Conservation says:",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The name 'hellbender' probably comes from the animal's odd look. One theory claims the hellbender was named by settlers who thought \"it was a creature from hell where it's bent on returning.\" Another rendition says the undulating skin of a hellbender reminded observers of \"horrible tortures of the infernal regions.\" In reality, it's a harmless aquatic salamander.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In a study conducted in Indiana, informing the public about the rarity and locality of the hellbender resulted in more positive attitudes toward this species than were previously held. Other vernacular names include snot otter, lasagna lizard, devil dog, mud-devil, mud dog, water dog, grampus, Allegheny alligator, and leverian water newt.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The generic name, Cryptobranchus, is derived from the Ancient Greek kryptos (hidden) and branchion (gill). The subspecific name bishopi is in honor of American herpetologist Sherman C. Bishop.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "C. alleganiensis has a flat body and head, with beady dorsal eyes and slimy skin. Like most salamanders, it has short legs with four toes on the front legs and five on its back limbs, and its tail is keeled for propulsion. Their tail is shaped like a rudder, but it is rarely used for swimming; these salamanders use pads on their toes instead to grip rocks and walk up and down streams instead of swimming. The hellbender has working lungs, but gill slits are often retained, although only immature specimens have true gills; the hellbender absorbs oxygen from the water through capillaries of its side frills. Only occasionally leaving the water, the hellbender makes little use of these lungs and the juveniles lose their external gills after around 18 months Hellbenders use their lungs for buoyancy more than breathing. It is blotchy brown or red-brown in color, with a paler underbelly.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Both males and females grow to an adult length of 24 to 40 cm (9.4 to 15.7 in) from snout to vent, with a total length of 30 to 74 cm (12 to 29 in), making them the fourth-largest aquatic salamander species in the world (after the South China giant salamander, the Chinese giant salamander and the Japanese giant salamander, respectively) and the largest amphibian in North America, although this length is rivaled by the reticulated siren of the southeastern United States (although the siren is much leaner in build). An adult weighs 1.5 to 2.5 kg (3.3 to 5.5 lb), making them the fifth heaviest living amphibian in the world after their South China, Chinese and Japanese cousins and the goliath frog, while the largest cane toads may also weigh as much as a hellbender. Hellbenders reach sexual maturity at about five years of age, and may live 30 years in captivity.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The hellbender has a few characteristics that make it distinguishable from other native salamanders, including a gigantic, dorsoventrally flattened body with thick folds travelling down the sides, a single open gill slit on each side, and hind feet with five toes each. Easily distinguished from most other endemic salamander species simply by their size, hellbenders average up to 60 cm or about 2 ft in length; the only species requiring further distinction (due to an overlap in distribution and size range) is the common mudpuppy (Necturus maculosus). This demarcation can be made by noting the presence of external gills in the mudpuppy, which are lacking in the hellbender, as well as the presence of four toes on each hind foot of the mudpuppy (in contrast with the hellbender's five). Furthermore, the average size of C. a. alleganiensis has been reported to be 45–60 cm (with some reported as reaching up to 74 cm or 30 in), while N. m. maculosus has a reported average size of 28 to 40 cm (11 to 16 in) in length, which means that hellbender adults will still generally be notably larger than even the biggest mudpuppies.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The genus Cryptobranchus has historically only been considered to contain one species, C. alleganiensis, with two subspecies, C. a. alleganiensis and C. a. bishopi. A recent decline in population size of the Ozark subspecies C. a. bishopi has led to further research into populations of this subspecies, including genetic analysis to determine the best method for conservation. Crowhurst et al., for instance, found that the \"Ozark subspecies\" denomination is insufficient for describing genetic (and therefore evolutionary) divergence within the genus Cryptobranchus in the Ozark region. They found three equally divergent genetic units within the genus: C. a. alleganiensis, and two distinct eastern and western populations of C. a. bishopi. These three groups were shown to be isolated, and are considered to most likely be \"diverging on different evolutionary paths\".",
"title": "Taxonomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Hellbenders are present in a number of Eastern US states, from southern New York to northern Georgia, including parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, and extending into Oklahoma and Kansas. The subspecies (or species, depending on the source) C. a. bishopi is confined to the Ozarks of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, while C. a. alleganiensis is found in the rest of these states.",
"title": "Distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Some hellbender populations—namely a few in Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee—have historically been noted to be quite abundant, but several man-made threats have converged on the species such that it has seen a serious population decline throughout its range. In Missouri, it is estimated that the populations have declined by 77% since the 1980s. Hellbender populations were listed in 1981 as already extinct or endangered in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Maryland, decreasing in Arkansas and Kentucky, and generally threatened as a species throughout their range by various human activities and developments.",
"title": "Distribution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The hellbender salamander, considered a \"habitat specialist\", has adapted to fill a specific niche within a very specific environment, and is labeled as such \"because its success is dependent on a constancy of dissolved oxygen, temperature and flow found in swift water areas\", which in turn limits it to a narrow spectrum of stream/river choices. As a result of this specialization, hellbenders are generally found in areas with large, irregularly shaped, and intermittent rocks and swiftly moving water, while they tend to avoid wider, slow-moving waters with muddy banks and/or slab rock bottoms. This specialization likely contributed to the decline in their populations, as collectors could easily identify their specific habitats. One collector noted, at one time, \"one could find a specimen under almost every suitable rock\", but after years of collecting, the population had declined significantly. The same collector noted, he \"never found two specimens under the same rock\", corroborating the account given by other researchers that hellbenders are generally solitary; they are thought to gather only during the mating season. On average, their home range is estimated to be 198 square meters as of 2005.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Both subspecies, C. a. alleganiensis and C. a. bishopi undergo a metamorphosis after around a year and a half of life. At this point, when they are roughly 13.5 cm (5.3 in) long, they lose the gills present during their larval stage. Until then, they are easily confused with mudpuppies, and can be differentiated often only through toe number. After this metamorphosis, hellbenders must be able to absorb oxygen through the folds in their skin, which is largely behind the need for fast-moving, oxygenated water. If a hellbender ends up in an area of slow-moving water, not enough of it will pass over its skin in a given time, making it difficult to garner enough oxygen to support necessary respiratory functions. A below-favorable oxygen content can make life equally difficult.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Hellbenders are preyed upon by diverse predators, including various fish and reptiles (including both snakes and turtles). Cannibalism of eggs is also considered a common occurrence.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Once a hellbender finds a favorable location, it generally does not stray too far from it—except occasionally for breeding and hunting—and will protect it from other hellbenders both in and out of the breeding season. While the range of two hellbenders may overlap, they are noted as rarely being present in the overlapping area when the other salamander is in the area. The species is at least somewhat nocturnal, with peak activity being reported by one source as occurring around \"two hours after dark\" and again at dawn (although the dawn peak was recorded in the lab and could be misleading as a result). Nocturnal activity has been found to be most prevalent in early summer, perhaps coinciding with highest water depths.",
"title": "Life history and behavior"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "C. alleganiensis feeds primarily on crayfish and small fish, but also insects, worms, molluscs, tadpoles and smaller salamanders. A study conducted in 2017 found that larval hellbenders eat mayfly and caddisfly nymphs. One report, written by a commercial collector in the 1940s, noted a trend of more crayfish predation in the summer during times of higher prey activity, whereas fish made up a larger part of the winter diet, when crayfish are less active. There seems to be a specific temperature range in which hellbenders feed, as well: between 45 and 80 °F (7 and 27 °C). Cannibalism—mainly on eggs—has been known to occur within hellbender populations. One researcher claimed perhaps density is maintained, and density dependence in turn created, in part by intraspecific predation.",
"title": "Life history and behavior"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The hellbenders' breeding season begins in late August or early- to mid-September and can continue as late as the end of November, depending on region. They exhibit no sexual dimorphism, except during the fall mating season, when males have a bulging ring around their cloacal glands. Unlike most salamanders, the hellbender performs external fertilization. Before mating, each male excavates a brood site, a saucer-shaped depression under a rock or log, with its entrance positioned out of the direct current, usually pointing downstream. The male remains in the brood site awaiting a female. When a female approaches, the male guides or drives her into his burrow and prevents her from leaving until she oviposits.",
"title": "Life history and behavior"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Female hellbenders lay 150–200 eggs over a two- to three-day period; the eggs are 18–20 mm (0.71–0.79 in) in diameter, connected by five to ten cords. As the female lays eggs, the male positions himself alongside or slightly above them, spraying the eggs with sperm while swaying his tail and moving his hind limbs, which disperses the sperm uniformly. The male often tempts other females to lay eggs in his nest, and as many as 1,946 eggs have been counted in a single nest. Males also exhibit mate and shelter guarding. Studies have found that until the female successfully reproduces, the male hellbender will guard her in his territory until the reproduction is complete. Cannibalism, however, leads to a much lower number of eggs in hellbender nests than would be predicted by egg counts.",
"title": "Life history and behavior"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After oviposition, the male drives the female away from the nest and guards the eggs. Incubating males rock back and forth and undulate their lateral skin folds, which circulates the water, increasing oxygen supply to both eggs and adult. Incubation lasts from 45 to 75 days, depending on region.",
"title": "Life history and behavior"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Hatchling hellbenders are 25–33 mm (0.98–1.30 in) long, have a yolk sac as a source of energy for the first few months of life, and lack functional limbs.",
"title": "Life history and behavior"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Hellbenders are superbly adapted to the shallow, fast-flowing, rocky streams in which they live. Their flattened shape offers little resistance to the flowing water, allowing them to work their way upstream and also to crawl into narrow spaces under rocks. The wrinkles and folds along their skin are used to expand surface area for cutaneous respiration. Their skin also has a secretion that is important for innate immunity against chytrid activity. Although their eyesight is relatively poor, they have light-sensitive cells all over their bodies. Those on their tails are especially finely tuned and may help them position safely under rocks without their tails poking out to give themselves away. They have a good sense of smell and move upstream in search of food such as dead fish, following the trail of scent molecules. Smell is possibly their most important sense when hunting. They also have a lateral line similar to those of fish, with which they can detect vibrations in the water.",
"title": "Adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Research throughout the range of the hellbender has shown a dramatic decline in populations in the majority of locations. As of 2022, the species is classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN. Many different anthropogenic sources have contributed to this decline, including the siltation and sedimentation, blocking of dispersal/migration routes, and destruction of riverine habitats created by dams and other development, as well as pollution, disease and overharvesting for commercial and scientific purposes. As many of these detrimental effects have irreversibly damaged hellbender populations, it is important to conserve the remaining populations through protecting habitats and—perhaps in places where the species was once endemic and has been extirpated—by augmenting numbers through reintroduction.",
"title": "Conservation status"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Due to sharp decreases seen in the Ozark subspecies, researchers have been trying to differentiate C. a. alleganiensis and C. a. bishopi into two management units. Indeed, researchers found significant genetic divergence between the two groups, as well as between them and another isolated population of C. a. alleganiensis. This could be reason enough to ensure work is done on both subspecies, as preserving extant genetic diversity is of crucial ecological importance.",
"title": "Conservation status"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Ozark hellbender has been listed as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act by the US Fish and Wildlife Service since October 5, 2011. This hellbender subspecies inhabits the White River and Spring River systems in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, and its population has declined an estimated 75% since the 1980s, with only about 590 individuals remaining in the wild. Degraded water quality, habitat loss resulting from impoundments, ore and gravel mining, sedimentation, and collection for the pet trade are thought to be the main factors resulting in the amphibian's decline. When chytridiomycosis killed 75% of the St. Louis Zoo's captive hellbender population between March 2006 and April 2007, tests began to be conducted on wild populations. The disease has been detected in all Missouri populations of the Ozark hellbender. NatureServe treats C. a. alleganiensis as an Imperiled Subspecies, C. a. bishopi as a Critically Imperiled Subspecies, and the species as a whole as Vulnerable.",
"title": "Conservation status"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Ozark hellbender was successfully bred in captivity for the first time at the St. Louis Zoo, in a joint project with the Missouri Department of Conservation, hatching on November 15, 2011.",
"title": "Conservation status"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Apart from the Ozark efforts, head-starting programs, in which eggs are collected from the wild and raised in captivity for re-release at a less vulnerable stage, have been initiated in Indiana, New York, and Ohio.",
"title": "Conservation status"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Members of the Pennsylvania State Senate have voted to approve the eastern hellbender as the official state amphibian in an effort to raise awareness about its endangered status. The legislation has been mired in controversy due to a dispute by House members who argue that Wehrle's salamander should be given the honor. The legislation did not pass in 2018, but was reintroduced in 2019. On April 23, 2019, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf signed legislation making the eastern hellbender Pennsylvania's official state amphibian. Youth members of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Pennsylvania Student Leadership Council were heavily involved writing and advocating on behalf of this legislation. They hope that the success of the hellbender bill in the Pennsylvania Senate will contribute to clean water efforts and raise awareness for the hellbender's struggling population.",
"title": "Conservation status"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The hellbender faces an array of challenges that jeopardize its habitat and overall well-being. These challenges include habitat degradation, habitat modifications, pollution, and the looming threat of emerging diseases. The conservation of this species is of paramount importance to ensure its continued existence in the wild.",
"title": "Threats"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The hellbender faces a significant threat due to habitat degradation, primarily caused by activities like dam construction, which disrupts water flow and submerges vital riffle habitats. Logging, mining, and road construction contribute to sedimentation, covering essential nesting and shelter sites. Chemical pollutants and misconceptions about the species have led to declines. Over-collection for sale and deliberate eradication efforts have also been detrimental.",
"title": "Threats"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The salamander's habitat is further jeopardized by habitat modifications stemming from industrialization and urbanization, including increased stream channelization and pollution from agricultural runoff, mining, and thermal pollution. Diseases, like Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) and Ranavirus infections, have been detected in hellbender populations, contributing to population declines.",
"title": "Threats"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "An emerging disease threat is the salamander chytrid fungus (Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, or \"Bsal\"), which has caused severe declines in other salamander species. Although not confirmed in the Americas, Bsal's potential introduction poses a substantial risk. If introduced, the impacts on hellbender populations could be swift and severe, necessitating immediate mitigation measures.",
"title": "Threats"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Karel Čapek War with the Newts (Válka s Mloky in the original Czech), also translated as Salamander Wars, is a 1936 satirical science fiction novel by Czech author Karel Čapek",
"title": "Further reading"
}
]
| The hellbender, also known as the hellbender salamander, is a species of aquatic giant salamander endemic to the eastern and central United States. It is the largest salamander in North America. A member of the family Cryptobranchidae, the hellbender is the only extant member of the genus Cryptobranchus. Other closely related salamanders in the same family are in the genus Andrias, which contains the Japanese and Chinese giant salamanders. The hellbender, which is much larger than all other salamanders in its geographic range, employs an unusual means of respiration, and fills a particular niche—both as a predator and prey—in its ecosystem, which either it or its ancestors have occupied for around 65 million years. The species is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species due to the impacts of disease and widespread habitat loss and degradation throughout much of its range. | 2002-01-24T01:53:23Z | 2023-11-24T19:03:58Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellbender |
14,466 | Doc Edgerton | Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990), also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device. He also was deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography, and his equipment was used in collaboration with Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness Monster.
Edgerton was born in Fremont, Nebraska, on April 6, 1903, the son of Mary Nettie Coe and Frank Eugene Edgerton, a descendant of Samuel Edgerton, the son of Richard Edgerton, one of the founders of Norwich, Connecticut, and Alice Ripley, a great-granddaughter of Governor William Bradford (1590–1657) of the Plymouth Colony and a passenger on the Mayflower. His father was a lawyer, journalist, author and orator and served as the assistant attorney general of Nebraska from 1911 to 1915. Edgerton grew up in Aurora, Nebraska. He also spent some of his childhood years in Washington, DC, and Lincoln, Nebraska.
In 1925 Edgerton received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he became a member of Acacia fraternity. He earned an SM in electrical engineering from MIT in 1927. Edgerton used stroboscopes to study synchronous motors for his ScD thesis in electrical engineering at MIT, awarded in 1931. He credited Charles Stark Draper with inspiring him to photograph everyday objects using electronic flash; the first was a stream of water from a faucet.
In 1936 Edgerton visited hummingbird expert May Rogers Webster. He was able to illustrate with her help that it was possible to take photographs of the birds beating their wings 60 times a second using an exposure of one hundred thousandth of a second. A picture of her with the birds flying around her appeared in National Geographic.
In 1937 Edgerton began a lifelong association with photographer Gjon Mili, who used stroboscopic equipment, in particular, multiple studio electronic flash units, to produce strikingly beautiful photographs, many of which appeared in Life Magazine. When taking multiflash photographs this strobe light equipment could flash up to 120 times a second. Edgerton was a pioneer in using short duration electronic flash in photographing fast events photography, subsequently using the technique to capture images of balloons at different stages of their bursting, a bullet during its impact with an apple, or using multiflash to track the motion of a devil stick, for example.
He was awarded a bronze medal by the Royal Photographic Society in 1934, the Howard N. Potts Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1941, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1966, the David Richardson Medal by the Optical Society of America in 1968, the Albert A. Michelson Medal from the same Franklin Institute in 1969, and the National Medal of Science in 1973.
Edgerton partnered with Kenneth J. Germeshausen to do consulting for industrial clients. Later Herbert Grier joined them. The company name "Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier" was changed to EG&G in 1947. EG&G became a prime contractor for the Atomic Energy Commission and had a major role in photographing and recording nuclear tests for the US through the fifties and sixties. For this role Edgerton and Charles Wykoff and others at EG&G developed and manufactured the Rapatronic camera.
His work was instrumental in the development of side-scan sonar technology, used to scan the sea floor for wrecks. Edgerton worked with undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, by first providing him with custom-designed underwater photographic equipment featuring electronic flash, and then by developing sonar techniques used to discover the Britannic. Edgerton participated in the discovery of the American Civil War battleship USS Monitor. While working with Cousteau, he acquired the nickname in photographic circles: "Papa Flash". In 1988 Doc Edgerton worked with Paul Kronfield in Greece on a sonar search for the lost city of Helike, believed to be the basis for the legend of Atlantis.
Edgerton co-founded EG&G, Inc., which manufactured advanced electronic equipment including side-scan sonars and sub-bottom profiling equipment. EG&G also invented and manufactured the Krytron, the detonation trigger for the hydrogen bomb, and an EG&G division supervised many of America's nuclear tests.
In addition to having the scientific and engineering acumen to perfect strobe lighting commercially, Edgerton is equally recognized for his visual aesthetic: many of the striking images he created in illuminating phenomena that occurred too fast for the naked eye now adorn art museums worldwide. In 1940, his high speed stroboscopic short film Quicker'n a Wink won an Oscar.
Edgerton was appointed a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1934. In 1956, Edgerton was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He became a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1964 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1972. He was especially loved by MIT students for his willingness to teach and his kindness: "The trick to education", he said, "is to teach people in such a way that they don't realize they're learning until it's too late". His last undergraduate class, taught during fall semester 1977, was a freshman seminar titled "Bird and Insect Photography". One of the graduate student dormitories at MIT carries his name.
In 1962, Edgerton appeared on I've Got a Secret, where he demonstrated strobe flash photography by shooting a bullet into a playing card and photographing the result.
Edgerton's work was featured in an October 1987 National Geographic Magazine article entitled "Doc Edgerton: the man who made time stand still".
After graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Edgerton married Esther May Garrett in 1928. She was born in Aurora, Nebraska, on September 8, 1903, and died on March 9, 2002, in Charleston, South Carolina. She received a bachelor's degree in mathematics, music and education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A skilled pianist and singer, she attended the New England Conservatory of Music and taught in public schools in Aurora, Nebraska and Boston. During their marriage they had three children: Mary Louise (April 21, 1931), William Eugene (8/9/1933), Robert Frank (5/10/1935). His sister, Mary Ellen Edgerton, was the wife of L. Welch Pogue (1899–2003) a pioneering aviation attorney and Chairman of the old Civil Aeronautics Board. The technology writer, journalist, and commentator David Pogue is his great nephew.
Edgerton remained active throughout his later years, and was seen on the MIT campus many times after his official retirement. He died suddenly on January 4, 1990, at the MIT Faculty Club at the age of 86, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
On July 3, 1990, in an effort to memorialize Edgerton's accomplishments, several community members in Aurora, Nebraska, decided to construct a "Hands-On" science center. It was designated as a "teaching museum," that would preserve Doc's work and artifacts, as well as feature the "Explorit Zone" where people of all ages could participate in hands-on exhibits and interact with live science demonstrations. After five years of private and community-wide fund-raising, as well as individual investments by Doc's surviving family members, the Edgerton Explorit Center was officially dedicated on September 9, 1995, in Aurora.
At MIT, the Edgerton Center, founded in 1992, is a hands-on laboratory resource for undergraduate and graduate students, and also conducts educational outreach programs for high school students and teachers.
Some of Edgerton's noted photographs are :
Edgerton's work is held in the following public collection: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Harold Eugene \"Doc\" Edgerton (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990), also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device. He also was deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography, and his equipment was used in collaboration with Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness Monster.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Edgerton was born in Fremont, Nebraska, on April 6, 1903, the son of Mary Nettie Coe and Frank Eugene Edgerton, a descendant of Samuel Edgerton, the son of Richard Edgerton, one of the founders of Norwich, Connecticut, and Alice Ripley, a great-granddaughter of Governor William Bradford (1590–1657) of the Plymouth Colony and a passenger on the Mayflower. His father was a lawyer, journalist, author and orator and served as the assistant attorney general of Nebraska from 1911 to 1915. Edgerton grew up in Aurora, Nebraska. He also spent some of his childhood years in Washington, DC, and Lincoln, Nebraska.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1925 Edgerton received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he became a member of Acacia fraternity. He earned an SM in electrical engineering from MIT in 1927. Edgerton used stroboscopes to study synchronous motors for his ScD thesis in electrical engineering at MIT, awarded in 1931. He credited Charles Stark Draper with inspiring him to photograph everyday objects using electronic flash; the first was a stream of water from a faucet.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1936 Edgerton visited hummingbird expert May Rogers Webster. He was able to illustrate with her help that it was possible to take photographs of the birds beating their wings 60 times a second using an exposure of one hundred thousandth of a second. A picture of her with the birds flying around her appeared in National Geographic.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1937 Edgerton began a lifelong association with photographer Gjon Mili, who used stroboscopic equipment, in particular, multiple studio electronic flash units, to produce strikingly beautiful photographs, many of which appeared in Life Magazine. When taking multiflash photographs this strobe light equipment could flash up to 120 times a second. Edgerton was a pioneer in using short duration electronic flash in photographing fast events photography, subsequently using the technique to capture images of balloons at different stages of their bursting, a bullet during its impact with an apple, or using multiflash to track the motion of a devil stick, for example.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "He was awarded a bronze medal by the Royal Photographic Society in 1934, the Howard N. Potts Medal from the Franklin Institute in 1941, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1966, the David Richardson Medal by the Optical Society of America in 1968, the Albert A. Michelson Medal from the same Franklin Institute in 1969, and the National Medal of Science in 1973.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Edgerton partnered with Kenneth J. Germeshausen to do consulting for industrial clients. Later Herbert Grier joined them. The company name \"Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier\" was changed to EG&G in 1947. EG&G became a prime contractor for the Atomic Energy Commission and had a major role in photographing and recording nuclear tests for the US through the fifties and sixties. For this role Edgerton and Charles Wykoff and others at EG&G developed and manufactured the Rapatronic camera.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "His work was instrumental in the development of side-scan sonar technology, used to scan the sea floor for wrecks. Edgerton worked with undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, by first providing him with custom-designed underwater photographic equipment featuring electronic flash, and then by developing sonar techniques used to discover the Britannic. Edgerton participated in the discovery of the American Civil War battleship USS Monitor. While working with Cousteau, he acquired the nickname in photographic circles: \"Papa Flash\". In 1988 Doc Edgerton worked with Paul Kronfield in Greece on a sonar search for the lost city of Helike, believed to be the basis for the legend of Atlantis.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Edgerton co-founded EG&G, Inc., which manufactured advanced electronic equipment including side-scan sonars and sub-bottom profiling equipment. EG&G also invented and manufactured the Krytron, the detonation trigger for the hydrogen bomb, and an EG&G division supervised many of America's nuclear tests.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In addition to having the scientific and engineering acumen to perfect strobe lighting commercially, Edgerton is equally recognized for his visual aesthetic: many of the striking images he created in illuminating phenomena that occurred too fast for the naked eye now adorn art museums worldwide. In 1940, his high speed stroboscopic short film Quicker'n a Wink won an Oscar.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Edgerton was appointed a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1934. In 1956, Edgerton was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He became a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1964 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1972. He was especially loved by MIT students for his willingness to teach and his kindness: \"The trick to education\", he said, \"is to teach people in such a way that they don't realize they're learning until it's too late\". His last undergraduate class, taught during fall semester 1977, was a freshman seminar titled \"Bird and Insect Photography\". One of the graduate student dormitories at MIT carries his name.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1962, Edgerton appeared on I've Got a Secret, where he demonstrated strobe flash photography by shooting a bullet into a playing card and photographing the result.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Edgerton's work was featured in an October 1987 National Geographic Magazine article entitled \"Doc Edgerton: the man who made time stand still\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Edgerton married Esther May Garrett in 1928. She was born in Aurora, Nebraska, on September 8, 1903, and died on March 9, 2002, in Charleston, South Carolina. She received a bachelor's degree in mathematics, music and education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A skilled pianist and singer, she attended the New England Conservatory of Music and taught in public schools in Aurora, Nebraska and Boston. During their marriage they had three children: Mary Louise (April 21, 1931), William Eugene (8/9/1933), Robert Frank (5/10/1935). His sister, Mary Ellen Edgerton, was the wife of L. Welch Pogue (1899–2003) a pioneering aviation attorney and Chairman of the old Civil Aeronautics Board. The technology writer, journalist, and commentator David Pogue is his great nephew.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Edgerton remained active throughout his later years, and was seen on the MIT campus many times after his official retirement. He died suddenly on January 4, 1990, at the MIT Faculty Club at the age of 86, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "On July 3, 1990, in an effort to memorialize Edgerton's accomplishments, several community members in Aurora, Nebraska, decided to construct a \"Hands-On\" science center. It was designated as a \"teaching museum,\" that would preserve Doc's work and artifacts, as well as feature the \"Explorit Zone\" where people of all ages could participate in hands-on exhibits and interact with live science demonstrations. After five years of private and community-wide fund-raising, as well as individual investments by Doc's surviving family members, the Edgerton Explorit Center was officially dedicated on September 9, 1995, in Aurora.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "At MIT, the Edgerton Center, founded in 1992, is a hands-on laboratory resource for undergraduate and graduate students, and also conducts educational outreach programs for high school students and teachers.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Some of Edgerton's noted photographs are :",
"title": "Works"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Edgerton's work is held in the following public collection:",
"title": "Collections"
}
]
| Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton, also known as Papa Flash, was an American scientist and researcher, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device. He also was deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography, and his equipment was used in collaboration with Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness Monster. | 2002-01-24T08:34:55Z | 2023-12-29T07:15:57Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doc_Edgerton |
14,467 | Harry Kroto | Sir Harold Walter Kroto FRS (born Harold Walter Krotoschiner; 7 October 1939 – 30 April 2016) was an English chemist. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes. He was the recipient of many other honors and awards.
Kroto ended his career as the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University, which he joined in 2004. Prior to this, he spent approximately 40 years at the University of Sussex.
Kroto promoted science education and was a critic of religious faith.
Kroto was born in Wisbech, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, England, to Edith and Heinz Krotoschiner, his name being of Silesian origin. His father's family came from Bojanowo, Poland, and his mother's from Berlin. Both of his parents were born in Berlin and fled to Great Britain in the 1930s as refugees from Nazi Germany; his father was Jewish. Harry was raised in Bolton while the British authorities interned his father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien during World War II. Kroto attended Bolton School, where he was a contemporary of the actor Ian McKellen. In 1955, Harold's father shortened the family name to Kroto.
As a child, he became fascinated by a Meccano set. Kroto credited Meccano, as well as his aiding his father in the latter's balloon factory after World War II – amongst other things – with developing skills useful in scientific research. He developed an interest in chemistry, physics, and mathematics in secondary school, and because his sixth form chemistry teacher (Harry Heaney – who subsequently became a university professor) felt that the University of Sheffield had the best chemistry department in the United Kingdom, he went to Sheffield.
Although raised Jewish, Kroto stated that religion never made any sense to him. He was a humanist who claimed to have three religions: Amnesty Internationalism, atheism, and humour. He was a distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.
In 2015, Kroto signed the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change on the final day of the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. The declaration was signed by a total of 76 Nobel Laureates and handed to then-President of the French Republic, François Hollande, as part of the successful COP21 climate summit in Paris.
Kroto was educated at Bolton School and went to the University of Sheffield in 1958, where he obtained a first-class honours BSc degree in Chemistry (1961) and a PhD in Molecular Spectroscopy (1964). During his time at Sheffield he also was the art editor of Arrows – the university student magazine, played tennis for the university team (reaching the UAU finals twice) and was President of the Student Athletics Council (1963–64). Among other things such as making the first phosphaalkenes (compounds with carbon phosphorus double bonds), his doctoral studies included unpublished research on carbon suboxide, O=C=C=C=O, and this led to a general interest in molecules containing chains of carbon atoms with numerous multiple bonds. He started his work with an interest in organic chemistry, but when he learned about spectroscopy it inclined him towards quantum chemistry; he later developed an interest in astrochemistry.
After obtaining his PhD, Kroto spent two-years as a postdoctoral fellow in the molecular spectroscopy group of Gerhard Herzberg at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, and the subsequent year (1966–1967) at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey carrying out Raman studies of liquid phase interactions and worked on quantum chemistry.
In 1967, Kroto began teaching and research at the University of Sussex in England. During his time at Sussex from 1967 to 1985, he carried out research mainly focused on the spectroscopic studies of new and novel unstable and semi-stable species. This work resulted in the birth of the various fields of new chemistry involving carbon multiply bonded to second and third row elements e.g. S, Se and P. A particularly important breakthrough (with Sussex colleague John Nixon) was the creation of several new phosphorus species detected by microwave spectroscopy. This work resulted in the birth of the field(s) of phosphaalkene and phosphaalkyne chemistry. These species contain carbon double and triple bonded to phosphorus (C=P and C≡P) such as cyanophosphaethyne.
In 1975, he became a full professor of Chemistry. This coincided with laboratory microwave measurements with Sussex colleague David Walton on long linear carbon chain molecules, leading to radio astronomy observations with Canadian astronomers surprisingly revealing that these unusual carbonaceous species exist in relatively large abundances in interstellar space as well as the outer atmospheres of certain stars – the carbon-rich red giants.
In 1985, on the basis of the Sussex studies and the stellar discoveries, laboratory experiments (with co-workers James R. Heath, Sean C. O'Brien, Yuan Liu, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University) which simulated the chemical reactions in the atmospheres of the red giant stars demonstrated that stable C60 molecules could form spontaneously from a condensing carbon vapour. The co-investigators directed lasers at graphite and examined the results. The C60 molecule is a molecule with the same symmetry pattern as a football, consisting of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons of carbon atoms. Kroto named the molecule buckminsterfullerene, after Buckminster Fuller who had conceived of the geodesic domes, as the dome concept had provided a clue to the likely structure of the new species.
In 1985, the C60 discovery caused Kroto to shift the focus of his research from spectroscopy in order to probe the consequences of the C60 structural concept (and prove it correct) and to exploit the implications for chemistry and material science.
This research is significant for the discovery of a new allotrope of carbon known as a fullerene. Other allotropes of carbon include graphite, diamond and graphene. Kroto's 1985 paper entitled "C60: Buckminsterfullerene", published with colleagues J. R. Heath, S. C. O'Brien, R. F. Curl, and R. E. Smalley, was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, presented to Rice University in 2015. The discovery of fullerenes was recognized in 2010 by the designation of a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society at the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
In 2004, Kroto left the University of Sussex to take up a new position as Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University. At FSU he carried out fundamental research on: Carbon vapour with Professor Alan Marshall; Open framework condensed phase systems with strategically important electrical and magnetic behaviour with Professors Naresh Dalal (FSU) and Tony Cheetham (Cambridge); and the mechanism of formation and properties of nano-structured systems. In addition, he participated in research initiatives at FSU that probed the astrochemistry of fullerenes, metallofullerenes, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in stellar/circumstellar space, as well as their relevance to stardust.
In 1995, he jointly set up the Vega Science Trust, a UK educational charity that created high quality science films including lectures and interviews with Nobel Laureates, discussion programmes, careers and teaching resources for TV and Internet Broadcast. Vega produced over 280 programmes, that streamed for free from the Vega website which acted as a TV science channel. The trust closed in 2012.
In 2009, Kroto spearheaded the development of a second science education initiative, Geoset. Short for the Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology, GEOSET is an ever-growing online cache of recorded teaching modules that are freely downloadable to educators and the public. The program aims to increase knowledge of the sciences by creating a global repository of educational videos and presentations from leading universities and institutions.
In 2003, prior to the Blair/Bush invasion of Iraq on the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Kroto initiated and organised the publication of a letter to be signed by a dozen UK Nobel Laureates and published in The Times. It was composed by his friend the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate the late Sir Joseph Rotblat and published in The Times on 15 February 2003.
He wrote a set of articles, mostly opinion pieces, from 2002 to 2003 for the Times Higher Education Supplement, a weekly UK publication.
From 2002 to 2004, Kroto served as president of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2004, he was appointed to the Francis Eppes Professorship in the chemistry department at Florida State University, carrying out research in nanoscience and nanotechnology.
He spoke at Auburn University on 29 April 2010, and at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University with Robert Curl on 13 October 2010.
In October 2010 Kroto participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students had the opportunity to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize–winning scientist.
He spoke at Mahatma Gandhi University, at Kottayam, in Kerala, India in January 2011, where he was an 'Erudite' special invited lecturer of the Government of Kerala, from 5 to 11 January 2011.
Kroto spoke at CSICon 2011, a convention "dedicated to scientific inquiry and critical thinking" organized by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in association with Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the Center for Inquiry. He also delivered the IPhO 2012 lecture at the International Physics Olympiad held in Estonia.
In 2014, Kroto spoke at the Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands, delivering a lecture about his life in science, chemistry, and design.
In 1963, Kroto married Margaret Henrietta Hunter, also a student of the University of Sheffield at the time. The couple had two sons. Throughout his life, Kroto was a lover of film, theatre, art, and music and published his own artwork.
Kroto was a "devout atheist" who thought that beliefs in immortality derive from lack of the courage to accept human mortality. He was a patron of the British Humanist Association. He was a supporter of Amnesty International. He referred to his view that religious dogma causes people to accept unethical or inhumane actions: "The only mistake Bernie Madoff made was to promise returns in this life." He held that scientists had a responsibility to work for the benefit of the entire species. On 15 September 2010, Kroto, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK.
Kroto was an early Signatory of Asteroid Day.
In 2008, Kroto was critical of Michael Reiss for directing the teaching of creationism alongside evolution.
Kroto praised the increase of organized online information as an "Educational Revolution" and named it as the "GooYouWiki" world referring to Google, YouTube and Wikipedia.
The discovery of buckminsterfullerene caused Kroto to postpone his dream of setting up an art and graphic design studio – he had been doing graphics semi-professionally for years. However, Kroto's graphic design work resulted in numerous posters, letterheads, logos, book/journal covers, medal design, etc. He produced artwork after receiving graphic awards in the Sunday Times Book Jacket Design competition (1964) and the Moet Hennesy/Louis Vuitton Science pour l'Art Prize (1994). Other notable graphical works include the design of the Nobel UK Stamp for Chemistry (2001) and features at the Royal Academy (London) Summer Exhibition (2004).
Kroto died on 30 April 2016 in Lewes, East Sussex, from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at the age of 76.
Richard Dawkins wrote a memorial for Kroto in which he mentioned Kroto's "passionate hatred of religion." The Wall Street Journal described him as "(spending much of his later life) jetting around the world to extol scientific education in a world he saw as blinded by religion." Slate's Zack Kopplin related a story about how Kroto gave him advice and support to fight Louisiana's creationism law, a law that allows public school science teachers to attack evolution and how Kroto defended the scientific findings of global warming. In an obituary published in the journal Nature, Robert Curl and James R. Heath described Kroto as having an "impish sense of humour similar to that of the British comedy group Monty Python".
Kroto won numerous awards, individually and with others:
Kroto was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1996 New Year Honours list.
The University of Sheffield North Campus contains two buildings named after Kroto: The Kroto Innovation Centre and the Kroto Research Institute. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Sir Harold Walter Kroto FRS (born Harold Walter Krotoschiner; 7 October 1939 – 30 April 2016) was an English chemist. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes. He was the recipient of many other honors and awards.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kroto ended his career as the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University, which he joined in 2004. Prior to this, he spent approximately 40 years at the University of Sussex.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Kroto promoted science education and was a critic of religious faith.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kroto was born in Wisbech, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, England, to Edith and Heinz Krotoschiner, his name being of Silesian origin. His father's family came from Bojanowo, Poland, and his mother's from Berlin. Both of his parents were born in Berlin and fled to Great Britain in the 1930s as refugees from Nazi Germany; his father was Jewish. Harry was raised in Bolton while the British authorities interned his father on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien during World War II. Kroto attended Bolton School, where he was a contemporary of the actor Ian McKellen. In 1955, Harold's father shortened the family name to Kroto.",
"title": "Early years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "As a child, he became fascinated by a Meccano set. Kroto credited Meccano, as well as his aiding his father in the latter's balloon factory after World War II – amongst other things – with developing skills useful in scientific research. He developed an interest in chemistry, physics, and mathematics in secondary school, and because his sixth form chemistry teacher (Harry Heaney – who subsequently became a university professor) felt that the University of Sheffield had the best chemistry department in the United Kingdom, he went to Sheffield.",
"title": "Early years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Although raised Jewish, Kroto stated that religion never made any sense to him. He was a humanist who claimed to have three religions: Amnesty Internationalism, atheism, and humour. He was a distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.",
"title": "Early years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 2015, Kroto signed the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change on the final day of the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. The declaration was signed by a total of 76 Nobel Laureates and handed to then-President of the French Republic, François Hollande, as part of the successful COP21 climate summit in Paris.",
"title": "Early years"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Kroto was educated at Bolton School and went to the University of Sheffield in 1958, where he obtained a first-class honours BSc degree in Chemistry (1961) and a PhD in Molecular Spectroscopy (1964). During his time at Sheffield he also was the art editor of Arrows – the university student magazine, played tennis for the university team (reaching the UAU finals twice) and was President of the Student Athletics Council (1963–64). Among other things such as making the first phosphaalkenes (compounds with carbon phosphorus double bonds), his doctoral studies included unpublished research on carbon suboxide, O=C=C=C=O, and this led to a general interest in molecules containing chains of carbon atoms with numerous multiple bonds. He started his work with an interest in organic chemistry, but when he learned about spectroscopy it inclined him towards quantum chemistry; he later developed an interest in astrochemistry.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "After obtaining his PhD, Kroto spent two-years as a postdoctoral fellow in the molecular spectroscopy group of Gerhard Herzberg at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, and the subsequent year (1966–1967) at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey carrying out Raman studies of liquid phase interactions and worked on quantum chemistry.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1967, Kroto began teaching and research at the University of Sussex in England. During his time at Sussex from 1967 to 1985, he carried out research mainly focused on the spectroscopic studies of new and novel unstable and semi-stable species. This work resulted in the birth of the various fields of new chemistry involving carbon multiply bonded to second and third row elements e.g. S, Se and P. A particularly important breakthrough (with Sussex colleague John Nixon) was the creation of several new phosphorus species detected by microwave spectroscopy. This work resulted in the birth of the field(s) of phosphaalkene and phosphaalkyne chemistry. These species contain carbon double and triple bonded to phosphorus (C=P and C≡P) such as cyanophosphaethyne.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1975, he became a full professor of Chemistry. This coincided with laboratory microwave measurements with Sussex colleague David Walton on long linear carbon chain molecules, leading to radio astronomy observations with Canadian astronomers surprisingly revealing that these unusual carbonaceous species exist in relatively large abundances in interstellar space as well as the outer atmospheres of certain stars – the carbon-rich red giants.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1985, on the basis of the Sussex studies and the stellar discoveries, laboratory experiments (with co-workers James R. Heath, Sean C. O'Brien, Yuan Liu, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University) which simulated the chemical reactions in the atmospheres of the red giant stars demonstrated that stable C60 molecules could form spontaneously from a condensing carbon vapour. The co-investigators directed lasers at graphite and examined the results. The C60 molecule is a molecule with the same symmetry pattern as a football, consisting of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons of carbon atoms. Kroto named the molecule buckminsterfullerene, after Buckminster Fuller who had conceived of the geodesic domes, as the dome concept had provided a clue to the likely structure of the new species.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1985, the C60 discovery caused Kroto to shift the focus of his research from spectroscopy in order to probe the consequences of the C60 structural concept (and prove it correct) and to exploit the implications for chemistry and material science.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "This research is significant for the discovery of a new allotrope of carbon known as a fullerene. Other allotropes of carbon include graphite, diamond and graphene. Kroto's 1985 paper entitled \"C60: Buckminsterfullerene\", published with colleagues J. R. Heath, S. C. O'Brien, R. F. Curl, and R. E. Smalley, was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the Division of History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, presented to Rice University in 2015. The discovery of fullerenes was recognized in 2010 by the designation of a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the American Chemical Society at the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University in Houston, Texas.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 2004, Kroto left the University of Sussex to take up a new position as Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University. At FSU he carried out fundamental research on: Carbon vapour with Professor Alan Marshall; Open framework condensed phase systems with strategically important electrical and magnetic behaviour with Professors Naresh Dalal (FSU) and Tony Cheetham (Cambridge); and the mechanism of formation and properties of nano-structured systems. In addition, he participated in research initiatives at FSU that probed the astrochemistry of fullerenes, metallofullerenes, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in stellar/circumstellar space, as well as their relevance to stardust.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1995, he jointly set up the Vega Science Trust, a UK educational charity that created high quality science films including lectures and interviews with Nobel Laureates, discussion programmes, careers and teaching resources for TV and Internet Broadcast. Vega produced over 280 programmes, that streamed for free from the Vega website which acted as a TV science channel. The trust closed in 2012.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 2009, Kroto spearheaded the development of a second science education initiative, Geoset. Short for the Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology, GEOSET is an ever-growing online cache of recorded teaching modules that are freely downloadable to educators and the public. The program aims to increase knowledge of the sciences by creating a global repository of educational videos and presentations from leading universities and institutions.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 2003, prior to the Blair/Bush invasion of Iraq on the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Kroto initiated and organised the publication of a letter to be signed by a dozen UK Nobel Laureates and published in The Times. It was composed by his friend the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate the late Sir Joseph Rotblat and published in The Times on 15 February 2003.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "He wrote a set of articles, mostly opinion pieces, from 2002 to 2003 for the Times Higher Education Supplement, a weekly UK publication.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "From 2002 to 2004, Kroto served as president of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2004, he was appointed to the Francis Eppes Professorship in the chemistry department at Florida State University, carrying out research in nanoscience and nanotechnology.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "He spoke at Auburn University on 29 April 2010, and at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University with Robert Curl on 13 October 2010.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In October 2010 Kroto participated in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students had the opportunity to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize–winning scientist.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "He spoke at Mahatma Gandhi University, at Kottayam, in Kerala, India in January 2011, where he was an 'Erudite' special invited lecturer of the Government of Kerala, from 5 to 11 January 2011.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Kroto spoke at CSICon 2011, a convention \"dedicated to scientific inquiry and critical thinking\" organized by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in association with Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the Center for Inquiry. He also delivered the IPhO 2012 lecture at the International Physics Olympiad held in Estonia.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 2014, Kroto spoke at the Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands, delivering a lecture about his life in science, chemistry, and design.",
"title": "Education and academic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1963, Kroto married Margaret Henrietta Hunter, also a student of the University of Sheffield at the time. The couple had two sons. Throughout his life, Kroto was a lover of film, theatre, art, and music and published his own artwork.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Kroto was a \"devout atheist\" who thought that beliefs in immortality derive from lack of the courage to accept human mortality. He was a patron of the British Humanist Association. He was a supporter of Amnesty International. He referred to his view that religious dogma causes people to accept unethical or inhumane actions: \"The only mistake Bernie Madoff made was to promise returns in this life.\" He held that scientists had a responsibility to work for the benefit of the entire species. On 15 September 2010, Kroto, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Kroto was an early Signatory of Asteroid Day.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In 2008, Kroto was critical of Michael Reiss for directing the teaching of creationism alongside evolution.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Kroto praised the increase of organized online information as an \"Educational Revolution\" and named it as the \"GooYouWiki\" world referring to Google, YouTube and Wikipedia.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The discovery of buckminsterfullerene caused Kroto to postpone his dream of setting up an art and graphic design studio – he had been doing graphics semi-professionally for years. However, Kroto's graphic design work resulted in numerous posters, letterheads, logos, book/journal covers, medal design, etc. He produced artwork after receiving graphic awards in the Sunday Times Book Jacket Design competition (1964) and the Moet Hennesy/Louis Vuitton Science pour l'Art Prize (1994). Other notable graphical works include the design of the Nobel UK Stamp for Chemistry (2001) and features at the Royal Academy (London) Summer Exhibition (2004).",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Kroto died on 30 April 2016 in Lewes, East Sussex, from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at the age of 76.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Richard Dawkins wrote a memorial for Kroto in which he mentioned Kroto's \"passionate hatred of religion.\" The Wall Street Journal described him as \"(spending much of his later life) jetting around the world to extol scientific education in a world he saw as blinded by religion.\" Slate's Zack Kopplin related a story about how Kroto gave him advice and support to fight Louisiana's creationism law, a law that allows public school science teachers to attack evolution and how Kroto defended the scientific findings of global warming. In an obituary published in the journal Nature, Robert Curl and James R. Heath described Kroto as having an \"impish sense of humour similar to that of the British comedy group Monty Python\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Kroto won numerous awards, individually and with others:",
"title": "Honours and awards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Kroto was made a Knight Bachelor in the 1996 New Year Honours list.",
"title": "Honours and awards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The University of Sheffield North Campus contains two buildings named after Kroto: The Kroto Innovation Centre and the Kroto Research Institute.",
"title": "Honours and awards"
}
]
| Sir Harold Walter Kroto was an English chemist. He shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes. He was the recipient of many other honors and awards. Kroto ended his career as the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University, which he joined in 2004. Prior to this, he spent approximately 40 years at the University of Sussex. Kroto promoted science education and was a critic of religious faith. | 2002-01-24T15:08:20Z | 2023-10-12T21:30:28Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Kroto |
14,468 | Heimskringla | Heimskringla (Old Norse pronunciation: [ˈheimsˌkʰriŋgla], Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈheimsˌkʰriŋla]) is the best known of the Old Norse kings' sagas. It was written in Old Norse in Iceland by the poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (1178/79–1241) c. 1230. The name Heimskringla was first used in the 17th century, derived from the first two words of one of the manuscripts (kringla heimsins, "the circle of the world").
Heimskringla is a collection of sagas about Swedish and Norwegian kings, beginning with the saga of the legendary Swedish dynasty of the Ynglings, followed by accounts of historical Norwegian rulers from Harald Fairhair of the 9th century up to the death of the pretender Eystein Meyla in 1177. The exact sources of Snorri's work are disputed, but they include earlier kings' sagas, such as Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna and the 12th-century Norwegian synoptic histories and oral traditions, notably many skaldic poems. He explicitly names the now lost work Hryggjarstykki as his source for the events of the mid-12th century. Although Snorri used these and other materials collected during his trips to Norway and Sweden, he composed the sagas himself.
The name Heimskringla comes from the fact that the first words of the first saga in the compilation (Ynglinga saga) are Kringla heimsins, "the orb of the Earth".
The earliest parchment copy of the work is Kringla, now in the National and University Library of Iceland, catalogued as Lbs fragm 82. It is a single vellum leaf from c. 1260, a part of the Saga of St. Olaf; the rest of the manuscript was lost to fire in 1728.
Heimskringla consists of several sagas, often thought of as falling into three groups, giving the overall work the character of a triptych. The saga narrates the contests of the kings, the establishment of the kingdom of Norway, Norse expeditions to various European countries, ranging as far afield as Palestine in the saga of Sigurd the Crusader, where the Norwegian fleet is attacked by Arab Muslim pirates, referred to as Vikings. The stories are told with energy, giving a picture of human life in all its dimensions. The saga is a prose epic, relevant to the history of not only Scandinavia but the regions included in the wider medieval Scandinavian diaspora. The first part of the Heimskringla is rooted in Norse mythology; as the collection proceeds, fable and fact intermingle, but the accounts become increasingly historically reliable.
The first saga tells of the mythological prehistory of the Swedish and Norwegian royal dynasty, the Ynglings, tracing their lineage to Freyr (Yngve) of the Vanaland people, who arrived in Scandinavia with Odin from the legendary Asgard. The subsequent sagas are (with few exceptions) devoted to individual rulers, starting with Halfdan the Black.
A version of Óláfs saga helga, about the saint Olaf II of Norway, is the main and central part of the collection: Olaf's 15-year-long reign takes up about one third of the entire work.
Thereafter, the saga of Harald Hardrada narrates Harald's expedition to the East, his brilliant exploits in Constantinople, Syria, and Sicily, his skaldic accomplishments, and his battles in England against Harold Godwinson, the son of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, where he fell at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, only a few days before Harold fell at the Battle of Hastings. After presenting a series of other kings, the saga ends with Magnus V of Norway.
Heimskringla contains the following sagas (see also List of Norwegian monarchs):
Snorri explicitly mentions a few prose sources, now mostly lost in the form that he knew them: Hryggjarstykki ('spine pieces') by Eiríkr Oddsson (covering events 1130–61), Skjǫldunga saga, an unidentified saga about Knútr inn gamli, and a text called Jarlasǫgurnar ('sagas of the jarls', which seems to correspond to the saga now known as Orkneyinga saga).
Snorri may have had access to a wide range of the early Scandinavian historical texts known today as the 'synoptic histories', but made most use of:
Snorri also made extensive use of skaldic verse which he believed to have been composed at the time of the events portrayed and transmitted orally from that time onwards, and clearly made use of other oral accounts, though it is uncertain to what extent.
Up until the mid-19th century, historians put great trust in the factual truth of Snorri's narrative, as well as other old Norse sagas. In the early 20th century, this trust was largely abandoned with the advent of saga criticism, pioneered by Lauritz and Curt Weibull. These historians pointed out that Snorri's work had been written several centuries after most of the events it describes. In Norway, the historian Edvard Bull famously proclaimed that "we have to give up all illusions that Snorri's mighty epic bears any deeper resemblance to what actually happened" in the time it describes. A school of historians has come to believe that the motives Snorri and the other saga writers give to their characters owe more to conditions in the 13th century than in earlier times.
Heimskringla has, however, continued to be used as a historical source, though with more caution. It is not common to believe in the detailed accuracy of the historical narrative and historians tend to see little to no historical truth behind the first few sagas, however, they are still seen by many as a valuable source of knowledge about the society and politics of medieval Norway. The factual content of the work tends to be deemed more credible where it discusses more recent times, as the distance in time between the events described and the composition of the saga was shorter, allowing traditions to be retained in a largely accurate form, and because in the twelfth century the first contemporary written sources begin to emerge in Norway.
Whereas prior to Heimskringla there seems to have been a diversity of efforts to write histories of kings, Snorri's Heimskringla seems thereafter to have been the basis for Icelandic writing about Scandinavian kings, and was expanded by scribes rather than entirely revised. Flateyjarbók, from the end of the fourteenth century, is the most extreme example of expansion, interweaving Snorri's text with many þættir and other whole sagas, prominently Orkneyinga saga, Færeyinga saga, and Fóstbrœðra saga.
The text is also referenced in Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne; the work is the one Professor Liedenbrock finds Arne Saknussem's note in.
By the mid-16th century, the Old Norse language was unintelligible to Norwegian, Swedish or Danish readers. At that time several translations of extracts were made in Norway into the Danish language, which was the literary language of Norway at the time. The first complete translation was made around 1600 by Peder Claussøn Friis, and printed in 1633. This was based on a manuscript known as Jofraskinna.
Subsequently, the Stockholm manuscript was translated into Swedish and Latin by Johan Peringskiöld (by order of Charles XI) and published in 1697 at Stockholm under the title Heimskringla, which is the first known use of the name. This edition also included the first printing of the text in Old Norse. A new Danish translation with the text in Old Norse and a Latin translation came out in 1777–83 (by order of Frederick VI as crown prince). An English translation by Samuel Laing was finally published in 1844, with a second edition in 1889. Starting in the 1960s English-language revisions of Laing appeared, as well as fresh English translations.
In the 19th century, as Norway was achieving independence after centuries of union with Denmark and Sweden, the stories of the independent Norwegian medieval kingdom won great popularity in Norway. Heimskringla, although written by an Icelander, became an important national symbol for Norway during the period of romantic nationalism. In 1900, the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, subsidized the publication of new translations of Heimskringla into both Norwegian written forms, landsmål and riksmål, "in order that the work may achieve wide distribution at a low price".
The most recent English translation of Heimskringla is by Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes and is available open-access. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Heimskringla (Old Norse pronunciation: [ˈheimsˌkʰriŋgla], Icelandic pronunciation: [ˈheimsˌkʰriŋla]) is the best known of the Old Norse kings' sagas. It was written in Old Norse in Iceland by the poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (1178/79–1241) c. 1230. The name Heimskringla was first used in the 17th century, derived from the first two words of one of the manuscripts (kringla heimsins, \"the circle of the world\").",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Heimskringla is a collection of sagas about Swedish and Norwegian kings, beginning with the saga of the legendary Swedish dynasty of the Ynglings, followed by accounts of historical Norwegian rulers from Harald Fairhair of the 9th century up to the death of the pretender Eystein Meyla in 1177. The exact sources of Snorri's work are disputed, but they include earlier kings' sagas, such as Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna and the 12th-century Norwegian synoptic histories and oral traditions, notably many skaldic poems. He explicitly names the now lost work Hryggjarstykki as his source for the events of the mid-12th century. Although Snorri used these and other materials collected during his trips to Norway and Sweden, he composed the sagas himself.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The name Heimskringla comes from the fact that the first words of the first saga in the compilation (Ynglinga saga) are Kringla heimsins, \"the orb of the Earth\".",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The earliest parchment copy of the work is Kringla, now in the National and University Library of Iceland, catalogued as Lbs fragm 82. It is a single vellum leaf from c. 1260, a part of the Saga of St. Olaf; the rest of the manuscript was lost to fire in 1728.",
"title": "Manuscript history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Heimskringla consists of several sagas, often thought of as falling into three groups, giving the overall work the character of a triptych. The saga narrates the contests of the kings, the establishment of the kingdom of Norway, Norse expeditions to various European countries, ranging as far afield as Palestine in the saga of Sigurd the Crusader, where the Norwegian fleet is attacked by Arab Muslim pirates, referred to as Vikings. The stories are told with energy, giving a picture of human life in all its dimensions. The saga is a prose epic, relevant to the history of not only Scandinavia but the regions included in the wider medieval Scandinavian diaspora. The first part of the Heimskringla is rooted in Norse mythology; as the collection proceeds, fable and fact intermingle, but the accounts become increasingly historically reliable.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The first saga tells of the mythological prehistory of the Swedish and Norwegian royal dynasty, the Ynglings, tracing their lineage to Freyr (Yngve) of the Vanaland people, who arrived in Scandinavia with Odin from the legendary Asgard. The subsequent sagas are (with few exceptions) devoted to individual rulers, starting with Halfdan the Black.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A version of Óláfs saga helga, about the saint Olaf II of Norway, is the main and central part of the collection: Olaf's 15-year-long reign takes up about one third of the entire work.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Thereafter, the saga of Harald Hardrada narrates Harald's expedition to the East, his brilliant exploits in Constantinople, Syria, and Sicily, his skaldic accomplishments, and his battles in England against Harold Godwinson, the son of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, where he fell at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, only a few days before Harold fell at the Battle of Hastings. After presenting a series of other kings, the saga ends with Magnus V of Norway.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Heimskringla contains the following sagas (see also List of Norwegian monarchs):",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Snorri explicitly mentions a few prose sources, now mostly lost in the form that he knew them: Hryggjarstykki ('spine pieces') by Eiríkr Oddsson (covering events 1130–61), Skjǫldunga saga, an unidentified saga about Knútr inn gamli, and a text called Jarlasǫgurnar ('sagas of the jarls', which seems to correspond to the saga now known as Orkneyinga saga).",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Snorri may have had access to a wide range of the early Scandinavian historical texts known today as the 'synoptic histories', but made most use of:",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Snorri also made extensive use of skaldic verse which he believed to have been composed at the time of the events portrayed and transmitted orally from that time onwards, and clearly made use of other oral accounts, though it is uncertain to what extent.",
"title": "Sources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Up until the mid-19th century, historians put great trust in the factual truth of Snorri's narrative, as well as other old Norse sagas. In the early 20th century, this trust was largely abandoned with the advent of saga criticism, pioneered by Lauritz and Curt Weibull. These historians pointed out that Snorri's work had been written several centuries after most of the events it describes. In Norway, the historian Edvard Bull famously proclaimed that \"we have to give up all illusions that Snorri's mighty epic bears any deeper resemblance to what actually happened\" in the time it describes. A school of historians has come to believe that the motives Snorri and the other saga writers give to their characters owe more to conditions in the 13th century than in earlier times.",
"title": "Historical reliability"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Heimskringla has, however, continued to be used as a historical source, though with more caution. It is not common to believe in the detailed accuracy of the historical narrative and historians tend to see little to no historical truth behind the first few sagas, however, they are still seen by many as a valuable source of knowledge about the society and politics of medieval Norway. The factual content of the work tends to be deemed more credible where it discusses more recent times, as the distance in time between the events described and the composition of the saga was shorter, allowing traditions to be retained in a largely accurate form, and because in the twelfth century the first contemporary written sources begin to emerge in Norway.",
"title": "Historical reliability"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Whereas prior to Heimskringla there seems to have been a diversity of efforts to write histories of kings, Snorri's Heimskringla seems thereafter to have been the basis for Icelandic writing about Scandinavian kings, and was expanded by scribes rather than entirely revised. Flateyjarbók, from the end of the fourteenth century, is the most extreme example of expansion, interweaving Snorri's text with many þættir and other whole sagas, prominently Orkneyinga saga, Færeyinga saga, and Fóstbrœðra saga.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The text is also referenced in Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne; the work is the one Professor Liedenbrock finds Arne Saknussem's note in.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "By the mid-16th century, the Old Norse language was unintelligible to Norwegian, Swedish or Danish readers. At that time several translations of extracts were made in Norway into the Danish language, which was the literary language of Norway at the time. The first complete translation was made around 1600 by Peder Claussøn Friis, and printed in 1633. This was based on a manuscript known as Jofraskinna.",
"title": "Editions and translations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Subsequently, the Stockholm manuscript was translated into Swedish and Latin by Johan Peringskiöld (by order of Charles XI) and published in 1697 at Stockholm under the title Heimskringla, which is the first known use of the name. This edition also included the first printing of the text in Old Norse. A new Danish translation with the text in Old Norse and a Latin translation came out in 1777–83 (by order of Frederick VI as crown prince). An English translation by Samuel Laing was finally published in 1844, with a second edition in 1889. Starting in the 1960s English-language revisions of Laing appeared, as well as fresh English translations.",
"title": "Editions and translations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In the 19th century, as Norway was achieving independence after centuries of union with Denmark and Sweden, the stories of the independent Norwegian medieval kingdom won great popularity in Norway. Heimskringla, although written by an Icelander, became an important national symbol for Norway during the period of romantic nationalism. In 1900, the Norwegian parliament, the Storting, subsidized the publication of new translations of Heimskringla into both Norwegian written forms, landsmål and riksmål, \"in order that the work may achieve wide distribution at a low price\".",
"title": "Editions and translations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The most recent English translation of Heimskringla is by Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes and is available open-access.",
"title": "Editions and translations"
}
]
| Heimskringla is the best known of the Old Norse kings' sagas. It was written in Old Norse in Iceland by the poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (1178/79–1241) c. 1230. The name Heimskringla was first used in the 17th century, derived from the first two words of one of the manuscripts. Heimskringla is a collection of sagas about Swedish and Norwegian kings, beginning with the saga of the legendary Swedish dynasty of the Ynglings, followed by accounts of historical Norwegian rulers from Harald Fairhair of the 9th century up to the death of the pretender Eystein Meyla in 1177. The exact sources of Snorri's work are disputed, but they include earlier kings' sagas, such as Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna and the 12th-century Norwegian synoptic histories and oral traditions, notably many skaldic poems. He explicitly names the now lost work Hryggjarstykki as his source for the events of the mid-12th century. Although Snorri used these and other materials collected during his trips to Norway and Sweden, he composed the sagas himself. | 2002-01-24T17:17:49Z | 2023-12-22T20:25:23Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimskringla |
14,470 | Hamar | Hamar [ˈhɑ̂ːmɑr] is a town in Hamar Municipality in Innlandet county, Norway. Hamar is the administrative centre of Hamar Municipality. It is located in the traditional region of Hedmarken. The town is located on the shores of Mjøsa, Norway's largest lake. Historically, it was the principal city of the former Hedmark county, now part of the larger Innlandet county.
The town of Hamar lies in the southwestern part of the municipality, and the urban area of the town actually extends over the municipal borders into both Ringsaker and Stange municipalities. The 13.95-square-kilometre (5.39 sq mi) town has a population (2021) of 28,535 and a population density of 2,045 inhabitants per square kilometre (5,300/sq mi). About 1.5 square kilometres (370 acres) and 2,109 residents within the town are actually located in Ringsaker Municipality and another 0.29 square kilometres (72 acres) and 305 residents of the town are located within Stange Municipality.
The municipality (originally the town) is named after the old Hamar farm (Old Norse: Hamarr). The medieval market was first built on this farm and that market eventually became a kjøpstad which in turn became a self-governing municipality. The name is identical with the word hamarr which means "rocky hill".
The coat of arms were granted on 2 June 1896. The arms show a Black Grouse sitting in the top of a pine tree on a white background. An older version of the arms had been used for a long time. The old version was first described in the anonymous Hamar Chronicle, written in 1553.
Between 500 and 1000 AD, the Åker farm was one of the most important power centres in Norway, located just a few kilometres away from today's town of Hamar. Three coins found in Ringerike in 1895 have been dated to the time of Harald Hardråde and are inscribed Olafr a Hamri.
At some point, presumably after 1030 but clearly before 1152, the centre was moved from Åker to the peninsula near Rosenlundvika, what we today know as Domkirkeodden in what is now the town of Hamar. There are some indications Harald Hardråde initiated this move because he had property at the new site.
Much of the information about medieval Hamar is derived from the Hamar Chronicle, dated to about 1550. The town is said to have reached its apex in the early 14th century, dominated by the Hamar Cathedral, the bishop's manor, and a fortress, plus the surrounding urbanization. The town was known for its fragrant apple orchards, but there were also merchants, craftsmen, and fishermen in the town.
After the Christianization of Norway in 1030, Hamar began to gain influence as a centre for trade and religion. In 1152, the episcopal representative Nikolaus Breakspear founded Hamar Kaupangen as one of five dioceses in medieval Norway. This diocese included all of Hedemarkens Amt and Christians Amt, which were both separated from the Diocese of Oslo in 1152. The first bishop of Hamar was Arnold, Bishop of Gardar, Greenland (1124–1152). He began to build the (now ruined) Cathedral of Christ Church, which was completed about the time of Bishop Paul (1232–1252). Bishop Thorfinn (1278–1282) was exiled and died at Ter Doest abbey in Flanders, and was later canonised. Bishop Jörund (1285–1286) was transferred to Trondheim. A provincial council was held in 1380. Hamar remained an important religious and political centre in Norway, organized around the cathedral and the bishop's manor until the Reformation that took place in 1536–1537. At this time, Hamar lost its status as the seat of the Diocese after the last Catholic bishop, Mogens Lauritssøn (1513–1537), was taken prisoner in his castle at Hamar by Truid Ulfstand, a Danish noble, and then sent to Antvorskov in Denmark, where he was mildly treated until his death in 1542. At Hamar's peak, there was a Cathedral chapter with ten canons, a school, a Dominican Priory of St. Olaf, and a monastery of the Canons Regular of St. Anthony of Vienne.
Hamar, like most of Norway, was severely diminished by the Black Plague in 1349, and by all accounts continued this decline until the Reformation, after which it disappeared.
The Reformation in Norway took less than ten years to complete, from 1526 to 1536. During this time, the fortress in Hamar was made into the residence of the sheriff and renamed Hamarhus fortress. The cathedral was still used as a regular church, but it fell into disrepair culminating with the Swedish army's siege and attempted demolition in 1567, during the Northern Seven Years' War. The old bishop's manor was also devastated during this siege.
By 1587, merchants in Christiania had succeeded in moving all of Hamar's market activities to Oslo. Though some regional and seasonal trade persisted into the 17th century, Hamar as a town ceased to exist by then. In its place, the area was used for agriculture under the Storhamar farm, though the ruins of the cathedral, fortress, and lesser buildings became landmarks for centuries since then.
The King made Hamarhus a feudal seat until 1649, when Frederick III transferred the property known as Hammer to Hannibal Sehested, making it private property. In 1716, the estate was sold to Jens Grønbech (1666–1734). With this, a series of construction projects started, and the farm became known as Storhamar, passing through several owners until Norwegian nobility was abolished in 1831, when Erik Anker took over the farm.
As early as 1755, the Danish government in Copenhagen expressed an interest in establishing a trading center on the shores of the lake Mjøsa. Elverum was considered a frontier town with frequent unrest, and there was even talk of encouraging the dissenting Hans Nielsen Hauge to settle in the area. Bishop Fredrik Julius Bech, one of the most prominent officials of his time, proposed establishing a town at or near Storhamar, at the foot of Furuberget.
In 1812, negotiations started in earnest, when the regional governor of Christians Amt, proposed establishing a market on Mjøsa. A four-person commission was named on 26 July 1814, with the mandate of determining a suitable site for a new town along the shore. On 8 June 1815, the commission recommended establishing such a town at Lillehammer, then also a farm, part of the prestegjeld of Fåberg.
Acting on objections to this recommendation, the department of the interior asked two professors, Ludvig Stoud Platou and Gregers Fougner Lundh, to survey the area and develop an alternative recommendation. It appears that Lundh in particular put great effort into this assignment, and in 1824 he presented to the Storting a lengthy report, that included maps and plans for the new town.
Lundh's premise was that the national economic interest reigned supreme, so he based his recommendation on the proposed town's ability to quickly achieve self-sustaining growth. He proposed that the name of the new town be called Carlshammer and proposed it be built along the shore just north of Storhamar and eastward. His plans were detailed, calling for streets that were 20 metres (66 ft) wide, rectangular blocks with 12 buildings in each, 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) separating each of them. He also proposed tax relief for 20 years for the town's first residents, that the state relinquish property taxes in favor of the town, and that the town be given monopoly rights to certain trade. He even proposed that certain types of foreigners be allowed to settle in the town to promote trade, in particular, the Quakers.
His recommendation was accepted in principle by the government, but the parliamentary committee equivocated on the location. It left the determination of the actual site to the king so as to not slow down things further. Another commission was named in June 1825, consisting of Herman Wedel-Jarlsberg, professor Lundh, and other prominent Norwegians. After surveying the entire lake, it submitted another report that considered eleven different locations, including sites near today's Eidsvoll, Minnesund, Tangen in Stange, Åker, Storhamar, Brumunddal, Nes, Moelven, Lillehammer, Gjøvik, and Toten. Each was presented with pros and cons. The commission itself was split between Lillehammer and Storhamar. The parliament finally decided on Lillehammer, relegating Hamar once more, it seemed, to be a sleepy agricultural area.
As steamboats were introduced on the lake, the urban elite developed an interest in the medieval Hamar, and in 1841, editorials appeared advocating the re-establishment of a town at Storhamar. By then, the limitations of Lillehammer's location had also become apparent, in particular those of its shallow harbor. After a few more years of discussions and negotiations both regionally and nationally, member of parliament Frederik Stang put on the table once more the possibility of a town in or near Storhamar. The governor at the time, Frederik Hartvig Johan Heidmann, presented a thorough deliberation of possible specific locations, and ended up proposing the current site, at Gammelhusbukten.
On 26 April 1848, the king signed into law the establishment of Hamar as a kjøpstad on the grounds of the farms of Storhamar and Holset, along the shores of the lake Mjøsa. The law stated that the town will be founded on the date its borders are settled, which turned out to be 21 March 1849. Hamar was given a trading zone up to 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) from its border. The new town was taken out of the municipality of Vang and created established as Hamar Municipality under the formannskapsdistrikt law that was passed in 1838.
The area of the new town and municipality covered an area measuring "400 mål" which is the equivalent to today's 40 hectares (99 acres). An army engineer, Røyem, drafted the initial plan. There would be three thoroughfares, at Strandgata, Torggata, and Grønnegate (the latter the name of a medieval road) and a grid system of streets between them. The orientation of the town was toward the shore. Røyem set aside space for three parks and a public square, and also room for a church just outside the town border.
There were critics of the plan, pointing out that the terrain was hilly and not suitable for the proposed rigid grid. Some adjustments were made, but the plan was largely accepted and is evident in today's Hamar. There were also lingering concerns about the town's vulnerability to flooding.
Construction began as soon as the law passed, in the spring of 1849. The first buildings were much like sheds, but there was great enthusiasm, and by the end of 1849, ten buildings were insured in the new town. None of these are standing today; the last two were adjacent buildings on Skappelsgate. By 1850, there were 31 insured houses, in 1852 there were 42; and in 1853, 56. Building slowed down for a few years and then picked up again in 1858, and by the end of 1860 there were a hundred insured houses in the town. The shore side properties were obliged to grow gardens, setting the stage for a leafy urban landscape.
Roads quickly became a challenge – in some places, it was necessary to ford creeks in the middle of town. The road inspector found himself under considerable stress, and it took until 1869 to settle on street names. Highways in and out of the city also caused considerable debate, especially regarding how to finance them.
The first passenger terminal in Hamar was in fact a crag in the lake, from which travelers were rowed into the city. In 1850, another pier was built with a two-storey terminal building. All this was complicated by the significant seasonal variations in water levels. In 1857 a canal was built around a basin that would allow freight ships to access a large warehouse. Although the canal and basin still were not deep enough to accommodate passenger steamships, the area became one of the busiest areas in the town and the point around which the harbor was further developed.
The Diocese of Hamar was established in 1864, and the Hamar Cathedral was consecrated in 1866 and remains a central point in the city.
A promenade came into being from the harbor area, past the gardens on the shore, and north toward the site of the old town.
The first executive of Hamar was Johannes Bay, who arrived in October 1849 to facilitate an election of a board of supervisors and representatives. The town's royal charter called for the election of three supervisors and nine representatives. Elections were announced in the paper and through the town crier. Of the ten eligible town citizens, three supervisors were elected, and the remaining six were elected by consent to be representatives, resulting in a shortfall of three on the board. The first mayor of Hamar was Christian Borchgrevink.
The first order of business was the allocation of liquor licenses and the upper limit of alcohol that could be sold within the town limits. The board quickly decided to award licenses to both applicants and set the upper limit to 12,000 "pots" of liquor, an amount that was for all intents and purposes limitless.
The electorate increased in 1849 to 26, including merchants and various craftsmen, and the empty representative posts were filled in November. In 1850, the board allowed for unlimited exercise of any craft for which no citizenship had been taken out, which led to much unregulated craftsmanship. Part-time policemen were hired, and the town started setting taxes and a budget by the end of 1849. In 1850, a new election was held for the town board.
The painter Jakobsen had early on offered the use of his home for public meetings and assembly, and upon buying a set of solid locks, his basement also became the town prison. One merchant was designated as the town's firefighter and was given two buckets with equipment, and later a simple hose. By 1852 a full-time fire chief was named. There was also some controversy around the watchman who loudly reported the time to all the town's inhabitants every half-hour, every night. Hamar also had a scrupulously enforced ordinance against smoking (pipe) without a lid in public or private.
In Hamar's early days, the entire population consisted of young entrepreneurs, and little was needed in the way of social services. After a few years, a small number of indigent people needed support, and a poorhouse was erected.
On 1 January 1878, the town/municipality of Hamar was enlarged by annexing about 800 decares (200 acres) of land and 138 people from the neighboring municipality of Vang to Hamar.
In 1860, concerns about flooding were vindicated when a late and sudden spring caused the lake to flood, peaking around 24 June, when the street-level floor of the front properties was completely inundated. This was the worst flood recorded since 1789. By 9 July, the flooding had receded. In August, massive rainfall led to flash flooding in the area, putting several streets under water. This was immediately followed by unseasonably cold weather, freezing the potato crops and inconveniencing Hamar's residents. Then mild weather set in, and melted all the ice and accumulated snow, which lead to another round of flooding. By the time a particularly cold and snow-filled winter set in, there was mostly relief about getting some stability.
In 1876, the town was scandalized by the apprehension of one Kristoffer Svartbækken, arrested for the cold-blooded murder of 19-year-old Even Nilsen Dæhlin. Svartbækken was convicted for the murder and executed the following year in the neighboring rural community of Løten, with an audience of 3,000 locals, presumably the majority of Hamar's population at the time.
In 1878, as the firefighting capabilities of the young town were upgraded, a fire broke out in a bakery. The fire was put out without doing too much damage. In February 1879 at 2:00 in the morning another fire broke out after festivities, burning down an entire building that housed many historical items from the town. This was followed by a series of fires that left entire blocks in ashes. The fires kept happening until 1881, when a professional fire corps was hired.
In 1889, there were riots in Hamar over the arrest of one of their own constables, one sergeant Huse, who had been insubordinate while on a military drill at the cavalry camp at Gardermoen. In an act of poor judgment, Huse's superior sent him to Hamar's prison in place of military stockades. Partly led and partly tolerated by other constables, the town's population engaged in demonstrations, marches, and other unlawful but non-violent acts that were effectively ended when a company of soldiers arrived from the camp at Terningmoen near Elverum.
Composer Fredrikke Waaler founded and directed the first orchestra in Hamar in 1893. She also directed a choir and wrote a song for the city.
In 1946, a large area in Vang that surrounded the town of Hamar (population: 4,087) was transferred out of Vang and merged into Hamar. The following year, a part of the municipality of Furnes (population: 821) was also merged into Hamar. On 1 January 1965, a part of Ringsaker with a population of about 100 people was transferred to Hamar.
In 1975, Storhamar Church was built to serve Hamar's growing population.
On 1 January 1992, the municipality of Vang (population: 9,103) was merged with the town of Hamar (population: 16,351) and parts of the Stensby, Hanstad, Viker, and Stammerud areas of Ringsaker (population: 224) to form a new, larger Hamar Municipality.
The Hedmark museum, located on Domkirkeodden, is an important historical landmark in Hamar, an outdoor museum with remains of the medieval church, in a protective glass housing, the episcopal fortress and a collection of old farm houses. The institution is a combined medieval, ethnological and archaeological museum, and has received architectural prizes for its approach to conservation and exhibition. It also houses a vast photographic archive for the Hedmark region.
Additionally, Hamar is known for its indoor long track speed skating and bandy arena, the Olympia Hall, better known as Vikingskipet ("The Viking ship") for its shape. It was built to host the speed skating competitions of the 1994 Winter Olympics that were held in nearby Lillehammer. Already in 1993 it hosted the Bandy World Championship. The Vikingskipet Olympic Arena was later used in the winter of 2007 as the service park for Rally Norway, the second round of the 2007 World Rally Championship season. It has been the host for the world's second largest computer party The Gathering starting on the Wednesday in Easter each year, for the last 13 years.
Also situated in Hamar is the Hamar Olympic Amphitheatre which hosted the figure skating and short track speed skating events of the 1994 Winter Olympics. The figure skating competition was highly anticipated. It featured Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, who drew most of the media attention, however the gold medal was won by Oksana Baiul of Ukraine.
The centre of Hamar is the pedestrian walkway in the middle of town, with the library, cinema and farmer's market on Stortorget (the big square) on the western side, and Østre Torg (the eastern square), which sits on top of an underground multi-story carpark, on the eastern side.
Hamar is an important railway junction between two different lines from Oslo to Trondheim. Rørosbanen, the old railway line, branches off from the mainline Dovre Line. The Norwegian Railway Museum (Norsk Jernbanemuseum) is also in Hamar. Hamar Airport, Stafsberg caters to general aviation.
Hamar has a humid continental climate (Dfb) with fairly dry and cold winters, and comfortably warm summers. The Hamar II weather station, at an elevation of 141 metres (463 ft), started recording in 1968. The all-time high 33 °C (91 °F) was recorded in July 2018, which was the warmest month on record with average daily high 28.8 °C (83.8 °F) and mean 21.6 °C (70.9 °F). The all-time low −29.8 °C (−21.6 °F) is from in December 2010, which was a very cold month with mean −14 °C (7 °F) and average daily low −18.2 °C (−0.8 °F). A previous weather station (Hamar I, at an elevation of 139 m) recorded the coldest month on record with mean −17.2 °C (1.0 °F) in January 1917. In August 1975, the weather station "Staur Forsøksgård" in nearby Stange recorded 35 °C (95 °F).
Hamar boasts several teams at the Norwegian top level in various sports:
Hamar is known for its speed skating history, both for its skaters and the championships that have been hosted by the city, already in 1894 Hamar hosted its first European championship, and the first World Championship the following year. After the Vikingskipet was built, Hamar has hosted international championships on a regular basis.
The most notable skaters from Hamar are Dag Fornæss and Even Wetten, both former World champions, allround and 1000m respectively. Amund Sjøbrend, Ådne Søndrål and Eskil Ervik have all been members of the local club Hamar IL, although they were not born in Hamar.
In Hamar on 17 July 1993, Scottish cyclist Graeme Obree set a world record for longest distance covered in an hour. His 51,596 metres broke the 51,151 set at altitude nine years earlier. The record lasted only six days, before Chris Boardman beat it in Bordeaux, France.
Other notable athletes:
Hamar was the venue of three sports during the 1994 Winter Olympics, figure skating, short track and speed skating.
The following cities, both in Scandinavia and around the world, are twinned with Hamar:
Part of the plot of "The Axe", the first volume of Sigrid Undset's "The Master of Hestviken", is set in the Medieval Hamar. The book's young lovers, denied the right to marry by malicious relatives, come to the town in order to try to get the help of the kindly and compassionate Bishop Thorfinn of Hamar.
Jorma Kaukonen, former guitarist of Jefferson Airplane, celebrated his love of speed-skating in the song Hamar Promenade on his 1974 album Quah.
Norwegian jazz-pop singer/songwriter Silje Nergaard dedicated her album Hamar Railway Station, released in December 2020, to Hamar's railway junction. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Hamar [ˈhɑ̂ːmɑr] is a town in Hamar Municipality in Innlandet county, Norway. Hamar is the administrative centre of Hamar Municipality. It is located in the traditional region of Hedmarken. The town is located on the shores of Mjøsa, Norway's largest lake. Historically, it was the principal city of the former Hedmark county, now part of the larger Innlandet county.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The town of Hamar lies in the southwestern part of the municipality, and the urban area of the town actually extends over the municipal borders into both Ringsaker and Stange municipalities. The 13.95-square-kilometre (5.39 sq mi) town has a population (2021) of 28,535 and a population density of 2,045 inhabitants per square kilometre (5,300/sq mi). About 1.5 square kilometres (370 acres) and 2,109 residents within the town are actually located in Ringsaker Municipality and another 0.29 square kilometres (72 acres) and 305 residents of the town are located within Stange Municipality.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The municipality (originally the town) is named after the old Hamar farm (Old Norse: Hamarr). The medieval market was first built on this farm and that market eventually became a kjøpstad which in turn became a self-governing municipality. The name is identical with the word hamarr which means \"rocky hill\".",
"title": "General information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The coat of arms were granted on 2 June 1896. The arms show a Black Grouse sitting in the top of a pine tree on a white background. An older version of the arms had been used for a long time. The old version was first described in the anonymous Hamar Chronicle, written in 1553.",
"title": "General information"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Between 500 and 1000 AD, the Åker farm was one of the most important power centres in Norway, located just a few kilometres away from today's town of Hamar. Three coins found in Ringerike in 1895 have been dated to the time of Harald Hardråde and are inscribed Olafr a Hamri.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "At some point, presumably after 1030 but clearly before 1152, the centre was moved from Åker to the peninsula near Rosenlundvika, what we today know as Domkirkeodden in what is now the town of Hamar. There are some indications Harald Hardråde initiated this move because he had property at the new site.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Much of the information about medieval Hamar is derived from the Hamar Chronicle, dated to about 1550. The town is said to have reached its apex in the early 14th century, dominated by the Hamar Cathedral, the bishop's manor, and a fortress, plus the surrounding urbanization. The town was known for its fragrant apple orchards, but there were also merchants, craftsmen, and fishermen in the town.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "After the Christianization of Norway in 1030, Hamar began to gain influence as a centre for trade and religion. In 1152, the episcopal representative Nikolaus Breakspear founded Hamar Kaupangen as one of five dioceses in medieval Norway. This diocese included all of Hedemarkens Amt and Christians Amt, which were both separated from the Diocese of Oslo in 1152. The first bishop of Hamar was Arnold, Bishop of Gardar, Greenland (1124–1152). He began to build the (now ruined) Cathedral of Christ Church, which was completed about the time of Bishop Paul (1232–1252). Bishop Thorfinn (1278–1282) was exiled and died at Ter Doest abbey in Flanders, and was later canonised. Bishop Jörund (1285–1286) was transferred to Trondheim. A provincial council was held in 1380. Hamar remained an important religious and political centre in Norway, organized around the cathedral and the bishop's manor until the Reformation that took place in 1536–1537. At this time, Hamar lost its status as the seat of the Diocese after the last Catholic bishop, Mogens Lauritssøn (1513–1537), was taken prisoner in his castle at Hamar by Truid Ulfstand, a Danish noble, and then sent to Antvorskov in Denmark, where he was mildly treated until his death in 1542. At Hamar's peak, there was a Cathedral chapter with ten canons, a school, a Dominican Priory of St. Olaf, and a monastery of the Canons Regular of St. Anthony of Vienne.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Hamar, like most of Norway, was severely diminished by the Black Plague in 1349, and by all accounts continued this decline until the Reformation, after which it disappeared.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Reformation in Norway took less than ten years to complete, from 1526 to 1536. During this time, the fortress in Hamar was made into the residence of the sheriff and renamed Hamarhus fortress. The cathedral was still used as a regular church, but it fell into disrepair culminating with the Swedish army's siege and attempted demolition in 1567, during the Northern Seven Years' War. The old bishop's manor was also devastated during this siege.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "By 1587, merchants in Christiania had succeeded in moving all of Hamar's market activities to Oslo. Though some regional and seasonal trade persisted into the 17th century, Hamar as a town ceased to exist by then. In its place, the area was used for agriculture under the Storhamar farm, though the ruins of the cathedral, fortress, and lesser buildings became landmarks for centuries since then.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The King made Hamarhus a feudal seat until 1649, when Frederick III transferred the property known as Hammer to Hannibal Sehested, making it private property. In 1716, the estate was sold to Jens Grønbech (1666–1734). With this, a series of construction projects started, and the farm became known as Storhamar, passing through several owners until Norwegian nobility was abolished in 1831, when Erik Anker took over the farm.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "As early as 1755, the Danish government in Copenhagen expressed an interest in establishing a trading center on the shores of the lake Mjøsa. Elverum was considered a frontier town with frequent unrest, and there was even talk of encouraging the dissenting Hans Nielsen Hauge to settle in the area. Bishop Fredrik Julius Bech, one of the most prominent officials of his time, proposed establishing a town at or near Storhamar, at the foot of Furuberget.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1812, negotiations started in earnest, when the regional governor of Christians Amt, proposed establishing a market on Mjøsa. A four-person commission was named on 26 July 1814, with the mandate of determining a suitable site for a new town along the shore. On 8 June 1815, the commission recommended establishing such a town at Lillehammer, then also a farm, part of the prestegjeld of Fåberg.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Acting on objections to this recommendation, the department of the interior asked two professors, Ludvig Stoud Platou and Gregers Fougner Lundh, to survey the area and develop an alternative recommendation. It appears that Lundh in particular put great effort into this assignment, and in 1824 he presented to the Storting a lengthy report, that included maps and plans for the new town.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Lundh's premise was that the national economic interest reigned supreme, so he based his recommendation on the proposed town's ability to quickly achieve self-sustaining growth. He proposed that the name of the new town be called Carlshammer and proposed it be built along the shore just north of Storhamar and eastward. His plans were detailed, calling for streets that were 20 metres (66 ft) wide, rectangular blocks with 12 buildings in each, 2 metres (6 ft 7 in) separating each of them. He also proposed tax relief for 20 years for the town's first residents, that the state relinquish property taxes in favor of the town, and that the town be given monopoly rights to certain trade. He even proposed that certain types of foreigners be allowed to settle in the town to promote trade, in particular, the Quakers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "His recommendation was accepted in principle by the government, but the parliamentary committee equivocated on the location. It left the determination of the actual site to the king so as to not slow down things further. Another commission was named in June 1825, consisting of Herman Wedel-Jarlsberg, professor Lundh, and other prominent Norwegians. After surveying the entire lake, it submitted another report that considered eleven different locations, including sites near today's Eidsvoll, Minnesund, Tangen in Stange, Åker, Storhamar, Brumunddal, Nes, Moelven, Lillehammer, Gjøvik, and Toten. Each was presented with pros and cons. The commission itself was split between Lillehammer and Storhamar. The parliament finally decided on Lillehammer, relegating Hamar once more, it seemed, to be a sleepy agricultural area.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "As steamboats were introduced on the lake, the urban elite developed an interest in the medieval Hamar, and in 1841, editorials appeared advocating the re-establishment of a town at Storhamar. By then, the limitations of Lillehammer's location had also become apparent, in particular those of its shallow harbor. After a few more years of discussions and negotiations both regionally and nationally, member of parliament Frederik Stang put on the table once more the possibility of a town in or near Storhamar. The governor at the time, Frederik Hartvig Johan Heidmann, presented a thorough deliberation of possible specific locations, and ended up proposing the current site, at Gammelhusbukten.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "On 26 April 1848, the king signed into law the establishment of Hamar as a kjøpstad on the grounds of the farms of Storhamar and Holset, along the shores of the lake Mjøsa. The law stated that the town will be founded on the date its borders are settled, which turned out to be 21 March 1849. Hamar was given a trading zone up to 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) from its border. The new town was taken out of the municipality of Vang and created established as Hamar Municipality under the formannskapsdistrikt law that was passed in 1838.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The area of the new town and municipality covered an area measuring \"400 mål\" which is the equivalent to today's 40 hectares (99 acres). An army engineer, Røyem, drafted the initial plan. There would be three thoroughfares, at Strandgata, Torggata, and Grønnegate (the latter the name of a medieval road) and a grid system of streets between them. The orientation of the town was toward the shore. Røyem set aside space for three parks and a public square, and also room for a church just outside the town border.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "There were critics of the plan, pointing out that the terrain was hilly and not suitable for the proposed rigid grid. Some adjustments were made, but the plan was largely accepted and is evident in today's Hamar. There were also lingering concerns about the town's vulnerability to flooding.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Construction began as soon as the law passed, in the spring of 1849. The first buildings were much like sheds, but there was great enthusiasm, and by the end of 1849, ten buildings were insured in the new town. None of these are standing today; the last two were adjacent buildings on Skappelsgate. By 1850, there were 31 insured houses, in 1852 there were 42; and in 1853, 56. Building slowed down for a few years and then picked up again in 1858, and by the end of 1860 there were a hundred insured houses in the town. The shore side properties were obliged to grow gardens, setting the stage for a leafy urban landscape.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Roads quickly became a challenge – in some places, it was necessary to ford creeks in the middle of town. The road inspector found himself under considerable stress, and it took until 1869 to settle on street names. Highways in and out of the city also caused considerable debate, especially regarding how to finance them.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The first passenger terminal in Hamar was in fact a crag in the lake, from which travelers were rowed into the city. In 1850, another pier was built with a two-storey terminal building. All this was complicated by the significant seasonal variations in water levels. In 1857 a canal was built around a basin that would allow freight ships to access a large warehouse. Although the canal and basin still were not deep enough to accommodate passenger steamships, the area became one of the busiest areas in the town and the point around which the harbor was further developed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Diocese of Hamar was established in 1864, and the Hamar Cathedral was consecrated in 1866 and remains a central point in the city.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A promenade came into being from the harbor area, past the gardens on the shore, and north toward the site of the old town.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The first executive of Hamar was Johannes Bay, who arrived in October 1849 to facilitate an election of a board of supervisors and representatives. The town's royal charter called for the election of three supervisors and nine representatives. Elections were announced in the paper and through the town crier. Of the ten eligible town citizens, three supervisors were elected, and the remaining six were elected by consent to be representatives, resulting in a shortfall of three on the board. The first mayor of Hamar was Christian Borchgrevink.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The first order of business was the allocation of liquor licenses and the upper limit of alcohol that could be sold within the town limits. The board quickly decided to award licenses to both applicants and set the upper limit to 12,000 \"pots\" of liquor, an amount that was for all intents and purposes limitless.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The electorate increased in 1849 to 26, including merchants and various craftsmen, and the empty representative posts were filled in November. In 1850, the board allowed for unlimited exercise of any craft for which no citizenship had been taken out, which led to much unregulated craftsmanship. Part-time policemen were hired, and the town started setting taxes and a budget by the end of 1849. In 1850, a new election was held for the town board.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The painter Jakobsen had early on offered the use of his home for public meetings and assembly, and upon buying a set of solid locks, his basement also became the town prison. One merchant was designated as the town's firefighter and was given two buckets with equipment, and later a simple hose. By 1852 a full-time fire chief was named. There was also some controversy around the watchman who loudly reported the time to all the town's inhabitants every half-hour, every night. Hamar also had a scrupulously enforced ordinance against smoking (pipe) without a lid in public or private.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In Hamar's early days, the entire population consisted of young entrepreneurs, and little was needed in the way of social services. After a few years, a small number of indigent people needed support, and a poorhouse was erected.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "On 1 January 1878, the town/municipality of Hamar was enlarged by annexing about 800 decares (200 acres) of land and 138 people from the neighboring municipality of Vang to Hamar.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 1860, concerns about flooding were vindicated when a late and sudden spring caused the lake to flood, peaking around 24 June, when the street-level floor of the front properties was completely inundated. This was the worst flood recorded since 1789. By 9 July, the flooding had receded. In August, massive rainfall led to flash flooding in the area, putting several streets under water. This was immediately followed by unseasonably cold weather, freezing the potato crops and inconveniencing Hamar's residents. Then mild weather set in, and melted all the ice and accumulated snow, which lead to another round of flooding. By the time a particularly cold and snow-filled winter set in, there was mostly relief about getting some stability.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1876, the town was scandalized by the apprehension of one Kristoffer Svartbækken, arrested for the cold-blooded murder of 19-year-old Even Nilsen Dæhlin. Svartbækken was convicted for the murder and executed the following year in the neighboring rural community of Løten, with an audience of 3,000 locals, presumably the majority of Hamar's population at the time.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1878, as the firefighting capabilities of the young town were upgraded, a fire broke out in a bakery. The fire was put out without doing too much damage. In February 1879 at 2:00 in the morning another fire broke out after festivities, burning down an entire building that housed many historical items from the town. This was followed by a series of fires that left entire blocks in ashes. The fires kept happening until 1881, when a professional fire corps was hired.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1889, there were riots in Hamar over the arrest of one of their own constables, one sergeant Huse, who had been insubordinate while on a military drill at the cavalry camp at Gardermoen. In an act of poor judgment, Huse's superior sent him to Hamar's prison in place of military stockades. Partly led and partly tolerated by other constables, the town's population engaged in demonstrations, marches, and other unlawful but non-violent acts that were effectively ended when a company of soldiers arrived from the camp at Terningmoen near Elverum.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Composer Fredrikke Waaler founded and directed the first orchestra in Hamar in 1893. She also directed a choir and wrote a song for the city.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 1946, a large area in Vang that surrounded the town of Hamar (population: 4,087) was transferred out of Vang and merged into Hamar. The following year, a part of the municipality of Furnes (population: 821) was also merged into Hamar. On 1 January 1965, a part of Ringsaker with a population of about 100 people was transferred to Hamar.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 1975, Storhamar Church was built to serve Hamar's growing population.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "On 1 January 1992, the municipality of Vang (population: 9,103) was merged with the town of Hamar (population: 16,351) and parts of the Stensby, Hanstad, Viker, and Stammerud areas of Ringsaker (population: 224) to form a new, larger Hamar Municipality.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The Hedmark museum, located on Domkirkeodden, is an important historical landmark in Hamar, an outdoor museum with remains of the medieval church, in a protective glass housing, the episcopal fortress and a collection of old farm houses. The institution is a combined medieval, ethnological and archaeological museum, and has received architectural prizes for its approach to conservation and exhibition. It also houses a vast photographic archive for the Hedmark region.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Additionally, Hamar is known for its indoor long track speed skating and bandy arena, the Olympia Hall, better known as Vikingskipet (\"The Viking ship\") for its shape. It was built to host the speed skating competitions of the 1994 Winter Olympics that were held in nearby Lillehammer. Already in 1993 it hosted the Bandy World Championship. The Vikingskipet Olympic Arena was later used in the winter of 2007 as the service park for Rally Norway, the second round of the 2007 World Rally Championship season. It has been the host for the world's second largest computer party The Gathering starting on the Wednesday in Easter each year, for the last 13 years.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Also situated in Hamar is the Hamar Olympic Amphitheatre which hosted the figure skating and short track speed skating events of the 1994 Winter Olympics. The figure skating competition was highly anticipated. It featured Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, who drew most of the media attention, however the gold medal was won by Oksana Baiul of Ukraine.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The centre of Hamar is the pedestrian walkway in the middle of town, with the library, cinema and farmer's market on Stortorget (the big square) on the western side, and Østre Torg (the eastern square), which sits on top of an underground multi-story carpark, on the eastern side.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Hamar is an important railway junction between two different lines from Oslo to Trondheim. Rørosbanen, the old railway line, branches off from the mainline Dovre Line. The Norwegian Railway Museum (Norsk Jernbanemuseum) is also in Hamar. Hamar Airport, Stafsberg caters to general aviation.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Hamar has a humid continental climate (Dfb) with fairly dry and cold winters, and comfortably warm summers. The Hamar II weather station, at an elevation of 141 metres (463 ft), started recording in 1968. The all-time high 33 °C (91 °F) was recorded in July 2018, which was the warmest month on record with average daily high 28.8 °C (83.8 °F) and mean 21.6 °C (70.9 °F). The all-time low −29.8 °C (−21.6 °F) is from in December 2010, which was a very cold month with mean −14 °C (7 °F) and average daily low −18.2 °C (−0.8 °F). A previous weather station (Hamar I, at an elevation of 139 m) recorded the coldest month on record with mean −17.2 °C (1.0 °F) in January 1917. In August 1975, the weather station \"Staur Forsøksgård\" in nearby Stange recorded 35 °C (95 °F).",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Hamar boasts several teams at the Norwegian top level in various sports:",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Hamar is known for its speed skating history, both for its skaters and the championships that have been hosted by the city, already in 1894 Hamar hosted its first European championship, and the first World Championship the following year. After the Vikingskipet was built, Hamar has hosted international championships on a regular basis.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The most notable skaters from Hamar are Dag Fornæss and Even Wetten, both former World champions, allround and 1000m respectively. Amund Sjøbrend, Ådne Søndrål and Eskil Ervik have all been members of the local club Hamar IL, although they were not born in Hamar.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In Hamar on 17 July 1993, Scottish cyclist Graeme Obree set a world record for longest distance covered in an hour. His 51,596 metres broke the 51,151 set at altitude nine years earlier. The record lasted only six days, before Chris Boardman beat it in Bordeaux, France.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Other notable athletes:",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Hamar was the venue of three sports during the 1994 Winter Olympics, figure skating, short track and speed skating.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The following cities, both in Scandinavia and around the world, are twinned with Hamar:",
"title": "International relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Part of the plot of \"The Axe\", the first volume of Sigrid Undset's \"The Master of Hestviken\", is set in the Medieval Hamar. The book's young lovers, denied the right to marry by malicious relatives, come to the town in order to try to get the help of the kindly and compassionate Bishop Thorfinn of Hamar.",
"title": "In literature and popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Jorma Kaukonen, former guitarist of Jefferson Airplane, celebrated his love of speed-skating in the song Hamar Promenade on his 1974 album Quah.",
"title": "In literature and popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Norwegian jazz-pop singer/songwriter Silje Nergaard dedicated her album Hamar Railway Station, released in December 2020, to Hamar's railway junction.",
"title": "In literature and popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Hamar is a town in Hamar Municipality in Innlandet county, Norway. Hamar is the administrative centre of Hamar Municipality. It is located in the traditional region of Hedmarken. The town is located on the shores of Mjøsa, Norway's largest lake. Historically, it was the principal city of the former Hedmark county, now part of the larger Innlandet county. The town of Hamar lies in the southwestern part of the municipality, and the urban area of the town actually extends over the municipal borders into both Ringsaker and Stange municipalities. The 13.95-square-kilometre (5.39 sq mi) town has a population (2021) of 28,535 and a population density of 2,045 inhabitants per square kilometre (5,300/sq mi). About 1.5 square kilometres and 2,109 residents within the town are actually located in Ringsaker Municipality and another 0.29 square kilometres and 305 residents of the town are located within Stange Municipality. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-10-27T15:57:27Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamar |
14,472 | Book of Helaman | The Book of Helaman (/ˈhiːləmən/ HEE-lə-mən) is one of the books that make up the Book of Mormon, a text held sacred by churches within the Latter Day Saint movement, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). The book continues the history of the Nephites and the Lamanites from approximately 50 BC to 1 BC. It discusses political unrest among the Nephites and the formation of a group of secret dissenters called the Gadianton Robbers. Helaman, son of Helaman leads the Nephites for a time, and his sons Nephi and Lehi go on a successful mission to the Lamanites. When Nephi returns home, he correctly identifies the murderer of the chief judge using his prophetic powers, and sends a famine to the Nephite which lasts three years. After a digression from Mormon, the book of Helaman ends with Samuel the Lamanite's prophecy of the signs that will precede Christ's birth and death. Helaman deals with themes of external and internal conflict, hidden information, Nephite racism, and Mormon's views of history as deduced by his redaction of it.
In the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith originally gave his scribes an arrangement of five chapters that were larger than the chapters in modern editions of the Book of Mormon.
According to the narrative in the Book of Mormon, the Book of Helaman is set in 50-1 BC. Helaman is named for Alma's grandson, Helaman. The actions of the first three chapters center around him. Helaman's son Nephi is central to the rest of the record. The book of Helaman as a whole is edited and compiled by Mormon, who is the author of chapter 12. Events are related episodically. The miraculous incidents in Helaman 5 describe a significant conversion of many Lamanites to Book of Mormon Christianity.
In the first part of Helaman, a secret society, commonly called a secret combination, spurs political unrest among the Nephites. Pahoran's son, also named Pahoran, wins the election to be the new chief judge. Paanchi and his followers make an oath of secrecy and murder son Pahoran. A few months later, a Lamanite army captures the Nephite capital until the Nephites reclaim it. Helaman, son of Helaman is elected as the new chief judge. The same group who murdered Pahoran tries to murder Helaman, but a spy kills the assassin before he succeeds. The group retreats to the wilderness and they are referred to as a "band of robbers". (Chapters 1-2.)
The second part of Helaman covers a period of Nephite technological growth, war with the Lamanites, and proselyting to the Lamanites. Helaman reigns over the Nephites, who develop shipping, expand northward, and become wealthy and prideful. Helaman dies and his son Nephi becomes chief judge. Disagreements in the land of the Nephites lead to war with the Lamanites, where Moronihah conquers half of their land. After stepping down as chief judge, Nephi goes with his brother Lehi to preach to the Nephites and the Lamanites. Lamanites in Nephites lands imprison them. Angels and a pillar of fire manifest and their presence sparks the conversion of onlookers, who in turn convert the Lamanites, who peaceably leave the Nephite lands they were occupying. The Gadianton robbers return and murder Cezoram, who filled in for Nephi in the judgement seat. Meanwhile, the Lamanites' righteousness increases. (Chapters 3-6.)
In the third part of Helaman, Nephi prophesies about the Nephites and their future. Nephi comes home after his six-year mission to find that the Nephites have become wicked in his absence. He says that the Nephites' destruction is nigh. He prophesies that the chief judge has been murdered by his brother, and this prophecy is confirmed. He prophesies that the brother will deny murdering the chief judge, but that the blood on the skirts of his cloak will give him away. The Nephites are divided. God grants Nephi the power to do "all things" "according to [his] word". Nephi sends a famine into the land for three years, when many people return to their faith and Nephi prays the rain back. The Gadianton robbers become more powerful. (Chapters 7-11.)
In the last part of Helaman, Samuel the Lamanite prophesies that the Nephites will be destroyed in 400 years. He promises that their attempts to secure their future using money will fail. He says that unless the Nephites repent, their women and children will suffer and die. He foretells of the signs and wonders of Jesus' birth and death. The Nephites reject his prophecies.(Chapters 13-16)
The short preface to the Book of Helaman is written by Mormon, the editor of the books following Omni according to the Book of Mormon narrative. Mormon describes the book of Helaman as being about "wars and contentions". According to Brant Gardner, author of a six-volume commentary that grew out of his work for the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, the goal of Mormon's compilation is theological, not historical. "Contentions" refers to internal conflicts, while "wars" refers to external ones. Mormon may have chosen to focus on contentions to fulfill Nephi's vision when Nephi sees "wars, and rumors of wars" as well as "wars and contentions in the land". For Gardner, Mormon isn't just trying to fulfill Nephi's vision, but also to show that Christ's coming is a type, and that it was and will be preceded by war and contention.
In Helaman, the Gadianton robbers are mentioned for the first time in the text of the Book of Mormon, a recurring instance of Nephite secret combinations important to the rest of the Book of Mormon narrative. According to Maxwell Institute scholar Kim Matheson, Helaman's contrasts show how the Nephites are constantly noticing the wrong things. Instead of noticing their own spiritual decay, they increase their wealth and military power. Important aspects of the plot are covert, like the secret combinations, assassins, and spiritual alignment with God.
Former dean of religious education at Brigham Young University, Robert J. Matthews, noticed that within the Nephite culture, because the majority of the people chose evil, the government became corrupt, even though it was a form of free government. People in government started to ignore the poor and there was a general disdain of the law. In the Book of Mormon Reference Companion, published by LDS Church publisher Deseret Book, John Tanner also highlights the passage in Helaman about how "they who chose evil were more numerous than they who chose good."
Helaman ends with Samuel prophesying of Christ and the Nephites rejecting Samuel's prophecy. Samuel does not mention Christ's resurrection, but focuses on the signs of his birth and death. For Grant Hardy, in his The Annotated Book of Mormon, since Samuel is a Lamanite, it is possible that Nephite racism contributed to their rejection of him. For Matheson, Nephite racism causes them to reject Samuel, and their interest in comparing themselves to the Lamanites prevents them from honestly repenting of their misdeeds.
In Mormon's digression in Helaman 12, he describes the cycle of righteousness and unrighteousness. He reveals his assumption that the righteousness of a people is the most important historical question to consider, relegating factors such as economic growth to their influence on the righteousness of the people. For Tanner, Mormon draws attention to his commentary with the phrase "thus we see," and his "fullest articulation of the cyclical pattern" is found in Helaman 12. Hardy describes this "pride cycle" as one of the main features of Helaman. Prosperous Nephites become prideful and forget God, which leads to their downfall. Humbled, they return to worshipping God and become prosperous again. Hardy draws a parallel to a similar cycle in the Biblical Book of Judges, noting that in Helaman, communal repentance plays a larger role. In the larger narrative of the Book of Mormon, this cycle is broken for 200 years after Jesus visits the land. | [
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"text": "The Book of Helaman (/ˈhiːləmən/ HEE-lə-mən) is one of the books that make up the Book of Mormon, a text held sacred by churches within the Latter Day Saint movement, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). The book continues the history of the Nephites and the Lamanites from approximately 50 BC to 1 BC. It discusses political unrest among the Nephites and the formation of a group of secret dissenters called the Gadianton Robbers. Helaman, son of Helaman leads the Nephites for a time, and his sons Nephi and Lehi go on a successful mission to the Lamanites. When Nephi returns home, he correctly identifies the murderer of the chief judge using his prophetic powers, and sends a famine to the Nephite which lasts three years. After a digression from Mormon, the book of Helaman ends with Samuel the Lamanite's prophecy of the signs that will precede Christ's birth and death. Helaman deals with themes of external and internal conflict, hidden information, Nephite racism, and Mormon's views of history as deduced by his redaction of it.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith originally gave his scribes an arrangement of five chapters that were larger than the chapters in modern editions of the Book of Mormon.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "According to the narrative in the Book of Mormon, the Book of Helaman is set in 50-1 BC. Helaman is named for Alma's grandson, Helaman. The actions of the first three chapters center around him. Helaman's son Nephi is central to the rest of the record. The book of Helaman as a whole is edited and compiled by Mormon, who is the author of chapter 12. Events are related episodically. The miraculous incidents in Helaman 5 describe a significant conversion of many Lamanites to Book of Mormon Christianity.",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In the first part of Helaman, a secret society, commonly called a secret combination, spurs political unrest among the Nephites. Pahoran's son, also named Pahoran, wins the election to be the new chief judge. Paanchi and his followers make an oath of secrecy and murder son Pahoran. A few months later, a Lamanite army captures the Nephite capital until the Nephites reclaim it. Helaman, son of Helaman is elected as the new chief judge. The same group who murdered Pahoran tries to murder Helaman, but a spy kills the assassin before he succeeds. The group retreats to the wilderness and they are referred to as a \"band of robbers\". (Chapters 1-2.)",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The second part of Helaman covers a period of Nephite technological growth, war with the Lamanites, and proselyting to the Lamanites. Helaman reigns over the Nephites, who develop shipping, expand northward, and become wealthy and prideful. Helaman dies and his son Nephi becomes chief judge. Disagreements in the land of the Nephites lead to war with the Lamanites, where Moronihah conquers half of their land. After stepping down as chief judge, Nephi goes with his brother Lehi to preach to the Nephites and the Lamanites. Lamanites in Nephites lands imprison them. Angels and a pillar of fire manifest and their presence sparks the conversion of onlookers, who in turn convert the Lamanites, who peaceably leave the Nephite lands they were occupying. The Gadianton robbers return and murder Cezoram, who filled in for Nephi in the judgement seat. Meanwhile, the Lamanites' righteousness increases. (Chapters 3-6.)",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In the third part of Helaman, Nephi prophesies about the Nephites and their future. Nephi comes home after his six-year mission to find that the Nephites have become wicked in his absence. He says that the Nephites' destruction is nigh. He prophesies that the chief judge has been murdered by his brother, and this prophecy is confirmed. He prophesies that the brother will deny murdering the chief judge, but that the blood on the skirts of his cloak will give him away. The Nephites are divided. God grants Nephi the power to do \"all things\" \"according to [his] word\". Nephi sends a famine into the land for three years, when many people return to their faith and Nephi prays the rain back. The Gadianton robbers become more powerful. (Chapters 7-11.)",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the last part of Helaman, Samuel the Lamanite prophesies that the Nephites will be destroyed in 400 years. He promises that their attempts to secure their future using money will fail. He says that unless the Nephites repent, their women and children will suffer and die. He foretells of the signs and wonders of Jesus' birth and death. The Nephites reject his prophecies.(Chapters 13-16)",
"title": "Summary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The short preface to the Book of Helaman is written by Mormon, the editor of the books following Omni according to the Book of Mormon narrative. Mormon describes the book of Helaman as being about \"wars and contentions\". According to Brant Gardner, author of a six-volume commentary that grew out of his work for the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, the goal of Mormon's compilation is theological, not historical. \"Contentions\" refers to internal conflicts, while \"wars\" refers to external ones. Mormon may have chosen to focus on contentions to fulfill Nephi's vision when Nephi sees \"wars, and rumors of wars\" as well as \"wars and contentions in the land\". For Gardner, Mormon isn't just trying to fulfill Nephi's vision, but also to show that Christ's coming is a type, and that it was and will be preceded by war and contention.",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In Helaman, the Gadianton robbers are mentioned for the first time in the text of the Book of Mormon, a recurring instance of Nephite secret combinations important to the rest of the Book of Mormon narrative. According to Maxwell Institute scholar Kim Matheson, Helaman's contrasts show how the Nephites are constantly noticing the wrong things. Instead of noticing their own spiritual decay, they increase their wealth and military power. Important aspects of the plot are covert, like the secret combinations, assassins, and spiritual alignment with God.",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Former dean of religious education at Brigham Young University, Robert J. Matthews, noticed that within the Nephite culture, because the majority of the people chose evil, the government became corrupt, even though it was a form of free government. People in government started to ignore the poor and there was a general disdain of the law. In the Book of Mormon Reference Companion, published by LDS Church publisher Deseret Book, John Tanner also highlights the passage in Helaman about how \"they who chose evil were more numerous than they who chose good.\"",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Helaman ends with Samuel prophesying of Christ and the Nephites rejecting Samuel's prophecy. Samuel does not mention Christ's resurrection, but focuses on the signs of his birth and death. For Grant Hardy, in his The Annotated Book of Mormon, since Samuel is a Lamanite, it is possible that Nephite racism contributed to their rejection of him. For Matheson, Nephite racism causes them to reject Samuel, and their interest in comparing themselves to the Lamanites prevents them from honestly repenting of their misdeeds.",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In Mormon's digression in Helaman 12, he describes the cycle of righteousness and unrighteousness. He reveals his assumption that the righteousness of a people is the most important historical question to consider, relegating factors such as economic growth to their influence on the righteousness of the people. For Tanner, Mormon draws attention to his commentary with the phrase \"thus we see,\" and his \"fullest articulation of the cyclical pattern\" is found in Helaman 12. Hardy describes this \"pride cycle\" as one of the main features of Helaman. Prosperous Nephites become prideful and forget God, which leads to their downfall. Humbled, they return to worshipping God and become prosperous again. Hardy draws a parallel to a similar cycle in the Biblical Book of Judges, noting that in Helaman, communal repentance plays a larger role. In the larger narrative of the Book of Mormon, this cycle is broken for 200 years after Jesus visits the land.",
"title": "Themes"
},
{
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"title": "External links"
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| The Book of Helaman is one of the books that make up the Book of Mormon, a text held sacred by churches within the Latter Day Saint movement, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The book continues the history of the Nephites and the Lamanites from approximately 50 BC to 1 BC. It discusses political unrest among the Nephites and the formation of a group of secret dissenters called the Gadianton Robbers. Helaman, son of Helaman leads the Nephites for a time, and his sons Nephi and Lehi go on a successful mission to the Lamanites. When Nephi returns home, he correctly identifies the murderer of the chief judge using his prophetic powers, and sends a famine to the Nephite which lasts three years. After a digression from Mormon, the book of Helaman ends with Samuel the Lamanite's prophecy of the signs that will precede Christ's birth and death. Helaman deals with themes of external and internal conflict, hidden information, Nephite racism, and Mormon's views of history as deduced by his redaction of it. | 2002-01-25T06:31:35Z | 2023-12-22T22:44:50Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Helaman |
14,526 | Irina Krush | Irina Borisivna Krush (Ukrainian: Ірина Борисівна Круш; born December 24, 1983) is an American chess Grandmaster. She is the only woman to earn the GM title while playing for the United States. Krush is an eight-time U.S. Women's Champion.
Irina Krush was born in Odesa, USSR (now Ukraine), and emigrated with her parents to Brooklyn in 1989. Her father, a college chess player, taught Irina the game. When she was 6, she won her first tournament, and at the age of 7 she represented the U.S. at the World Youth Championships for girls under 10 in Poland.
At age 14, Krush won the 1998 U.S. Women's Chess Championship to become the youngest U.S. women's champion ever. She has won the championship on seven other occasions, in 2007, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2020.
In 1999, Krush took part in the "Kasparov versus the World" chess competition. Garry Kasparov played the white pieces and the Internet public, via a Microsoft host website, voted on moves for the black pieces, guided by the recommendations of Krush and three of her contemporaries, Étienne Bacrot, Elisabeth Pähtz and Florin Felecan. On the tenth move, Krush suggested a novelty, for which the World team voted. Kasparov said later that he lost control of the game at that point, and wasn't sure whether he was winning or losing.
Krush played in the Group C of the 2008 Corus Chess Tournament, a 14-player round-robin tournament held in Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands. She finished in joint fifth place having scored 7/13 points after five wins (including the one against the eventual winner, Fabiano Caruana), four draws and four losses.
In 2013, she was awarded the Grandmaster title due to her results at the NYC Mayor's Cup International GM Tournament in 2001, Women's World Team Chess Championship 2013 and Baku Open 2013.
In 2022, she won the 2022 American Cup (Women's field) in a double-elimination format. She tied with Jennifer Yu in the 2022 U.S. Women's Chess Championship but lost the playoff.
Krush has played on the U.S. national team in the Women's Chess Olympiad since 1998. The U.S. team won the silver medal in 2004 and bronze in 2008. In 2022 Krush was member of the U.S. women's team at the 44th Chess Olympiad; the team finished as fourth. She also competed as part of the US team in the Women's World Team Chess Championship in 2009 and 2013.
She played for the team Manhattan Applesauce in the U.S. Chess League in 2015; she previously played for the New York Knights (2005–2011, 2013). Krush and her ex-husband, Canadian Grandmaster Pascal Charbonneau, have played in the United Kingdom league for Guildford-ADC.
In May 2020, Krush played for the USA team in the FIDE Online Nations Cup.
Krush frequently contributes articles to Chess Life magazine and uschess.org. Her article on earning her grandmaster title in 2013 was honored as the "Best of US Chess" that year.
Krush attended Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn. She graduated in International Relations from New York University in 2006.
In March 2016, Hillary Clinton was a guest on the Steve Harvey television show. On the show, Krush appeared along with two actresses trying to impersonate Krush. The trio answered questions from host Steve Harvey and Clinton regarding her life and chess career. Clinton successfully identified the real Irina Krush.
In March 2020, she was hospitalized and treated for a "moderate" COVID-19 infection, then released to recover under quarantine at home. While quarantined, she played in the Isolated Queens Swiss, an online women's blitz chess tournament. She scored 7.5/10 in the tournament, putting her in joint second place, a half point behind tournament winner GM Alexandra Kosteniuk.
On January 18, 2023, Krush appeared on a primetime special of The Price Is Right and won the Clock Game, but she failed to advance to the Showcases. | [
{
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"text": "Irina Borisivna Krush (Ukrainian: Ірина Борисівна Круш; born December 24, 1983) is an American chess Grandmaster. She is the only woman to earn the GM title while playing for the United States. Krush is an eight-time U.S. Women's Champion.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "Irina Krush was born in Odesa, USSR (now Ukraine), and emigrated with her parents to Brooklyn in 1989. Her father, a college chess player, taught Irina the game. When she was 6, she won her first tournament, and at the age of 7 she represented the U.S. at the World Youth Championships for girls under 10 in Poland.",
"title": "Early life"
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{
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"text": "At age 14, Krush won the 1998 U.S. Women's Chess Championship to become the youngest U.S. women's champion ever. She has won the championship on seven other occasions, in 2007, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2020.",
"title": "Chess career"
},
{
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"text": "In 1999, Krush took part in the \"Kasparov versus the World\" chess competition. Garry Kasparov played the white pieces and the Internet public, via a Microsoft host website, voted on moves for the black pieces, guided by the recommendations of Krush and three of her contemporaries, Étienne Bacrot, Elisabeth Pähtz and Florin Felecan. On the tenth move, Krush suggested a novelty, for which the World team voted. Kasparov said later that he lost control of the game at that point, and wasn't sure whether he was winning or losing.",
"title": "Chess career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Krush played in the Group C of the 2008 Corus Chess Tournament, a 14-player round-robin tournament held in Wijk aan Zee, the Netherlands. She finished in joint fifth place having scored 7/13 points after five wins (including the one against the eventual winner, Fabiano Caruana), four draws and four losses.",
"title": "Chess career"
},
{
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"text": "In 2013, she was awarded the Grandmaster title due to her results at the NYC Mayor's Cup International GM Tournament in 2001, Women's World Team Chess Championship 2013 and Baku Open 2013.",
"title": "Chess career"
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{
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"text": "In 2022, she won the 2022 American Cup (Women's field) in a double-elimination format. She tied with Jennifer Yu in the 2022 U.S. Women's Chess Championship but lost the playoff.",
"title": "Chess career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Krush has played on the U.S. national team in the Women's Chess Olympiad since 1998. The U.S. team won the silver medal in 2004 and bronze in 2008. In 2022 Krush was member of the U.S. women's team at the 44th Chess Olympiad; the team finished as fourth. She also competed as part of the US team in the Women's World Team Chess Championship in 2009 and 2013.",
"title": "Chess career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "She played for the team Manhattan Applesauce in the U.S. Chess League in 2015; she previously played for the New York Knights (2005–2011, 2013). Krush and her ex-husband, Canadian Grandmaster Pascal Charbonneau, have played in the United Kingdom league for Guildford-ADC.",
"title": "Chess career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In May 2020, Krush played for the USA team in the FIDE Online Nations Cup.",
"title": "Chess career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Krush frequently contributes articles to Chess Life magazine and uschess.org. Her article on earning her grandmaster title in 2013 was honored as the \"Best of US Chess\" that year.",
"title": "Chess career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Krush attended Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn. She graduated in International Relations from New York University in 2006.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In March 2016, Hillary Clinton was a guest on the Steve Harvey television show. On the show, Krush appeared along with two actresses trying to impersonate Krush. The trio answered questions from host Steve Harvey and Clinton regarding her life and chess career. Clinton successfully identified the real Irina Krush.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In March 2020, she was hospitalized and treated for a \"moderate\" COVID-19 infection, then released to recover under quarantine at home. While quarantined, she played in the Isolated Queens Swiss, an online women's blitz chess tournament. She scored 7.5/10 in the tournament, putting her in joint second place, a half point behind tournament winner GM Alexandra Kosteniuk.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "On January 18, 2023, Krush appeared on a primetime special of The Price Is Right and won the Clock Game, but she failed to advance to the Showcases.",
"title": "Personal life"
}
]
| Irina Borisivna Krush is an American chess Grandmaster. She is the only woman to earn the GM title while playing for the United States. Krush is an eight-time U.S. Women's Champion. | 2001-02-22T03:46:51Z | 2023-12-25T12:59:38Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irina_Krush |
14,527 | Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques | The Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS; English: Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies) is a French research institute supporting advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics. It is located in Bures-sur-Yvette, just south of Paris. It is an independently governed research institute and a founding member of the University of Paris-Saclay.
The IHÉS was founded in 1958 by businessman and mathematical physicist Léon Motchane with the help of Robert Oppenheimer and Jean Dieudonné as a research centre in France, modeled on the renowned Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, United States.
IHÉS explicitly draws inspiration from the model of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (IAS). ... IHÉS adopted its basic characteristics – the intellectual ones – as a high level institute dedicated to basic research – and certain practical ones – such as the tradition of tea being served daily, conducive to exchanges of views. Of equal importance was the relationship between Oppenheimer and Léon Motchane (1900–1990), the founder and first director of IHÉS. As life member of the scientific committee, advisor to the director, frequent visitor and regular correspondent, Oppenheimer played a major role in the crucial early years at IHÉS. ... Oppenheimer and Motchane ... exchanged long letters and short telegrams on all aspects of life at IHÉS. ... Visits by Oppenheimer were cleverly orchestrated by Léon Motchane and reported in the press. Oppenheimer's presence was an event in itself and his coming to lHÉS gave the Institute important official recognition. Oppenheimer was to come to IHÉS three times: from 16 to 19 September 1959, on 17 and 18 October 1961 (in Bures, although the Institute had not moved there yet), and from 14 to 17 May 1963. His last visit, planned for 1965, was cancelled for health reasons.
The strong personality of Alexander Grothendieck and the broad sweep of his revolutionizing theories were a dominating feature of the first ten years at the IHÉS. René Thom received an invitation from IHÉS in 1963 and after his appointment remained there until his death in 2002. Dennis Sullivan is remembered as one who had a special talent for encouraging fruitful exchanges among visitors and provoking a new and deeper insight into their ideas.
The IHÉS runs a highly regarded mathematical journal, Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS.
IHÉS celebrated its 40th anniversary in 1998 and its 50th in 2008.
Alain Connes (Fields Medal 1982), has been holding the Léon Motchane Chair since 1979. Several CNRS researchers are also based at the IHES: Ahmed Abbes, Cédric Deffayet, Ofer Gabber, Fanny Kassel, and Christophe Soulé.
48°41′42″N 2°10′09″E / 48.694954°N 2.16908°E / 48.694954; 2.16908 | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS; English: Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies) is a French research institute supporting advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics. It is located in Bures-sur-Yvette, just south of Paris. It is an independently governed research institute and a founding member of the University of Paris-Saclay.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "The IHÉS was founded in 1958 by businessman and mathematical physicist Léon Motchane with the help of Robert Oppenheimer and Jean Dieudonné as a research centre in France, modeled on the renowned Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, United States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "IHÉS explicitly draws inspiration from the model of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (IAS). ... IHÉS adopted its basic characteristics – the intellectual ones – as a high level institute dedicated to basic research – and certain practical ones – such as the tradition of tea being served daily, conducive to exchanges of views. Of equal importance was the relationship between Oppenheimer and Léon Motchane (1900–1990), the founder and first director of IHÉS. As life member of the scientific committee, advisor to the director, frequent visitor and regular correspondent, Oppenheimer played a major role in the crucial early years at IHÉS. ... Oppenheimer and Motchane ... exchanged long letters and short telegrams on all aspects of life at IHÉS. ... Visits by Oppenheimer were cleverly orchestrated by Léon Motchane and reported in the press. Oppenheimer's presence was an event in itself and his coming to lHÉS gave the Institute important official recognition. Oppenheimer was to come to IHÉS three times: from 16 to 19 September 1959, on 17 and 18 October 1961 (in Bures, although the Institute had not moved there yet), and from 14 to 17 May 1963. His last visit, planned for 1965, was cancelled for health reasons.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The strong personality of Alexander Grothendieck and the broad sweep of his revolutionizing theories were a dominating feature of the first ten years at the IHÉS. René Thom received an invitation from IHÉS in 1963 and after his appointment remained there until his death in 2002. Dennis Sullivan is remembered as one who had a special talent for encouraging fruitful exchanges among visitors and provoking a new and deeper insight into their ideas.",
"title": "History"
},
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"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The IHÉS runs a highly regarded mathematical journal, Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS.",
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"text": "IHÉS celebrated its 40th anniversary in 1998 and its 50th in 2008.",
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"text": "Alain Connes (Fields Medal 1982), has been holding the Léon Motchane Chair since 1979. Several CNRS researchers are also based at the IHES: Ahmed Abbes, Cédric Deffayet, Ofer Gabber, Fanny Kassel, and Christophe Soulé.",
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"text": "48°41′42″N 2°10′09″E / 48.694954°N 2.16908°E / 48.694954; 2.16908",
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| The Institut des hautes études scientifiques is a French research institute supporting advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics. It is located in Bures-sur-Yvette, just south of Paris. It is an independently governed research institute and a founding member of the University of Paris-Saclay. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-11-01T15:52:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_des_Hautes_%C3%89tudes_Scientifiques |
14,531 | Iceland | Iceland (Icelandic: Ísland, pronounced [ˈistlant] ) is a Nordic island country between the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between North America and Europe. It is linked culturally and politically with Europe, and is the region's most sparsely populated country. Its capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which is home to about 36% of the country's roughly 380,000 residents. The official language of the country is Icelandic.
Located on a rift between tectonic plates, Iceland's geologic activity includes geysers and frequent volcanic eruptions. The interior consists of a volcanic plateau characterised by sand and lava fields, mountains, and glaciers, and many glacial rivers flow to the sea through the lowlands. Iceland is warmed by the Gulf Stream and has a temperate climate, despite a latitude just south of the Arctic Circle. Its high latitude and marine influence keep summers chilly, and most of its islands have a polar climate.
According to the ancient manuscript Landnámabók, the settlement of Iceland began in 874 AD when the Norwegian chieftain Ingólfr Arnarson became the first permanent settler on the island. In the following centuries, Norwegians, and to a lesser extent other Scandinavians, immigrated to Iceland, bringing with them thralls (i.e., slaves or serfs) of Gaelic origin.
The island was governed as an independent commonwealth under the native parliament, the Althing, one of the world's oldest functioning legislative assemblies. Following a period of civil strife, Iceland acceded to Norwegian rule in the 13th century. The establishment of the Kalmar Union in 1397 united the kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Iceland thus followed Norway's integration into that union, coming under Danish rule after Sweden seceded from the union in 1523. The Danish kingdom forcefully introduced Lutheranism to Iceland in 1550.
Influenced by ideals of nationalism after the French Revolution, Iceland's struggle for independence took form and culminated in the Danish–Icelandic Act of Union in 1918, with the establishment of the Kingdom of Iceland, sharing through a personal union the incumbent monarch of Denmark. During the occupation of Denmark in World War II, Iceland voted overwhelmingly to become a republic in 1944, thus ending the remaining formal ties with Denmark. Although the Althing was suspended from 1799 to 1845, the island republic has nevertheless been credited with sustaining the world's oldest and longest-running parliament.
Until the 20th century, Iceland relied largely on subsistence fishing and agriculture. Industrialization of the fisheries and Marshall Plan aid following World War II brought prosperity, and Iceland became one of the wealthiest and most developed nations in the world. It became a part of the European Economic Area in 1994; this further diversified the economy into sectors such as finance, biotechnology, and manufacturing.
Iceland has a market economy with relatively low taxes, compared to other OECD countries, as well as the highest trade union membership in the world. It maintains a Nordic social welfare system that provides universal health care and tertiary education for its citizens. Iceland ranks highly in international comparisons of national performance, such as quality of life, education, protection of civil liberties, government transparency, and economic freedom.
Icelandic culture is founded upon the nation's Scandinavian heritage. Most Icelanders are descendants of Norse and Gaelic settlers. Icelandic, a North Germanic language, is descended from Old West Norse and is closely related to Faroese. The country's cultural heritage includes traditional Icelandic cuisine, Icelandic literature, and medieval sagas. Iceland has the smallest population of any NATO member and is the only one with no standing army, possessing only a lightly armed coast guard.
The Sagas of Icelanders say that a Norwegian named Naddodd (or Naddador) was the first Norseman to reach Iceland, and in the ninth century, he named it Snæland or "snow land" because it was snowing. Following Naddodd, the Swede Garðar Svavarsson arrived, and so the island was then called Garðarshólmur which means "Garðar's Isle".
Then came a Viking named Flóki Vilgerðarson; his daughter drowned en route, then his livestock starved to death. The sagas say that the rather despondent Flóki climbed a mountain and saw a fjord (Arnarfjörður) full of icebergs, which led him to give the island its new and present name. The notion that Iceland's Viking settlers chose that name to discourage the settlement of their verdant isle is a myth.
According to both Landnámabók and Íslendingabók, monks known as the Papar lived in Iceland before Scandinavian settlers arrived, possibly members of a Hiberno-Scottish mission. Recent archaeological excavations have revealed the ruins of a cabin in Hafnir on the Reykjanes peninsula. Carbon dating indicates that it was abandoned sometime between 770 and 880. In 2016, archaeologists uncovered a longhouse in Stöðvarfjörður that has been dated to as early as 800.
Swedish Viking explorer Garðar Svavarsson was the first to circumnavigate Iceland in 870 and establish that it was an island. He stayed during the winter and built a house in Húsavík. Garðar departed the following summer, but one of his men, Náttfari, decided to stay behind with two slaves. Náttfari settled in what is now known as Náttfaravík, and he and his slaves became the first permanent residents of Iceland to be documented.
The Norwegian-Norse chieftain Ingólfr Arnarson built his homestead in present-day Reykjavík in 874. Ingólfr was followed by many other emigrant settlers, largely Scandinavians and their thralls, many of whom were Irish or Scottish. By 930, most arable land on the island had been claimed; the Althing, a legislative and judicial assembly was initiated to regulate the Icelandic Commonwealth. The lack of arable land also served as an impetus to the settlement of Greenland starting in 986. The period of these early settlements coincided with the Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures were similar to those of the early 20th century. At this time about 25% of Iceland was covered with forest, compared to 1% in the present day. Christianity was adopted by consensus around 999–1000, although Norse paganism persisted among segments of the population for some years afterward.
The Icelandic Commonwealth lasted until the 13th century when the political system devised by the original settlers proved unable to cope with the increasing power of Icelandic chieftains. The internal struggles and civil strife of the Age of the Sturlungs led to the signing of the Old Covenant in 1262, which ended the Commonwealth and brought Iceland under the Norwegian crown. Possession of Iceland passed from the Kingdom of Norway (872–1397) to the Kalmar Union in 1415, when the kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden were united. After the break-up of the union in 1523, it remained a Norwegian dependency, as a part of Denmark–Norway.
Infertile soil, volcanic eruptions, deforestation, and an unforgiving climate made for harsh life in a society where subsistence depended almost entirely on agriculture. The Black Death swept Iceland twice, first in 1402–1404 and again in 1494–1495. The former outbreak killed 50% to 60% of the population, and the latter 30% to 50%.
Around the middle of the 16th century, as part of the Protestant Reformation, King Christian III of Denmark began to impose Lutheranism on all his subjects. Jón Arason, the last Catholic bishop of Hólar, was beheaded in 1550 along with two of his sons. The country subsequently became officially Lutheran, and Lutheranism has since remained the dominant religion.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Denmark imposed harsh trade restrictions on Iceland. Natural disasters, including volcanic eruptions and disease, contributed to a decreasing population. In the summer of 1627, Barbary Pirates committed the events known locally as the Turkish Abductions, in which hundreds of residents were taken into slavery in North Africa and dozens killed; this was the only invasion in Icelandic history to have casualties. The 1707–08 Iceland smallpox epidemic is estimated to have killed a quarter to a third of the population. In 1783 the Laki volcano erupted, with devastating effects. In the years following the eruption, known as the Mist Hardships (Icelandic: Móðuharðindin), over half of all livestock in the country died. Around a quarter of the population starved to death in the ensuing famine.
In 1814, following the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark-Norway was broken up into two separate kingdoms via the Treaty of Kiel but Iceland remained a Danish dependency. Throughout the 19th century, the country's climate continued to grow colder, resulting in mass emigration to the New World, particularly to the region of Gimli, Manitoba in Canada, which was sometimes referred to as New Iceland. About 15,000 people emigrated, out of a total population of 70,000.
A national consciousness arose in the first half of the 19th century, inspired by romantic and nationalist ideas from mainland Europe. An Icelandic independence movement took shape in the 1850s under the leadership of Jón Sigurðsson, based on the burgeoning Icelandic nationalism inspired by the Fjölnismenn and other Danish-educated Icelandic intellectuals. In 1874, Denmark granted Iceland a constitution and limited home rule. This was expanded in 1904, and Hannes Hafstein served as the first Minister for Iceland in the Danish cabinet.
The Danish–Icelandic Act of Union, an agreement with Denmark signed on 1 December 1918 and valid for 25 years, recognised Iceland as a fully sovereign and independent state in a personal union with Denmark. The Government of Iceland established an embassy in Copenhagen and requested that Denmark carry out on its behalf certain defence and foreign affairs matters, subject to consultation with the Althing. Danish embassies around the world displayed two coats of arms and two flags: those of the Kingdom of Denmark and those of the Kingdom of Iceland. Iceland's legal position became comparable to those of countries belonging to the Commonwealth of Nations, such as Canada, whose sovereign is King Charles III.
During World War II, Iceland joined Denmark in asserting neutrality. After the German occupation of Denmark on 9 April 1940, the Althing replaced the King with a regent and declared that the Icelandic government would take control of its own defence and foreign affairs. A month later, British armed forces conducted Operation Fork, the invasion and occupation of the country, violating Icelandic neutrality. In 1941, the Government of Iceland, friendly to Britain, invited the then-neutral United States to take over its defence so that Britain could use its troops elsewhere.
On 31 December 1943, the Danish–Icelandic Act of Union expired after 25 years. Beginning on 20 May 1944, Icelanders voted in a four-day plebiscite on whether to terminate the personal union with Denmark, abolish the monarchy, and establish a republic. The vote was 97% to end the union, and 95% in favour of the new republican constitution. Iceland formally became a republic on 17 June 1944, with Sveinn Björnsson as its first president.
In 1946, the US Defence Force Allied left Iceland. The nation formally became a member of NATO on 30 March 1949, amid domestic controversy and riots. On 5 May 1951, a defence agreement was signed with the United States. American troops returned to Iceland as the Iceland Defence Force and remained throughout the Cold War. The US withdrew the last of its forces on 30 September 2006.
Iceland prospered during the Second World War. The immediate post-war period was followed by substantial economic growth, driven by the industrialisation of the fishing industry and the US Marshall Plan programme, through which Icelanders received the most aid per capita of any European country (at US$209, with the war-ravaged Netherlands a distant second at US$109).
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir assumed Iceland's presidency on 1 August 1980, making her the first elected female head of state in the world.
The 1970s were marked by the Cod Wars—several disputes with the United Kingdom over Iceland's extension of its fishing limits to 200 nmi (370 km) offshore. Iceland hosted a summit in Reykjavík in 1986 between United States President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, during which they took significant steps towards nuclear disarmament. A few years later, Iceland became the first country to recognise the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as they broke away from the USSR. Throughout the 1990s, the country expanded its international role and developed a foreign policy orientated towards humanitarian and peacekeeping causes. To that end, Iceland provided aid and expertise to various NATO-led interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq.
Iceland joined the European Economic Area in 1994, after which the economy was greatly diversified and liberalised. International economic relations increased further after 2001 when Iceland's newly deregulated banks began to raise great amounts of external debt, contributing to a 32 percent increase in Iceland's gross national income between 2002 and 2007.
In 2003–2007, following the privatisation of the banking sector under the government of Davíð Oddsson, Iceland moved towards having an economy based on international investment banking and financial services. It was quickly becoming one of the most prosperous countries in the world, but was hit hard by a major financial crisis. The crisis resulted in the greatest migration from Iceland since 1887, with a net emigration of 5,000 people in 2009.
Iceland's economy stabilised under the government of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir and grew by 1.6% in 2012. The centre-right Independence Party was returned to power in coalition with the Progressive Party in the 2013 election. In the following years, Iceland saw a surge in tourism as the country became a popular holiday destination. In 2016, Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned after being implicated in the Panama Papers scandal. Early elections in 2016 resulted in a right-wing coalition government of the Independence Party, the Reform Party and Bright Future. This government fell when Bright Future quit the coalition due to a scandal involving then-Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson's father's letter of support for a convicted child sex offender. Snap elections in October 2017 brought to power a new coalition consisting of the Independence Party, the Progressive Party, and the Left-Green Movement, headed by Katrín Jakobsdóttir.
After the 2021 parliamentary election, the new government was, just like the previous government, a tri-party coalition of the Independence Party, the Progressive Party, and the Left-Green Movement, headed by Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir.
Iceland is at the juncture of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The main island is entirely south of the Arctic Circle, which passes through the small Icelandic island of Grímsey off the main island's northern coast. The country lies between latitudes 63 and 68°N, and longitudes 25 and 13°W.
Iceland is closer to continental Europe than to mainland North America, although it is closest to Greenland (290 kilometres; 155 nautical miles), an island of North America. Iceland is generally included in Europe for geographical, historical, political, cultural, linguistic and practical reasons. Geologically, the island includes parts of both continental plates. The closest bodies of land in Europe are the Faroe Islands (420 km; 225 nmi); Jan Mayen Island (570 km; 310 nmi); Shetland and the Outer Hebrides, both about 740 km (400 nmi); and the Scottish mainland and Orkney, both about 750 km (405 nmi). The nearest part of Continental Europe is mainland Norway, about 970 km (525 nmi) away, while mainland North America is 2,070 km (1,120 nmi) away, at the northern tip of Labrador.
Iceland is the world's 18th-largest island, and Europe's second-largest island after Great Britain and before Ireland. The main island covers 101,826 km (39,315 sq mi), but the entire country is 103,000 km (40,000 sq mi) in size, of which 62.7% is tundra. Iceland contains about 30 minor islands, including the lightly populated Grímsey and the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago. Lakes and glaciers cover 14.3% of its surface; only 23% is vegetated. The largest lakes are Þórisvatn reservoir: 83–88 km (32–34 sq mi) and Þingvallavatn: 82 km (32 sq mi); other important lakes include Lagarfljót and Mývatn. Jökulsárlón is the deepest lake, at 248 m (814 ft).
Geologically, Iceland is part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a ridge along which the oceanic crust spreads and forms new crust. This part of the mid-ocean ridge is located above a mantle plume, causing Iceland to be subaerial (above the surface of the sea). The ridge marks the boundary between the Eurasian and North American Plates, and Iceland was created by rifting and accretion through volcanism along the ridge.
Many fjords punctuate Iceland's 4,970-km-long (3,088-mi) coastline, which is also where most settlements are situated. The island's interior, the Highlands of Iceland, is a cold and uninhabitable combination of sand, mountains, and lava fields. The major towns are the capital city of Reykjavík, along with its outlying towns of Kópavogur, Hafnarfjörður, and Garðabær, nearby Reykjanesbær where the international airport is located, and the town of Akureyri in northern Iceland. The island of Grímsey on the Arctic Circle contains the northernmost habitation of Iceland, whereas Kolbeinsey contains the northernmost point of Iceland. Iceland has three national parks: Vatnajökull National Park, Snæfellsjökull National Park, and Þingvellir National Park. The country is considered a "strong performer" in environmental protection, having been ranked 13th in Yale University's Environmental Performance Index of 2012.
A geologically young land at 16 to 18 million years old, Iceland is the surface expression of the Iceland Plateau, a large igneous province forming as a result of volcanism from the Iceland hotspot and along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the latter of which runs right through it. This means that the island is highly geologically active with many volcanoes including Hekla, Eldgjá, Herðubreið, and Eldfell. The volcanic eruption of Laki in 1783–1784 caused a famine that killed nearly a quarter of the island's population. In addition, the eruption caused dust clouds and haze to appear over most of Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for several months afterwards, and affected climates in other areas.
Iceland has many geysers, including Geysir, from which the English word is derived, and the famous Strokkur, which erupts every 8–10 minutes. After a phase of inactivity, Geysir started erupting again after a series of earthquakes in 2000. Geysir has since grown quieter and does not erupt often.
With the widespread availability of geothermal power and the harnessing of many rivers and waterfalls for hydroelectricity, most residents have access to inexpensive hot water, heating, and electricity. The island is composed primarily of basalt, a low-silica lava associated with effusive volcanism as has occurred also in Hawaii. Iceland, however, has a variety of volcanic types (composite and fissure), many producing more evolved lavas such as rhyolite and andesite. Iceland has hundreds of volcanoes with about 30 active volcanic systems.
Surtsey, one of the youngest islands in the world, is part of Iceland. Named after Surtr, it rose above the ocean in a series of volcanic eruptions between 8 November 1963 and 5 June 1968. Only scientists researching the growth of new life are allowed to visit the island.
On 21 March 2010, a volcano in Eyjafjallajökull in the south of Iceland erupted for the first time since 1821, forcing 600 people to flee their homes. Additional eruptions on 14 April forced hundreds of people to abandon their homes. The resultant cloud of volcanic ash brought major disruption to air travel across Europe.
Another large eruption occurred on 21 May 2011. This time it was the Grímsvötn volcano, located under the thick ice of Europe's largest glacier, Vatnajökull. Grímsvötn is one of Iceland's most active volcanoes, and this eruption was much more powerful than the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull activity, with ash and lava hurled 20 km (12 mi) into the atmosphere, creating a large cloud.
A great deal of volcanic activity was occurring in the Reykjanes Peninsula in 2020 and into 2021, after nearly 800 years of inactivity. After the eruption of the Fagradalsfjall volcano on 19 March 2021, National Geographic's experts predicted that this "may mark the start of decades of volcanic activity." The eruption was small, leading to a prediction that this volcano was unlikely to threaten "any population centers".
The highest elevation for Iceland is listed as 2,110 m (6,920 ft) at Hvannadalshnúkur (64°00′N 16°39′W).
On 19 December 2023, after weeks of seismic activity, a volcano erupted on Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula, prompting the evacuation of 4,000 people from Grindavik and the closure of the Blue Lagoon. The eruption began from 4km north-east of Grindavik, with visible lava flow. Unlike the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull, this event wasn't expected to cause significant disruption due to the volcano's limited ash cloud generation.
The climate of Iceland's coast is subarctic. The warm North Atlantic Current ensures generally higher annual temperatures than in most places of similar latitude in the world. Regions in the world with similar climates include the Aleutian Islands, the Alaska Peninsula, and Tierra del Fuego, although these regions are closer to the equator. Despite its proximity to the Arctic, the island's coasts remain ice-free through the winter. Ice incursions are rare, with the last having occurred on the north coast in 1969.
The climate varies between different parts of the island. Generally speaking, the south coast is warmer, wetter, and windier than the north. The Central Highlands are the coldest part of the country. Low-lying inland areas in the north are the aridest. Snowfall in winter is more common in the north than in the south.
The highest air temperature recorded was 30.5 °C (86.9 °F) on 22 June 1939 at Teigarhorn on the southeastern coast. The lowest was −38 °C (−36.4 °F) on 22 January 1918 at Grímsstaðir and Möðrudalur in the northeastern hinterland. The temperature records for Reykjavík are 26.2 °C (79.2 °F) on 30 July 2008, and −24.5 °C (−12.1 °F) on 21 January 1918.
Phytogeographically, Iceland belongs to the Arctic province of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. Plantlife consists mainly of grassland, which is regularly grazed by livestock. The most common tree native to Iceland is the northern birch (Betula pubescens), which formerly formed forests over much of Iceland, along with aspens (Populus tremula), rowans (Sorbus aucuparia), common junipers (Juniperus communis), and other smaller trees, mainly willows.
When the island was first settled, it was extensively forested, with around 30% of the land covered in trees. In the late 12th century, Ari the Wise described it in the Íslendingabók as "forested from mountain to sea shore". Permanent human settlement greatly disturbed the isolated ecosystem of thin, volcanic soils and limited species diversity. The forests were heavily exploited over the centuries for firewood and timber. Deforestation, climatic deterioration during the Little Ice Age, and overgrazing by sheep imported by settlers caused a loss of critical topsoil due to erosion. Today, many farms have been abandoned. Three-quarters of Iceland's 100,000 square kilometres (39,000 sq mi) is affected by soil erosion; 18,000 km (6,900 sq mi) is affected to a degree serious enough to make the land useless. Only a few small birch stands now exist in isolated reserves. The Icelandic Forest Service and other forestry groups promote large-scale reforestation in the country. Due to the reforestation efforts, the forest cover of Iceland increased six-fold since the 1990s. This helps to offset carbon emissions, prevent sand storms and increase the productivity of farms. The planting of new forests has increased the number of trees, but the result does not compare to the original forests. Some of the planted forests include introduced species. The tallest tree in Iceland is a sitka spruce planted in 1949 in Kirkjubæjarklaustur; it was measured at 25.2 m (83 ft) in 2013. Algae such as Chondrus crispus, Phyllphora truncata and Phyllophora crispa and others have been recorded from Iceland.
The only native land mammal when humans arrived was the Arctic fox, which came to the island at the end of the ice age, walking over the frozen sea. On rare occasions, bats have been carried to the island with the winds, but they are not able to breed there. No native or free-living reptiles or amphibians are on the island.
The animals of Iceland include the Icelandic sheep, cattle, chickens, goats, the sturdy Icelandic horse, and the Icelandic Sheepdog, all descendants of animals imported by Europeans. Wild mammals include the Arctic fox, mink, mice, rats, rabbits, and reindeer. Polar bears occasionally visit the island, travelling from Greenland on icebergs, but no Icelandic populations exist. In June 2008, two polar bears arrived in the same month. Marine mammals include the grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) and harbour seal (Phoca vitulina).
Many species of fish live in the ocean waters surrounding Iceland, and the fishing industry is a major part of Iceland's economy, accounting for roughly half of the country's total exports. Birds, especially seabirds, are an important part of Iceland's animal life. Atlantic puffins, skuas, and black-legged kittiwakes nest on its sea cliffs.
Commercial whaling is practised intermittently along with scientific whale hunts. Whale watching has become an important part of Iceland's economy since 1997.
Around 1,300 species of insects are known in Iceland. This is low compared with other countries (over one million species have been described worldwide). Iceland is essentially free of mosquitoes.
Iceland has a left–right multi-party system. Following the 2017 and 2021 parliamentary elections, the biggest parties are the centre-right Independence Party (Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn), the Progressive Party (Framsóknarflokkurinn) and the Left-Green Movement (Vinstrihreyfingin – grænt framboð). These three parties form the ruling coalition in the cabinet led by leftist Katrín Jakobsdóttir. Other political parties with seats in the Althing (Parliament) are the Social Democratic Alliance (Samfylkingin), the People's Party (Flokkur fólksins), Iceland's Pirates (Píratar), the Reform Party (Viðreisn) and the Centre Party (Miðflokkurinn).
Iceland was the first country in the world to have a political party formed and led entirely by women. Known as the Women's List or Women's Alliance (Kvennalistinn), it was founded in 1983 to advance the political, economic, and social needs of women. After participating in its first parliamentary elections, the Women's List helped increase the proportion of female parliamentarians by 15%. It disbanded in 1999, formally merging the next year with the Social Democratic Alliance, although about half of its members joined the Left-Green Movement instead. It did leave a lasting influence on Iceland's politics: every major party has a 40% quota for women, and in 2009 nearly a third of members of parliament were female, compared to the global average of 16%. Following the 2016 and 2021 elections, 48% of members of parliament are female.
In 2016, Iceland was ranked second in the strength of its democratic institutions and 13th in government transparency. The country has a high level of civic participation, with 81.4% voter turnout during the most recent elections, compared to an OECD average of 72%. However, only 50% of Icelanders say they trust their political institutions, slightly less than the OECD average of 56% (and most probably a consequence of the political scandals in the wake of the Icelandic financial crisis).
Iceland is a representative democracy and a parliamentary republic. The modern parliament, Alþingi (English: Althing), was founded in 1845 as an advisory body to the Danish monarch. It was widely seen as a re-establishment of the assembly founded in 930 in the Commonwealth period and temporarily suspended from 1799 to 1845. Consequently, "it is arguably the world's oldest parliamentary democracy." It has 63 members, elected for a maximum period of four years.
The head of government is the prime minister who, together with the cabinet, is responsible for executive government.
The president of Iceland, in contrast, is a largely ceremonial head of state and serves as a diplomat, but may veto laws voted by the parliament and put them to a national referendum. They are elected by popular vote for a term of four years with no term limit. The current president is Guðni Th. Jóhannesson. On 1 August 2016, he became the new president of Iceland, and he was re-elected with an overwhelming majority of the vote in the 2020 presidential election.
The elections for the president, the Althing, and local municipal councils are all held separately every four years.
The cabinet in the country's government is typically appointed by the president after a general election to the Althing. However, the appointment is usually negotiated by the leaders of the political parties, who decide amongst themselves which parties can form the cabinet and how to distribute its seats, as long as it has majority support in the Althing. If the party leaders are unable to come to an agreement within a reasonable period of time, the president will personally appoint the cabinet. This has not happened since the republic was founded in 1944, although in 1942 the regent, Sveinn Björnsson, appointed a non-parliamentary government. Sveinn held the practical position of a president at the time, and later became the country's first official president in 1944.
The governments of Iceland have always been coalition governments, with two or more parties involved, as no single political party has ever received a majority of seats in the Althing throughout the republican period. There is no legal consensus on the extent of the political power possessed by the office of the president; several provisions of the constitution appear to give the president some important powers, but other provisions and traditions suggest differently. In 1980, Icelanders elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as president, the world's first directly elected female head of state. She retired from office in 1996. In 2009, Iceland became the first country with an openly gay head of government when Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became prime minister.
Iceland is divided into regions, constituencies, and municipalities. The eight regions are primarily used for statistical purposes. District court jurisdictions also use an older version of this division. Until 2003, the constituencies for the parliamentary elections were the same as the regions, but by an amendment to the constitution, they were changed to the current six constituencies:
The redistricting change was made to balance the weight of different districts of the country since previously a vote cast in the sparsely populated areas around the country would count much more than a vote cast in the Reykjavík city area. The imbalance between districts has been reduced by the new system but still exists.
Sixty-nine municipalities in Iceland govern local matters like schools, transport, and zoning. These are the actual second-level subdivisions of Iceland, as the constituencies have no relevance except in elections and for statistical purposes. Reykjavík is by far the most populous municipality, about four times more populous than Kópavogur, the second one.
Iceland, which is a member of the UN, NATO, EFTA, Council of Europe, and OECD, maintains diplomatic and commercial relations with practically all nations, but its ties with the Nordic countries, Germany, the United States, Canada, and the other NATO nations are particularly close. Historically, due to cultural, economic, and linguistic similarities, Iceland is a Nordic country, and it participates in intergovernmental cooperation through the Nordic Council.
Iceland is a member of the European Economic Area (EEA), which allows the country access to the single market of the European Union (EU). It was not a member of the EU, but in July 2009, the Icelandic parliament, the Althing, voted in favour of the application for EU membership and officially applied on 17 July 2009. However, in 2013, opinion polls showed that many Icelanders were now against joining the EU; following the 2013 Icelandic parliamentary election the two parties that formed the island's new government—the centrist Progressive Party and the right-wing Independence Party—announced they would hold a referendum on EU membership. In 2015, Minister for Foreign Affairs Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson informed the EU that Iceland would no longer pursue membership, but the application was not formally withdrawn and there have been subsequent calls for a referendum on the issue.
Iceland has no standing army but has the Icelandic Coast Guard which also maintains the Iceland Air Defence System, and an Iceland Crisis Response Unit to support peacekeeping missions and perform paramilitary functions.
The Iceland Defense Force (IDF) was a military command of the United States Armed Forces from 1951 to 2006. The IDF, created at the request of NATO, came into existence when the United States signed an agreement to provide for the defence of Iceland. The IDF also consisted of civilian Icelanders and military members of other NATO nations. The IDF was downsized after the end of the Cold War and the U.S. Air Force maintained four to six interceptor aircraft at the Naval Air Station Keflavik until they were withdrawn on 30 September 2006. Since May 2008, NATO nations have periodically deployed fighters to patrol Icelandic airspace under the Icelandic Air Policing mission. Iceland supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq despite much domestic controversy, deploying a Coast Guard EOD team to Iraq, which was replaced later by members of the Iceland Crisis Response Unit. Iceland has also participated in the conflict in Afghanistan and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Despite the ongoing financial crisis the first new patrol ship in decades was launched on 29 April 2009.
Iceland was the neutral host of the historic 1986 Reagan–Gorbachev summit in Reykjavík, which set the stage for the end of the Cold War. Iceland's principal historical international disputes involved disagreements over exclusive economic zones. Conflict with the United Kingdom led to a series of so-called Cod Wars, which included confrontations between the Icelandic Coast Guard and the Royal Navy over British fishermen: in 1952–1956 due to the extension of Iceland's fishing zone from 3 to 4 nmi (5.6 to 7.4 km; 3.5 to 4.6 mi), in 1958–1961 following a further extension to 12 nmi (22.2 km; 13.8 mi), in 1972–1973 with another extension to 50 nmi (92.6 km; 57.5 mi), and in 1975–1976 after another extension to 200 nmi (370.4 km; 230.2 mi).
According to the 2011 Global Peace Index, Iceland is the most peaceful country in the world, due to its lack of armed forces, low crime rate and high level of socio-political stability. Iceland is listed in Guinness World Records as the "country ranked most at peace" and the "lowest military spending per capita".
In 2007, Iceland was the seventh-most productive country in the world per capita (US$54,858), and the fifth-most productive by GDP at purchasing power parity ($40,112). About 85 percent of the total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources. Use of abundant hydroelectric and geothermal power has made Iceland the world's largest electricity producer per capita. As a result of its commitment to renewable energy, the 2016 Global Green Economy Index ranked Iceland among the top 10 greenest economies in the world. Historically, Iceland's economy depended heavily on fishing, which still provides 40% of export earnings and employs 7% of the workforce. The economy is vulnerable to declining fish stocks and falls in world prices for its main material exports: fish and fish products, aluminium, and ferrosilicon. Whaling in Iceland has been historically significant. Iceland still relies heavily on fishing, but its importance is diminishing from an export share of 90% in the 1960s to 40% in 2006.
Until the 20th century, Iceland was a fairly poor country. It is now one of the most developed countries in the world. Strong economic growth led Iceland to be ranked third in the United Nations' Human Development Index report for 2021/2022. According to the Economist Intelligence Index of 2011, Iceland had the second-highest quality of life in the world. Based on the Gini coefficient, Iceland also has one of the lowest rates of income inequality in the world, and when adjusted for inequality, its HDI ranking is sixth. Iceland's unemployment rate has declined consistently since the crisis, with 4.8% of the labour force being unemployed as of June 2012, compared to 6% in 2011 and 8.1% in 2010.
Many political parties remain opposed to EU membership, primarily due to Icelanders' concern about losing control over their natural resources (particularly fisheries). The national currency of Iceland is the Icelandic króna (ISK). Iceland is the only country in the world to have a population under two million yet still have a floating exchange rate and an independent monetary policy.
A poll released on 5 March 2010 by Capacent Gallup showed that 31% of respondents were in favour of adopting the euro and 69% opposed. Another Capacent Gallup poll conducted in February 2012 found that 67.4% of Icelanders would reject EU membership in a referendum.
Iceland's economy has been diversifying into manufacturing and service industries in the last decade, including software production, biotechnology, and finance; industry accounts for around a quarter of economic activity, while services comprise close to 70%. The tourism sector is expanding, especially in ecotourism and whale-watching. On average, Iceland receives around 1.1 million visitors annually, which is more than three times the native population. 1.7 million people visited Iceland in 2016, 3 times more than the number that came in 2010. Iceland's agriculture industry, accounting for 5.4% of GDP, consists mainly of potatoes, green vegetables (in greenhouses), mutton, and dairy products. The financial centre is Borgartún in Reykjavík, which hosts a large number of companies and three investment banks. Iceland's stock market, the Iceland Stock Exchange (ISE), was established in 1985.
Iceland is ranked 27th in the 2012 Index of Economic Freedom, lower than in prior years but still among the freest in the world. As of 2016, it ranks 29th in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitive Index, one place lower than in 2015. According to the Global Innovation Index, Iceland is the 20th most innovative country in the world in 2022 and 2023. Unlike most Western European countries, Iceland has a flat tax system: the main personal income tax rate is a flat 22.75% and combined with municipal taxes, the total tax rate equals no more than 35.7%, not including the many available deductions. The corporate tax rate is a flat 18%, one of the lowest in the world. There is also a value added tax, whereas a net wealth tax was eliminated in 2006. Employment regulations are relatively flexible and the labour market is one of the freest in the world. Property rights are strong and Iceland is one of the few countries where they are applied to fishery management. Like other welfare states, taxpayers pay various subsidies to each other, but with spending being less than in most European countries.
Despite low tax rates, agricultural assistance is the highest among OECD countries and a potential impediment to structural change. Also, health care and education spending have relatively poor returns by OECD measures, though improvements have been made in both areas. The OECD Economic Survey of Iceland 2008 highlighted Iceland's challenges in currency and macroeconomic policy. There was a currency crisis that started in the spring of 2008, and on 6 October trading in Iceland's banks was suspended as the government battled to save the economy. An assessment by the OECD 2011 determined that Iceland has made progress in many areas, particularly in creating a sustainable fiscal policy and restoring the health of the financial sector; however, challenges remain in making the fishing industry more efficient and sustainable, as well as in improving monetary policy to address inflation. Iceland's public debt has decreased since the economic crisis, and as of 2015 is the 31st-highest in the world by proportion of national GDP.
Iceland was hit especially hard by the Great Recession that began in December 2007 because of the failure of its banking system and a subsequent economic crisis. Before the crash of the country's three largest banks, Glitnir, Landsbanki and Kaupthing, their combined debt exceeded approximately six times the nation's gross domestic product of €14 billion ($19 billion). In October 2008, the Icelandic parliament passed emergency legislation to minimise the impact of the financial crisis. The Financial Supervisory Authority of Iceland used permission granted by the emergency legislation to take over the domestic operations of the three largest banks. Icelandic officials, including central bank governor Davíð Oddsson, stated that the state did not intend to take over any of the banks' foreign debts or assets. Instead, new banks were established to take on the domestic operations of the banks, and the old banks were to be run into bankruptcy.
On 28 October 2008, the Icelandic government raised interest rates to 18% (as of August 2019, it was 3.5%), a move forced in part by the terms of acquiring a loan from International Monetary Fund (IMF). After the rate hike, trading on the Icelandic króna finally resumed on the open market, with a valuation at around 250 ISK per euro, less than one-third the value of the 1:70 exchange rate during most of 2008, and a significant drop from the 1:150 exchange ratio of the week before. On 20 November 2008, the Nordic countries agreed to lend Iceland $2.5 billion.
On 26 January 2009, the coalition government collapsed due to public dissent over the handling of the financial crisis. A new left-wing government was formed a week later and immediately set about removing Central Bank governor Davíð Oddsson and his aides from the bank through changes in the law. Davíð was removed on 26 February 2009 in the wake of protests outside the Central Bank.
Thousands of Icelanders left the country after the collapse, many of those moving to Norway. In 2005, 293 people moved from Iceland to Norway; in 2009, the figure was 1,625. In April 2010, the Icelandic Parliament's Special Investigation Commission published the findings of its investigation, revealing the extent of control fraud in this crisis. By June 2012, Landsbanki managed to repay about half of the Icesave debt.
According to Bloomberg in 2014, Iceland was on the trajectory of 2% unemployment as a result of crisis-management decisions made back in 2008, including allowing the banks to fail.
Iceland has a high level of car ownership per capita, with a car for every 1.5 inhabitants; it is the main form of transport. Iceland has 13,034 km (8,099 mi) of administered roads, of which 4,617 km (2,869 mi) are paved and 8,338 km (5,181 mi) are not. A great number of roads remain unpaved, mostly little-used rural roads. The road speed limits are 30 and 50 km/h (19 and 31 mph) in towns, 80 km/h (50 mph) on gravel country roads and 90 km/h (56 mph) on hard-surfaced roads.
Route 1, or the Ring Road (Icelandic: Þjóðvegur 1 or Hringvegur), was completed in 1974, and is the main road that runs around Iceland and connects all the inhabited parts of the island, with the interior of the island being uninhabited. This paved road is 1,332 km (828 mi) long with one lane in each direction, except near larger towns and cities and in the Hvalfjörður Tunnel where it has more lanes. Many bridges on it, especially in the north and east, are single lanes and made of timber or steel.
Keflavík International Airport (KEF) is the largest airport and the main aviation hub for international passenger transport. It serves several international and domestic airline companies. KEF is in the vicinity of the larger metropolitan capital areas, 49 km (30 mi) to the WSW of Reykjavík centre, and public bus services are available.
Iceland has no passenger railways.
Reykjavík Airport (RKV) is the second-largest airport, located just 1.5 km from the capital centre. RKV serves general aviation traffic and has daily or regular domestic flights to 12 local townships within Iceland. RKV also serves international flights to Greenland and the Faroe Islands, business and private aeroplanes along with aviation training.
Akureyri Airport (AEY) and Egilsstaðir Airport (EGS) are two other domestic airports with limited international service capacity. There are a total of 103 registered airports and airfields in Iceland; most of them are unpaved and located in rural areas. The second-longest runway is at Geitamelur, a four-runway glider field around 100 km (62 mi) east of Reykjavík.
Several ferry services provide regular access to various outpost communities or shorten travel distances.
Renewable sources—geothermal and hydropower—provide effectively all of Iceland's electricity and around 85% of the nation's total primary energy consumption, with most of the remainder consisting of imported oil products used in transportation and in the fishing fleet. A 2000 report from the University of Iceland suggested that Iceland could potentially convert from oil to hydrogen power by 2040. Iceland's largest geothermal power plants are Hellisheiði and Nesjavellir, while Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Plant is the country's largest hydroelectric power station. When the Kárahnjúkavirkjun started operating, Iceland became the world's largest electricity producer per capita. Iceland is one of the few countries that have filling stations dispensing hydrogen fuel for cars powered by fuel cells.
Despite this, Icelanders emitted 16.9 tonnes of CO2 per capita in 2016, the highest among EFTA and EU members, mainly resulting from transport and aluminium smelting. Nevertheless, in 2010, Iceland was reported by Guinness World Records as "the Greenest Country", reaching the highest score by the Environmental Sustainability Index, which measures a country's water use, biodiversity and adoption of clean energies, with a score of 93.5/100.
On 22 January 2009, Iceland announced its first round of offshore licences for companies wanting to conduct hydrocarbon exploration and production in a region northeast of Iceland, known as the Dreki area. Three exploration licences were awarded but all were subsequently relinquished.
Iceland's official governmental goal is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by the year 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by the year 2040.
The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture is responsible for the policies and methods that schools must use, and they issue the National Curriculum Guidelines. However, playschools, primary schools, and lower secondary schools are funded and administered by the municipalities. The government does allow citizens to home educate their children, however, under a very strict set of demands. Students must adhere closely to the government-mandated curriculum, and the parent teaching must acquire a government approved teaching certificate.
Nursery school, or leikskóli, is non-compulsory education for children younger than six years and is the first step in the education system. The current legislation concerning playschools was passed in 1994. They are also responsible for ensuring that the curriculum is suitable to make the transition into compulsory education as easy as possible.
Compulsory education, or grunnskóli, comprises primary and lower secondary education, which often is conducted at the same institution. Education is mandatory by law for children aged from 6 to 16 years. The school year lasts nine months, beginning between 21 August and 1 September, and ending between 31 May and 10 June. The minimum number of school days was once 170, but after a new teachers' wage contract, it increased to 180. Lessons take place five days a week. All public schools have mandatory education in Christianity, although an exemption may be considered by the Minister of Education.
Upper secondary education, or framhaldsskóli, follows lower secondary education. These schools are also known as gymnasia in English. Though not compulsory, everyone who has had a compulsory education has the right to upper secondary education. This stage of education is governed by the Upper Secondary School Act of 1996. All schools in Iceland are mixed-sex schools. The largest seat of higher education is the University of Iceland, which has its main campus in central Reykjavík. Other schools offering university-level instruction include Reykjavík University, University of Akureyri, Agricultural University of Iceland and Bifröst University.
An OECD assessment found that 64% of Icelanders aged 25–64 have earned the equivalent of a high-school degree, which is lower than the OECD average of 73%. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, only 69% have earned the equivalent of a high-school degree, significantly lower than the OECD average of 80%. Nevertheless, Iceland's education system is considered excellent: the Programme for International Student Assessment ranks it as the 16th best performing, above the OECD average. Students were particularly proficient in reading and mathematics.
According to a 2013 Eurostat report by the European Commission, Iceland spends around 3.11% of its GDP on scientific research and development (R&D), over 1 percentage point higher than the EU average of 2.03%, and has set a target of 4% to reach by 2020. Iceland was ranked 17th in the Global Innovation Index in 2021, up from 20th in 2019. A 2010 UNESCO report found that out of 72 countries that spend the most on R&D (US$100 million or more), Iceland ranked ninth by proportion of GDP, tied with Taiwan, Switzerland, and Germany and ahead of France, the United Kingdom and Canada.
The original population of Iceland was of Nordic and Gaelic origin. This is evident from literary evidence dating from the settlement period as well as from later scientific studies such as blood type and genetic analyses. One such genetic study indicated that the majority of the male settlers were of Nordic origin while the majority of the women were of Gaelic origin, meaning many settlers of Iceland were Norsemen who brought Gaelic slaves with them.
Iceland has extensive genealogical records dating back to the late 17th century and fragmentary records extending back to the Age of Settlement. The biopharmaceutical company deCODE genetics has funded the creation of a genealogy database that is intended to cover all of Iceland's known inhabitants. It views the database, called Íslendingabók, as a valuable tool for conducting research on genetic diseases, given the relative isolation of Iceland's population.
The population of the island is believed to have varied from 40,000 to 60,000 in the period ranging from initial settlement until the mid-19th century. During that time, cold winters, ash fall from volcanic eruptions, and bubonic plagues adversely affected the population several times. There were 37 famine years in Iceland between 1500 and 1804. The first census was carried out in 1703 and revealed that the population was then 50,358. After the destructive volcanic eruptions of the Laki volcano during 1783–1784, the population reached a low of about 40,000. Improving living conditions have triggered a rapid increase in population since the mid-19th century—from about 60,000 in 1850 to 320,000 in 2008. Iceland has a relatively young population for a developed country, with one out of five people being 14 years old or younger. With a fertility rate of 2.1, Iceland is one of only a few European countries with a birth rate sufficient for long-term population growth (see table below).
In December 2007, 33,678 people (13.5% of the total population) living in Iceland had been born abroad, including children of Icelandic parents living abroad. Around 19,000 people (6% of the population) held foreign citizenship. Polish people make up the largest minority group by a considerable margin and still form the bulk of the foreign workforce. About 8,000 Poles now live in Iceland, 1,500 of them in Fjarðabyggð where they make up 75% of the workforce who are constructing the Fjarðarál aluminium plant. Large-scale construction projects in the east of Iceland (see Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Plant) have also brought in many people whose stay is expected to be temporary. Many Polish immigrants were also considering leaving in 2008 as a result of the Icelandic financial crisis.
The southwest corner of Iceland is by far the most densely populated region. It is also the location of the capital Reykjavík, the northernmost national capital in the world. More than 70 percent of Iceland's population lives in the southwest corner (Greater Reykjavík and the nearby Southern Peninsula), which covers less than two percent of Iceland's land area. The largest town outside Greater Reykjavík is Reykjanesbær, which is located on the Southern Peninsula, less than 50 km (31 mi) from the capital. The largest town outside the southwest corner is Akureyri in northern Iceland.
Some 500 Icelanders under the leadership of Erik the Red settled Greenland in the late tenth century. The total population reached a high point of perhaps 5,000, and developed independent institutions before disappearing by 1500. People from Greenland attempted to set up a settlement at Vinland in North America, but abandoned it in the face of hostility from the Indigenous residents.
Emigration of Icelanders to the United States and Canada began in the 1870s. As of 2006, Canada had over 88,000 people of Icelandic descent, while there are more than 40,000 Americans of Icelandic descent, according to the 2000 US census.
Iceland's 10 most populous urban areas:
Iceland's official written and spoken language is Icelandic, a North Germanic language descended from Old Norse. In grammar and vocabulary, it has changed less from Old Norse than the other Nordic languages; Icelandic has preserved more verb and noun inflection, and has to a considerable extent developed new vocabulary based on native roots rather than borrowings from other languages. The puristic tendency in the development of Icelandic vocabulary is to a large degree a result of conscious language planning, in addition to centuries of isolation. Icelandic is the only living language to retain the use of the runic letter Þ in Latin script. The closest living relative of the Icelandic language is Faroese.
Icelandic Sign Language was officially recognised as a minority language in 2011. In education, its use for Iceland's deaf community is regulated by the National Curriculum Guide.
English and Danish are compulsory subjects in the school curriculum. English is widely understood and spoken, while basic to moderate knowledge of Danish is common mainly among the older generations. Polish is mostly spoken by the local Polish community (the largest minority of Iceland), and Danish is mostly spoken in a way largely comprehensible to Swedes and Norwegians—it is often referred to as skandinavíska (i.e. Scandinavian) in Iceland.
Rather than using family names, as is the usual custom in most Western nations, Icelanders carry patronymic or matronymic surnames, patronyms being far more commonly practised. Patronymic last names are based on the first name of the father, while matronymic names are based on the first name of the mother. These follow the person's given name, e.g. Elísabet Jónsdóttir ("Elísabet, Jón's daughter" (Jón being the father)) or Ólafur Katrínarson ("Ólafur, Katrín's son" (Katrín being the mother)). Consequently, Icelanders refer to one another by their given name, and the Icelandic telephone directory lists people alphabetically by the first name rather than by surname. All new names must be approved by the Icelandic Naming Committee.
Iceland has a universal health care system that is administered by its Ministry of Welfare (Icelandic: Velferðarráðuneytið) and paid for mostly by taxes (85%) and to a lesser extent by service fees (15%). Unlike most countries, there are no private hospitals, and private insurance is practically nonexistent.
A considerable portion of the government budget is assigned to health care, and Iceland ranks 11th in health care expenditures as a percentage of GDP and 14th in spending per capita. Overall, the country's health care system is one of the best performing in the world, ranked 15th by the World Health Organization. According to an OECD report, Iceland devotes far more resources to healthcare than most industrialised nations. As of 2009, Iceland had 3.7 doctors per 1,000 people (compared with an average of 3.1 in OECD countries) and 15.3 nurses per 1,000 people (compared with an OECD average of 8.4).
Icelanders are among the world's healthiest people, with 81% reporting they are in good health, according to an OECD survey. Although it is a growing problem, obesity is not as prevalent as in other developed countries. Iceland has many campaigns for health and wellbeing, including the famous television show Lazytown, starring and created by former gymnastics champion Magnus Scheving. Infant mortality is one of the lowest in the world, and the proportion of the population that smokes is lower than the OECD average. Almost all women choose to terminate pregnancies of children with Down syndrome in Iceland. The average life expectancy is 81.8 (compared to an OECD average of 79.5), the fourth-highest in the world.
Iceland has a very low level of pollution, thanks to an overwhelming reliance on cleaner geothermal energy, a low population density, and a high level of environmental consciousness among citizens. According to an OECD assessment, the amount of toxic materials in the atmosphere is far lower than in any other industrialised country measured.
in 2019 the age-adjusted suicide rate in Iceland was 11.2 cases per 100,000.
Icelanders have freedom of religion guaranteed under the Constitution, although the Church of Iceland, a Lutheran body, is the state church:
The Evangelical Lutheran Church shall be the State Church in Iceland and, as such, it shall be supported and protected by the State.
Approximately 80 percent of Icelanders legally affiliate with a religious denomination, a process that happens automatically at birth and from which they can choose to opt out. They also pay a church tax (sóknargjald), which the government directs to help support their registered religion, or, in the case of no religion, the University of Iceland.
The Registers Iceland keeps account of the religious affiliation of every Icelandic citizen. In 2017, Icelanders were divided into religious groups as follows:
On March 8, 2021, Iceland formally recognised Judaism as a religion for the first time. Iceland's Jews will have the choice to register as such and direct their taxes to their own religion. Among other benefits, the recognition will also allow Jewish marriage, baby-naming and funeral ceremonies to be civilly recognised.
Iceland is a very secular country; as with other Nordic nations, church attendance is relatively low. The above statistics represent administrative membership of religious organisations, which does not necessarily reflect the belief demographics of the population. According to a study published in 2001, 23% of the inhabitants were either atheist or agnostic. A Gallup poll conducted in 2012 found that 57% of Icelanders considered themselves "religious", 31% considered themselves "non-religious", while 10% defined themselves as "convinced atheists", placing Iceland among the ten countries with the highest proportions of atheists in the world.
Icelandic culture has its roots in North Germanic traditions. Icelandic literature is popular, in particular the sagas and eddas that were written during the High and Late Middle Ages. Centuries of isolation have helped to insulate the country's Nordic culture from external influence; a prominent example is the preservation of the Icelandic language, which remains the closest to Old Norse of all modern Nordic languages.
In contrast to other Nordic countries, Icelanders place relatively great importance on independence and self-sufficiency; in a public opinion analysis conducted by the European Commission, over 85% of Icelanders believe independence is "very important", compared to 47% of Norwegians, 49% of Danes, and an average of 53% for the EU25. Icelanders also have a very strong work ethic, working some of the longest hours of any industrialised nation.
According to a poll conducted by the OECD, 66% of Icelanders were satisfied with their lives, while 70% believed that their lives will be satisfying in the future. Similarly, 83% reported having more positive experiences in an average day than negative ones, compared to an OECD average of 72%, which makes Iceland one of the happiest countries in the OECD. A more recent 2012 survey found that around three-quarters of respondents stated they were satisfied with their lives, compared to a global average of about 53%.
Iceland is liberal about LGBT rights issues. In 1996, the Icelandic parliament passed legislation to create registered partnerships for same-sex couples, conferring nearly all the rights and benefits of marriage. In 2006, parliament voted unanimously to grant same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couples in adoption, parenting, and assisted insemination treatment. In 2010, the Icelandic parliament amended the marriage law, making it gender-neutral and defining marriage as between two individuals, making Iceland one of the first countries in the world to legalise same-sex marriages. The law took effect on 27 June 2010. The amendment to the law also means registered partnerships for same-sex couples are now no longer possible, and marriage is their only option—identical to the existing situation for opposite-sex couples.
Icelanders are known for their strong sense of community and lack of social isolation: An OECD survey found that 98% believe they know someone they could rely on in a time of need, higher than in any other industrialised country. Similarly, only 6% reported "rarely" or "never" socialising with others. This high level of social cohesion is attributed to the small size and homogeneity of the population, as well as to a long history of harsh survival in an isolated environment, which reinforced the importance of unity and cooperation.
Egalitarianism is highly valued among the people of Iceland, with income inequality being among the lowest in the world. The constitution explicitly prohibits the enactment of noble privileges, titles, and ranks. Everyone is addressed by their first name. As in other Nordic countries, equality between the sexes is very high; Iceland is consistently ranked among the top three countries in the world for women to live in.
In 2011, Reykjavík was designated a UNESCO City of Literature.
Iceland's best-known classical works of literature are the Icelanders' sagas, prose epics set in Iceland's age of settlement. The most famous of these include Njáls saga, about an epic blood feud, and Grænlendinga saga and Eiríks saga, describing the discovery and settlement of Greenland and Vinland (modern Newfoundland). Egils saga, Laxdæla saga, Grettis saga, Gísla saga and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu are also notable and popular Icelanders' sagas.
A translation of the Bible was published in the 16th century. Important compositions from the 15th to the 19th century include sacred verse, most famously the Passion Hymns of Hallgrímur Pétursson, and rímur, rhyming epic poems. Originating in the 14th century, rímur were popular into the 19th century, when the development of new literary forms was provoked by the influential National-Romantic writer Jónas Hallgrímsson. In recent times, Iceland has produced many great writers, the best-known of whom is arguably Halldór Laxness, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955 (the only Icelander to win a Nobel Prize thus far). Steinn Steinarr was an influential modernist poet during the early 20th century who remains popular.
Icelanders are avid consumers of literature, with the highest number of bookstores per capita in the world. For its size, Iceland imports and translates more international literature than any other nation. Iceland also has the highest per capita publication of books and magazines, and around 10% of the population will publish a book in their lifetimes.
Most books in Iceland are sold between late September to early November. This period is known as Jólabókaflóð, the Christmas Book Flood. The Flood begins with the Iceland Publisher's Association distributing Bókatíðindi, a catalogue of all new publications, free to each Icelandic home.
The distinctive rendition of the Icelandic landscape by its painters can be linked to nationalism and the movement for home rule and independence, which was very active in the mid-19th century.
Contemporary Icelandic painting is typically traced to the work of Þórarinn Þorláksson, who, following formal training in art in the 1890s in Copenhagen, returned to Iceland to paint and exhibit works from 1900 to his death in 1924, almost exclusively portraying the Icelandic landscape. Several other Icelandic men and women artists studied at Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at that time, including Ásgrímur Jónsson, who together with Þórarinn created a distinctive portrayal of Iceland's landscape in a romantic naturalistic style. Other landscape artists quickly followed in the footsteps of Þórarinn and Ásgrímur. These included Jóhannes Kjarval and Júlíana Sveinsdóttir. Kjarval in particular is noted for the distinct techniques in the application of paint that he developed in a concerted effort to render the characteristic volcanic rock that dominates the Icelandic environment. Einar Hákonarson is an expressionistic and figurative painter who by some is considered to have brought the figure back into Icelandic painting. In the 1980s, many Icelandic artists worked with the subject of the new painting in their work.
In recent years the artistic practice has multiplied, and the Icelandic art scene has become a setting for many large-scale projects and exhibitions. The artist-run gallery space Kling og Bang, members of which later ran the studio complex and exhibition venue Klink og Bank, has been a significant part of the trend of self-organised spaces, exhibitions, and projects. The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík Municipal Art Museum, Reykjavík Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Iceland are the larger, more established institutions, curating shows and festivals.
Much Icelandic music is related to Nordic music, and includes folk and pop traditions. Notable Icelandic music acts include medieval music group Voces Thules, alternative and indie rock acts such as The Sugarcubes, Sóley and Of Monsters and Men, jazz fusion band Mezzoforte, pop singers such as Hafdís Huld, Emilíana Torrini and Björk, solo ballad singers like Bubbi Morthens, and post-rock bands such as Amiina and Sigur Rós. Independent music is strong in Iceland, with bands such as múm and solo artists such as Daði Freyr.
Traditional Icelandic music is strongly religious. Hymns, both religious and secular, are a particularly well-developed form of music, due to the scarcity of musical instruments throughout much of Iceland's history. Hallgrímur Pétursson wrote many Protestant hymns in the 17th century. Icelandic music was modernised in the 19th century when Magnús Stephensen brought pipe organs, which were followed by harmoniums. Other vital traditions of Icelandic music are epic alliterative and rhyming ballads called rímur. Rímur are epic tales, usually a cappella, which can be traced back to skaldic poetry, using complex metaphors and elaborate rhyme schemes. The best-known rímur poet of the 19th century was Sigurður Breiðfjörð (1798–1846). A modern revitalisation of the tradition began in 1929 with the formation of Kvæðamannafélagið Iðunn [is].
Among Iceland's best-known classical composers are Daníel Bjarnason and Anna S. Þorvaldsdóttir, who in 2012 received the Nordic Council Music Prize and in 2015 was chosen as the New York Philharmonic's Kravis Emerging Composer, an honour that includes a $50,000 cash prize and a commission to write a composition for the orchestra; she is the second recipient.
The national anthem of Iceland is Lofsöngur, written by Matthías Jochumsson, with music by Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson.
Iceland's largest television stations are the state-run Sjónvarpið and the privately owned Stöð 2 and SkjárEinn. Smaller stations exist, many of them local. Radio is broadcast throughout the country, including in some parts of the interior. The main radio stations are Rás 1, Rás 2, X-ið 977, Bylgjan and FM957. The daily newspapers are Morgunblaðið and Fréttablaðið. The most popular websites are the news sites Vísir and Mbl.is.
Iceland is home to LazyTown (Icelandic: Latibær), a children's educational musical comedy programme created by Magnús Scheving. It has become a very popular programme for children and adults and is shown in over 100 countries, including the Americas, the UK and Sweden. The LazyTown studios are located in Garðabær. The 2015 television crime series Trapped aired in the UK on BBC4 in February and March 2016, to critical acclaim and according to the Guardian "the unlikeliest TV hit of the year".
In 1992, the Icelandic film industry achieved its greatest recognition hitherto, when Friðrik Þór Friðriksson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for his Children of Nature. It features the story of an old man who is unable to continue running his farm. After being unwelcomed in his daughter's and father-in-law's house in town, he is put in a home for the elderly. There, he meets an old girlfriend of his youth, and they both begin a journey through the wilds of Iceland to die together. This is the only Icelandic movie to have ever been nominated for an Academy Award.
Singer-songwriter Björk received international acclaim for her starring role in the Danish musical drama Dancer in the Dark, directed by Lars von Trier, in which she plays Selma Ježková, a factory worker who struggles to pay for her son's eye operation. The film premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where she won the Best Actress Award. The movie also led Björk to nominations for Best Original Song at the 73rd Academy Awards, with the song I've Seen It All and for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama.
Guðrún S. Gísladóttir, who is Icelandic, played one of the major roles in Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's film The Sacrifice (1986). Anita Briem, known for her performance in Showtime's The Tudors, is also Icelandic. Briem starred in the film Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008), which shot scenes in Iceland. The James Bond movie Die Another Day (2002) is set for a large part in Iceland. Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar (2014) was also filmed in Iceland for some of its scenes, as was Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012).
On 17 June 2010, the parliament passed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, proposing greater protection of free speech rights and the identity of journalists and whistle-blowers—the strongest journalist protection law in the world. According to a 2011 report by Freedom House, Iceland is one of the highest-ranked countries in press freedom.
CCP Games, developers of the critically acclaimed EVE Online and Dust 514, are headquartered in Reykjavík. CCP Games hosts the third-most populated MMO in the world, which also has the largest total game area for an online game, according to Guinness World Records.
Iceland has a highly developed internet culture, with around 95% of the population having internet access, the highest proportion in the world. Iceland ranked 12th in the World Economic Forum's 2009–2010 Network Readiness Index, which measures a country's ability to competitively exploit communications technology. The United Nations International Telecommunication Union ranks the country third in its development of information and communications technology, having moved up four places between 2008 and 2010. In February 2013 the country (ministry of the interior) was researching possible methods to protect children in regards to Internet pornography, claiming that pornography online is a threat to children as it supports child slavery and abuse. Strong voices within the community expressed concerns with this, stating that it is impossible to block access to pornography without compromising freedom of speech.
Much of Iceland's cuisine is based on fish, lamb, and dairy products, with little to no use of herbs or spices. Due to the island's climate, fruits and vegetables are not generally a component of traditional dishes, although the use of greenhouses has made them more common in contemporary food. Þorramatur is a selection of traditional cuisine consisting of many dishes and is usually consumed around the month of Þorri, which begins on the first Friday after 19 January. Traditional dishes also include skyr (a yogurt-like cheese), hákarl (cured shark), cured ram, singed sheep heads, and black pudding, Flatkaka (flatbread), dried fish and dark rye bread traditionally baked in the ground in geothermal areas. Puffin is considered a local delicacy that is often prepared through broiling.
Breakfast usually consists of pancakes, cereal, fruit, and coffee, while lunch may take the form of a smörgåsbord. The main meal of the day for most Icelanders is dinner, which usually involves fish or lamb as the main course. Seafood is central to most Icelandic cooking, particularly cod and haddock but also salmon, herring, and halibut. It is often prepared in a wide variety of ways, either smoked, pickled, boiled, or dried. Lamb is by far the most common meat, and it tends to be either smoke-cured (known as hangikjöt) or salt-preserved (saltkjöt). Many older dishes make use of every part of the sheep, such as slátur, which consists of offal (internal organs and entrails) minced together with blood and served in sheep stomach. Additionally, boiled or mashed potatoes, pickled cabbage, green beans, and rye bread are prevalent side dishes.
Coffee is a popular beverage in Iceland, with the country being third placed by per capita consumption worldwide in 2016, and is drunk at breakfast, after meals, and with a light snack in mid-afternoon. Coca-Cola is also widely consumed, to the extent that the country is said to have one of the highest per capita consumption rates in the world.
Iceland's signature alcoholic beverage is brennivín (literally "burnt [i.e., distilled] wine"), which is similar in flavouring to the akvavit variant of Scandinavian brännvin. It is a type of schnapps made from distilled potatoes and flavoured with either caraway seeds or angelica. Its potency has earned it the nickname svarti dauði ("Black Death"). Modern distilleries on Iceland produce vodka (Reyka), gin (Ísafold), moss schnapps (Fjallagrasa), and a birch-flavoured schnapps and liqueur (Foss Distillery's Birkir and Björk). Martin Miller blends Icelandic water with its England-distilled gin on the island. Strong beer was banned until 1989, so bjórlíki, a mixture of legal, low-alcohol pilsner beer and vodka, became popular. Several strong beers are now made by Icelandic breweries.
Sport is an important part of Icelandic culture, as the population is generally quite active. The main traditional sport in Iceland is Glíma, a form of wrestling thought to have originated in medieval times.
Popular sports include football, track and field, handball and basketball. Handball is often referred to as the national sport. The Icelandic national football team qualified for the 2016 UEFA European football championship for the first time. They recorded a draw against later winners Portugal in the group stage, and defeated England 2–1 in the round of 16, with goals from Ragnar Sigurðsson and Kolbeinn Sigþórsson. They then lost to hosts and later finalists France in the quarter-finals. Following up on this, Iceland made its debut at the 2018 FIFA World Cup. For both the European and the world championships, Iceland is to date the smallest nation in terms of population to qualify.
Iceland is also the smallest country to ever qualify for Eurobasket, having done so in both 2015 and 2017. However, they have not managed to win a single game in the European Basketball final stages.
Iceland has excellent conditions for skiing, fishing, snowboarding, ice climbing and rock climbing, although mountain climbing and hiking are preferred by the general public. Iceland is also a world-class destination for alpine ski touring and Telemark skiing, with the Troll Peninsula in Northern Iceland being the main centre of activity. Although the country's environment is generally ill-suited for golf, there are nevertheless many golf courses throughout the island, and Iceland has a greater percentage of the population playing golf than Scotland with over 17,000 registered golfers out of a population of approximately 300,000. Iceland hosts an annual international golf tournament known as the Arctic Open played through the night during the summer solstice at Akureyri Golf Club. Iceland has also won the second most World's Strongest Man competitions of any country with nine titles, including four by both Magnús Ver Magnússon and Jón Páll Sigmarsson and most recently Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson in 2018.
Iceland is also one of the leading countries in ocean rowing. Icelandic explorer and endurance athlete Fiann Paul holds the highest number of performance-based Guinness World Records within a single athletic discipline. As of 2020, he is the first and only person to achieve the Ocean Explorers Grand Slam (performing open-water crossings on each of the five oceans using human-powered vessels) and has claimed overall speed Guinness World Records for the fastest rowing of all four oceans (Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, and the Arctic) in a human-powered row boat. He had achieved a total of 41, including 33 performance based Guinness World Records by 2020.
Swimming is popular in Iceland. Geothermally heated outdoor pools are widespread, and swimming courses are a mandatory part of the national curriculum. Horseback riding, which was historically the most prevalent form of transportation on the island, remains a common pursuit for many Icelanders.
The oldest sports association in Iceland is the Reykjavík Shooting Association, founded in 1867. Rifle shooting became very popular in the 19th century with the encouragement of politicians and nationalists who were pushing for Icelandic independence. To this day, it remains a significant pastime.
Iceland has also produced many chess masters and hosted the historic World Chess Championship 1972 in Reykjavík during the height of the Cold War. As of 2008, there have been nine Icelandic chess grandmasters, a considerable number given the small size of the population. Bridge is also popular, with Iceland participating in several international tournaments. Iceland won the world bridge championship (the Bermuda Bowl) in Yokohama, Japan, in 1991 and took second place (with Sweden) in Hamilton, Bermuda, in 1950.
65°N 18°W / 65°N 18°W / 65; -18 | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iceland (Icelandic: Ísland, pronounced [ˈistlant] ) is a Nordic island country between the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between North America and Europe. It is linked culturally and politically with Europe, and is the region's most sparsely populated country. Its capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which is home to about 36% of the country's roughly 380,000 residents. The official language of the country is Icelandic.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Located on a rift between tectonic plates, Iceland's geologic activity includes geysers and frequent volcanic eruptions. The interior consists of a volcanic plateau characterised by sand and lava fields, mountains, and glaciers, and many glacial rivers flow to the sea through the lowlands. Iceland is warmed by the Gulf Stream and has a temperate climate, despite a latitude just south of the Arctic Circle. Its high latitude and marine influence keep summers chilly, and most of its islands have a polar climate.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "According to the ancient manuscript Landnámabók, the settlement of Iceland began in 874 AD when the Norwegian chieftain Ingólfr Arnarson became the first permanent settler on the island. In the following centuries, Norwegians, and to a lesser extent other Scandinavians, immigrated to Iceland, bringing with them thralls (i.e., slaves or serfs) of Gaelic origin.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The island was governed as an independent commonwealth under the native parliament, the Althing, one of the world's oldest functioning legislative assemblies. Following a period of civil strife, Iceland acceded to Norwegian rule in the 13th century. The establishment of the Kalmar Union in 1397 united the kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Iceland thus followed Norway's integration into that union, coming under Danish rule after Sweden seceded from the union in 1523. The Danish kingdom forcefully introduced Lutheranism to Iceland in 1550.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Influenced by ideals of nationalism after the French Revolution, Iceland's struggle for independence took form and culminated in the Danish–Icelandic Act of Union in 1918, with the establishment of the Kingdom of Iceland, sharing through a personal union the incumbent monarch of Denmark. During the occupation of Denmark in World War II, Iceland voted overwhelmingly to become a republic in 1944, thus ending the remaining formal ties with Denmark. Although the Althing was suspended from 1799 to 1845, the island republic has nevertheless been credited with sustaining the world's oldest and longest-running parliament.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Until the 20th century, Iceland relied largely on subsistence fishing and agriculture. Industrialization of the fisheries and Marshall Plan aid following World War II brought prosperity, and Iceland became one of the wealthiest and most developed nations in the world. It became a part of the European Economic Area in 1994; this further diversified the economy into sectors such as finance, biotechnology, and manufacturing.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Iceland has a market economy with relatively low taxes, compared to other OECD countries, as well as the highest trade union membership in the world. It maintains a Nordic social welfare system that provides universal health care and tertiary education for its citizens. Iceland ranks highly in international comparisons of national performance, such as quality of life, education, protection of civil liberties, government transparency, and economic freedom.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Icelandic culture is founded upon the nation's Scandinavian heritage. Most Icelanders are descendants of Norse and Gaelic settlers. Icelandic, a North Germanic language, is descended from Old West Norse and is closely related to Faroese. The country's cultural heritage includes traditional Icelandic cuisine, Icelandic literature, and medieval sagas. Iceland has the smallest population of any NATO member and is the only one with no standing army, possessing only a lightly armed coast guard.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Sagas of Icelanders say that a Norwegian named Naddodd (or Naddador) was the first Norseman to reach Iceland, and in the ninth century, he named it Snæland or \"snow land\" because it was snowing. Following Naddodd, the Swede Garðar Svavarsson arrived, and so the island was then called Garðarshólmur which means \"Garðar's Isle\".",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Then came a Viking named Flóki Vilgerðarson; his daughter drowned en route, then his livestock starved to death. The sagas say that the rather despondent Flóki climbed a mountain and saw a fjord (Arnarfjörður) full of icebergs, which led him to give the island its new and present name. The notion that Iceland's Viking settlers chose that name to discourage the settlement of their verdant isle is a myth.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "According to both Landnámabók and Íslendingabók, monks known as the Papar lived in Iceland before Scandinavian settlers arrived, possibly members of a Hiberno-Scottish mission. Recent archaeological excavations have revealed the ruins of a cabin in Hafnir on the Reykjanes peninsula. Carbon dating indicates that it was abandoned sometime between 770 and 880. In 2016, archaeologists uncovered a longhouse in Stöðvarfjörður that has been dated to as early as 800.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Swedish Viking explorer Garðar Svavarsson was the first to circumnavigate Iceland in 870 and establish that it was an island. He stayed during the winter and built a house in Húsavík. Garðar departed the following summer, but one of his men, Náttfari, decided to stay behind with two slaves. Náttfari settled in what is now known as Náttfaravík, and he and his slaves became the first permanent residents of Iceland to be documented.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Norwegian-Norse chieftain Ingólfr Arnarson built his homestead in present-day Reykjavík in 874. Ingólfr was followed by many other emigrant settlers, largely Scandinavians and their thralls, many of whom were Irish or Scottish. By 930, most arable land on the island had been claimed; the Althing, a legislative and judicial assembly was initiated to regulate the Icelandic Commonwealth. The lack of arable land also served as an impetus to the settlement of Greenland starting in 986. The period of these early settlements coincided with the Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures were similar to those of the early 20th century. At this time about 25% of Iceland was covered with forest, compared to 1% in the present day. Christianity was adopted by consensus around 999–1000, although Norse paganism persisted among segments of the population for some years afterward.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Icelandic Commonwealth lasted until the 13th century when the political system devised by the original settlers proved unable to cope with the increasing power of Icelandic chieftains. The internal struggles and civil strife of the Age of the Sturlungs led to the signing of the Old Covenant in 1262, which ended the Commonwealth and brought Iceland under the Norwegian crown. Possession of Iceland passed from the Kingdom of Norway (872–1397) to the Kalmar Union in 1415, when the kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden were united. After the break-up of the union in 1523, it remained a Norwegian dependency, as a part of Denmark–Norway.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Infertile soil, volcanic eruptions, deforestation, and an unforgiving climate made for harsh life in a society where subsistence depended almost entirely on agriculture. The Black Death swept Iceland twice, first in 1402–1404 and again in 1494–1495. The former outbreak killed 50% to 60% of the population, and the latter 30% to 50%.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Around the middle of the 16th century, as part of the Protestant Reformation, King Christian III of Denmark began to impose Lutheranism on all his subjects. Jón Arason, the last Catholic bishop of Hólar, was beheaded in 1550 along with two of his sons. The country subsequently became officially Lutheran, and Lutheranism has since remained the dominant religion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the 17th and 18th centuries, Denmark imposed harsh trade restrictions on Iceland. Natural disasters, including volcanic eruptions and disease, contributed to a decreasing population. In the summer of 1627, Barbary Pirates committed the events known locally as the Turkish Abductions, in which hundreds of residents were taken into slavery in North Africa and dozens killed; this was the only invasion in Icelandic history to have casualties. The 1707–08 Iceland smallpox epidemic is estimated to have killed a quarter to a third of the population. In 1783 the Laki volcano erupted, with devastating effects. In the years following the eruption, known as the Mist Hardships (Icelandic: Móðuharðindin), over half of all livestock in the country died. Around a quarter of the population starved to death in the ensuing famine.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 1814, following the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark-Norway was broken up into two separate kingdoms via the Treaty of Kiel but Iceland remained a Danish dependency. Throughout the 19th century, the country's climate continued to grow colder, resulting in mass emigration to the New World, particularly to the region of Gimli, Manitoba in Canada, which was sometimes referred to as New Iceland. About 15,000 people emigrated, out of a total population of 70,000.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "A national consciousness arose in the first half of the 19th century, inspired by romantic and nationalist ideas from mainland Europe. An Icelandic independence movement took shape in the 1850s under the leadership of Jón Sigurðsson, based on the burgeoning Icelandic nationalism inspired by the Fjölnismenn and other Danish-educated Icelandic intellectuals. In 1874, Denmark granted Iceland a constitution and limited home rule. This was expanded in 1904, and Hannes Hafstein served as the first Minister for Iceland in the Danish cabinet.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Danish–Icelandic Act of Union, an agreement with Denmark signed on 1 December 1918 and valid for 25 years, recognised Iceland as a fully sovereign and independent state in a personal union with Denmark. The Government of Iceland established an embassy in Copenhagen and requested that Denmark carry out on its behalf certain defence and foreign affairs matters, subject to consultation with the Althing. Danish embassies around the world displayed two coats of arms and two flags: those of the Kingdom of Denmark and those of the Kingdom of Iceland. Iceland's legal position became comparable to those of countries belonging to the Commonwealth of Nations, such as Canada, whose sovereign is King Charles III.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "During World War II, Iceland joined Denmark in asserting neutrality. After the German occupation of Denmark on 9 April 1940, the Althing replaced the King with a regent and declared that the Icelandic government would take control of its own defence and foreign affairs. A month later, British armed forces conducted Operation Fork, the invasion and occupation of the country, violating Icelandic neutrality. In 1941, the Government of Iceland, friendly to Britain, invited the then-neutral United States to take over its defence so that Britain could use its troops elsewhere.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On 31 December 1943, the Danish–Icelandic Act of Union expired after 25 years. Beginning on 20 May 1944, Icelanders voted in a four-day plebiscite on whether to terminate the personal union with Denmark, abolish the monarchy, and establish a republic. The vote was 97% to end the union, and 95% in favour of the new republican constitution. Iceland formally became a republic on 17 June 1944, with Sveinn Björnsson as its first president.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1946, the US Defence Force Allied left Iceland. The nation formally became a member of NATO on 30 March 1949, amid domestic controversy and riots. On 5 May 1951, a defence agreement was signed with the United States. American troops returned to Iceland as the Iceland Defence Force and remained throughout the Cold War. The US withdrew the last of its forces on 30 September 2006.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Iceland prospered during the Second World War. The immediate post-war period was followed by substantial economic growth, driven by the industrialisation of the fishing industry and the US Marshall Plan programme, through which Icelanders received the most aid per capita of any European country (at US$209, with the war-ravaged Netherlands a distant second at US$109).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Vigdís Finnbogadóttir assumed Iceland's presidency on 1 August 1980, making her the first elected female head of state in the world.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The 1970s were marked by the Cod Wars—several disputes with the United Kingdom over Iceland's extension of its fishing limits to 200 nmi (370 km) offshore. Iceland hosted a summit in Reykjavík in 1986 between United States President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, during which they took significant steps towards nuclear disarmament. A few years later, Iceland became the first country to recognise the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as they broke away from the USSR. Throughout the 1990s, the country expanded its international role and developed a foreign policy orientated towards humanitarian and peacekeeping causes. To that end, Iceland provided aid and expertise to various NATO-led interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Iceland joined the European Economic Area in 1994, after which the economy was greatly diversified and liberalised. International economic relations increased further after 2001 when Iceland's newly deregulated banks began to raise great amounts of external debt, contributing to a 32 percent increase in Iceland's gross national income between 2002 and 2007.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 2003–2007, following the privatisation of the banking sector under the government of Davíð Oddsson, Iceland moved towards having an economy based on international investment banking and financial services. It was quickly becoming one of the most prosperous countries in the world, but was hit hard by a major financial crisis. The crisis resulted in the greatest migration from Iceland since 1887, with a net emigration of 5,000 people in 2009.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Iceland's economy stabilised under the government of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir and grew by 1.6% in 2012. The centre-right Independence Party was returned to power in coalition with the Progressive Party in the 2013 election. In the following years, Iceland saw a surge in tourism as the country became a popular holiday destination. In 2016, Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned after being implicated in the Panama Papers scandal. Early elections in 2016 resulted in a right-wing coalition government of the Independence Party, the Reform Party and Bright Future. This government fell when Bright Future quit the coalition due to a scandal involving then-Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson's father's letter of support for a convicted child sex offender. Snap elections in October 2017 brought to power a new coalition consisting of the Independence Party, the Progressive Party, and the Left-Green Movement, headed by Katrín Jakobsdóttir.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "After the 2021 parliamentary election, the new government was, just like the previous government, a tri-party coalition of the Independence Party, the Progressive Party, and the Left-Green Movement, headed by Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Iceland is at the juncture of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. The main island is entirely south of the Arctic Circle, which passes through the small Icelandic island of Grímsey off the main island's northern coast. The country lies between latitudes 63 and 68°N, and longitudes 25 and 13°W.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Iceland is closer to continental Europe than to mainland North America, although it is closest to Greenland (290 kilometres; 155 nautical miles), an island of North America. Iceland is generally included in Europe for geographical, historical, political, cultural, linguistic and practical reasons. Geologically, the island includes parts of both continental plates. The closest bodies of land in Europe are the Faroe Islands (420 km; 225 nmi); Jan Mayen Island (570 km; 310 nmi); Shetland and the Outer Hebrides, both about 740 km (400 nmi); and the Scottish mainland and Orkney, both about 750 km (405 nmi). The nearest part of Continental Europe is mainland Norway, about 970 km (525 nmi) away, while mainland North America is 2,070 km (1,120 nmi) away, at the northern tip of Labrador.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Iceland is the world's 18th-largest island, and Europe's second-largest island after Great Britain and before Ireland. The main island covers 101,826 km (39,315 sq mi), but the entire country is 103,000 km (40,000 sq mi) in size, of which 62.7% is tundra. Iceland contains about 30 minor islands, including the lightly populated Grímsey and the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago. Lakes and glaciers cover 14.3% of its surface; only 23% is vegetated. The largest lakes are Þórisvatn reservoir: 83–88 km (32–34 sq mi) and Þingvallavatn: 82 km (32 sq mi); other important lakes include Lagarfljót and Mývatn. Jökulsárlón is the deepest lake, at 248 m (814 ft).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Geologically, Iceland is part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a ridge along which the oceanic crust spreads and forms new crust. This part of the mid-ocean ridge is located above a mantle plume, causing Iceland to be subaerial (above the surface of the sea). The ridge marks the boundary between the Eurasian and North American Plates, and Iceland was created by rifting and accretion through volcanism along the ridge.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Many fjords punctuate Iceland's 4,970-km-long (3,088-mi) coastline, which is also where most settlements are situated. The island's interior, the Highlands of Iceland, is a cold and uninhabitable combination of sand, mountains, and lava fields. The major towns are the capital city of Reykjavík, along with its outlying towns of Kópavogur, Hafnarfjörður, and Garðabær, nearby Reykjanesbær where the international airport is located, and the town of Akureyri in northern Iceland. The island of Grímsey on the Arctic Circle contains the northernmost habitation of Iceland, whereas Kolbeinsey contains the northernmost point of Iceland. Iceland has three national parks: Vatnajökull National Park, Snæfellsjökull National Park, and Þingvellir National Park. The country is considered a \"strong performer\" in environmental protection, having been ranked 13th in Yale University's Environmental Performance Index of 2012.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "A geologically young land at 16 to 18 million years old, Iceland is the surface expression of the Iceland Plateau, a large igneous province forming as a result of volcanism from the Iceland hotspot and along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the latter of which runs right through it. This means that the island is highly geologically active with many volcanoes including Hekla, Eldgjá, Herðubreið, and Eldfell. The volcanic eruption of Laki in 1783–1784 caused a famine that killed nearly a quarter of the island's population. In addition, the eruption caused dust clouds and haze to appear over most of Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for several months afterwards, and affected climates in other areas.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Iceland has many geysers, including Geysir, from which the English word is derived, and the famous Strokkur, which erupts every 8–10 minutes. After a phase of inactivity, Geysir started erupting again after a series of earthquakes in 2000. Geysir has since grown quieter and does not erupt often.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "With the widespread availability of geothermal power and the harnessing of many rivers and waterfalls for hydroelectricity, most residents have access to inexpensive hot water, heating, and electricity. The island is composed primarily of basalt, a low-silica lava associated with effusive volcanism as has occurred also in Hawaii. Iceland, however, has a variety of volcanic types (composite and fissure), many producing more evolved lavas such as rhyolite and andesite. Iceland has hundreds of volcanoes with about 30 active volcanic systems.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Surtsey, one of the youngest islands in the world, is part of Iceland. Named after Surtr, it rose above the ocean in a series of volcanic eruptions between 8 November 1963 and 5 June 1968. Only scientists researching the growth of new life are allowed to visit the island.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "On 21 March 2010, a volcano in Eyjafjallajökull in the south of Iceland erupted for the first time since 1821, forcing 600 people to flee their homes. Additional eruptions on 14 April forced hundreds of people to abandon their homes. The resultant cloud of volcanic ash brought major disruption to air travel across Europe.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Another large eruption occurred on 21 May 2011. This time it was the Grímsvötn volcano, located under the thick ice of Europe's largest glacier, Vatnajökull. Grímsvötn is one of Iceland's most active volcanoes, and this eruption was much more powerful than the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull activity, with ash and lava hurled 20 km (12 mi) into the atmosphere, creating a large cloud.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "A great deal of volcanic activity was occurring in the Reykjanes Peninsula in 2020 and into 2021, after nearly 800 years of inactivity. After the eruption of the Fagradalsfjall volcano on 19 March 2021, National Geographic's experts predicted that this \"may mark the start of decades of volcanic activity.\" The eruption was small, leading to a prediction that this volcano was unlikely to threaten \"any population centers\".",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The highest elevation for Iceland is listed as 2,110 m (6,920 ft) at Hvannadalshnúkur (64°00′N 16°39′W).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "On 19 December 2023, after weeks of seismic activity, a volcano erupted on Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula, prompting the evacuation of 4,000 people from Grindavik and the closure of the Blue Lagoon. The eruption began from 4km north-east of Grindavik, with visible lava flow. Unlike the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull, this event wasn't expected to cause significant disruption due to the volcano's limited ash cloud generation.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The climate of Iceland's coast is subarctic. The warm North Atlantic Current ensures generally higher annual temperatures than in most places of similar latitude in the world. Regions in the world with similar climates include the Aleutian Islands, the Alaska Peninsula, and Tierra del Fuego, although these regions are closer to the equator. Despite its proximity to the Arctic, the island's coasts remain ice-free through the winter. Ice incursions are rare, with the last having occurred on the north coast in 1969.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The climate varies between different parts of the island. Generally speaking, the south coast is warmer, wetter, and windier than the north. The Central Highlands are the coldest part of the country. Low-lying inland areas in the north are the aridest. Snowfall in winter is more common in the north than in the south.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The highest air temperature recorded was 30.5 °C (86.9 °F) on 22 June 1939 at Teigarhorn on the southeastern coast. The lowest was −38 °C (−36.4 °F) on 22 January 1918 at Grímsstaðir and Möðrudalur in the northeastern hinterland. The temperature records for Reykjavík are 26.2 °C (79.2 °F) on 30 July 2008, and −24.5 °C (−12.1 °F) on 21 January 1918.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Phytogeographically, Iceland belongs to the Arctic province of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom. Plantlife consists mainly of grassland, which is regularly grazed by livestock. The most common tree native to Iceland is the northern birch (Betula pubescens), which formerly formed forests over much of Iceland, along with aspens (Populus tremula), rowans (Sorbus aucuparia), common junipers (Juniperus communis), and other smaller trees, mainly willows.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "When the island was first settled, it was extensively forested, with around 30% of the land covered in trees. In the late 12th century, Ari the Wise described it in the Íslendingabók as \"forested from mountain to sea shore\". Permanent human settlement greatly disturbed the isolated ecosystem of thin, volcanic soils and limited species diversity. The forests were heavily exploited over the centuries for firewood and timber. Deforestation, climatic deterioration during the Little Ice Age, and overgrazing by sheep imported by settlers caused a loss of critical topsoil due to erosion. Today, many farms have been abandoned. Three-quarters of Iceland's 100,000 square kilometres (39,000 sq mi) is affected by soil erosion; 18,000 km (6,900 sq mi) is affected to a degree serious enough to make the land useless. Only a few small birch stands now exist in isolated reserves. The Icelandic Forest Service and other forestry groups promote large-scale reforestation in the country. Due to the reforestation efforts, the forest cover of Iceland increased six-fold since the 1990s. This helps to offset carbon emissions, prevent sand storms and increase the productivity of farms. The planting of new forests has increased the number of trees, but the result does not compare to the original forests. Some of the planted forests include introduced species. The tallest tree in Iceland is a sitka spruce planted in 1949 in Kirkjubæjarklaustur; it was measured at 25.2 m (83 ft) in 2013. Algae such as Chondrus crispus, Phyllphora truncata and Phyllophora crispa and others have been recorded from Iceland.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The only native land mammal when humans arrived was the Arctic fox, which came to the island at the end of the ice age, walking over the frozen sea. On rare occasions, bats have been carried to the island with the winds, but they are not able to breed there. No native or free-living reptiles or amphibians are on the island.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The animals of Iceland include the Icelandic sheep, cattle, chickens, goats, the sturdy Icelandic horse, and the Icelandic Sheepdog, all descendants of animals imported by Europeans. Wild mammals include the Arctic fox, mink, mice, rats, rabbits, and reindeer. Polar bears occasionally visit the island, travelling from Greenland on icebergs, but no Icelandic populations exist. In June 2008, two polar bears arrived in the same month. Marine mammals include the grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) and harbour seal (Phoca vitulina).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Many species of fish live in the ocean waters surrounding Iceland, and the fishing industry is a major part of Iceland's economy, accounting for roughly half of the country's total exports. Birds, especially seabirds, are an important part of Iceland's animal life. Atlantic puffins, skuas, and black-legged kittiwakes nest on its sea cliffs.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Commercial whaling is practised intermittently along with scientific whale hunts. Whale watching has become an important part of Iceland's economy since 1997.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Around 1,300 species of insects are known in Iceland. This is low compared with other countries (over one million species have been described worldwide). Iceland is essentially free of mosquitoes.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Iceland has a left–right multi-party system. Following the 2017 and 2021 parliamentary elections, the biggest parties are the centre-right Independence Party (Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn), the Progressive Party (Framsóknarflokkurinn) and the Left-Green Movement (Vinstrihreyfingin – grænt framboð). These three parties form the ruling coalition in the cabinet led by leftist Katrín Jakobsdóttir. Other political parties with seats in the Althing (Parliament) are the Social Democratic Alliance (Samfylkingin), the People's Party (Flokkur fólksins), Iceland's Pirates (Píratar), the Reform Party (Viðreisn) and the Centre Party (Miðflokkurinn).",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Iceland was the first country in the world to have a political party formed and led entirely by women. Known as the Women's List or Women's Alliance (Kvennalistinn), it was founded in 1983 to advance the political, economic, and social needs of women. After participating in its first parliamentary elections, the Women's List helped increase the proportion of female parliamentarians by 15%. It disbanded in 1999, formally merging the next year with the Social Democratic Alliance, although about half of its members joined the Left-Green Movement instead. It did leave a lasting influence on Iceland's politics: every major party has a 40% quota for women, and in 2009 nearly a third of members of parliament were female, compared to the global average of 16%. Following the 2016 and 2021 elections, 48% of members of parliament are female.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In 2016, Iceland was ranked second in the strength of its democratic institutions and 13th in government transparency. The country has a high level of civic participation, with 81.4% voter turnout during the most recent elections, compared to an OECD average of 72%. However, only 50% of Icelanders say they trust their political institutions, slightly less than the OECD average of 56% (and most probably a consequence of the political scandals in the wake of the Icelandic financial crisis).",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Iceland is a representative democracy and a parliamentary republic. The modern parliament, Alþingi (English: Althing), was founded in 1845 as an advisory body to the Danish monarch. It was widely seen as a re-establishment of the assembly founded in 930 in the Commonwealth period and temporarily suspended from 1799 to 1845. Consequently, \"it is arguably the world's oldest parliamentary democracy.\" It has 63 members, elected for a maximum period of four years.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The head of government is the prime minister who, together with the cabinet, is responsible for executive government.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The president of Iceland, in contrast, is a largely ceremonial head of state and serves as a diplomat, but may veto laws voted by the parliament and put them to a national referendum. They are elected by popular vote for a term of four years with no term limit. The current president is Guðni Th. Jóhannesson. On 1 August 2016, he became the new president of Iceland, and he was re-elected with an overwhelming majority of the vote in the 2020 presidential election.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The elections for the president, the Althing, and local municipal councils are all held separately every four years.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The cabinet in the country's government is typically appointed by the president after a general election to the Althing. However, the appointment is usually negotiated by the leaders of the political parties, who decide amongst themselves which parties can form the cabinet and how to distribute its seats, as long as it has majority support in the Althing. If the party leaders are unable to come to an agreement within a reasonable period of time, the president will personally appoint the cabinet. This has not happened since the republic was founded in 1944, although in 1942 the regent, Sveinn Björnsson, appointed a non-parliamentary government. Sveinn held the practical position of a president at the time, and later became the country's first official president in 1944.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The governments of Iceland have always been coalition governments, with two or more parties involved, as no single political party has ever received a majority of seats in the Althing throughout the republican period. There is no legal consensus on the extent of the political power possessed by the office of the president; several provisions of the constitution appear to give the president some important powers, but other provisions and traditions suggest differently. In 1980, Icelanders elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as president, the world's first directly elected female head of state. She retired from office in 1996. In 2009, Iceland became the first country with an openly gay head of government when Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became prime minister.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Iceland is divided into regions, constituencies, and municipalities. The eight regions are primarily used for statistical purposes. District court jurisdictions also use an older version of this division. Until 2003, the constituencies for the parliamentary elections were the same as the regions, but by an amendment to the constitution, they were changed to the current six constituencies:",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The redistricting change was made to balance the weight of different districts of the country since previously a vote cast in the sparsely populated areas around the country would count much more than a vote cast in the Reykjavík city area. The imbalance between districts has been reduced by the new system but still exists.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Sixty-nine municipalities in Iceland govern local matters like schools, transport, and zoning. These are the actual second-level subdivisions of Iceland, as the constituencies have no relevance except in elections and for statistical purposes. Reykjavík is by far the most populous municipality, about four times more populous than Kópavogur, the second one.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Iceland, which is a member of the UN, NATO, EFTA, Council of Europe, and OECD, maintains diplomatic and commercial relations with practically all nations, but its ties with the Nordic countries, Germany, the United States, Canada, and the other NATO nations are particularly close. Historically, due to cultural, economic, and linguistic similarities, Iceland is a Nordic country, and it participates in intergovernmental cooperation through the Nordic Council.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Iceland is a member of the European Economic Area (EEA), which allows the country access to the single market of the European Union (EU). It was not a member of the EU, but in July 2009, the Icelandic parliament, the Althing, voted in favour of the application for EU membership and officially applied on 17 July 2009. However, in 2013, opinion polls showed that many Icelanders were now against joining the EU; following the 2013 Icelandic parliamentary election the two parties that formed the island's new government—the centrist Progressive Party and the right-wing Independence Party—announced they would hold a referendum on EU membership. In 2015, Minister for Foreign Affairs Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson informed the EU that Iceland would no longer pursue membership, but the application was not formally withdrawn and there have been subsequent calls for a referendum on the issue.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Iceland has no standing army but has the Icelandic Coast Guard which also maintains the Iceland Air Defence System, and an Iceland Crisis Response Unit to support peacekeeping missions and perform paramilitary functions.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The Iceland Defense Force (IDF) was a military command of the United States Armed Forces from 1951 to 2006. The IDF, created at the request of NATO, came into existence when the United States signed an agreement to provide for the defence of Iceland. The IDF also consisted of civilian Icelanders and military members of other NATO nations. The IDF was downsized after the end of the Cold War and the U.S. Air Force maintained four to six interceptor aircraft at the Naval Air Station Keflavik until they were withdrawn on 30 September 2006. Since May 2008, NATO nations have periodically deployed fighters to patrol Icelandic airspace under the Icelandic Air Policing mission. Iceland supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq despite much domestic controversy, deploying a Coast Guard EOD team to Iraq, which was replaced later by members of the Iceland Crisis Response Unit. Iceland has also participated in the conflict in Afghanistan and the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Despite the ongoing financial crisis the first new patrol ship in decades was launched on 29 April 2009.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Iceland was the neutral host of the historic 1986 Reagan–Gorbachev summit in Reykjavík, which set the stage for the end of the Cold War. Iceland's principal historical international disputes involved disagreements over exclusive economic zones. Conflict with the United Kingdom led to a series of so-called Cod Wars, which included confrontations between the Icelandic Coast Guard and the Royal Navy over British fishermen: in 1952–1956 due to the extension of Iceland's fishing zone from 3 to 4 nmi (5.6 to 7.4 km; 3.5 to 4.6 mi), in 1958–1961 following a further extension to 12 nmi (22.2 km; 13.8 mi), in 1972–1973 with another extension to 50 nmi (92.6 km; 57.5 mi), and in 1975–1976 after another extension to 200 nmi (370.4 km; 230.2 mi).",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "According to the 2011 Global Peace Index, Iceland is the most peaceful country in the world, due to its lack of armed forces, low crime rate and high level of socio-political stability. Iceland is listed in Guinness World Records as the \"country ranked most at peace\" and the \"lowest military spending per capita\".",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 2007, Iceland was the seventh-most productive country in the world per capita (US$54,858), and the fifth-most productive by GDP at purchasing power parity ($40,112). About 85 percent of the total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources. Use of abundant hydroelectric and geothermal power has made Iceland the world's largest electricity producer per capita. As a result of its commitment to renewable energy, the 2016 Global Green Economy Index ranked Iceland among the top 10 greenest economies in the world. Historically, Iceland's economy depended heavily on fishing, which still provides 40% of export earnings and employs 7% of the workforce. The economy is vulnerable to declining fish stocks and falls in world prices for its main material exports: fish and fish products, aluminium, and ferrosilicon. Whaling in Iceland has been historically significant. Iceland still relies heavily on fishing, but its importance is diminishing from an export share of 90% in the 1960s to 40% in 2006.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Until the 20th century, Iceland was a fairly poor country. It is now one of the most developed countries in the world. Strong economic growth led Iceland to be ranked third in the United Nations' Human Development Index report for 2021/2022. According to the Economist Intelligence Index of 2011, Iceland had the second-highest quality of life in the world. Based on the Gini coefficient, Iceland also has one of the lowest rates of income inequality in the world, and when adjusted for inequality, its HDI ranking is sixth. Iceland's unemployment rate has declined consistently since the crisis, with 4.8% of the labour force being unemployed as of June 2012, compared to 6% in 2011 and 8.1% in 2010.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Many political parties remain opposed to EU membership, primarily due to Icelanders' concern about losing control over their natural resources (particularly fisheries). The national currency of Iceland is the Icelandic króna (ISK). Iceland is the only country in the world to have a population under two million yet still have a floating exchange rate and an independent monetary policy.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "A poll released on 5 March 2010 by Capacent Gallup showed that 31% of respondents were in favour of adopting the euro and 69% opposed. Another Capacent Gallup poll conducted in February 2012 found that 67.4% of Icelanders would reject EU membership in a referendum.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Iceland's economy has been diversifying into manufacturing and service industries in the last decade, including software production, biotechnology, and finance; industry accounts for around a quarter of economic activity, while services comprise close to 70%. The tourism sector is expanding, especially in ecotourism and whale-watching. On average, Iceland receives around 1.1 million visitors annually, which is more than three times the native population. 1.7 million people visited Iceland in 2016, 3 times more than the number that came in 2010. Iceland's agriculture industry, accounting for 5.4% of GDP, consists mainly of potatoes, green vegetables (in greenhouses), mutton, and dairy products. The financial centre is Borgartún in Reykjavík, which hosts a large number of companies and three investment banks. Iceland's stock market, the Iceland Stock Exchange (ISE), was established in 1985.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Iceland is ranked 27th in the 2012 Index of Economic Freedom, lower than in prior years but still among the freest in the world. As of 2016, it ranks 29th in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitive Index, one place lower than in 2015. According to the Global Innovation Index, Iceland is the 20th most innovative country in the world in 2022 and 2023. Unlike most Western European countries, Iceland has a flat tax system: the main personal income tax rate is a flat 22.75% and combined with municipal taxes, the total tax rate equals no more than 35.7%, not including the many available deductions. The corporate tax rate is a flat 18%, one of the lowest in the world. There is also a value added tax, whereas a net wealth tax was eliminated in 2006. Employment regulations are relatively flexible and the labour market is one of the freest in the world. Property rights are strong and Iceland is one of the few countries where they are applied to fishery management. Like other welfare states, taxpayers pay various subsidies to each other, but with spending being less than in most European countries.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Despite low tax rates, agricultural assistance is the highest among OECD countries and a potential impediment to structural change. Also, health care and education spending have relatively poor returns by OECD measures, though improvements have been made in both areas. The OECD Economic Survey of Iceland 2008 highlighted Iceland's challenges in currency and macroeconomic policy. There was a currency crisis that started in the spring of 2008, and on 6 October trading in Iceland's banks was suspended as the government battled to save the economy. An assessment by the OECD 2011 determined that Iceland has made progress in many areas, particularly in creating a sustainable fiscal policy and restoring the health of the financial sector; however, challenges remain in making the fishing industry more efficient and sustainable, as well as in improving monetary policy to address inflation. Iceland's public debt has decreased since the economic crisis, and as of 2015 is the 31st-highest in the world by proportion of national GDP.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Iceland was hit especially hard by the Great Recession that began in December 2007 because of the failure of its banking system and a subsequent economic crisis. Before the crash of the country's three largest banks, Glitnir, Landsbanki and Kaupthing, their combined debt exceeded approximately six times the nation's gross domestic product of €14 billion ($19 billion). In October 2008, the Icelandic parliament passed emergency legislation to minimise the impact of the financial crisis. The Financial Supervisory Authority of Iceland used permission granted by the emergency legislation to take over the domestic operations of the three largest banks. Icelandic officials, including central bank governor Davíð Oddsson, stated that the state did not intend to take over any of the banks' foreign debts or assets. Instead, new banks were established to take on the domestic operations of the banks, and the old banks were to be run into bankruptcy.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "On 28 October 2008, the Icelandic government raised interest rates to 18% (as of August 2019, it was 3.5%), a move forced in part by the terms of acquiring a loan from International Monetary Fund (IMF). After the rate hike, trading on the Icelandic króna finally resumed on the open market, with a valuation at around 250 ISK per euro, less than one-third the value of the 1:70 exchange rate during most of 2008, and a significant drop from the 1:150 exchange ratio of the week before. On 20 November 2008, the Nordic countries agreed to lend Iceland $2.5 billion.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "On 26 January 2009, the coalition government collapsed due to public dissent over the handling of the financial crisis. A new left-wing government was formed a week later and immediately set about removing Central Bank governor Davíð Oddsson and his aides from the bank through changes in the law. Davíð was removed on 26 February 2009 in the wake of protests outside the Central Bank.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Thousands of Icelanders left the country after the collapse, many of those moving to Norway. In 2005, 293 people moved from Iceland to Norway; in 2009, the figure was 1,625. In April 2010, the Icelandic Parliament's Special Investigation Commission published the findings of its investigation, revealing the extent of control fraud in this crisis. By June 2012, Landsbanki managed to repay about half of the Icesave debt.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "According to Bloomberg in 2014, Iceland was on the trajectory of 2% unemployment as a result of crisis-management decisions made back in 2008, including allowing the banks to fail.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Iceland has a high level of car ownership per capita, with a car for every 1.5 inhabitants; it is the main form of transport. Iceland has 13,034 km (8,099 mi) of administered roads, of which 4,617 km (2,869 mi) are paved and 8,338 km (5,181 mi) are not. A great number of roads remain unpaved, mostly little-used rural roads. The road speed limits are 30 and 50 km/h (19 and 31 mph) in towns, 80 km/h (50 mph) on gravel country roads and 90 km/h (56 mph) on hard-surfaced roads.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Route 1, or the Ring Road (Icelandic: Þjóðvegur 1 or Hringvegur), was completed in 1974, and is the main road that runs around Iceland and connects all the inhabited parts of the island, with the interior of the island being uninhabited. This paved road is 1,332 km (828 mi) long with one lane in each direction, except near larger towns and cities and in the Hvalfjörður Tunnel where it has more lanes. Many bridges on it, especially in the north and east, are single lanes and made of timber or steel.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Keflavík International Airport (KEF) is the largest airport and the main aviation hub for international passenger transport. It serves several international and domestic airline companies. KEF is in the vicinity of the larger metropolitan capital areas, 49 km (30 mi) to the WSW of Reykjavík centre, and public bus services are available.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Iceland has no passenger railways.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Reykjavík Airport (RKV) is the second-largest airport, located just 1.5 km from the capital centre. RKV serves general aviation traffic and has daily or regular domestic flights to 12 local townships within Iceland. RKV also serves international flights to Greenland and the Faroe Islands, business and private aeroplanes along with aviation training.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Akureyri Airport (AEY) and Egilsstaðir Airport (EGS) are two other domestic airports with limited international service capacity. There are a total of 103 registered airports and airfields in Iceland; most of them are unpaved and located in rural areas. The second-longest runway is at Geitamelur, a four-runway glider field around 100 km (62 mi) east of Reykjavík.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Several ferry services provide regular access to various outpost communities or shorten travel distances.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Renewable sources—geothermal and hydropower—provide effectively all of Iceland's electricity and around 85% of the nation's total primary energy consumption, with most of the remainder consisting of imported oil products used in transportation and in the fishing fleet. A 2000 report from the University of Iceland suggested that Iceland could potentially convert from oil to hydrogen power by 2040. Iceland's largest geothermal power plants are Hellisheiði and Nesjavellir, while Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Plant is the country's largest hydroelectric power station. When the Kárahnjúkavirkjun started operating, Iceland became the world's largest electricity producer per capita. Iceland is one of the few countries that have filling stations dispensing hydrogen fuel for cars powered by fuel cells.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Despite this, Icelanders emitted 16.9 tonnes of CO2 per capita in 2016, the highest among EFTA and EU members, mainly resulting from transport and aluminium smelting. Nevertheless, in 2010, Iceland was reported by Guinness World Records as \"the Greenest Country\", reaching the highest score by the Environmental Sustainability Index, which measures a country's water use, biodiversity and adoption of clean energies, with a score of 93.5/100.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "On 22 January 2009, Iceland announced its first round of offshore licences for companies wanting to conduct hydrocarbon exploration and production in a region northeast of Iceland, known as the Dreki area. Three exploration licences were awarded but all were subsequently relinquished.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Iceland's official governmental goal is to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by the year 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by the year 2040.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture is responsible for the policies and methods that schools must use, and they issue the National Curriculum Guidelines. However, playschools, primary schools, and lower secondary schools are funded and administered by the municipalities. The government does allow citizens to home educate their children, however, under a very strict set of demands. Students must adhere closely to the government-mandated curriculum, and the parent teaching must acquire a government approved teaching certificate.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Nursery school, or leikskóli, is non-compulsory education for children younger than six years and is the first step in the education system. The current legislation concerning playschools was passed in 1994. They are also responsible for ensuring that the curriculum is suitable to make the transition into compulsory education as easy as possible.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Compulsory education, or grunnskóli, comprises primary and lower secondary education, which often is conducted at the same institution. Education is mandatory by law for children aged from 6 to 16 years. The school year lasts nine months, beginning between 21 August and 1 September, and ending between 31 May and 10 June. The minimum number of school days was once 170, but after a new teachers' wage contract, it increased to 180. Lessons take place five days a week. All public schools have mandatory education in Christianity, although an exemption may be considered by the Minister of Education.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Upper secondary education, or framhaldsskóli, follows lower secondary education. These schools are also known as gymnasia in English. Though not compulsory, everyone who has had a compulsory education has the right to upper secondary education. This stage of education is governed by the Upper Secondary School Act of 1996. All schools in Iceland are mixed-sex schools. The largest seat of higher education is the University of Iceland, which has its main campus in central Reykjavík. Other schools offering university-level instruction include Reykjavík University, University of Akureyri, Agricultural University of Iceland and Bifröst University.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "An OECD assessment found that 64% of Icelanders aged 25–64 have earned the equivalent of a high-school degree, which is lower than the OECD average of 73%. Among 25- to 34-year-olds, only 69% have earned the equivalent of a high-school degree, significantly lower than the OECD average of 80%. Nevertheless, Iceland's education system is considered excellent: the Programme for International Student Assessment ranks it as the 16th best performing, above the OECD average. Students were particularly proficient in reading and mathematics.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "According to a 2013 Eurostat report by the European Commission, Iceland spends around 3.11% of its GDP on scientific research and development (R&D), over 1 percentage point higher than the EU average of 2.03%, and has set a target of 4% to reach by 2020. Iceland was ranked 17th in the Global Innovation Index in 2021, up from 20th in 2019. A 2010 UNESCO report found that out of 72 countries that spend the most on R&D (US$100 million or more), Iceland ranked ninth by proportion of GDP, tied with Taiwan, Switzerland, and Germany and ahead of France, the United Kingdom and Canada.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The original population of Iceland was of Nordic and Gaelic origin. This is evident from literary evidence dating from the settlement period as well as from later scientific studies such as blood type and genetic analyses. One such genetic study indicated that the majority of the male settlers were of Nordic origin while the majority of the women were of Gaelic origin, meaning many settlers of Iceland were Norsemen who brought Gaelic slaves with them.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Iceland has extensive genealogical records dating back to the late 17th century and fragmentary records extending back to the Age of Settlement. The biopharmaceutical company deCODE genetics has funded the creation of a genealogy database that is intended to cover all of Iceland's known inhabitants. It views the database, called Íslendingabók, as a valuable tool for conducting research on genetic diseases, given the relative isolation of Iceland's population.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "The population of the island is believed to have varied from 40,000 to 60,000 in the period ranging from initial settlement until the mid-19th century. During that time, cold winters, ash fall from volcanic eruptions, and bubonic plagues adversely affected the population several times. There were 37 famine years in Iceland between 1500 and 1804. The first census was carried out in 1703 and revealed that the population was then 50,358. After the destructive volcanic eruptions of the Laki volcano during 1783–1784, the population reached a low of about 40,000. Improving living conditions have triggered a rapid increase in population since the mid-19th century—from about 60,000 in 1850 to 320,000 in 2008. Iceland has a relatively young population for a developed country, with one out of five people being 14 years old or younger. With a fertility rate of 2.1, Iceland is one of only a few European countries with a birth rate sufficient for long-term population growth (see table below).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "In December 2007, 33,678 people (13.5% of the total population) living in Iceland had been born abroad, including children of Icelandic parents living abroad. Around 19,000 people (6% of the population) held foreign citizenship. Polish people make up the largest minority group by a considerable margin and still form the bulk of the foreign workforce. About 8,000 Poles now live in Iceland, 1,500 of them in Fjarðabyggð where they make up 75% of the workforce who are constructing the Fjarðarál aluminium plant. Large-scale construction projects in the east of Iceland (see Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Plant) have also brought in many people whose stay is expected to be temporary. Many Polish immigrants were also considering leaving in 2008 as a result of the Icelandic financial crisis.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "The southwest corner of Iceland is by far the most densely populated region. It is also the location of the capital Reykjavík, the northernmost national capital in the world. More than 70 percent of Iceland's population lives in the southwest corner (Greater Reykjavík and the nearby Southern Peninsula), which covers less than two percent of Iceland's land area. The largest town outside Greater Reykjavík is Reykjanesbær, which is located on the Southern Peninsula, less than 50 km (31 mi) from the capital. The largest town outside the southwest corner is Akureyri in northern Iceland.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Some 500 Icelanders under the leadership of Erik the Red settled Greenland in the late tenth century. The total population reached a high point of perhaps 5,000, and developed independent institutions before disappearing by 1500. People from Greenland attempted to set up a settlement at Vinland in North America, but abandoned it in the face of hostility from the Indigenous residents.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Emigration of Icelanders to the United States and Canada began in the 1870s. As of 2006, Canada had over 88,000 people of Icelandic descent, while there are more than 40,000 Americans of Icelandic descent, according to the 2000 US census.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Iceland's 10 most populous urban areas:",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Iceland's official written and spoken language is Icelandic, a North Germanic language descended from Old Norse. In grammar and vocabulary, it has changed less from Old Norse than the other Nordic languages; Icelandic has preserved more verb and noun inflection, and has to a considerable extent developed new vocabulary based on native roots rather than borrowings from other languages. The puristic tendency in the development of Icelandic vocabulary is to a large degree a result of conscious language planning, in addition to centuries of isolation. Icelandic is the only living language to retain the use of the runic letter Þ in Latin script. The closest living relative of the Icelandic language is Faroese.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Icelandic Sign Language was officially recognised as a minority language in 2011. In education, its use for Iceland's deaf community is regulated by the National Curriculum Guide.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "English and Danish are compulsory subjects in the school curriculum. English is widely understood and spoken, while basic to moderate knowledge of Danish is common mainly among the older generations. Polish is mostly spoken by the local Polish community (the largest minority of Iceland), and Danish is mostly spoken in a way largely comprehensible to Swedes and Norwegians—it is often referred to as skandinavíska (i.e. Scandinavian) in Iceland.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Rather than using family names, as is the usual custom in most Western nations, Icelanders carry patronymic or matronymic surnames, patronyms being far more commonly practised. Patronymic last names are based on the first name of the father, while matronymic names are based on the first name of the mother. These follow the person's given name, e.g. Elísabet Jónsdóttir (\"Elísabet, Jón's daughter\" (Jón being the father)) or Ólafur Katrínarson (\"Ólafur, Katrín's son\" (Katrín being the mother)). Consequently, Icelanders refer to one another by their given name, and the Icelandic telephone directory lists people alphabetically by the first name rather than by surname. All new names must be approved by the Icelandic Naming Committee.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Iceland has a universal health care system that is administered by its Ministry of Welfare (Icelandic: Velferðarráðuneytið) and paid for mostly by taxes (85%) and to a lesser extent by service fees (15%). Unlike most countries, there are no private hospitals, and private insurance is practically nonexistent.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "A considerable portion of the government budget is assigned to health care, and Iceland ranks 11th in health care expenditures as a percentage of GDP and 14th in spending per capita. Overall, the country's health care system is one of the best performing in the world, ranked 15th by the World Health Organization. According to an OECD report, Iceland devotes far more resources to healthcare than most industrialised nations. As of 2009, Iceland had 3.7 doctors per 1,000 people (compared with an average of 3.1 in OECD countries) and 15.3 nurses per 1,000 people (compared with an OECD average of 8.4).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Icelanders are among the world's healthiest people, with 81% reporting they are in good health, according to an OECD survey. Although it is a growing problem, obesity is not as prevalent as in other developed countries. Iceland has many campaigns for health and wellbeing, including the famous television show Lazytown, starring and created by former gymnastics champion Magnus Scheving. Infant mortality is one of the lowest in the world, and the proportion of the population that smokes is lower than the OECD average. Almost all women choose to terminate pregnancies of children with Down syndrome in Iceland. The average life expectancy is 81.8 (compared to an OECD average of 79.5), the fourth-highest in the world.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Iceland has a very low level of pollution, thanks to an overwhelming reliance on cleaner geothermal energy, a low population density, and a high level of environmental consciousness among citizens. According to an OECD assessment, the amount of toxic materials in the atmosphere is far lower than in any other industrialised country measured.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "in 2019 the age-adjusted suicide rate in Iceland was 11.2 cases per 100,000.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Icelanders have freedom of religion guaranteed under the Constitution, although the Church of Iceland, a Lutheran body, is the state church:",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "The Evangelical Lutheran Church shall be the State Church in Iceland and, as such, it shall be supported and protected by the State.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Approximately 80 percent of Icelanders legally affiliate with a religious denomination, a process that happens automatically at birth and from which they can choose to opt out. They also pay a church tax (sóknargjald), which the government directs to help support their registered religion, or, in the case of no religion, the University of Iceland.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "The Registers Iceland keeps account of the religious affiliation of every Icelandic citizen. In 2017, Icelanders were divided into religious groups as follows:",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "On March 8, 2021, Iceland formally recognised Judaism as a religion for the first time. Iceland's Jews will have the choice to register as such and direct their taxes to their own religion. Among other benefits, the recognition will also allow Jewish marriage, baby-naming and funeral ceremonies to be civilly recognised.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Iceland is a very secular country; as with other Nordic nations, church attendance is relatively low. The above statistics represent administrative membership of religious organisations, which does not necessarily reflect the belief demographics of the population. According to a study published in 2001, 23% of the inhabitants were either atheist or agnostic. A Gallup poll conducted in 2012 found that 57% of Icelanders considered themselves \"religious\", 31% considered themselves \"non-religious\", while 10% defined themselves as \"convinced atheists\", placing Iceland among the ten countries with the highest proportions of atheists in the world.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "Icelandic culture has its roots in North Germanic traditions. Icelandic literature is popular, in particular the sagas and eddas that were written during the High and Late Middle Ages. Centuries of isolation have helped to insulate the country's Nordic culture from external influence; a prominent example is the preservation of the Icelandic language, which remains the closest to Old Norse of all modern Nordic languages.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "In contrast to other Nordic countries, Icelanders place relatively great importance on independence and self-sufficiency; in a public opinion analysis conducted by the European Commission, over 85% of Icelanders believe independence is \"very important\", compared to 47% of Norwegians, 49% of Danes, and an average of 53% for the EU25. Icelanders also have a very strong work ethic, working some of the longest hours of any industrialised nation.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "According to a poll conducted by the OECD, 66% of Icelanders were satisfied with their lives, while 70% believed that their lives will be satisfying in the future. Similarly, 83% reported having more positive experiences in an average day than negative ones, compared to an OECD average of 72%, which makes Iceland one of the happiest countries in the OECD. A more recent 2012 survey found that around three-quarters of respondents stated they were satisfied with their lives, compared to a global average of about 53%.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "Iceland is liberal about LGBT rights issues. In 1996, the Icelandic parliament passed legislation to create registered partnerships for same-sex couples, conferring nearly all the rights and benefits of marriage. In 2006, parliament voted unanimously to grant same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couples in adoption, parenting, and assisted insemination treatment. In 2010, the Icelandic parliament amended the marriage law, making it gender-neutral and defining marriage as between two individuals, making Iceland one of the first countries in the world to legalise same-sex marriages. The law took effect on 27 June 2010. The amendment to the law also means registered partnerships for same-sex couples are now no longer possible, and marriage is their only option—identical to the existing situation for opposite-sex couples.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Icelanders are known for their strong sense of community and lack of social isolation: An OECD survey found that 98% believe they know someone they could rely on in a time of need, higher than in any other industrialised country. Similarly, only 6% reported \"rarely\" or \"never\" socialising with others. This high level of social cohesion is attributed to the small size and homogeneity of the population, as well as to a long history of harsh survival in an isolated environment, which reinforced the importance of unity and cooperation.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "Egalitarianism is highly valued among the people of Iceland, with income inequality being among the lowest in the world. The constitution explicitly prohibits the enactment of noble privileges, titles, and ranks. Everyone is addressed by their first name. As in other Nordic countries, equality between the sexes is very high; Iceland is consistently ranked among the top three countries in the world for women to live in.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "In 2011, Reykjavík was designated a UNESCO City of Literature.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "Iceland's best-known classical works of literature are the Icelanders' sagas, prose epics set in Iceland's age of settlement. The most famous of these include Njáls saga, about an epic blood feud, and Grænlendinga saga and Eiríks saga, describing the discovery and settlement of Greenland and Vinland (modern Newfoundland). Egils saga, Laxdæla saga, Grettis saga, Gísla saga and Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu are also notable and popular Icelanders' sagas.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "A translation of the Bible was published in the 16th century. Important compositions from the 15th to the 19th century include sacred verse, most famously the Passion Hymns of Hallgrímur Pétursson, and rímur, rhyming epic poems. Originating in the 14th century, rímur were popular into the 19th century, when the development of new literary forms was provoked by the influential National-Romantic writer Jónas Hallgrímsson. In recent times, Iceland has produced many great writers, the best-known of whom is arguably Halldór Laxness, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955 (the only Icelander to win a Nobel Prize thus far). Steinn Steinarr was an influential modernist poet during the early 20th century who remains popular.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "Icelanders are avid consumers of literature, with the highest number of bookstores per capita in the world. For its size, Iceland imports and translates more international literature than any other nation. Iceland also has the highest per capita publication of books and magazines, and around 10% of the population will publish a book in their lifetimes.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "Most books in Iceland are sold between late September to early November. This period is known as Jólabókaflóð, the Christmas Book Flood. The Flood begins with the Iceland Publisher's Association distributing Bókatíðindi, a catalogue of all new publications, free to each Icelandic home.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "The distinctive rendition of the Icelandic landscape by its painters can be linked to nationalism and the movement for home rule and independence, which was very active in the mid-19th century.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "Contemporary Icelandic painting is typically traced to the work of Þórarinn Þorláksson, who, following formal training in art in the 1890s in Copenhagen, returned to Iceland to paint and exhibit works from 1900 to his death in 1924, almost exclusively portraying the Icelandic landscape. Several other Icelandic men and women artists studied at Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at that time, including Ásgrímur Jónsson, who together with Þórarinn created a distinctive portrayal of Iceland's landscape in a romantic naturalistic style. Other landscape artists quickly followed in the footsteps of Þórarinn and Ásgrímur. These included Jóhannes Kjarval and Júlíana Sveinsdóttir. Kjarval in particular is noted for the distinct techniques in the application of paint that he developed in a concerted effort to render the characteristic volcanic rock that dominates the Icelandic environment. Einar Hákonarson is an expressionistic and figurative painter who by some is considered to have brought the figure back into Icelandic painting. In the 1980s, many Icelandic artists worked with the subject of the new painting in their work.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "In recent years the artistic practice has multiplied, and the Icelandic art scene has become a setting for many large-scale projects and exhibitions. The artist-run gallery space Kling og Bang, members of which later ran the studio complex and exhibition venue Klink og Bank, has been a significant part of the trend of self-organised spaces, exhibitions, and projects. The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík Municipal Art Museum, Reykjavík Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Iceland are the larger, more established institutions, curating shows and festivals.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "Much Icelandic music is related to Nordic music, and includes folk and pop traditions. Notable Icelandic music acts include medieval music group Voces Thules, alternative and indie rock acts such as The Sugarcubes, Sóley and Of Monsters and Men, jazz fusion band Mezzoforte, pop singers such as Hafdís Huld, Emilíana Torrini and Björk, solo ballad singers like Bubbi Morthens, and post-rock bands such as Amiina and Sigur Rós. Independent music is strong in Iceland, with bands such as múm and solo artists such as Daði Freyr.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "Traditional Icelandic music is strongly religious. Hymns, both religious and secular, are a particularly well-developed form of music, due to the scarcity of musical instruments throughout much of Iceland's history. Hallgrímur Pétursson wrote many Protestant hymns in the 17th century. Icelandic music was modernised in the 19th century when Magnús Stephensen brought pipe organs, which were followed by harmoniums. Other vital traditions of Icelandic music are epic alliterative and rhyming ballads called rímur. Rímur are epic tales, usually a cappella, which can be traced back to skaldic poetry, using complex metaphors and elaborate rhyme schemes. The best-known rímur poet of the 19th century was Sigurður Breiðfjörð (1798–1846). A modern revitalisation of the tradition began in 1929 with the formation of Kvæðamannafélagið Iðunn [is].",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Among Iceland's best-known classical composers are Daníel Bjarnason and Anna S. Þorvaldsdóttir, who in 2012 received the Nordic Council Music Prize and in 2015 was chosen as the New York Philharmonic's Kravis Emerging Composer, an honour that includes a $50,000 cash prize and a commission to write a composition for the orchestra; she is the second recipient.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "The national anthem of Iceland is Lofsöngur, written by Matthías Jochumsson, with music by Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "Iceland's largest television stations are the state-run Sjónvarpið and the privately owned Stöð 2 and SkjárEinn. Smaller stations exist, many of them local. Radio is broadcast throughout the country, including in some parts of the interior. The main radio stations are Rás 1, Rás 2, X-ið 977, Bylgjan and FM957. The daily newspapers are Morgunblaðið and Fréttablaðið. The most popular websites are the news sites Vísir and Mbl.is.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "Iceland is home to LazyTown (Icelandic: Latibær), a children's educational musical comedy programme created by Magnús Scheving. It has become a very popular programme for children and adults and is shown in over 100 countries, including the Americas, the UK and Sweden. The LazyTown studios are located in Garðabær. The 2015 television crime series Trapped aired in the UK on BBC4 in February and March 2016, to critical acclaim and according to the Guardian \"the unlikeliest TV hit of the year\".",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "In 1992, the Icelandic film industry achieved its greatest recognition hitherto, when Friðrik Þór Friðriksson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for his Children of Nature. It features the story of an old man who is unable to continue running his farm. After being unwelcomed in his daughter's and father-in-law's house in town, he is put in a home for the elderly. There, he meets an old girlfriend of his youth, and they both begin a journey through the wilds of Iceland to die together. This is the only Icelandic movie to have ever been nominated for an Academy Award.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Singer-songwriter Björk received international acclaim for her starring role in the Danish musical drama Dancer in the Dark, directed by Lars von Trier, in which she plays Selma Ježková, a factory worker who struggles to pay for her son's eye operation. The film premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where she won the Best Actress Award. The movie also led Björk to nominations for Best Original Song at the 73rd Academy Awards, with the song I've Seen It All and for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "Guðrún S. Gísladóttir, who is Icelandic, played one of the major roles in Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's film The Sacrifice (1986). Anita Briem, known for her performance in Showtime's The Tudors, is also Icelandic. Briem starred in the film Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008), which shot scenes in Iceland. The James Bond movie Die Another Day (2002) is set for a large part in Iceland. Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar (2014) was also filmed in Iceland for some of its scenes, as was Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "On 17 June 2010, the parliament passed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, proposing greater protection of free speech rights and the identity of journalists and whistle-blowers—the strongest journalist protection law in the world. According to a 2011 report by Freedom House, Iceland is one of the highest-ranked countries in press freedom.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "CCP Games, developers of the critically acclaimed EVE Online and Dust 514, are headquartered in Reykjavík. CCP Games hosts the third-most populated MMO in the world, which also has the largest total game area for an online game, according to Guinness World Records.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "Iceland has a highly developed internet culture, with around 95% of the population having internet access, the highest proportion in the world. Iceland ranked 12th in the World Economic Forum's 2009–2010 Network Readiness Index, which measures a country's ability to competitively exploit communications technology. The United Nations International Telecommunication Union ranks the country third in its development of information and communications technology, having moved up four places between 2008 and 2010. In February 2013 the country (ministry of the interior) was researching possible methods to protect children in regards to Internet pornography, claiming that pornography online is a threat to children as it supports child slavery and abuse. Strong voices within the community expressed concerns with this, stating that it is impossible to block access to pornography without compromising freedom of speech.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "Much of Iceland's cuisine is based on fish, lamb, and dairy products, with little to no use of herbs or spices. Due to the island's climate, fruits and vegetables are not generally a component of traditional dishes, although the use of greenhouses has made them more common in contemporary food. Þorramatur is a selection of traditional cuisine consisting of many dishes and is usually consumed around the month of Þorri, which begins on the first Friday after 19 January. Traditional dishes also include skyr (a yogurt-like cheese), hákarl (cured shark), cured ram, singed sheep heads, and black pudding, Flatkaka (flatbread), dried fish and dark rye bread traditionally baked in the ground in geothermal areas. Puffin is considered a local delicacy that is often prepared through broiling.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "Breakfast usually consists of pancakes, cereal, fruit, and coffee, while lunch may take the form of a smörgåsbord. The main meal of the day for most Icelanders is dinner, which usually involves fish or lamb as the main course. Seafood is central to most Icelandic cooking, particularly cod and haddock but also salmon, herring, and halibut. It is often prepared in a wide variety of ways, either smoked, pickled, boiled, or dried. Lamb is by far the most common meat, and it tends to be either smoke-cured (known as hangikjöt) or salt-preserved (saltkjöt). Many older dishes make use of every part of the sheep, such as slátur, which consists of offal (internal organs and entrails) minced together with blood and served in sheep stomach. Additionally, boiled or mashed potatoes, pickled cabbage, green beans, and rye bread are prevalent side dishes.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "Coffee is a popular beverage in Iceland, with the country being third placed by per capita consumption worldwide in 2016, and is drunk at breakfast, after meals, and with a light snack in mid-afternoon. Coca-Cola is also widely consumed, to the extent that the country is said to have one of the highest per capita consumption rates in the world.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "Iceland's signature alcoholic beverage is brennivín (literally \"burnt [i.e., distilled] wine\"), which is similar in flavouring to the akvavit variant of Scandinavian brännvin. It is a type of schnapps made from distilled potatoes and flavoured with either caraway seeds or angelica. Its potency has earned it the nickname svarti dauði (\"Black Death\"). Modern distilleries on Iceland produce vodka (Reyka), gin (Ísafold), moss schnapps (Fjallagrasa), and a birch-flavoured schnapps and liqueur (Foss Distillery's Birkir and Björk). Martin Miller blends Icelandic water with its England-distilled gin on the island. Strong beer was banned until 1989, so bjórlíki, a mixture of legal, low-alcohol pilsner beer and vodka, became popular. Several strong beers are now made by Icelandic breweries.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "Sport is an important part of Icelandic culture, as the population is generally quite active. The main traditional sport in Iceland is Glíma, a form of wrestling thought to have originated in medieval times.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "Popular sports include football, track and field, handball and basketball. Handball is often referred to as the national sport. The Icelandic national football team qualified for the 2016 UEFA European football championship for the first time. They recorded a draw against later winners Portugal in the group stage, and defeated England 2–1 in the round of 16, with goals from Ragnar Sigurðsson and Kolbeinn Sigþórsson. They then lost to hosts and later finalists France in the quarter-finals. Following up on this, Iceland made its debut at the 2018 FIFA World Cup. For both the European and the world championships, Iceland is to date the smallest nation in terms of population to qualify.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 156,
"text": "Iceland is also the smallest country to ever qualify for Eurobasket, having done so in both 2015 and 2017. However, they have not managed to win a single game in the European Basketball final stages.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 157,
"text": "Iceland has excellent conditions for skiing, fishing, snowboarding, ice climbing and rock climbing, although mountain climbing and hiking are preferred by the general public. Iceland is also a world-class destination for alpine ski touring and Telemark skiing, with the Troll Peninsula in Northern Iceland being the main centre of activity. Although the country's environment is generally ill-suited for golf, there are nevertheless many golf courses throughout the island, and Iceland has a greater percentage of the population playing golf than Scotland with over 17,000 registered golfers out of a population of approximately 300,000. Iceland hosts an annual international golf tournament known as the Arctic Open played through the night during the summer solstice at Akureyri Golf Club. Iceland has also won the second most World's Strongest Man competitions of any country with nine titles, including four by both Magnús Ver Magnússon and Jón Páll Sigmarsson and most recently Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson in 2018.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 158,
"text": "Iceland is also one of the leading countries in ocean rowing. Icelandic explorer and endurance athlete Fiann Paul holds the highest number of performance-based Guinness World Records within a single athletic discipline. As of 2020, he is the first and only person to achieve the Ocean Explorers Grand Slam (performing open-water crossings on each of the five oceans using human-powered vessels) and has claimed overall speed Guinness World Records for the fastest rowing of all four oceans (Atlantic, Indian, Pacific, and the Arctic) in a human-powered row boat. He had achieved a total of 41, including 33 performance based Guinness World Records by 2020.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 159,
"text": "Swimming is popular in Iceland. Geothermally heated outdoor pools are widespread, and swimming courses are a mandatory part of the national curriculum. Horseback riding, which was historically the most prevalent form of transportation on the island, remains a common pursuit for many Icelanders.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 160,
"text": "The oldest sports association in Iceland is the Reykjavík Shooting Association, founded in 1867. Rifle shooting became very popular in the 19th century with the encouragement of politicians and nationalists who were pushing for Icelandic independence. To this day, it remains a significant pastime.",
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"text": "Iceland has also produced many chess masters and hosted the historic World Chess Championship 1972 in Reykjavík during the height of the Cold War. As of 2008, there have been nine Icelandic chess grandmasters, a considerable number given the small size of the population. Bridge is also popular, with Iceland participating in several international tournaments. Iceland won the world bridge championship (the Bermuda Bowl) in Yokohama, Japan, in 1991 and took second place (with Sweden) in Hamilton, Bermuda, in 1950.",
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| Iceland is a Nordic island country between the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge between North America and Europe. It is linked culturally and politically with Europe, and is the region's most sparsely populated country. Its capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which is home to about 36% of the country's roughly 380,000 residents. The official language of the country is Icelandic. Located on a rift between tectonic plates, Iceland's geologic activity includes geysers and frequent volcanic eruptions. The interior consists of a volcanic plateau characterised by sand and lava fields, mountains, and glaciers, and many glacial rivers flow to the sea through the lowlands. Iceland is warmed by the Gulf Stream and has a temperate climate, despite a latitude just south of the Arctic Circle. Its high latitude and marine influence keep summers chilly, and most of its islands have a polar climate. According to the ancient manuscript Landnámabók, the settlement of Iceland began in 874 AD when the Norwegian chieftain Ingólfr Arnarson became the first permanent settler on the island. In the following centuries, Norwegians, and to a lesser extent other Scandinavians, immigrated to Iceland, bringing with them thralls of Gaelic origin. The island was governed as an independent commonwealth under the native parliament, the Althing, one of the world's oldest functioning legislative assemblies. Following a period of civil strife, Iceland acceded to Norwegian rule in the 13th century. The establishment of the Kalmar Union in 1397 united the kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Iceland thus followed Norway's integration into that union, coming under Danish rule after Sweden seceded from the union in 1523. The Danish kingdom forcefully introduced Lutheranism to Iceland in 1550. Influenced by ideals of nationalism after the French Revolution, Iceland's struggle for independence took form and culminated in the Danish–Icelandic Act of Union in 1918, with the establishment of the Kingdom of Iceland, sharing through a personal union the incumbent monarch of Denmark. During the occupation of Denmark in World War II, Iceland voted overwhelmingly to become a republic in 1944, thus ending the remaining formal ties with Denmark. Although the Althing was suspended from 1799 to 1845, the island republic has nevertheless been credited with sustaining the world's oldest and longest-running parliament. Until the 20th century, Iceland relied largely on subsistence fishing and agriculture. Industrialization of the fisheries and Marshall Plan aid following World War II brought prosperity, and Iceland became one of the wealthiest and most developed nations in the world. It became a part of the European Economic Area in 1994; this further diversified the economy into sectors such as finance, biotechnology, and manufacturing. Iceland has a market economy with relatively low taxes, compared to other OECD countries, as well as the highest trade union membership in the world. It maintains a Nordic social welfare system that provides universal health care and tertiary education for its citizens. Iceland ranks highly in international comparisons of national performance, such as quality of life, education, protection of civil liberties, government transparency, and economic freedom. Icelandic culture is founded upon the nation's Scandinavian heritage. Most Icelanders are descendants of Norse and Gaelic settlers. Icelandic, a North Germanic language, is descended from Old West Norse and is closely related to Faroese. The country's cultural heritage includes traditional Icelandic cuisine, Icelandic literature, and medieval sagas. Iceland has the smallest population of any NATO member and is the only one with no standing army, possessing only a lightly armed coast guard. | 2001-08-03T15:13:47Z | 2023-12-20T19:11:28Z | [
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14,532 | Italy | Italy (Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja] ), officially the Italian Republic (Italian: Repubblica Italiana [reˈpubblika itaˈljaːna]), is a country in Southern and Western Europe. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, it consists of a peninsula delimited by the Alps and surrounded by several islands. Italy shares land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. It has a territorial exclave in Switzerland (Campione) and an archipelago in the African Plate (Pelagie Islands). Italy covers an area of 301,340 km (116,350 sq mi), with a population of nearly 60 million; it is the tenth-largest country by land area in the European continent and the third-most populous member state of the European Union. Its capital and largest city is Rome.
The Italian peninsula was historically the native place and destination of numerous ancient peoples. The Latin city of Rome in central Italy, founded as a Kingdom, became a Republic that conquered the Mediterranean world and ruled it for centuries as an Empire. With the spread of Christianity, Rome became the seat of the Catholic Church and of the Papacy. During the Early Middle Ages, Italy experienced the fall of the Western Roman Empire and inward migration from Germanic tribes. By the 11th century, Italian city-states and maritime republics expanded, bringing renewed prosperity through commerce and laying the groundwork for modern capitalism. The Italian Renaissance flourished in Florence during the 15th and 16th centuries and spread to the rest of Europe. Italian explorers also discovered new routes to the Far East and the New World, helping to usher in the European Age of Discovery. However, centuries of rivalry and infighting between the Italian city-states among other factors left the peninsula divided into numerous states until the late modern period. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Italian economic and commercial importance significantly waned.
After centuries of political and territorial divisions, Italy was almost entirely unified in 1861 following Wars of independence and the Expedition of the Thousand, establishing the Kingdom of Italy. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, Italy rapidly industrialised, mainly in the north, and acquired a colonial empire, while the south remained largely impoverished and excluded from industrialisation, fuelling a large immigrant diaspora. From 1915 to 1918, Italy took part in World War I on the side of the Entente and against the Central Powers. In 1922, following a period of crisis and turmoil, the Italian fascist dictatorship was established. During World War II, Italy was first part of the Axis until it surrendered to the Allied powers (1940-1943) and then, as part of its territory was occupied by Nazi Germany with fascist collaboration, a co-belligerent of the Allies during the Italian resistance and the liberation of Italy (1943-1945). Following the end of the war, the country replaced the monarchy with a republic via referendum and enjoyed a prolonged economic boom, becoming a major advanced economy.
Italy has the eighth-largest nominal GDP in the world, the second-largest manufacturing industry in Europe (7th-largest in the world). The country has a significant role in regional and global economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic affairs. Italy is a founding and leading member of the European Union, and it is in numerous international institutions including NATO, the G7, the Mediterranean Union, the Latin Union, and many more. The source of many inventions and discoveries, the country is considered a cultural superpower and has long been a global centre of art, music, literature, cuisine, science and technology and fashion. It has the world's largest number of World Heritage Sites (58), and is the world's fifth-most visited country.
Hypotheses for the etymology of the name "Italia" are numerous. One is that it was borrowed via Ancient Greek from the Oscan Víteliú 'land of calves' (cf. Lat vitulus "calf", Umb vitlo "calf"). Ancient Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus gives this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides.
According to Antiochus of Syracuse, the term Italy was used by the ancient Greeks to initially refer only to the southern portion of the Bruttium peninsula corresponding to the modern province of Reggio and part of the provinces of Catanzaro and Vibo Valentia in southern Italy. Nevertheless, by his time the larger concept of Oenotria and "Italy" had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. According to Strabo's Geographica, before the expansion of the Roman Republic, the name was used by ancient Greeks to indicate the land between the strait of Messina and the line connecting the gulf of Salerno and gulf of Taranto, corresponding roughly to the current region of Calabria. The ancient Greeks gradually came to apply the name "Italia" to a larger region In addition to the "Greek Italy" in the south, historians have suggested the existence of an "Etruscan Italy" covering variable areas of central Italy.
The borders of Roman Italy, Italia, are better established. Cato's Origines, the first work of history composed in Latin, described Italy as the entire peninsula south of the Alps. According to Cato and several Roman authors, the Alps formed the "walls of Italy". In 264 BC, Roman Italy extended from the Arno and Rubicon rivers of the centre-north to the entire south. The northern area of Cisalpine Gaul was occupied by Rome in the 220s BC and became considered geographically and de facto part of Italy, but remained politically and de jure separated. It was legally merged into the administrative unit of Italy in 42 BC by the triumvir Octavian as already planned by Julius Caesar. The islands of Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily and Malta were added to Italy by Diocletian in 292 AD, coinciding with the whole Italian geographical region. All its inhabitants were considered Italic and Roman.
The Latin term Italicus was used to describe "a man of Italy" as opposed to a provincial. For example, Pliny the Elder notably wrote in a letter Italicus es an provincialis? meaning "are you an Italian or a provincial?". The adjective italianus, from which are derived the Italian (and also French and English) name of the Italians, is medieval and was used alternatively with Italicus during the early modern period.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which was caused by the invasion of the Ostrogoths, the Kingdom of Italy was created. After the Lombard invasions, "Italia" was retained as the name for their kingdom, and for its successor kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire, which nominally lasted until 1806, although it had de facto disintegrated due to factional politics pitting the empire against the ascendant city republics in the 13th century.
Thousands of Lower Paleolithic artefacts have been recovered from Monte Poggiolo, dating as far back as 850,000 years. Excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Middle Palaeolithic period some 200,000 years ago, while modern humans appeared about 40,000 years ago at Riparo Mochi. Archaeological sites from this period include Addaura cave, Altamura, Ceprano, and Gravina in Puglia.
The Ancient peoples of pre-Roman Italy – such as the Umbrians, the Latins (from which the Romans emerged), Volsci, Oscans, Samnites, Sabines, the Celts, the Ligures, the Veneti, the Iapygians, and many others – were Indo-European peoples, most of them specifically of the Italic group. The main historic peoples of possible non-Indo-European or pre-Indo-European heritage include the Etruscans of central and northern Italy, the Elymians and the Sicani in Sicily, and the prehistoric Sardinians, who gave birth to the Nuragic civilisation. Other ancient populations being of undetermined language families and of possible non-Indo-European origin include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni, known for their rock carvings in Valcamonica, the largest collections of prehistoric petroglyphs in the world. A well-preserved natural mummy known as Ötzi the Iceman, determined to be 5,000 years old (between 3400 and 3100 BCE, Copper Age), was discovered in the Similaun glacier of South Tyrol in 1991.
The first foreign colonisers were the Phoenicians, who initially established colonies and founded various emporiums on the coasts of Sicily and Sardinia. Some of these soon became small urban centres and were developed parallel to the ancient Greek colonies; among the main centres there were the cities of Motya, Zyz (modern Palermo), Soluntum in Sicily, and Nora, Sulci, and Tharros in Sardinia.
Between the 17th and the 11th centuries BC Mycenaean Greeks established contacts with Italy. In the 8th and 7th centuries BC a number of Greek colonies were established starting at Pithecusae and eventually extending all along the southern part of the Italian Peninsula and the coast of Sicily, an area that later became known as Magna Graecia.
Ionian settlers founded Elaia, Kyme, Rhegion, Naxos, Zankles, Hymera, and Katane. Doric colonists founded Taras, Syrakousai, Megara Hyblaia, Leontinoi, Akragas, Ghelas; the Syracusans founded Ankón and Adria; the megarese founded Selinunte. The Achaeans founded Sybaris, Poseidonia, Kroton, Lokroi Epizephyrioi, and Metapontum; tarantini and thuriots found Herakleia. The Greek colonization placed the Italic peoples in contact with democratic forms of government and with high artistic and cultural expressions.
Rome, a settlement around a ford on the river Tiber in central Italy conventionally founded in 753 BC, was ruled for a period of 244 years by a monarchical system, initially with sovereigns of Latin and Sabine origin, later by Etruscan kings. The tradition handed down seven kings: Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius and Tarquinius Superbus. In 509 BC, the Romans expelled the last king from their city, favouring a government of the Senate and the People (SPQR) and establishing an oligarchic republic.
The Italian Peninsula, named Italia, was consolidated into a single entity during the Roman expansion and conquest of new lands at the expense of the other Italic tribes, Etruscans, Celts, and Greeks. A permanent association with most of the local tribes and cities was formed, and Rome began the conquest of Western Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. In the wake of Julius Caesar's rise and death in the first century BC, Rome grew over the course of centuries into a massive empire stretching from Britain to the borders of Persia, and engulfing the whole Mediterranean basin, in which Greek and Roman and many other cultures merged into a unique civilisation. The long and triumphant reign of the first emperor, Augustus, began a golden age of peace and prosperity. Roman Italy remained the metropole of the empire, and as the homeland of the Romans and the territory of the capital, maintained a special status which made it Domina Provinciarum ("ruler of the provinces", the latter being all the remaining territories outside Italy). More than two centuries of stability followed, during which Italy was referred to as the Rectrix Mundi ("governor of the world") and Omnium Terrarum Parens ("parent of all lands").
The Roman Empire was among the most powerful economic, cultural, political and military forces in the world of its time, and it was one of the largest empires in world history. At its height under Trajan, it covered 5 million square kilometres. The Roman legacy has deeply influenced Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world; among the many legacies of Roman dominance are the widespread use of the Romance languages derived from Latin, the numerical system, the modern Western alphabet and calendar, and the emergence of Christianity as a major world religion.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Italy fell under the power of Odoacer's kingdom, and, later, was seized by the Ostrogoths, followed in the 6th century by a brief reconquest under Byzantine Emperor Justinian. The invasion of another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, late in the same century, reduced the Byzantine presence to the rump realm of the Exarchate of Ravenna and started the end of political unity of the peninsula for the next 1,300 years. The peninsula was therefore divided as follows: northern Italy and Tuscany formed the Lombard kingdom, with its capital in Pavia, while in central-southern Italy the Lombards controlled the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. The remaining part of the peninsula remained under the Byzantines and was divided between the exarchate of Italy, based in Ravenna, the Duchy of Rome, the Duchy of Naples, the Duchy of Calabria and Sicily, the latter directly dependent on the Emperor of Constantinople. Invasions of the peninsula caused a chaotic succession of barbarian kingdoms and the so-called "dark ages". The Lombard kingdom was subsequently absorbed into the Frankish Empire by Charlemagne in the late 8th century and became the Kingdom of Italy. The Franks also helped the formation of the Papal States in central Italy. Until the 13th century, Italian politics was dominated by the relations between the Holy Roman Emperors and the Papacy, with most of the Italian city-states siding with the former (Ghibellines) or with the latter (Guelphs) for momentary convenience.
The Germanic Emperor and the Roman Pontiff became the universal powers of medieval Europe. However, the conflict over the investiture controversy and the clash between Guelphs and Ghibellines led to the end of the Imperial-feudal system in the north of Italy where city-states gained independence. The investiture controversy was finally resolved by the Concordat of Worms. In 1176 a league of city-states, the Lombard League, defeated the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa at the Battle of Legnano, thus ensuring effective independence for most of northern and central Italian cities.
Italian city-states such as Milan, Florence and Venice played a crucial innovative role in financial development, devising the main instruments and practices of banking and the emergence of new forms of social and economic organization. In coastal and southern areas, the maritime republics grew to eventually dominate the Mediterranean and monopolise trade routes to the Orient. They were independent thalassocratic city-states, though most of them originated from territories once belonging to the Byzantine Empire. All these cities during the time of their independence had similar systems of government in which the merchant class had considerable power. Although in practice these were oligarchical, and bore little resemblance to a modern democracy, the relative political freedom they afforded was conducive to academic and artistic advancement. The four best known maritime republics were Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi; the others were Ancona, Gaeta, Noli, and Ragusa. Each of the maritime republics had dominion over different overseas lands, including many Mediterranean islands (especially Sardinia and Corsica), lands on the Adriatic, Aegean, and Black Sea (Crimea), and commercial colonies in the Near East and in North Africa. Venice maintained enormous tracts of land in Greece, Cyprus, Istria, and Dalmatia until as late as the mid-17th century.
Venice and Genoa were Europe's main gateways to trade with the East, and producers of fine glass, while Florence was a capital of silk, wool, banking, and jewellery. The wealth such business brought to Italy meant that large public and private artistic projects could be commissioned. The republics were heavily involved in the Crusades, providing support and transport, but most especially taking advantage of the political and trading opportunities resulting from these wars. Italy first felt the huge economic changes in Europe which led to the commercial revolution: the Republic of Venice was able to defeat the Byzantine Empire and finance the voyages of Marco Polo to Asia; the first universities were formed in Italian cities, and scholars such as Thomas Aquinas obtained international fame; Frederick I of Sicily made Italy the political-cultural centre of a reign that temporarily included the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Jerusalem; capitalism and banking families emerged in Florence, where Dante and Giotto were active around 1300.
In the south, Sicily had become an Arab Islamic emirate in the 9th century, thriving until the Italo-Normans conquered it in the late 11th century together with most of the Lombard and Byzantine principalities of southern Italy. Through a complex series of events, southern Italy developed as a unified kingdom, first under the House of Hohenstaufen, then under the Capetian House of Anjou and, from the 15th century, the House of Aragon. In Sardinia, the former Byzantine provinces became independent states known in Italian as Judicates, although some parts of the island fell under Genoese or Pisan rule until eventual Aragonese annexation in the 15th century. The Black Death pandemic of 1348 left its mark on Italy by killing perhaps one third of the population.
Italy was the birthplace and heart of the Renaissance during the 1400s and 1500s. The Italian Renaissance marked the transition from the medieval period to the modern age as Europe recovered, economically and culturally, from the crises of the Late Middle Ages and entered the Early Modern Period. The Italian polities were now regional states effectively ruled by Princes, de facto monarchs in control of trade and administration, and their courts became major centres of the arts and sciences. The Italian princedoms represented a first form of modern states as opposed to feudal monarchies and multinational empires. The princedoms were led by political dynasties and merchant families such as the Medici in Florence, the Visconti and Sforza in the Duchy of Milan, the Doria in the Republic of Genoa, the Loredan, Mocenigo and Barbarigo in the Republic of Venice, the Este in Ferrara, and the Gonzaga in Mantua. The Renaissance was therefore a result of the wealth accumulated by Italian merchant cities combined with the patronage of its dominant families. Italian Renaissance exercised a dominant influence on subsequent European painting and sculpture for centuries afterwards, with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giotto, Donatello, and Titian, and architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Palladio, and Donato Bramante.
Following the conclusion of the western schism in favour of Rome at the Council of Constance (1415–1417), the new Pope Martin V returned to the Papal States after a three years-long journey that touched many Italian cities and restored Italy as the sole centre of Western Christianity. During the course of this voyage, the Medici Bank was made the official credit institution of the Papacy, and several significant ties were established between the Church and the new political dynasties of the peninsula. The Popes' status as elective monarchs turned the conclaves and consistories of the Renaissance into political battles between the courts of Italy for primacy in the peninsula and access to the immense resources of the Catholic Church. In 1439, Pope Eugenius IV and the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos signed a reconciliation agreement between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church at the Council of Florence hosted by Cosimo the old de Medici. In 1453, Italian forces under Giovanni Giustiniani were sent by Pope Nicholas V to defend the Walls of Constantinople but the decisive battle was lost to the more advanced Turkish army equipped with cannons, and Byzantium fell to Sultan Mehmed II.
The fall of Constantinople led to the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy, fueling the rediscovery of Greco-Roman Humanism. Humanist rulers such as Federico da Montefeltro and Pope Pius II worked to establish ideal cities where man is the measure of all things, and therefore founded Urbino and Pienza respectively. Pico della Mirandola wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, considered the manifesto of Renaissance Humanism, in which he stressed the importance of free will in human beings. The humanist historian Leonardo Bruni was the first to divide human history in three periods: Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modernity. The second consequence of the Fall of Constantinople was the beginning of the Age of Discovery.
Italian explorers and navigators from the dominant maritime republics, eager to find an alternative route to the Indies in order to bypass the Ottoman Empire, offered their services to monarchs of Atlantic countries and played a key role in ushering the Age of Discovery and the European colonization of the Americas. The most notable among them were: Christopher Columbus (Italian: Cristoforo Colombo), colonizer in the name of Spain, who is credited with discovering the New World and the opening of the Americas for conquest and settlement by Europeans; John Cabot (Italian: Giovanni Caboto), sailing for England, who was the first European to set foot in "New Found Land" and explore parts of the North American continent in 1497; Amerigo Vespucci, sailing for Portugal, who first demonstrated in about 1501 that the New World (in particular Brazil) was not Asia as initially conjectured, but a fourth continent previously unknown to people of the Old World (America is named after him); and Giovanni da Verrazzano, at the service of France, renowned as the first European to explore the Atlantic coast of North America between Florida and New Brunswick in 1524.
Following the fall of Constantinople, the wars in Lombardy came to an end and a defensive alliance known as Italic League was formed between Venice, Naples, Florence, Milan, and the Papacy. Lorenzo the Magnificent de Medici was the greatest Florentine patron of the Renaissance and supporter of the Italic League. He notably avoided the collapse of the League in the aftermath of the Pazzi Conspiracy and during the aborted invasion of Italy by the Turks. However, the military campaign of Charles VIII of France in Italy caused the end of the Italic League and initiated the Italian Wars between the Valois and the Habsburgs. During the High Renaissance of the 1500s, Italy was therefore both the main European battleground and the cultural-economic centre of the continent. Popes such as Julius II (1503–1513) fought for the control of Italy against foreign monarchs, others such as Paul III (1534–1549) preferred to mediate between the European powers in order to secure peace in Italy. In the middle of this conflict, the Medici popes Leo X (1513–1521) and Clement VII (1523–1534) opposed the Protestant reformation and advanced the interests of their family. In 1559, at the end of the French invasions of Italy and of the Italian wars, the many states of northern Italy remained part of the Holy Roman Empire, indirectly subject to the Austrian Habsburgs, while all of Southern Italy (Naples, Sicily, Sardinia) and Milan were under Spanish Habsburg rule.
The Papacy remained a powerful force and launched the Counter-reformation. Key events of the period include: the Council of Trent (1545–1563); the excommunication of Elizabeth I (1570) and the Battle of Lepanto (1571), both occurring during the pontificate of Pius V; the construction of the Gregorian observatory, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, and the Jesuit China mission of Matteo Ricci under Pope Gregory XIII; the French Wars of Religion; the Long Turkish War and the execution of Giordano Bruno in 1600, under Pope Clement VIII; the birth of the Lyncean Academy of the Papal States, of which the main figure was Galileo Galilei (later put on trial); the final phases of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) during the pontificates of Urban VIII and Innocent X; and the formation of the last Holy League by Innocent XI during the Great Turkish War.
The Italian economy declined during the 1600s and 1700s. Following the European wars of succession of the 18th century, the North fell under the influence of the Habsburg-Lorraine of Austria, while the south passed to a cadet branch of the Spanish Bourbons. During the Coalition Wars, northern and central Italy was reorganised by Napoleon in a number of Sister Republics of France and later as a Kingdom of Italy in personal union with the French Empire. The southern half of the peninsula was administered by Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law, who was crowned as King of Naples. The 1814 Congress of Vienna restored the situation of the late 18th century, but the ideals of the French Revolution could not be eradicated, and soon re-surfaced during the political upheavals that characterised the first part of the 19th century.
During the Napoleonic era, in 1797, the first official adoption of the Italian tricolour as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, a Napoleonic sister republic of Revolutionary France, took place, on the basis of the events following the French Revolution (1789–1799) which, among its ideals, advocated the national self-determination. This event is celebrated by the Tricolour Day. The Italian national colours appeared for the first time on a tricolour cockade in 1789, anticipating by seven years the first green, white and red Italian military war flag, which was adopted by the Lombard Legion in 1796.
The birth of the Kingdom of Italy was the result of efforts by Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy to establish a united kingdom encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula. By the mid-19th century, rising Italian nationalism, along with other social, economic, and military events, led to a period of revolutionary political upheaval. Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the political and social Italian unification movement, or Risorgimento, emerged to unite Italy consolidating the different states of the peninsula and liberate it from foreign control. A prominent radical figure was the patriotic journalist Giuseppe Mazzini, member of the secret revolutionary society Carbonari and founder of the influential political movement Young Italy in the early 1830s, who favoured a unitary republic and advocated a broad nationalist movement. His prolific output of propaganda helped the unification movement stay active.
In this context, in 1847, the first public performance of the song "Il Canto degli Italiani", the Italian national anthem since 1946, took place. Il Canto degli Italiani, written by Goffredo Mameli set to music by Michele Novaro, is also known as the Inno di Mameli, after the author of the lyrics, or Fratelli d'Italia, from its opening line.
The most famous member of Young Italy was the revolutionary and general Giuseppe Garibaldi, renowned for his extremely loyal followers, who led the Italian republican drive for unification in Southern Italy. However, the Northern Italy monarchy of the House of Savoy in the Kingdom of Sardinia, whose government was led by Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, also had ambitions of establishing a united Italian state. In the context of the 1848 liberal revolutions that swept through Europe, an unsuccessful first war of independence was declared on Austria. In 1855, the Kingdom of Sardinia became an ally of Britain and France in the Crimean War, giving Cavour's diplomacy legitimacy in the eyes of the great powers. The Kingdom of Sardinia again attacked the Austrian Empire in the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859, with the aid of France, resulting in liberating Lombardy. On the basis of the Plombières Agreement, the Kingdom of Sardinia ceded Savoy and Nice to France, an event that caused the Niçard exodus, that was the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy, and the Niçard Vespers.
In 1860–1861, Garibaldi led the drive for unification in Naples and Sicily (the Expedition of the Thousand), while the House of Savoy troops occupied the central territories of the Italian peninsula, except Rome and part of Papal States. Teano was the site of the famous meeting of 26 October 1860 between Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II, last King of Sardinia, in which Garibaldi shook Victor Emanuel's hand and hailed him as King of Italy; thus, Garibaldi sacrificed republican hopes for the sake of Italian unity under a monarchy. Cavour agreed to include Garibaldi's Southern Italy allowing it to join the union with the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1860. This allowed the Sardinian government to declare a united Italian kingdom on 17 March 1861. Victor Emmanuel II then became the first king of a united Italy, and the capital was moved from Turin to Florence. The title of "King of Italy" had been out of use since the abdication of Napoleon I of France on 6 April 1814.
In 1866, Victor Emmanuel II allied with Prussia during the Austro-Prussian War, waging the Third Italian War of Independence which allowed Italy to annexe Venetia. Finally, in 1870, as France abandoned its garrisons in Rome during the disastrous Franco-Prussian War to keep the large Prussian Army at bay, the Italians rushed to fill the power gap by taking over the Papal States. Italian unification was completed and shortly afterwards Italy's capital was moved to Rome. Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi, Cavour, and Mazzini have been referred as Italy's Four Fathers of the Fatherland.
The new Kingdom of Italy obtained Great Power status. The Constitutional Law of the Kingdom of Sardinia the Albertine Statute of 1848, was extended to the whole Kingdom of Italy in 1861, and provided for basic freedoms of the new State, but electoral laws excluded the non-propertied and uneducated classes from voting. The government of the new kingdom took place in a framework of parliamentary constitutional monarchy dominated by liberal forces. As Northern Italy quickly industrialised, the South and rural areas of the North remained underdeveloped and overpopulated, forcing millions of people to migrate abroad and fuelling a large and influential diaspora. The Italian Socialist Party constantly increased in strength, challenging the traditional liberal and conservative establishment.
Starting in the last two decades of the 19th century, Italy developed into a colonial power by forcing under its rule Eritrea and Somalia in East Africa, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in North Africa (later unified in the colony of Libya) and the Dodecanese islands. From 2 November 1899 to 7 September 1901, Italy also participated as part of the Eight-Nation Alliance forces during the Boxer Rebellion in China; on 7 September 1901, a concession in Tientsin was ceded to the country, and on 7 June 1902, the concession was taken into Italian possession and administered by a consul. In 1913, male universal suffrage was adopted. The pre-war period dominated by Giovanni Giolitti, Prime Minister five times between 1892 and 1921, was characterised by the economic, industrial, and political-cultural modernization of Italian society.
Italy entered into the First World War in 1915 with the aim of completing national unity: for this reason, the Italian intervention in the First World War is also considered the Fourth Italian War of Independence, in a historiographical perspective that identifies in the latter the conclusion of the unification of Italy, whose military actions began during the revolutions of 1848 with the First Italian War of Independence.
Italy, nominally allied with the German Empire and the Empire of Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance, in 1915 joined the Allies into World War I with a promise of substantial territorial gains, that included western Inner Carniola, former Austrian Littoral, Dalmatia as well as parts of the Ottoman Empire. The country gave a fundamental contribution to the victory of the conflict as one of the "Big Four" top Allied powers. The war on the Italian Front was initially inconclusive, as the Italian army got stuck in a long attrition war in the Alps, making little progress and suffering heavy losses. However, the reorganization of the army and the conscription of the so-called '99 Boys (Ragazzi del '99, all males born in 1899 who were turning 18) led to more effective Italian victories in major battles, such as on Monte Grappa and in a series of battles on the Piave river. Eventually, in October 1918, the Italians launched a massive offensive, culminating in the victory of Vittorio Veneto. The Italian victory, which was announced by the Bollettino della Vittoria and the Bollettino della Vittoria Navale, marked the end of the war on the Italian Front, secured the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was chiefly instrumental in ending the First World War less than two weeks later. Italian armed forces were also involved in the African theatre, the Balkan theatre, the Middle Eastern theatre, and then took part in the Occupation of Constantinople.
During the war, more than 650,000 Italian soldiers and as many civilians died, and the kingdom went to the brink of bankruptcy. The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919) and the Treaty of Rapallo (1920) allowed the annexation of Trentino Alto-Adige, the Julian March, Istria and the Kvarner Gulf, as well as the Dalmatian city of Zara. The subsequent Treaty of Rome (1924) led to the annexation of the city of Fiume by Italy. Italy did not receive other territories promised by the Treaty of London (1915), so this outcome was denounced as a "mutilated victory". The rhetoric of "mutilated victory" was adopted by Benito Mussolini and led to the rise of Italian fascism, becoming a key point in the propaganda of Fascist Italy. Historians regard "mutilated victory" as a "political myth", used by fascists to fuel Italian imperialism and obscure the successes of liberal Italy in the aftermath of World War I. Italy also gained a permanent seat in the League of Nations's executive council.
The socialist agitations that followed the devastation of the Great War, inspired by the Russian Revolution, led to counter-revolution and repression throughout Italy. The liberal establishment, fearing a Soviet-style revolution, started to endorse the small National Fascist Party, led by Benito Mussolini. In October 1922 the Blackshirts of the National Fascist Party attempted a mass demonstration and a coup named the "March on Rome" which failed but at the last minute, King Victor Emmanuel III refused to proclaim a state of siege and appointed Mussolini prime minister, thereby transferring political power to the fascists without armed conflict. Over the next few years, Mussolini banned all political parties and curtailed personal liberties, thus forming a dictatorship. These actions attracted international attention and eventually inspired similar dictatorships such as Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain.
Italian Fascism is based upon Italian nationalism and imperialism, and in particular seeks to complete what it considers as the incomplete project of the unification of Italy by incorporating Italia Irredenta (unredeemed Italy) into the state of Italy. To the east of Italy, the Fascists claimed that Dalmatia was a land of Italian culture whose Italians, including those of Italianized South Slavic descent, had been driven out of Dalmatia and into exile in Italy, and supported the return of Italians of Dalmatian heritage. Mussolini identified Dalmatia as having strong Italian cultural roots for centuries, similarly to Istria, via the Roman Empire and the Republic of Venice. To the south of Italy, the Fascists claimed Malta, which belonged to the United Kingdom, and Corfu, which instead belonged to Greece; to the north claimed Italian Switzerland, while to the west claimed Corsica, Nice, and Savoy, which belonged to France. The Fascist regime produced literature on Corsica that presented evidence of the island's italianità. The Fascist regime produced literature on Nice that justified that Nice was an Italian land based on historic, ethnic, and linguistic grounds.
The Armistice of Villa Giusti, which ended fighting between Italy and Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I, resulted in Italian annexation of neighbouring parts of Yugoslavia. During the interwar period, the fascist Italian government undertook a campaign of Italianisation in the areas it annexed, which suppressed Slavic language, schools, political parties, and cultural institutions. Between 1922 and the beginning of World War II, the affected people were also the German-speaking and Ladin-speaking populations of Trentino-Alto Adige, and the French- and Arpitan-speaking regions of the western Alps, such as the Aosta valley.
Mussolini promised to bring Italy back as a great power in Europe, building a "New Roman Empire" and holding power over the Mediterranean Sea. In propaganda, Fascists used the ancient Roman motto "Mare Nostrum" (Latin for "Our Sea") to describe the Mediterranean. For this reason the Fascist regime engaged in interventionist foreign policy. In 1923, the Greek island of Corfu was briefly occupied by Italy, after the assassination of General Tellini in Greek territory. In 1925, Italy forced Albania to become a de facto protectorate. In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and founded Italian East Africa, resulting in an international alienation and leading to Italy's withdrawal from the League of Nations; Italy allied with Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan and strongly supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Italy formally annexed Albania. Italy entered World War II on 10 June 1940. The Italians initially advanced in British Somaliland, Egypt, the Balkans (establishing the Governorate of Dalmatia and Montenegro, the Province of Ljubljana, and the puppet states Independent State of Croatia and Hellenic State), and eastern fronts. They were, however, subsequently defeated on the Eastern Front as well as in the East African campaign and the North African campaign, losing as a result their territories in Africa and in the Balkans.
During World War II, Italian war crimes included extrajudicial killings and ethnic cleansing by deportation of about 25,000 people, mainly Jews, Croats, and Slovenians, to the Italian concentration camps, such as Rab, Gonars, Monigo, Renicci di Anghiari, and elsewhere. Yugoslav Partisans perpetrated their own crimes against the local ethnic Italian population (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) during and after the war, including the foibe massacres. In Italy and Yugoslavia, unlike in Germany, few war crimes were prosecuted.
An Allied invasion of Sicily began in July 1943, leading to the collapse of the Fascist regime and the fall of Mussolini on 25 July. Mussolini was deposed and arrested by order of King Victor Emmanuel III in co-operation with the majority of the members of the Grand Council of Fascism, which passed a motion of no confidence. On 8 September, Italy signed the Armistice of Cassibile, ending its war with the Allies. Shortly thereafter, the Germans, with the assistance of the Italian fascists, succeeded in taking control of northern and central Italy. The country remained a battlefield for the rest of the war, with the Allies slowly moving up from the south.
In the north, the Germans set up the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a Nazi puppet state with Mussolini installed as leader after he was rescued by German paratroopers. Some Italian troops in the south were organised into the Italian Co-belligerent Army, which fought alongside the Allies for the rest of the war, while other Italian troops, loyal to Mussolini and his RSI, continued to fight alongside the Germans in the National Republican Army. Also, the post-armistice period saw the rise of a large anti-fascist resistance movement, the Resistenza. As result, the country descended into civil war; the Italian resistance fought a guerrilla war against the Nazi German occupiers and Italian Fascist forces, while clashes between the Fascist RSI Army and the Royalist Italian Co-Belligerent Army were rare. In late April 1945, with total defeat looming, Mussolini attempted to escape north, but was captured and summarily executed near Lake Como by Italian partisans. His body was then taken to Milan, where it was hung upside down at a service station for public viewing and to provide confirmation of his demise.
Hostilities ended on 29 April 1945, when the German forces in Italy surrendered. Nearly half a million Italians (including civilians) died in the conflict, society was divided and the Italian economy had been all but destroyed; per capita income in 1944 was at its lowest point since the beginning of the 20th century. The aftermath of World War II left Italy also with an anger against the monarchy for its endorsement of the Fascist regime for the previous twenty years. These frustrations contributed to a revival of the Italian republican movement.
Italy became a republic after the 1946 Italian institutional referendum held on 2 June, a day celebrated since as Festa della Repubblica. This was the first time Italian women voted at the national level. Victor Emmanuel III's son, Umberto II, was forced to abdicate and exiled. The Republican Constitution was approved in 1948. Under the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947, areas next to the Adriatic Sea were annexed by Yugoslavia causing the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus, which led to the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 of local ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians), the others being ethnic Slovenians, ethnic Croatians, and ethnic Istro-Romanians, choosing to maintain Italian citizenship. Later, the Free Territory of Trieste was divided between the two states. Italy lost all of its colonial possessions, formally ending the Italian Empire. The Italian border today has existed since 1975, when Trieste was formally re-annexed to Italy.
Fears of a possible Communist takeover proved crucial for the 18 April 1948, when the Christian Democrats, under Alcide De Gasperi, obtained a landslide victory. Consequently, in 1949 Italy became a member of NATO. The Marshall Plan revived the Italian economy which, until the late 1960s, enjoyed a period of sustained economic growth commonly called the "Economic Miracle". In the 1950s, Italy became one of the six founding countries of the European Communities, a forerunner of the European Union.
From the late 1960s until the early 80s, the country experienced the Years of Lead, a period characterised by economic crisis, especially after the 1973 oil crisis, widespread social conflicts and terrorist massacres.
In the 1980s, for the first time since 1945, two governments were led by non-Christian-Democrat premiers: one republican and one socialist; the Christian Democrats remained, however, the main government party. The economy recovered and Italy became the world's fifth-largest industrial nation after it gained entry into the G7 in the 1970s. However, the Italian national debt skyrocketed passing 100% of the country's GDP.
Italy faced terror attacks between 1992-93 perpetrated by the Sicilian Mafia as a consequence of new anti-mafia measures launched by the government. One year later (May–July 1993), tourist spots were attacked, leaving 10 dead and 93 injured and causing severe damage to cultural heritage such as the Uffizi Gallery. The Catholic Church openly condemned the Mafia and an anti-Mafia priest shot dead in Rome.
In the early 1990s, voters – disenchanted with political paralysis, massive public debt and extensive corruption (known as Tangentopoli) uncovered by the Clean Hands (Mani Pulite) investigation – demanded radical reforms. The scandals involved all major parties, but especially those in the government coalition: the Christian Democrats, who ruled for almost 50 years, underwent a severe crisis and eventually disbanded, splitting into several factions. The Communists reorganised as a social-democratic force. During the 1990s and 2000s, centre-right (dominated by media magnate Silvio Berlusconi) and centre-left coalitions (led by university professor Romano Prodi) alternately governed the country.
Amidst the Great Recession, Berlusconi resigned in 2011, and was replaced by the technocratic cabinet of Mario Monti. Following the 2013 general election, the Vice-Secretary of the Democratic Party Enrico Letta formed a new government at the head of a right-left Grand coalition. In 2014, challenged by the new Secretary of the PD Matteo Renzi, Letta resigned and was replaced by Renzi. The new government started constitutional reforms. On 4 December constitutional reform was rejected in a referendum and Renzi resigned; Paolo Gentiloni was appointed Prime Minister.
In the European migrant crisis of the 2010s, Italy was the entry point and leading destination for most asylum seekers entering the EU. Between 2013-18, the country took in over 700,000 migrants and refugees, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, which caused strain on the public purse and a surge in support for far-right or euro-sceptic parties. The 2018 general election was characterised by a strong showing of the Five Star Movement and the Lega. Professor Giuseppe Conte became Prime Minister at the head of a populist coalition between these two parties. After only fourteen months the League withdrew its support from Conte, who formed a new government coalition between the Five Star Movement and the centre-left.
In 2020, Italy was severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Conte's government imposed a national lockdown. With more than 155,000 confirmed victims, Italy was one of the countries with the highest deaths in the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic caused a severe economic disruption, in which Italy was one of the most affected countries.
In February 2021, after a government crisis within his majority, Conte was forced to resign and Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, formed a national unity government supported by most of the main parties, pledging to oversee implementation of economic stimulus to face the crisis caused by the pandemic. On 22 October 2022, Giorgia Meloni was sworn in as Italy's first female prime minister. Her Brothers of Italy party formed a right-wing government with the far-right League and Berlusconi's Forza Italia.
Italy, whose territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical region, is located in Southern Europe and it is also considered a part of western Europe, between latitudes 35° and 47° N, and longitudes 6° and 19° E. To the north, Italy borders France, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia and is roughly delimited by the Alpine watershed, enclosing the Po Valley and the Venetian Plain. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula and the two Mediterranean islands of Sicily and Sardinia (the two biggest islands of the Mediterranean), in addition to many smaller islands. The sovereign states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland.
The country's total area is 301,230 square kilometres (116,306 sq mi), of which 294,020 km (113,522 sq mi) is land and 7,210 km (2,784 sq mi) is water. Including the islands, Italy has a coastline and border of 7,600 kilometres (4,722 miles) on the Adriatic, Ionian, Tyrrhenian seas, and borders shared with France (488 km (303 mi)), Austria (430 km (267 mi)), Slovenia (232 km (144 mi)) and Switzerland (740 km (460 mi)). San Marino (39 km (24 mi)) and Vatican City (3.2 km (2.0 mi)), both enclaves, account for the remainder.
Over 35% of the Italian territory is mountainous. The Apennine Mountains form the peninsula's backbone, and the Alps form most of its northern boundary, where Italy's highest point is located on Mont Blanc summit (Monte Bianco) (4,810 m or 15,780 ft). Other worldwide-known mountains in Italy include the Matterhorn (Monte Cervino), Monte Rosa, Gran Paradiso in the West Alps, and Bernina, Stelvio and Dolomites along the eastern side.
The Po, Italy's longest river (652 kilometres or 405 miles), flows from the Alps on the western border with France and crosses the Padan plain on its way to the Adriatic Sea. The Po Valley is the largest plain in Italy, with 46,000 km (18,000 sq mi), and it represents over 70% of the total plain area in the country.
Many elements of the Italian territory are of volcanic origin. Most of the small islands and archipelagos in the south, like Capraia, Ponza, Ischia, Eolie, Ustica and Pantelleria are volcanic islands. There are also active volcanoes: Mount Etna in Sicily (the largest active volcano in Europe), Vulcano, Stromboli, and Vesuvius (the only active volcano on mainland Europe).
The five largest lakes are, in order of diminishing size: Garda (367.94 km or 142 sq mi), Maggiore (212.51 km or 82 sq mi, whose minor northern part is part of Switzerland), Como (145.9 km or 56 sq mi), Trasimeno (124.29 km or 48 sq mi) and Bolsena (113.55 km or 44 sq mi). Four different seas surround the Italian Peninsula in the Mediterranean Sea from three sides: the Adriatic Sea in the east, the Ionian Sea in the south, and the Ligurian Sea and the Tyrrhenian Sea in the west. The longest Italian river is the Po, which flows for either 652 km (405 mi) or 682 km (424 mi). Most of the rivers of Italy drain either into the Adriatic Sea or the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Although the country includes the Italian peninsula, adjacent islands, and most of the southern Alpine basin, some of Italy's territory extends beyond the Alpine basin and some islands are located outside the Eurasian continental shelf. These territories are the comuni of: Livigno, Sexten, Innichen, Toblach (in part), Chiusaforte, Tarvisio, Graun im Vinschgau (in part), which are all part of the Danube's drainage basin, while the Val di Lei constitutes part of the Rhine's basin and the islands of Lampedusa and Lampione are on the African continental shelf.
After its quick industrial growth, Italy took a long time to confront its environmental problems. After several improvements, it now ranks 84th in the world for ecological sustainability. National parks cover about 5% of the country, while the total area protected by national parks, regional parks and nature reserves covers about 10.5% of the Italian territory, to which must be added 12% of coasts protected by marine protected areas.
In the last decade, Italy has become one of the world's leading producers of renewable energy, ranking as the world's fourth largest holder of installed solar energy capacity and the sixth largest holder of wind power capacity in 2010. Renewable energies provided approximately 37% Italy's energy consumption in 2020. However, air pollution remains a severe problem, especially in the industrialised north, reaching the tenth highest level worldwide of industrial carbon dioxide emissions in the 1990s. Italy is the twelfth-largest carbon dioxide producer.
Extensive traffic and congestion in the largest metropolitan areas continue to cause severe environmental and health issues, even if smog levels have decreased dramatically since the 1970s and 1980s, and the presence of smog is becoming an increasingly rarer phenomenon and levels of sulphur dioxide are decreasing.
Many watercourses and coastal stretches have also been contaminated by industrial and agricultural activity, while because of rising water levels, Venice has been regularly flooded throughout recent years. Waste from industrial activity is not always disposed of by legal means and has led to permanent health effects on inhabitants of affected areas, as in the case of the Seveso disaster. The country has also operated several nuclear reactors between 1963 and 1990 but, after the Chernobyl disaster and a referendum on the issue the nuclear programme was terminated, a decision that was overturned by the government in 2008, planning to build up to four nuclear power plants with French technology. This was in turn struck down by a referendum following the Fukushima nuclear accident.
Deforestation, illegal building developments and poor land-management policies have led to significant erosion all over Italy's mountainous regions, leading to major ecological disasters like the 1963 Vajont Dam flood, the 1998 Sarno and 2009 Messina mudslides. The country had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 3.65/10, ranking it 142nd globally out of 172 countries.
Italy has probably the highest level of faunal biodiversity in Europe, with over 57,000 species recorded, representing more than a third of all European fauna, and the highest level of biodiversity of both animal and plant species within the European Union. Italy's varied geological structure contributes to its high climate and habitat diversity. The Italian peninsula is in the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, forming a corridor between central Europe and North Africa, and has 8,000 km (5,000 mi) of coastline. Italy also receives species from the Balkans, Eurasia, and the Middle East. Italy's varied geological structure, including the Alps and the Apennines, Central Italian woodlands, and Southern Italian Garigue and Maquis shrubland, also contribute to high climate and habitat diversity.
The fauna of Italy includes 4,777 endemic animal species, which include the Sardinian long-eared bat, Sardinian red deer, spectacled salamander, brown cave salamander, Italian newt, Italian frog, Apennine yellow-bellied toad, Italian wall lizard, Aeolian wall lizard, Sicilian wall lizard, Italian Aesculapian snake, and Sicilian pond turtle. In Italy there are 119 mammals species, 550 bird species, 69 reptile species, 39 amphibian species, 623 fish species and 56,213 invertebrate species, of which 37,303 insect species.
The flora of Italy was traditionally estimated to comprise about 5,500 vascular plant species. However, as of 2005, 6,759 species are recorded in the Data bank of Italian vascular flora. Italy has 1,371 endemic plant species and subspecies, which include Sicilian Fir, Barbaricina columbine, Sea marigold, Lavender cotton and Ucriana violet. Italy is a signatory to the Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats and the Habitats Directive both affording protection to Italian fauna and flora.
Italy has many botanical gardens and historic gardens, some of which are known outside the country. The Italian garden is stylistically based on symmetry, axial geometry and on the principle of imposing order over nature. It influenced the history of gardening, especially French gardens and English gardens. The Italian garden was influenced by Roman gardens and Italian Renaissance gardens.
The Italian wolf is the national animal of Italy, while the national tree of the country is the strawberry tree. The reasons for this choice are related to the fact that the Italian wolf, which inhabits the Apennine Mountains and the Western Alps, features prominently in Latin and Italian cultures, such as in the legend of the founding of Rome, while the green leaves, white flowers and red berries of the strawberry tree, which is native to the Mediterranean region, recall the colours of the flag of Italy.
The climate of Italy is influenced by the large body of water of the Mediterranean Sea that surrounds Italy on every side except the north. These seas constitute a reservoir of heat and humidity for Italy. Within the southern temperate zone, they determine a Mediterranean climate with local differences due to the geomorphology of the territory, which tends to make its mitigating effects felt, especially in high pressure conditions.
Because of the length of the peninsula and the mostly mountainous hinterland, the climate of Italy is highly diverse. In most of the inland northern and central regions, the climate ranges from humid subtropical to humid continental and oceanic. The climate of the Po valley geographical region is mostly humid subtropical, with cool winters and hot summers. The coastal areas of Liguria, Tuscany and most of the South generally fit the Mediterranean climate stereotype (Köppen climate classification).
Conditions on the coast are different from those in the interior, particularly during winter months when the higher altitudes tend to be cold, wet, and often snowy. The coastal regions have mild winters and hot and generally dry summers; lowland valleys are hot in summer. Average winter temperatures vary from around 0 °C (32 °F) in the Alps to 12 °C (54 °F) in Sicily, so average summer temperatures range from 20 °C (68 °F) to over 25 °C (77 °F).
Winters can vary widely across the country with lingering cold, foggy and snowy periods in the north and milder, sunnier conditions in the south. Summers are hot across the country, except for at high altitude, particularly in the south. Northern and central areas can experience occasional strong thunderstorms from spring to autumn.
Italy has been a unitary parliamentary republic since 2 June 1946, when the monarchy was abolished by a constitutional referendum. The President of Italy (Presidente della Repubblica), currently Sergio Mattarella since 2015, is Italy's head of state. The President is elected for a single seven years mandate by the Parliament of Italy and some regional voters in joint session. Italy has a written democratic constitution, resulting from the work of a Constituent Assembly formed by the representatives of all the anti-fascist forces that contributed to the defeat of Nazi and Fascist forces during the Italian Civil War.
Italy has a parliamentary government based on a mixed proportional and majoritarian voting system. The parliament is perfectly bicameral: the two houses, the Chamber of Deputies that meets in Palazzo Montecitorio, and the Senate of the Republic that meets in Palazzo Madama, have the same powers. The Prime Minister, officially President of the Council of Ministers (Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri), is Italy's head of government. The Prime Minister and the cabinet are appointed by the President of the Republic of Italy and must pass a vote of confidence in Parliament to come into office. To remain the Prime Minister has to pass also eventual further votes of confidence or no confidence in Parliament.
The prime minister is the President of the Council of Ministers – which holds effective executive power – and must receive a vote of approval from it to execute most political activities. The office is similar to those in most other parliamentary systems, but the head of the Italian government is not authorised to request the dissolution of the Parliament of Italy.
Another difference with similar offices is that the overall political responsibility for intelligence is vested in the President of the Council of Ministers. By virtue of that, the Prime Minister has exclusive power to coordinate intelligence policies, determine the financial resources and strengthen national cyber security; apply and protect State secrets; authorise agents to carry out operations, in Italy or abroad, in violation of the law.
A peculiarity of the Italian Parliament is the representation given to Italian citizens permanently living abroad: 8 Deputies and 4 Senators elected in four distinct overseas constituencies. In addition, the Italian Senate is characterised also by a small number of senators for life, appointed by the President "for outstanding patriotic merits in the social, scientific, artistic or literary field". Former Presidents of the Republic are ex officio life senators.
Italy's three major political parties are the Brothers of Italy, the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement. During the 2022 general election, these three parties and their coalitions won 357 out of 400 seats available in the Chamber of Deputies and 187 out of 200 in the Senate. The centre-right coalition, which included Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, Matteo Salvini's League, Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Maurizio Lupi's Us Moderates, won a majority of the seats in parliament. The rest of the seats were taken by the centre-left coalition, which included Enrico Letta's Democratic Party, Angelo Bonelli's Greens and Left Alliance, Aosta Valley, Emma Bonino's More Europe & Luigi Di Maio's Civic Commitment, as well as by Giuseppe Conte's Five Star Movement, Carlo Calenda's Action - Italia Viva, Philipp Achammer and Philipp Achammer's South Tyrolean People's Party, Cateno De Luca's South Calls North and Ricardo Antonio Merlo's Associative Movement of Italians Abroad.
The law of Italy has a plurality of sources of production. These are arranged in a hierarchical scale, under which the rule of a lower source cannot conflict with the rule of an upper source (hierarchy of sources). The Constitution of 1948 is the main source. The judiciary of Italy is based on Roman law modified by the Napoleonic code and later statutes. The Supreme Court of Cassation is the highest court in Italy for both criminal and civil appeal cases. The Constitutional Court of Italy (Corte Costituzionale) rules on the conformity of laws with the constitution and is a post–World War II innovation.
Since their appearance in the middle of the 19th century, Italian organised crime and criminal organisations have infiltrated the social and economic life of many regions in Southern Italy, the most notorious of which being the Sicilian Mafia, which would later expand into some foreign countries including the United States. Mafia receipts may reach 9% of Italy's GDP.
A 2009 report identified 610 comuni which have a strong Mafia presence, where 13 million Italians live and 14.6% of the Italian GDP is produced. The Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, nowadays probably the most powerful crime syndicate of Italy, accounts alone for 3% of the country's GDP. However, at 0.013 per 1,000 people, Italy has only the 47th highest murder rate compared to 61 countries and the 43rd highest number of rapes per 1,000 people compared to 64 countries in the world. These are relatively low figures among developed countries.
The Italian law enforcement system is complex, with multiple police forces. The national policing agencies are the Polizia di Stato (State Police), the Arma dei Carabinieri, the Guardia di Finanza (Financial Guard), and the Polizia Penitenziaria (Prison Police), as well as the Guardia Costiera (coast guard police). Although policing in Italy is primarily provided on a national basis, there also exists Polizia Provinciale (provincial police) and Polizia Municipale (municipal police).
Italy is regarded as being behind other Western European nations with regards to LGBT rights. Additionally, Italy's law prohibiting torture is considered behind international standards.
Italy is a founding member of the European Economic Community (EEC), now the European Union (EU), and of NATO. Italy was admitted to the United Nations in 1955, and it is a member and a strong supporter of a wide number of international organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe, and the Central European Initiative. Its recent or upcoming turns in the rotating presidency of international organisations include the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2018, the G7 in 2017 and the EU Council from July to December 2014. Italy is also a recurrent non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, the most recently in 2017.
Italy strongly supports multilateral international politics, endorsing the United Nations and its international security activities. In 2013, Italy had 5,296 troops deployed abroad, engaged in 33 UN and NATO missions in 25 countries of the world. Italy deployed troops in support of UN peacekeeping missions in Somalia, Mozambique, and East Timor and provides support for NATO and UN operations in Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania. Italy deployed over 2,000 troops in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) from February 2003.
Italy supported international efforts to reconstruct and stabilise Iraq, but it had withdrawn its military contingent of some 3,200 troops by 2006, maintaining only humanitarian operators and other civilian personnel. In August 2006 Italy deployed about 2,450 troops in Lebanon for the United Nations' peacekeeping mission UNIFIL. Italy is one of the largest financiers of the Palestinian National Authority, contributing €60 million in 2013 alone.
The Italian Army, Navy, Air Force and Carabinieri collectively form the Italian Armed Forces, under the command of the High Council of Defence, presided over by the President of Italy, as established by article 87 of the Constitution of Italy. According to article 78, the Parliament has the authority to declare a state of war and vest the necessary powers in the Government.
Despite not being a branch of the armed forces, the Guardia di Finanza ("Financial Guard") has military status and is organized along military lines. Since 2005, military service is voluntary. In 2010, the Italian military had 293,202 personnel on active duty, of which 114,778 are Carabinieri. As part of NATO's nuclear sharing strategy Italy also hosts 90 United States B61 nuclear bombs, located in the Ghedi and Aviano air bases.
The Italian Army is the national ground defence force. Its best-known combat vehicles are the Dardo infantry fighting vehicle, the Centauro tank destroyer and the Ariete tank, and among its aircraft the Mangusta attack helicopter, in the last years deployed in EU, NATO and UN missions. It also has at its disposal many Leopard 1 and M113 armoured vehicles. It was formed in 1946 from what remained of the Regio Esercito ("Royal Army", which was established on the occasion of the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, 1861) after World War II, when Italy became a republic following a referendum.
The Italian Navy is a blue-water navy. In modern times the Italian Navy, being a member of the EU and NATO, has taken part in many coalition peacekeeping operations around the world. It was formed in 1946 from what remained of the Regia Marina ("Royal Navy", which was established on the occasion of the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, 1861) after World War II, when Italy became a republic following a referendum. The Italian Navy in 2014 operates 154 vessels in service, including minor auxiliary vessels.
The Italian Air Force in 2021 operates 219 combat jets. A transport capability is guaranteed by a fleet of 27 C-130Js and C-27J Spartan. The Italian Air Force was founded as an independent service arm on 28 March 1923 by King Victor Emmanuel III as the Regia Aeronautica ("Royal Air Force"). After World War II, when Italy became a republic following a referendum, the Regia Aeronautica was given its current name. The acrobatic display team is the Frecce Tricolori ("Tricolour Arrows").
An autonomous corps of the military, the Carabinieri are the gendarmerie and military police of Italy, policing the military and civilian population alongside Italy's other police forces. While the different branches of the Carabinieri report to separate ministries for each of their individual functions, the corps reports to the Ministry of Internal Affairs when maintaining public order and security.
Italy is constituted by 20 regions (regioni)—five of these regions having a special autonomous status that enables them to enact legislation on additional matters, 107 provinces (province) or metropolitan cities (città metropolitane), and 7,904 municipalities (comuni). This is a list of regions in Italy:
Italy has a major advanced capitalist mixed economy, ranking as the third-largest in the eurozone and the eighth-largest in the world by nominal GDP the ninth-largest national wealth and the third-largest central bank gold reserve. A founding member of the G7, the eurozone and the OECD, it is regarded as one of the world's most industrialised nations and a leading country in world trade and exports. It is a developed country, ranked 30th on the Human Development Index. It also performs well in life expectancy, healthcare and education. The country is well known for its creative and innovative business, a large and competitive agricultural sector (with the world's largest wine production), and for its influential and high-quality automobile, machinery, food, design and fashion industry.
Italy is the world's sixth-largest manufacturing country, characterised by a smaller number of global multinational corporations than other economies of comparable size and many dynamic small and medium-sized enterprises, notoriously clustered in several industrial districts, which are the backbone of the Italian industry. This has produced a manufacturing sector often focused on the export of niche market and luxury products, that if on one side is less capable to compete on the quantity, on the other side is more capable of facing the competition from China and other emerging Asian economies based on lower labour costs, with higher quality products. Italy was the world's tenth-largest exporter in 2019. Its closest trade ties are with the other countries of the European Union. Its largest export partners in 2019 were Germany (12%), France (11%), and the United States (10%).
The automotive industry is a significant part of the Italian manufacturing sector, with over 144,000 firms and almost 485,000 employed people in 2015, and a contribution of 8.5% to Italian GDP. Stellantis is currently the world's fifth-largest auto maker. The country boasts a wide range of acclaimed products, from compact city cars to luxury supercars such as Maserati, Pagani, Lamborghini, and Ferrari.
The Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena is the world's oldest or second oldest bank in continuous operation, depending on the definition, and the fourth-largest Italian commercial and retail bank. Italy has a strong cooperative sector, with the largest share of the population (4.5%) employed by a cooperative in the EU. The Val d'Agri area, Basilicata, hosts the largest onshore hydrocarbon field in Europe. Moderate natural gas reserves, mainly in the Po Valley and offshore Adriatic Sea, have been discovered in recent years and constitute the country's most important mineral resource. Italy is one of the world's leading producers of pumice, pozzolana, and feldspar. Another notable mineral resource is marble, especially the world-famous white Carrara marble from the Massa and Carrara quarries in Tuscany.
Italy is part of a monetary union, the eurozone, and of the European single market, which represents more than 500 million consumers. Several domestic commercial policies are determined by agreements among European Union (EU) members and by EU legislation. Italy introduced the common European currency, the euro in 2002. It is a member of the eurozone which represents around 330 million citizens. Its monetary policy is set by the European Central Bank.
Italy was hit hard by the financial crisis of 2007–08, that exacerbated the country's structural problems. Effectively, after a strong GDP growth of 5–6% per year from the 1950s to the early 1970s, and a progressive slowdown in the 1980–90s, the country virtually stagnated in the 2000s. The political efforts to revive growth with massive government spending eventually produced a severe rise in public debt, that stood at over 131.8% of GDP in 2017, ranking second in the EU only after the Greek one. For all that, the largest chunk of Italian public debt is owned by national subjects, a major difference between Italy and Greece, and the level of household debt is much lower than the OECD average.
A gaping North–South divide is a major factor of socio-economic weakness. It can be noted by the huge difference in statistical income between the northern and southern regions and municipalities. The richest province, Alto Adige-South Tyrol, earns 152% of the national GDP per capita, while the poorest region, Calabria, 61%. The unemployment rate (11.1%) stands slightly above the eurozone average, but the disaggregated figure is 6.6% in the North and 19.2% in the South. The youth unemployment rate (31.7% in March 2018) is extremely high compared to EU standards.
According to the last national agricultural census, there were 1.6 million farms in 2010 (−32.4% since 2000) covering 12,700,000 ha or 31,382,383 acres (63% of which are located in Southern Italy). The vast majority (99%) are family-operated and small, averaging only 8 ha (20 acres) in size. Of the total surface area in agricultural use (forestry excluded), grain fields take up 31%, olive tree orchards 8.2%, vineyards 5.4%, citrus orchards 3.8%, sugar beets 1.7%, and horticulture 2.4%. The remainder is primarily dedicated to pastures (25.9%) and feed grains (11.6%).
Italy is the world's largest wine producer, and one of the leading in olive oil, fruits (apples, olives, grapes, oranges, lemons, pears, apricots, hazelnuts, peaches, cherries, plums, strawberries and kiwifruits), and vegetables (especially artichokes and tomatoes). The most famous Italian wines are probably the Tuscan Chianti and the Piedmontese Barolo. Other famous wines are Barbaresco, Barbera d'Asti, Brunello di Montalcino, Frascati, Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, Morellino di Scansano, and the sparkling wines Franciacorta and Prosecco.
Quality goods in which Italy specialises, particularly the already mentioned wines and regional cheeses, are often protected under the quality assurance labels DOC/DOP. This geographical indication certificate, which is attributed by the European Union, is considered important in order to avoid confusion with low-quality mass-produced ersatz products.
Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways, the so-called autostrade, reserved for fast traffic and for motor vehicles only. Regarding the national road network, in 2002 there were 668,721 km (415,524 mi) of serviceable roads in Italy, including 6,487 km (4,031 mi) of motorways, state-owned but privately operated by Atlantia. In 2005, about 34,667,000 passenger cars (590 cars per 1,000 people) and 4,015,000 goods vehicles circulated on the national road network.
The national railway network, state-owned and operated by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (FSI), in 2008 totalled 16,529 km (10,271 mi) of which 11,727 km (7,287 mi) is electrified, and on which 4,802 locomotives and railcars run. The main public operator of high-speed trains is Trenitalia, part of FSI. Higher-speed trains are divided into three categories: Frecciarossa (English: red arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 300 km/h on dedicated high-speed tracks; Frecciargento (English: silver arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 250 km/h on both high-speed and mainline tracks; and Frecciabianca (English: white arrow) trains operate on high-speed regional lines at a maximum speed of 200 km/h. Italy has 11 rail border crossings over the Alpine mountains with its neighbouring countries.
Italy is the fifth in Europe by the number of passengers by air transport, with about 148 million passengers or about 10% of the European total in 2011. In 2022 there were 45 civil airports in Italy, including the two hubs of Malpensa International Airport in Milan and Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome. Since October 2021, Italy's flag carrier airline is ITA Airways, which took over the brand, the IATA ticketing code, and many assets belonging to the former flag carrier Alitalia, after its bankruptcy.
In 2004 there were 43 major seaports, including the seaport of Genoa, the country's largest and second-largest in the Mediterranean Sea. In 2005 Italy maintained a civilian air fleet of about 389,000 units and a merchant fleet of 581 ships. The national inland waterways network has a length of 2,400 km (1,491 mi) for commercial traffic in 2012.
Italy has been the final destination of the Silk Road for many centuries. In particular, the construction of the Suez Canal intensified sea trade with East Africa and Asia from the 19th century. Since the end of the Cold War and increasing European integration, the trade relations, which were often interrupted in the 20th century, have intensified again and the northern Italian ports such as the deep-water port of Trieste in the northernmost part of the Mediterranean with its extensive rail connections to Central and Eastern Europe are once again the destination of government subsidies and significant foreign investment.
In the last decade, Italy has become one of the world's largest producers of renewable energy, ranking as the second largest producer in the European Union and the ninth in the world. Wind power, hydroelectricity, and geothermal power are also significant sources of electricity in the country. Renewable sources account for 27.5% of all electricity produced in Italy, with hydro alone reaching 12.6%, followed by solar at 5.7%, wind at 4.1%, bioenergy at 3.5%, and geothermal at 1.6%. The rest of the national demand is covered by fossil fuels (38.2% natural gas, 13% coal, 8.4% oil) and by imports. Eni, with operations in 79 countries, is considered one of the seven "Supermajor" oil companies in the world, and one of the world's largest industrial companies.
Solar energy production alone accounted for almost 9% of the total electric production in the country in 2014, making Italy the country with the highest contribution from solar energy in the world. The Montalto di Castro Photovoltaic Power Station, completed in 2010, is the largest photovoltaic power station in Italy with 85 MW. Other examples of large PV plants in Italy are San Bellino (70.6 MW), Cellino san Marco (42.7 MW) and Sant' Alberto (34.6 MW). Italy was the first country in the world to exploit geothermal energy to produce electricity. Italy had managed four nuclear reactors until the 1980s. However, nuclear power in Italy has been abandoned following a 1987 referendum (in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Soviet Ukraine), though Italy still imports nuclear energy from Italy-owned reactors in foreign territories.
Through the centuries, Italy has fostered the scientific community that produced many major discoveries in physics and other sciences. During the Renaissance Italian polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) made contributions in a variety of fields, including biology, architecture, and engineering. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), an astronomer, physicist, engineer, and polymath, played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. He is considered the "father" of observational astronomy, modern physics, the scientific method, and modern science.
Other astronomers such as Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625–1712) and Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910) made discoveries about the Solar System. In mathematics, Joseph Louis Lagrange (born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia, 1736–1813) was active before leaving Italy. Fibonacci (c. 1170 – c. 1250), and Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) made fundamental advances in mathematics. Luca Pacioli established accounting to the world. Physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), a Nobel prize laureate, led the team in Chicago that developed the first nuclear reactor. He is considered the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". He, Emilio G. Segrè (1905–1989) who discovered the elements technetium and astatine, and the antiproton), Bruno Rossi (1905–1993) a pioneer in Cosmic Rays and X-ray astronomy) and a number of Italian physicists were forced to leave Italy in the 1930s by Fascist laws against Jews.
Other prominent physicists include: Amedeo Avogadro (most noted for his contributions to molecular theory, in particular, the Avogadro's law and the Avogadro constant), Evangelista Torricelli (inventor of barometer), Alessandro Volta (inventor of electric battery), Guglielmo Marconi (inventor of radio), Galileo Ferraris and Antonio Pacinotti, pioneers of the induction motor, Alessandro Cruto, pioneer of light bulb and Innocenzo Manzetti, eclectic pioneer of auto and robotics, Ettore Majorana (who discovered the Majorana fermions), Carlo Rubbia (1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN). Antonio Meucci is known for developing a voice-communication device which is often credited as the first telephone. Pier Giorgio Perotto in 1964 designed one of the first desktop programmable calculators, the Programma 101.
In biology, Francesco Redi has been the first to challenge the theory of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that maggots come from eggs of flies and he described 180 parasites in detail and Marcello Malpighi founded microscopic anatomy, Lazzaro Spallanzani conducted research in bodily functions, animal reproduction, and cellular theory, Camillo Golgi, whose many achievements include the discovery of the Golgi complex, paved the way to the acceptance of the Neuron doctrine, Rita Levi-Montalcini discovered the nerve growth factor (awarded 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine). In chemistry, Giulio Natta received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963 for his work on high polymers. Giuseppe Occhialini received the Wolf Prize in Physics for the discovery of the pion or pi-meson decay in 1947. Ennio de Giorgi, a Wolf Prize in Mathematics recipient in 1990, solved Bernstein's problem about minimal surfaces and the 19th Hilbert problem on the regularity of solutions of Elliptic partial differential equations.
Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) is the largest underground research centre in the world. ELETTRA, Eurac Research, ESA Centre for Earth Observation, Institute for Scientific Interchange, International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics conduct basic research. Trieste has the highest percentage of researchers in Europe in relation to the population. Italy was ranked 26th in the Global Innovation Index in 2023. There are numerous technology parks in Italy such as the Science and Technology Parks Kilometro Rosso (Bergamo), the AREA Science Park (Trieste), The VEGA-Venice Gateway for Science and Technology (Venezia), the Toscana Life Sciences (Siena), the Technology Park of Lodi Cluster (Lodi), and the Technology Park of Navacchio (Pisa), as well as science museums such as the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, the Città della Scienza in Naples and the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence.
Within this great Italian History of Science and Technology, modern times tell a different and more technologically divergent story. The North–South divide is a significant factor that leads to a vast difference in income between the Northern and Southern regions, which brings up the topic of the Digital Divide in Italy. The long history of this divided peninsula, now a unified nation-state, details the complex problems of underdeveloped areas in the South. As expected, these problems of underdevelopment and poverty still linger today, also reflected in the concept of the digital divide between the North and South. The Global digital divide is broadly described as the technological differences between underdeveloped and developed countries. While this does not necessarily mean that people have no access to technology, it is made clear that this equates to differences in technology, such as the Internet and household electronics. Digital inequalities between Northern and Southern Italy exist and are still prevalent, especially when related to education.
People have visited Italy for centuries, yet the first to visit the peninsula for touristic reasons were aristocrats during the Grand Tour, beginning in the 17th century, and flourishing in the 18th and the 19th century. This was a period in which European aristocrats, many of whom were British, visited parts of Europe, with Italy as a key destination. For Italy, this was in order to study ancient architecture, local culture and to admire the natural beauties.
Nowadays Italy is the fifth most visited country in international tourism, with a total of 52.3 million international arrivals in 2016. The total contribution of travel & tourism to GDP (including wider effects from investment, the supply chain and induced income impacts) was EUR162.7bn in 2014 (10.1% of GDP) and generated 1,082,000 jobs directly in 2014 (4.8% of total employment).
Factors of tourist interest in Italy are mainly culture, cuisine, history, fashion, architecture, art, religious sites and routes, wedding tourism, naturalistic beauties, nightlife, underwater sites and spas. Winter and summer tourism are present in many locations in the Alps and the Apennines, while seaside tourism is widespread in coastal locations on the Mediterranean Sea. Italy is the leading cruise tourism destination in the Mediterranean Sea. Small, historical and artistic Italian villages are promoted through the association I Borghi più belli d'Italia (literally "The Most Beautiful Villages of Italy").
The most visited regions of Italy, measured by nights spent in tourist accommodation establishments, are Veneto, Tuscany, Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna and Lazio. Rome is the 3rd most visited city in Europe and the 12th in the world, with 9.4 million arrivals in 2017 while Milan is the 27th worldwide with 6.8 million tourists. In addition, Venice and Florence are also among the world's top 100 destinations.
Italy is also the country with the highest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the world (58). Out of Italy's 58 heritage sites, 53 are cultural and 5 are natural. In Italy there is a broad variety of hotels, going from 1–5 stars. According to ISTAT, in 2017, there were 32,988 hotels with 1,133,452 rooms and 2,239,446 beds. As for non-hotel facilities (campsites, tourist villages, accommodations for rent, agritourism, etc.), in 2017 their number was 171,915 with 2,798,352 beds.
At the beginning of 2020, Italy had 60,317,116 inhabitants. The resulting population density, at 202 inhabitants per square kilometre (520/sq mi), is higher than that of most Western European countries. However, the distribution of the population is widely uneven. The most densely populated areas are the Po Valley (that accounts for almost a half of the national population) and the metropolitan areas of Rome and Naples, while vast regions such as the Alps and Apennines highlands, the plateaus of Basilicata and the island of Sardinia, as well as much of Sicily, are sparsely populated.
The population of Italy almost doubled during the 20th century, but the pattern of growth was extremely uneven because of large-scale internal migration from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North, a phenomenon which happened as a consequence of the Italian economic miracle of the 1950–1960s. High fertility and birth rates persisted until the 1970s, after which they started to decline. The population rapidly aged; by 2010, one in five Italians was over 65 years old, and the country currently has the fifth oldest population in the world, with a median age of 46.5 years. However, in recent years Italy has experienced significant growth in birth rates. The total fertility rate has also climbed from an all-time low of 1.18 children per woman in 1995 to 1.41 in 2008, albeit still below the replacement rate of 2.1 and considerably below the high of 5.06 children born per woman in 1883. Nevertheless, the total fertility rate is expected to reach 1.6–1.8 in 2030.
From the late 19th century until the 1960s Italy was a country of mass emigration. Between 1898 and 1914, the peak years of Italian diaspora, approximately 750,000 Italians emigrated each year. The diaspora concerned more than 25 million Italians and it is considered the biggest mass migration of contemporary times. As a result, today more than 4.1 million Italian citizens are living abroad, while at least 60 million people of full or part Italian ancestry live outside of Italy, most notably in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, the United States, Canada, Australia and France.
In 2021, Italy had about 5.17 million foreign residents, making up 8.7% of the total population. The figures include more than half a million children born in Italy to foreign nationals (second generation immigrants) but exclude foreign nationals who have subsequently acquired Italian citizenship; in 2016, about 201,000 people became Italian citizens. The official figures also exclude illegal immigrants, who estimated to number at least 670,000 as of 2008.
Starting from the early 1980s, until then a linguistically and culturally homogeneous society, Italy begun to attract substantial flows of foreign immigrants. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and, more recently, the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union, large waves of migration originated from the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe (especially Romania, Albania, Ukraine and Poland). Another source of immigration is neighbouring North Africa (in particular, Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia), with soaring arrivals as a consequence of the Arab Spring. Furthermore, in recent years, growing migration fluxes from Asia-Pacific (notably China and the Philippines) and Latin America have been recorded.
Currently, about one million Romanian citizens (around 10% of them being ethnic Romani people) are officially registered as living in Italy, representing the largest migrant population, followed by Albanians and Moroccans with about 500,000 people each. The number of unregistered Romanians is difficult to estimate, but the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network suggested in 2007 that there might have been half a million or more.
As of 2010, the foreign born population of Italy was from the following regions: Europe (54%), Africa (22%), Asia (16%), the Americas (8%) and Oceania (0.06%). The distribution of foreign population is geographically varied in Italy: in 2020, 61.2% of foreign citizens lived in Northern Italy (in particular 36.1% in the North West and 25.1% in the North East), 24.2% in the centre, 10.8% in the South and 3.9% in the Islands.
Italy's official language is Italian, as stated by the framework law no. 482/1999 and Trentino Alto-Adige's special Statute, which is adopted with a constitutional law. Around the world there are an estimated 64 million native Italian speakers and another 21 million who use it as a second language. Italian is often natively spoken in a regional variety, not to be confused with Italy's regional and minority languages; however, the establishment of a national education system led to a decrease in variation in the languages spoken across the country during the 20th century. Standardisation was further expanded in the 1950s and 1960s due to economic growth and the rise of mass media and television (the state broadcaster RAI helped set a standard Italian).
Twelve "historical minority languages" (minoranze linguistiche storiche) are formally recognised: Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian. Four of these also enjoy a co-official status in their respective region: French in the Aosta Valley; German in South Tyrol, and Ladin as well in some parts of the same province and in parts of the neighbouring Trentino; and Slovene in the provinces of Trieste, Gorizia and Udine. A number of other Ethnologue, ISO and UNESCO languages are not recognised by Italian law. Like France, Italy has signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, but has not ratified it.
Because of recent immigration, Italy has sizeable populations whose native language is not Italian, nor a regional language. According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, Romanian is the most common mother tongue among foreign residents in Italy: almost 800,000 people speak Romanian as their first language (21.9% of the foreign residents aged 6 and over). Other prevalent mother tongues are Arabic (spoken by over 475,000 people; 13.1% of foreign residents), Albanian (380,000 people) and Spanish (255,000 people).
Religion in Italy according to the Ipsos survey, 2023 (approximately 1000 participants)
Religiosity in Italy is rapidly declining, although it has been historically characterized by the dominance of Catholicism since the Great Schism. According to a 2023 Ipsos survey, 61% of the country's residents are Catholic, 4% are Protestants, 3% other Christians (68% are Christians overall), 28% are irreligious, 2% prefer not to say, 1% are Muslims, are 1% adhere to other religions. Most Catholics are nominal; the Associated Press describes Italian Catholicism as "a faith that’s... nominally embraced but rarely lived." Italy has the world's fifth-largest Catholic population, the largest in Europe.
In 2011, minority Christian faiths in Italy included an estimated 1.5 million Orthodox Christians. Protestantism has been growing in recent years. One of the longest-established minority religious faiths in Italy is Judaism. Italy has for centuries welcomed Jews expelled from other countries, notably Spain. However, about 20% of Italian Jews were killed during the Holocaust. This, together with the emigration which preceded and followed World War II, has left only around 28,400 Jews in Italy.
The Holy See, the episcopal jurisdiction of Rome, contains the central government of the Catholic Church. It is recognised by other subjects of international law as a sovereign entity, headed by the Pope, who is also the Bishop of Rome, with which diplomatic relations can be maintained. Often incorrectly referred to as "the Vatican", the Holy See is not the same entity as the Vatican City State because the Holy See is the jurisdiction and administrative entity of the Pope. The Vatican City came into existence only in 1929. There are also 120,000 Hindus, 70,000 Sikhs and 22 gurdwaras across the country.
Since 1985, Catholicism is no longer officially the state religion. However, the Italian state devolves shares of income tax to recognised religious communities, under a regime known as Eight per thousand. Donations are allowed to Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu communities; however, Islam remains excluded, since no Muslim communities have yet signed a concordat with the Italian state. Taxpayers who do not wish to fund a religion contribute their share to the state welfare system.
Education in Italy is free and mandatory from ages six to sixteen, and consists of five stages: kindergarten (scuola dell'infanzia), primary school (scuola primaria), lower secondary school (scuola secondaria di primo grado), upper secondary school (scuola secondaria di secondo grado) and university (università).
Primary education lasts eight years. Students are given a basic education in Italian, English, mathematics, natural sciences, history, geography, social studies, physical education and visual and musical arts. Secondary education lasts for five years and includes three traditional types of schools focused on different academic levels: the liceo prepares students for university studies with a classical or scientific curriculum, while the istituto tecnico and the Istituto professionale prepare pupils for vocational education.
In 2018, the Italian secondary education was evaluated as below the OECD average. Italy scored below the OECD average in reading and science, and near OECD average in mathematics. Mean performance in Italy declined in reading and science, and remained stable in mathematics. Trento and Bolzano scored at an above the national average in reading. Compared to school children in other OECD countries, children in Italy missed out on a greater amount of learning due to absences and indiscipline in classrooms. A wide gap exists between northern schools, which perform near average, and schools in the South, that had much poorer results.
Tertiary education in Italy is divided between public universities, private universities and the prestigious and selective superior graduate schools, such as the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. 33 Italian universities were ranked among the world's top 500 in 2019, the third-largest number in Europe after the United Kingdom and Germany. Bologna University, founded in 1088, is the oldest university in continuous operation, as well as one of the leading academic institutions in Italy and Europe. The Bocconi University, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, LUISS, Polytechnic University of Turin, Polytechnic University of Milan, Sapienza University of Rome, and University of Milan are also ranked among the best in the world.
Life expectancy in the country is 80 for males and 85 for females, placing the country 5th in the world. In comparison to other Western countries, Italy has a relatively low rate of adult obesity (below 10%), as there are several health benefits of the Mediterranean diet. The proportion of daily smokers was 22% in 2012, down from 24.4% in 2000 but still slightly above the OECD average. Smoking in public places including bars, restaurants, night clubs and offices has been restricted to specially ventilated rooms since 2005. In 2013, UNESCO added the Mediterranean diet to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of Italy (promoter), Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus and Croatia.
The Italian state runs a universal public healthcare system since 1978. However, healthcare is provided to all citizens and residents by a mixed public-private system. The public part is the Servizio Sanitario Nazionale, which is organised under the Ministry of Health and administered on a devolved regional basis. Healthcare spending accounted for 9.7% of GDP in 2020. Italy's healthcare system is consistently ranked among the best in the world. In 2018 Italy's healthcare is ranked 20th in Europe in the Euro Health Consumer Index.
Italy is considered one of the birthplaces of western civilization and a cultural superpower. Divided by politics and geography for centuries until its eventual unification in 1861, Italy's culture has been shaped by a multitude of regional customs and local centres of power and patronage. Italy has had a central role in Western culture for centuries and is still recognised for its cultural traditions and artists. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a number of courts competed to attract architects, artists and scholars, thus producing a legacy of monuments, paintings, music and literature. Despite the political and social isolation of these courts, Italy has made a substantial contribution to the cultural and historical heritage of Europe.
Italy is known for its considerable architectural achievements, such as the construction of arches, domes and similar structures during ancient Rome, the founding of the Renaissance architectural movement in the late-14th to 16th centuries, and being the homeland of Palladianism, a style of construction which inspired movements such as that of Neoclassical architecture, and influenced the designs which noblemen built their country houses all over the world, notably in the UK, Australia and the US during the late 17th to early 20th centuries.
Along with pre-historic architecture, the first people in Italy to truly begin a sequence of designs were the Greeks and the Etruscans, progressing to classical Roman, then to the revival of the classical Roman era during the Renaissance and evolving into the Baroque era. The Christian concept of a Basilica, a style of church architecture that came to dominate the early Middle Ages, was invented in Rome. They were known for being long, rectangular buildings, which were built in an almost ancient Roman style, often rich in mosaics and decorations. The early Christians' art and architecture were also widely inspired by that of the pagan Romans; statues, mosaics and paintings decorated all their churches.
The Romanesque movement, which went from approximately 800 AD to 1100 AD, was one of the most fruitful and creative periods in Italian architecture, when several masterpieces, such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the Piazza dei Miracoli, and the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan were built. It was known for its usage of Roman arches, stained glass windows, and also its curved columns which commonly featured in cloisters. The main innovation of Italian Romanesque architecture was the vault, which had never been seen before in the history of Western architecture.
A flowering of Italian architecture took place during the Renaissance. Filippo Brunelleschi contributed to architectural design with his dome for the Cathedral of Florence, a feat of engineering that had not been accomplished since antiquity. A popular achievement of Italian Renaissance architecture was St. Peter's Basilica, originally designed by Donato Bramante in the early 16th century. Also, Andrea Palladio influenced architects throughout Western Europe with the villas and palaces he designed in the middle and late 16th century; the city of Vicenza, with its twenty-three buildings designed by Palladio, and twenty-four Palladian Villas of the Veneto are listed by UNESCO as part of a World Heritage Site named City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto.
The Baroque period produced several outstanding Italian architects in the 17th century, especially those known for their churches. The most original work of all late Baroque and Rococo architecture is the Palazzina di caccia di Stupinigi, dating back to the 18th century. Luigi Vanvitelli began in 1752 the construction of the Royal Palace of Caserta. In this large complex, the grandiose Baroque-style interiors and gardens are opposed to a more sober building envelope. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries Italy was affected by the Neoclassical architectural movement. Villas, palaces, gardens, interiors and art began to be based on Roman and Greek themes.
During the Fascist period, the so-called "Novecento movement" flourished, based on the rediscovery of imperial Rome, with figures such as Gio Ponti and Giovanni Muzio. Marcello Piacentini, responsible for the urban transformations of several cities in Italy and remembered for the disputed Via della Conciliazione in Rome, devised a form of simplified Neoclassicism.
The history of Italian visual arts is significant to the history of Western painting. Roman art was influenced by Greece and can in part be taken as a descendant of ancient Greek painting. Roman painting does have its own unique characteristics. The only surviving Roman paintings are wall paintings, many from villas in Campania, in Southern Italy. Such paintings can be grouped into four main "styles" or periods and may contain the first examples of trompe-l'œil, pseudo-perspective, and pure landscape.
The Italian Renaissance is said by many to be the golden age of painting; roughly spanning the 14th through the mid-17th centuries with a significant influence also out of the borders of modern Italy. In Italy artists like Paolo Uccello, Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo Lippi, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Titian took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective, the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of refined drawing and painting techniques. Michelangelo was active as a sculptor from about 1500 to 1520; his works include his David, Pietà, Moses. Other Renaissance sculptors include Lorenzo Ghiberti, Luca Della Robbia, Donatello, Filippo Brunelleschi and Andrea del Verrocchio.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the High Renaissance gave rise to a stylised art known as Mannerism. In place of the balanced compositions and rational approach to perspective that characterised art at the dawn of the 16th century, the Mannerists sought instability, artifice, and doubt. The unperturbed faces and gestures of Piero della Francesca and the calm Virgins of Raphael are replaced by the troubled expressions of Pontormo and the emotional intensity of El Greco.
In the 17th century, among the greatest painters of Italian Baroque are Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Artemisia Gentileschi, Mattia Preti, Carlo Saraceni and Bartolomeo Manfredi. Subsequently, in the 18th century, Italian Rococo was mainly inspired by French Rococo, since France was the founding nation of that particular style, with artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Canaletto. Italian Neoclassical sculpture focused, with Antonio Canova's nudes, on the idealist aspect of the movement.
In the 19th century, major Italian Romantic painters were Francesco Hayez, Giuseppe Bezzuoli and Francesco Podesti. Impressionism was brought from France to Italy by the Macchiaioli, led by Giovanni Fattori, and Giovanni Boldini; Realism by Gioacchino Toma and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. In the 20th century, with Futurism, primarily through the works of Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, Italy rose again as a seminal country for artistic evolution in painting and sculpture. Futurism was succeeded by the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, who exerted a strong influence on the Surrealists and generations of artists to follow like Bruno Caruso and Renato Guttuso.
Formal Latin literature began in 240 BC, when the first stage play was performed in Rome. Latin literature was, and still is, highly influential in the world, with numerous writers, poets, philosophers, and historians, such as Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid and Livy. The Romans were also famous for their oral tradition, poetry, drama and epigrams. In early years of the 13th century, Francis of Assisi was considered the first Italian poet by literary critics, with his religious song Canticle of the Sun.
Another Italian voice originated in Sicily. At the court of Emperor Frederick II, who ruled the Sicilian kingdom during the first half of the 13th century, lyrics modelled on Provençal forms and themes were written in a refined version of the local vernacular. One of these poets was the notary Giacomo da Lentini, inventor of the sonnet form, though the most famous early sonneteer was Petrarch.
Guido Guinizelli is considered the founder of the Dolce Stil Novo, a school that added a philosophical dimension to traditional love poetry. This new understanding of love, expressed in a smooth, pure style, influenced Guido Cavalcanti and the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, who established the basis of the modern Italian language; his greatest work, the Divine Comedy, is considered among the finest works of world literature; furthermore, the poet invented the difficult terza rima. Two major writers of the 14th century, Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, sought out and imitated the works of antiquity and cultivated their own artistic personalities. Petrarch achieved fame through his collection of poems, Il Canzoniere. Petrarch's love poetry served as a model for centuries. Equally influential was Boccaccio's The Decameron, one of the most popular collections of short stories ever written.
Italian Renaissance authors produced works including Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, an essay on political science and modern philosophy in which the "effectual truth" is taken to be more important than any abstract ideal; Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's unfinished romance Orlando Innamorato; and Baldassare Castiglione's dialogue The Book of the Courtier which describes the ideal of the perfect court gentleman and of spiritual beauty. The lyric poet Torquato Tasso in Jerusalem Delivered wrote a Christian epic in ottava rima, with attention to the Aristotelian canons of unity.
Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, who have written The Facetious Nights of Straparola (1550–1555) and the Pentamerone (1634) respectively, printed some of the first known versions of fairy tales in Europe. In the early 17th century, some literary masterpieces were created, such as Giambattista Marino's long mythological poem, L'Adone. The Baroque period also produced the clear scientific prose of Galileo as well as Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun, a description of a perfect society ruled by a philosopher-priest. At the end of the 17th century, the Arcadians began a movement to restore simplicity and classical restraint to poetry, as in Metastasio's heroic melodramas. In the 18th century, playwright Carlo Goldoni created full-written plays, many portraying the middle class of his day.
Romanticism coincided with some ideas of the Risorgimento, the patriotic movement that brought Italy political unity and freedom from foreign domination. Italian writers embraced Romanticism in the early 19th century. The time of Italy's rebirth was heralded by the poets Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, and Giacomo Leopardi. The works by Alessandro Manzoni, the leading Italian Romantic, are a symbol of the Italian unification for their patriotic message and because of his efforts in the development of the modern, unified Italian language; his novel The Betrothed was the first Italian historical novel to glorify Christian values of justice and Providence, and it is generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature.
In the late 19th century, a realistic literary movement called Verismo played a major role in Italian literature; Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana were its main exponents. In the same period, Emilio Salgari, writer of action-adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction, published his Sandokan series. In 1883, Carlo Collodi also published the novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, the most celebrated children's classic by an Italian author and one of the most translated non-religious books in the world. A movement called Futurism influenced Italian literature in the early 20th century. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote Manifesto of Futurism, called for the use of language and metaphors that glorified the speed, dynamism, and violence of the machine age.
Modern literary figures and Nobel laureates are Gabriele D'Annunzio from 1889 to 1910, nationalist poet Giosuè Carducci in 1906, realist writer Grazia Deledda in 1926, modern theatre author Luigi Pirandello in 1936, short stories writer Italo Calvino in 1960, poets Salvatore Quasimodo in 1959 and Eugenio Montale in 1975, Umberto Eco in 1980, and satirist and theatre author Dario Fo in 1997.
Over the ages, Italian philosophy and literature had a vast influence on Western philosophy, beginning with the Greeks and Romans, and going onto Renaissance humanism, the Age of Enlightenment and modern philosophy. Philosophy was brought to Italy by Pythagoras, founder of the Italian school of philosophy in Crotone, Magna Graecia. Major Italian philosophers of the Greek period include Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles and Gorgias. Roman philosophers include Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca the Younger, Musonius Rufus, Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Clement of Alexandria, Sextus Empiricus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Augustine of Hippo, Philoponus of Alexandria and Boethius.
Italian Medieval philosophy was mainly Christian, and included philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism, who reintroduced Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity. Notable Renaissance philosophers include: Giordano Bruno, one of the major scientific figures of the western world; Marsilio Ficino, one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the period; and Niccolò Machiavelli, one of the main founders of modern political science. Machiavelli's most famous work was The Prince, whose contribution to the history of political thought is the fundamental break between political realism and political idealism. Italy was also affected by the Enlightenment, a movement which was a consequence of the Renaissance. University cities such as Padua, Bologna and Naples remained centres of scholarship and the intellect, with several philosophers such as Giambattista Vico (widely regarded as being the founder of modern Italian philosophy) and Antonio Genovesi. Cesare Beccaria was a significant Enlightenment figure and is now considered one of the fathers of classical criminal theory as well as modern penology. Beccaria is famous for his On Crimes and Punishments (1764), a treatise that served as one of the earliest prominent condemnations of torture and the death penalty and thus a landmark work in anti-death penalty philosophy.
Italy also had a renowned philosophical movement in the 1800s, with Idealism, Sensism and Empiricism. The main Sensist Italian philosophers were Melchiorre Gioja and Gian Domenico Romagnosi. Criticism of the Sensist movement came from other philosophers such as Pasquale Galluppi (1770–1846), who affirmed that a priori relationships were synthetic. Antonio Rosmini, instead, was the founder of Italian idealism. During the late 19th and 20th centuries, there were also several other movements which gained some form of popularity in Italy, such as Ontologism (whose main philosopher was Vincenzo Gioberti), anarchism, communism, socialism, futurism, fascism and Christian democracy. Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce were two of the most significant 20th-century Idealist philosophers. Anarcho-communism first fully formed into its modern strain within the Italian section of the First International. Antonio Gramsci remains a relevant philosopher within Marxist and communist theory, credited with creating the theory of cultural hegemony. Italian philosophers were also influential in the development of the non-Marxist liberal socialism philosophy, including Carlo Rosselli, Norberto Bobbio, Piero Gobetti and Aldo Capitini. In the 1960s, many Italian left-wing activists adopted the anti-authoritarian pro-working class leftist theories that would become known as autonomism and operaismo.
Early Italian feminists include Sibilla Aleramo, Alaide Gualberta Beccari, and Anna Maria Mozzoni, though proto-feminist philosophies had previously been touched upon by earlier Italian writers such as Christine de Pizan, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella. Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori is credited with the creation of the philosophy of education that bears her name, an educational philosophy now practised throughout the world. Giuseppe Peano was one of the founders of analytic philosophy and the contemporary philosophy of mathematics. Recent analytic philosophers include Carlo Penco, Gloria Origgi, Pieranna Garavaso and Luciano Floridi.
Italian theatre originates from the Middle Ages, with its background dating back to the times of the ancient Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, in Southern Italy, the theatre of the Italic peoples and the theatre of ancient Rome. It can therefore be assumed that there were two main lines of which the ancient Italian theatre developed in the Middle Ages. The first, consisting of the dramatization of Catholic liturgies and of which more documentation is retained, and the second, formed by pagan forms of spectacle such as the staging for city festivals, the court preparations of the jesters and the songs of the troubadours. The Renaissance theatre marked the beginning of the modern theatre due to the rediscovery and study of the classics, the ancient theatrical texts were recovered and translated, which were soon staged at the court and in the curtensi halls, and then moved to real theatre. In this way the idea of theatre came close to that of today: a performance in a designated place in which the public participates. In the late 15th century two cities were important centres for the rediscovery and renewal of theatrical art: Ferrara and Rome. The first, vital centre of art in the second half of the fifteenth century, saw the staging of some of the most famous Latin works by Plautus, rigorously translated into Italian.
During the 16th century and on into the 18th century, Commedia dell'arte was a form of improvisational theatre, and it is still performed today. Travelling troupes of players would set up an outdoor stage and provide amusement in the form of juggling, acrobatics and, more typically, humorous plays based on a repertoire of established characters with a rough storyline, called canovaccio. Plays did not originate from written drama but from scenarios called lazzi, which were loose frameworks that provided the situations, complications, and outcome of the action, around which the actors would improvise. The characters of the commedia usually represent fixed social types and stock characters, each of which has a distinct costume, such as foolish old men, devious servants, or military officers full of false bravado. The main categories of these characters include servants, old men, lovers, and captains.
The first recorded Commedia dell'arte performances came from Rome as early as 1551, and was performed outdoors in temporary venues by professional actors who were costumed and masked, as opposed to commedia erudita, which were written comedies, presented indoors by untrained and unmasked actors. By the mid-16th century, specific troupes of commedia performers began to coalesce, and by 1568 the Gelosi became a distinct company. Commedia often performed inside in court theatres or halls, and also in some fixed theatres such as Teatro Baldrucca in Florence. Flaminio Scala, who had been a minor performer in the Gelosi published the scenarios of the Commedia dell'arte around the start of the 17th century, really in an effort to legitimise the form—and ensure its legacy. These scenari are highly structured and built around the symmetry of the various types in duet: two zanni, vecchi, inamorate and inamorati, among others.
In Commedia dell'arte, female roles were played by women, documented as early as the 1560s, making them the first known professional actresses in Europe since antiquity. Lucrezia Di Siena, whose name is on a contract of actors from 10 October 1564, has been referred to as the first Italian actress known by name, with Vincenza Armani and Barbara Flaminia as the first primadonnas and the first well-documented actresses in Europe.
The Ballet dance genre also originated in Italy. It began during the Italian Renaissance court as an outgrowth of court pageantry, where aristocratic weddings were lavish celebrations. Court musicians and dancers collaborated to provide elaborate entertainment for them. At first, ballets were woven into the midst of an opera to allow the audience a moment of relief from the dramatic intensity. By the mid-seventeenth century, Italian ballets in their entirety were performed in between the acts of an opera. Over time, Italian ballets became part of theatrical life: ballet companies in Italy's major opera houses employed an average of four to twelve dancers; in 1815 many companies employed anywhere from eighty to one hundred dancers.
The Teatro di San Carlo in Naples is the oldest continuously active venue for public opera in the world, opening in 1737, decades before both Milan's La Scala and Venice's La Fenice theatres.
From folk music to classical, music is an intrinsic part of Italian culture. Instruments associated with classical music, including the piano and violin, were invented in Italy, and many of the prevailing classical music forms, such as the symphony, concerto, and sonata, can trace their roots back to innovations of 16th- and 17th-century Italian music.
Italy's most famous composers include the Renaissance composers Palestrina, Monteverdi and Gesualdo, the Baroque composers Scarlatti, Corelli and Vivaldi, the Classical composers Paisiello, Paganini and Rossini, and the Romantic composers Verdi and Puccini. Modern Italian composers such as Berio and Nono proved significant in the development of experimental and electronic music. While the classical music tradition still holds strong in Italy, as evidenced by the fame of its innumerable opera houses, such as La Scala of Milan and San Carlo of Naples (the oldest continuously active venue for public opera in the world), and performers such as the pianist Maurizio Pollini and tenor Luciano Pavarotti, Italians have been no less appreciative of their thriving contemporary music scene.
Italy is widely known for being the birthplace of opera. Italian opera was believed to have been founded in the early 17th century, in cities such as Mantua and Venice. Later, works and pieces composed by native Italian composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, are among the most famous operas ever written and today are performed in opera houses across the world. La Scala opera house in Milan is also renowned as one of the best in the world. Famous Italian opera singers include Enrico Caruso and Alessandro Bonci.
Introduced in the early 1920s, jazz took a particularly strong foothold in Italy, and remained popular despite the xenophobic cultural policies of the Fascist regime. Today, the most notable centres of jazz music in Italy include Milan, Rome, and Sicily. Later, Italy was at the forefront of the progressive rock and pop movement of the 1970s, with bands like PFM, Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Le Orme, Goblin, and Pooh. The same period saw diversification in the cinema of Italy, and Cinecittà films included complex scores by composers including Ennio Morricone, Armando Trovaioli, Piero Piccioni and Piero Umiliani. In the early 1980s, the first star to emerge from the Italian hip hop scene was singer Jovanotti. Italian metal bands include Rhapsody of Fire, Lacuna Coil, Elvenking, Forgotten Tomb, and Fleshgod Apocalypse.
Italy contributed to the development of disco and electronic music, with Italo disco, known for its futuristic sound and prominent use of synthesisers and drum machines, being one of the earliest electronic dance genres, as well as European forms of disco aside from Euro disco (which later went on to influence several genres such as Eurodance and Nu-disco).
Producers such as Giorgio Moroder, who won three Academy Awards and four Golden Globes for his music, were highly influential in the development of electronic dance music. Today, Italian pop music is represented annually with the Sanremo Music Festival, which served as inspiration for the Eurovision song contest, and the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. Singers such as Mina, Andrea Bocelli, Grammy winner Laura Pausini, Zucchero, Eros Ramazzotti, Elisa, Tiziano Ferro and Mahmood have attained international acclaim.
Gigliola Cinquetti, Toto Cutugno, and Måneskin won the Eurovision Song Contest, in 1964, 1990, and 2021 respectively.
The history of Italian cinema began a few months after the Lumière brothers began motion picture exhibitions. The first Italian director is considered to be Vittorio Calcina, a collaborator of the Lumière Brothers, who filmed Pope Leo XIII in 1896. In the 1910s the Italian film industry developed rapidly. In 1912, the year of the greatest expansion, 569 films were produced in Turin, 420 in Rome and 120 in Milan. Cabiria, a 1914 Italian epic film directed by Giovanni Pastrone, is considered the most famous Italian silent film. It was also the first film in history to be shown in the White House. The oldest European avant-garde cinema movement, Italian futurism, took place in the late 1910s.
After a period of decline in the 1920s, the Italian film industry was revitalized in the 1930s with the arrival of sound film. A popular Italian genre during this period, the Telefoni Bianchi, consisted of comedies with glamorous backgrounds. Calligrafismo was instead in a sharp contrast to Telefoni Bianchi-American style comedies and is rather artistic, highly formalistic, expressive in complexity and deals mainly with contemporary literary material. Cinema was later used by Benito Mussolini, who founded Rome's renowned Cinecittà studio also for the production of Fascist propaganda until World War II.
After the war, Italian film was widely recognised and exported until an artistic decline around the 1980s. Notable Italian film directors from this period include Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Dussio Tessari and Roberto Rossellini; some of these are recognised among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. Movies include world cinema treasures such as Bicycle Thieves, La dolce vita, 8½, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West. The mid-1940s to the early 1950s was the heyday of neorealist films, reflecting the poor condition of post-war Italy.
As the country grew wealthier in the 1950s, a form of neorealism known as pink neorealism succeeded, and starting from the 1950s through the Commedia all'italiana genre, and other film genres, such as sword-and-sandal followed as Spaghetti Westerns, were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Actresses such as Sophia Loren, Giulietta Masina and Gina Lollobrigida achieved international stardom during this period. Erotic Italian thrillers, or giallos, produced by directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento in the 1970s, also influenced the horror genre worldwide. In recent years, the Italian scene has received only occasional international attention, with movies like Cinema Paradiso written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, Mediterraneo directed by Gabriele Salvatores, Life Is Beautiful directed by Roberto Benigni, Il Postino: The Postman with Massimo Troisi and The Great Beauty directed by Paolo Sorrentino.
The aforementioned Cinecittà studio is today the largest film and television production facility in Europe, where many international box office hits were filmed. In the 1950s, the number of international productions being made there led to Rome's being dubbed "Hollywood on the Tiber". More than 3,000 productions have been made on its lot, of which 90 received an Academy Award nomination and 47 of these won it, from some cinema classics to recent rewarded features (such as Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur, Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, The English Patient, The Passion of the Christ, and Gangs of New York).
Italy is the most awarded country at the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, with 14 awards won, 3 Special Awards and 28 nominations. As of 2016, Italian films have also won 12 Palmes d'Or, 11 Golden Lions and 7 Golden Bears. The list of the 100 Italian films to be saved was created with the aim to report "100 films that have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978".
The most popular sport in Italy is football. Italy's national football team is one of the world's most successful teams with four FIFA World Cup victories (1934, 1938, 1982 and 2006). Italian clubs have won 48 major European trophies, making Italy the second most successful country in European football. Italy's top-flight club football league is named Serie A and is followed by millions of fans around the world.
Other popular team sports in Italy include basketball, volleyball and rugby. Italy's male and female national volleyball teams are often featured among the world's best. The Italian national basketball team's best results were gold at Eurobasket 1983 and EuroBasket 1999, as well as silver at the Olympics in 2004. Lega Basket Serie A is widely considered one of the most competitive in Europe. Italy's rugby national team competes in the Six Nations Championship, and is a regular at the Rugby World Cup. The men's volleyball team won three consecutive World Championships (in 1990, 1994, and 1998) and earned the Olympic silver medal in 1996, 2004, and 2016.
Italy has a long and successful tradition in individual sports as well. Bicycle racing is a familiar sport in the country. Italians have won the UCI World Championships more than any other country, except Belgium. The Giro d'Italia is a cycling race held every May and constitutes one of the three Grand Tours. Alpine skiing is also a widespread sport in Italy, and the country is a popular international skiing destination, known for its ski resorts. Italian skiers achieved good results in Winter Olympic Games, Alpine Ski World Cup, and tennis has a significant following in Italy, ranking as the fourth most practised sport in the country. The Rome Masters, founded in 1930, is one of the most prestigious tennis tournaments in the world. Italian professional tennis players won the Davis Cup in 1976 and the Fed Cup in 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2013.
Motorsports are also extremely popular in Italy. Italy has won, by far, the most MotoGP World Championships. Italian Scuderia Ferrari is the oldest surviving team in Grand Prix racing, having competed since 1948, and statistically the most successful Formula One team in history with a record of 232 wins. The Italian Grand Prix of Formula 1 is the fifth oldest surviving Grand Prix, having been held since 1921. It is also one of the two Grand Prix present in every championship since the first one in 1950. Every Formula 1 Grand Prix (except for the 1980) has been held at Autodromo Nazionale Monza. Formula 1 was also held at Imola (1980–2006, 2020) and Mugello (2020). Other successful Italian car manufacturers in motorsports are Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Maserati and Fiat.
Historically, Italy has been successful in the Olympic Games, taking part from the first Olympiad and in 47 Games out of 48, not having officially participated in the 1904 Summer Olympics. Italian sportsmen have won 522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, and another 106 at the Winter Olympic Games, for a combined total of 628 medals with 235 golds, which makes them the fifth most successful nation in Olympic history for total medals. The country hosted two Winter Olympics and will host a third (in 1956, 2006, and 2026), and one Summer games (in 1960).
Italian fashion has a long tradition. Milan, Florence and Rome are Italy's main fashion capitals. According to Top Global Fashion Capital Rankings 2013 by Global Language Monitor, Rome ranked sixth worldwide while Milan was twelfth. Previously, in 2009, Milan was declared the "fashion capital of the world" by Global Language Monitor itself. Major Italian fashion labels, such as Gucci, Armani, Prada, Versace, Valentino, Dolce & Gabbana, Missoni, Fendi, Moschino, Max Mara, Trussardi, and Ferragamo, to name a few, are regarded as among the finest fashion houses in the world. Jewellers like Bvlgari, Damiani and Buccellati have been founded in Italy. Also, the fashion magazine Vogue Italia, is considered one of the most prestigious fashion magazines in the world. The talent of young, creative fashion is also promoted, as in the ITS young fashion designer competition in Trieste.
Italy is also prominent in the field of design, notably interior design, architectural design, industrial design and urban design. The country has produced some well-known furniture designers, such as Gio Ponti and Ettore Sottsass, and Italian phrases such as "Bel Disegno" and "Linea Italiana" have entered the vocabulary of furniture design. Examples of classic pieces of Italian white goods and pieces of furniture include Zanussi's washing machines and fridges, the "New Tone" sofas by Atrium, and the post-modern bookcase by Ettore Sottsass, inspired by Bob Dylan's song "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again". Today, Milan and Turin are the nation's leaders in architectural design and industrial design. The city of Milan hosts Fiera Milano, Europe's largest design fair. Milan also hosts major design and architecture-related events and venues, such as the "Fuori Salone" and the Salone del Mobile, and has been home to the designers Bruno Munari, Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni.
The Italian cuisine has developed through centuries of social and political changes, with roots as far back as the 4th century BC. Italian cuisine in itself takes heavy influences, including Etruscan, ancient Greek, ancient Roman, Byzantine, and Jewish. Significant changes occurred with the discovery of the New World with the introduction of items such as potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers and maize, now central to the cuisine but not introduced in quantity until the 18th century. Italian cuisine is noted for its regional diversity, abundance of difference in taste, and is known to be one of the most popular in the world, wielding strong influence abroad.
The Mediterranean diet forms the basis of Italian cuisine, rich in pasta, fish, fruits and vegetables and characterised by its extreme simplicity and variety, with many dishes having only four to eight ingredients. Italian cooks rely chiefly on the quality of the ingredients rather than on elaborate preparation. Dishes and recipes are often derivatives from local and familial tradition rather than created by chefs, so many recipes are ideally suited for home cooking, this being one of the main reasons behind the ever-increasing worldwide popularity of Italian cuisine, from America to Asia. Ingredients and dishes vary widely by region.
Italian cuisine relies heavily on traditional products; the country has a large number of traditional specialities protected under EU law. Cheese, cold cuts and wine are central to Italian cuisine, with many regional declinations and Protected Designation of Origin or Protected Geographical Indication labels, and along with pizza and coffee (especially espresso) form part of Italian gastronomic culture. Desserts have a long tradition of merging local flavours such as citrus fruits, pistachio and almonds with sweet cheeses like mascarpone and ricotta or exotic tastes as cocoa, vanilla and cinnamon. Gelato, tiramisù and cassata are among the most famous examples of Italian desserts, cakes and patisserie.
Italian meal structure is typical of the European Mediterranean region and differs from North, Central, and Eastern European meal structure, though it still often consists of breakfast (colazione), lunch (pranzo), and dinner (cena). However, much less emphasis is placed on breakfast, and breakfast itself is often skipped or involves lighter meal portions than are seen in non-Mediterranean Western countries. Late-morning and mid-afternoon snacks, called merenda (plural merende), are also often included in this meal structure.
The marketing phenomenon consisting of words and images, colour combinations (the Italian tricolour) and geographical references for brands that are evocative of Italy to promote and market agri-food products that have nothing to do with Italian cuisine is known by the name of Italian Sounding.
Public holidays celebrated in Italy include religious, national and regional observances. Italy's National Day, the Festa della Repubblica (Republic Day), is celebrated on 2 June each year, with the main celebration taking place in Rome, and commemorates the birth of the Italian Republic in 1946. The ceremony of the event organized in Rome includes the deposition of a laurel wreath as a tribute to the Italian Unknown Soldier at the Altare della Patria by the President of the Italian Republic and a military parade along Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome.
The Saint Lucy's Day, which takes place on 13 December, is popular among children in some Italian regions, where she plays a role similar to Santa Claus. In addition, the Epiphany in Italy is associated with the folkloristic figure of the Befana, a broomstick-riding old woman who, in the night between 5 and 6 January, bringing good children gifts and sweets, and bad ones charcoal or bags of ashes. The Assumption of Mary coincides with Ferragosto on 15 August, the summer vacation period which may be a long weekend or most of the month.
The Italian national patronal day, on 4 October, celebrates Saints Francis and Catherine. Each city or town also celebrates a public holiday on the occasion of the festival of the local patron saint, for example: Rome on 29 June (Saints Peter and Paul), Milan on 7 December (Saint Ambrose), Naples on 19 September (Saint Januarius), Venice on 25 April (Saint Mark the Evangelist) and Florence on 24 June (Saint John the Baptist).
There are many festivals and festivities in Italy. Some of them include the Palio di Siena horse race, Holy Week rites, Saracen Joust of Arezzo, Saint Ubaldo Day in Gubbio, Giostra della Quintana in Foligno, and the Calcio Fiorentino. In 2013, UNESCO has included among the intangible cultural heritage some Italian festivals and pasos (in Italian "macchine a spalla"), such as the Varia di Palmi, the Macchina di Santa Rosa in Viterbo, the Festa dei Gigli in Nola, and faradda di li candareri in Sassari.
Other festivals include the carnivals in Venice, Viareggio, Satriano di Lucania, Mamoiada, and Ivrea, mostly known for its Battle of the Oranges. The Venice International Film Festival, awarding the "Golden Lion" and held annually since 1932, is the oldest film festival in the world and one of the "Big Three" alongside Cannes and Berlin.
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"text": "Italy (Italian: Italia [iˈtaːlja] ), officially the Italian Republic (Italian: Repubblica Italiana [reˈpubblika itaˈljaːna]), is a country in Southern and Western Europe. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, it consists of a peninsula delimited by the Alps and surrounded by several islands. Italy shares land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. It has a territorial exclave in Switzerland (Campione) and an archipelago in the African Plate (Pelagie Islands). Italy covers an area of 301,340 km (116,350 sq mi), with a population of nearly 60 million; it is the tenth-largest country by land area in the European continent and the third-most populous member state of the European Union. Its capital and largest city is Rome.",
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{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The Italian peninsula was historically the native place and destination of numerous ancient peoples. The Latin city of Rome in central Italy, founded as a Kingdom, became a Republic that conquered the Mediterranean world and ruled it for centuries as an Empire. With the spread of Christianity, Rome became the seat of the Catholic Church and of the Papacy. During the Early Middle Ages, Italy experienced the fall of the Western Roman Empire and inward migration from Germanic tribes. By the 11th century, Italian city-states and maritime republics expanded, bringing renewed prosperity through commerce and laying the groundwork for modern capitalism. The Italian Renaissance flourished in Florence during the 15th and 16th centuries and spread to the rest of Europe. Italian explorers also discovered new routes to the Far East and the New World, helping to usher in the European Age of Discovery. However, centuries of rivalry and infighting between the Italian city-states among other factors left the peninsula divided into numerous states until the late modern period. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Italian economic and commercial importance significantly waned.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "After centuries of political and territorial divisions, Italy was almost entirely unified in 1861 following Wars of independence and the Expedition of the Thousand, establishing the Kingdom of Italy. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, Italy rapidly industrialised, mainly in the north, and acquired a colonial empire, while the south remained largely impoverished and excluded from industrialisation, fuelling a large immigrant diaspora. From 1915 to 1918, Italy took part in World War I on the side of the Entente and against the Central Powers. In 1922, following a period of crisis and turmoil, the Italian fascist dictatorship was established. During World War II, Italy was first part of the Axis until it surrendered to the Allied powers (1940-1943) and then, as part of its territory was occupied by Nazi Germany with fascist collaboration, a co-belligerent of the Allies during the Italian resistance and the liberation of Italy (1943-1945). Following the end of the war, the country replaced the monarchy with a republic via referendum and enjoyed a prolonged economic boom, becoming a major advanced economy.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Italy has the eighth-largest nominal GDP in the world, the second-largest manufacturing industry in Europe (7th-largest in the world). The country has a significant role in regional and global economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic affairs. Italy is a founding and leading member of the European Union, and it is in numerous international institutions including NATO, the G7, the Mediterranean Union, the Latin Union, and many more. The source of many inventions and discoveries, the country is considered a cultural superpower and has long been a global centre of art, music, literature, cuisine, science and technology and fashion. It has the world's largest number of World Heritage Sites (58), and is the world's fifth-most visited country.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Hypotheses for the etymology of the name \"Italia\" are numerous. One is that it was borrowed via Ancient Greek from the Oscan Víteliú 'land of calves' (cf. Lat vitulus \"calf\", Umb vitlo \"calf\"). Ancient Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus gives this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "According to Antiochus of Syracuse, the term Italy was used by the ancient Greeks to initially refer only to the southern portion of the Bruttium peninsula corresponding to the modern province of Reggio and part of the provinces of Catanzaro and Vibo Valentia in southern Italy. Nevertheless, by his time the larger concept of Oenotria and \"Italy\" had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. According to Strabo's Geographica, before the expansion of the Roman Republic, the name was used by ancient Greeks to indicate the land between the strait of Messina and the line connecting the gulf of Salerno and gulf of Taranto, corresponding roughly to the current region of Calabria. The ancient Greeks gradually came to apply the name \"Italia\" to a larger region In addition to the \"Greek Italy\" in the south, historians have suggested the existence of an \"Etruscan Italy\" covering variable areas of central Italy.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The borders of Roman Italy, Italia, are better established. Cato's Origines, the first work of history composed in Latin, described Italy as the entire peninsula south of the Alps. According to Cato and several Roman authors, the Alps formed the \"walls of Italy\". In 264 BC, Roman Italy extended from the Arno and Rubicon rivers of the centre-north to the entire south. The northern area of Cisalpine Gaul was occupied by Rome in the 220s BC and became considered geographically and de facto part of Italy, but remained politically and de jure separated. It was legally merged into the administrative unit of Italy in 42 BC by the triumvir Octavian as already planned by Julius Caesar. The islands of Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily and Malta were added to Italy by Diocletian in 292 AD, coinciding with the whole Italian geographical region. All its inhabitants were considered Italic and Roman.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Latin term Italicus was used to describe \"a man of Italy\" as opposed to a provincial. For example, Pliny the Elder notably wrote in a letter Italicus es an provincialis? meaning \"are you an Italian or a provincial?\". The adjective italianus, from which are derived the Italian (and also French and English) name of the Italians, is medieval and was used alternatively with Italicus during the early modern period.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which was caused by the invasion of the Ostrogoths, the Kingdom of Italy was created. After the Lombard invasions, \"Italia\" was retained as the name for their kingdom, and for its successor kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire, which nominally lasted until 1806, although it had de facto disintegrated due to factional politics pitting the empire against the ascendant city republics in the 13th century.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Thousands of Lower Paleolithic artefacts have been recovered from Monte Poggiolo, dating as far back as 850,000 years. Excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Middle Palaeolithic period some 200,000 years ago, while modern humans appeared about 40,000 years ago at Riparo Mochi. Archaeological sites from this period include Addaura cave, Altamura, Ceprano, and Gravina in Puglia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Ancient peoples of pre-Roman Italy – such as the Umbrians, the Latins (from which the Romans emerged), Volsci, Oscans, Samnites, Sabines, the Celts, the Ligures, the Veneti, the Iapygians, and many others – were Indo-European peoples, most of them specifically of the Italic group. The main historic peoples of possible non-Indo-European or pre-Indo-European heritage include the Etruscans of central and northern Italy, the Elymians and the Sicani in Sicily, and the prehistoric Sardinians, who gave birth to the Nuragic civilisation. Other ancient populations being of undetermined language families and of possible non-Indo-European origin include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni, known for their rock carvings in Valcamonica, the largest collections of prehistoric petroglyphs in the world. A well-preserved natural mummy known as Ötzi the Iceman, determined to be 5,000 years old (between 3400 and 3100 BCE, Copper Age), was discovered in the Similaun glacier of South Tyrol in 1991.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The first foreign colonisers were the Phoenicians, who initially established colonies and founded various emporiums on the coasts of Sicily and Sardinia. Some of these soon became small urban centres and were developed parallel to the ancient Greek colonies; among the main centres there were the cities of Motya, Zyz (modern Palermo), Soluntum in Sicily, and Nora, Sulci, and Tharros in Sardinia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Between the 17th and the 11th centuries BC Mycenaean Greeks established contacts with Italy. In the 8th and 7th centuries BC a number of Greek colonies were established starting at Pithecusae and eventually extending all along the southern part of the Italian Peninsula and the coast of Sicily, an area that later became known as Magna Graecia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Ionian settlers founded Elaia, Kyme, Rhegion, Naxos, Zankles, Hymera, and Katane. Doric colonists founded Taras, Syrakousai, Megara Hyblaia, Leontinoi, Akragas, Ghelas; the Syracusans founded Ankón and Adria; the megarese founded Selinunte. The Achaeans founded Sybaris, Poseidonia, Kroton, Lokroi Epizephyrioi, and Metapontum; tarantini and thuriots found Herakleia. The Greek colonization placed the Italic peoples in contact with democratic forms of government and with high artistic and cultural expressions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Rome, a settlement around a ford on the river Tiber in central Italy conventionally founded in 753 BC, was ruled for a period of 244 years by a monarchical system, initially with sovereigns of Latin and Sabine origin, later by Etruscan kings. The tradition handed down seven kings: Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius and Tarquinius Superbus. In 509 BC, the Romans expelled the last king from their city, favouring a government of the Senate and the People (SPQR) and establishing an oligarchic republic.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Italian Peninsula, named Italia, was consolidated into a single entity during the Roman expansion and conquest of new lands at the expense of the other Italic tribes, Etruscans, Celts, and Greeks. A permanent association with most of the local tribes and cities was formed, and Rome began the conquest of Western Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. In the wake of Julius Caesar's rise and death in the first century BC, Rome grew over the course of centuries into a massive empire stretching from Britain to the borders of Persia, and engulfing the whole Mediterranean basin, in which Greek and Roman and many other cultures merged into a unique civilisation. The long and triumphant reign of the first emperor, Augustus, began a golden age of peace and prosperity. Roman Italy remained the metropole of the empire, and as the homeland of the Romans and the territory of the capital, maintained a special status which made it Domina Provinciarum (\"ruler of the provinces\", the latter being all the remaining territories outside Italy). More than two centuries of stability followed, during which Italy was referred to as the Rectrix Mundi (\"governor of the world\") and Omnium Terrarum Parens (\"parent of all lands\").",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Roman Empire was among the most powerful economic, cultural, political and military forces in the world of its time, and it was one of the largest empires in world history. At its height under Trajan, it covered 5 million square kilometres. The Roman legacy has deeply influenced Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world; among the many legacies of Roman dominance are the widespread use of the Romance languages derived from Latin, the numerical system, the modern Western alphabet and calendar, and the emergence of Christianity as a major world religion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Italy fell under the power of Odoacer's kingdom, and, later, was seized by the Ostrogoths, followed in the 6th century by a brief reconquest under Byzantine Emperor Justinian. The invasion of another Germanic tribe, the Lombards, late in the same century, reduced the Byzantine presence to the rump realm of the Exarchate of Ravenna and started the end of political unity of the peninsula for the next 1,300 years. The peninsula was therefore divided as follows: northern Italy and Tuscany formed the Lombard kingdom, with its capital in Pavia, while in central-southern Italy the Lombards controlled the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. The remaining part of the peninsula remained under the Byzantines and was divided between the exarchate of Italy, based in Ravenna, the Duchy of Rome, the Duchy of Naples, the Duchy of Calabria and Sicily, the latter directly dependent on the Emperor of Constantinople. Invasions of the peninsula caused a chaotic succession of barbarian kingdoms and the so-called \"dark ages\". The Lombard kingdom was subsequently absorbed into the Frankish Empire by Charlemagne in the late 8th century and became the Kingdom of Italy. The Franks also helped the formation of the Papal States in central Italy. Until the 13th century, Italian politics was dominated by the relations between the Holy Roman Emperors and the Papacy, with most of the Italian city-states siding with the former (Ghibellines) or with the latter (Guelphs) for momentary convenience.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Germanic Emperor and the Roman Pontiff became the universal powers of medieval Europe. However, the conflict over the investiture controversy and the clash between Guelphs and Ghibellines led to the end of the Imperial-feudal system in the north of Italy where city-states gained independence. The investiture controversy was finally resolved by the Concordat of Worms. In 1176 a league of city-states, the Lombard League, defeated the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa at the Battle of Legnano, thus ensuring effective independence for most of northern and central Italian cities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Italian city-states such as Milan, Florence and Venice played a crucial innovative role in financial development, devising the main instruments and practices of banking and the emergence of new forms of social and economic organization. In coastal and southern areas, the maritime republics grew to eventually dominate the Mediterranean and monopolise trade routes to the Orient. They were independent thalassocratic city-states, though most of them originated from territories once belonging to the Byzantine Empire. All these cities during the time of their independence had similar systems of government in which the merchant class had considerable power. Although in practice these were oligarchical, and bore little resemblance to a modern democracy, the relative political freedom they afforded was conducive to academic and artistic advancement. The four best known maritime republics were Venice, Genoa, Pisa and Amalfi; the others were Ancona, Gaeta, Noli, and Ragusa. Each of the maritime republics had dominion over different overseas lands, including many Mediterranean islands (especially Sardinia and Corsica), lands on the Adriatic, Aegean, and Black Sea (Crimea), and commercial colonies in the Near East and in North Africa. Venice maintained enormous tracts of land in Greece, Cyprus, Istria, and Dalmatia until as late as the mid-17th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Venice and Genoa were Europe's main gateways to trade with the East, and producers of fine glass, while Florence was a capital of silk, wool, banking, and jewellery. The wealth such business brought to Italy meant that large public and private artistic projects could be commissioned. The republics were heavily involved in the Crusades, providing support and transport, but most especially taking advantage of the political and trading opportunities resulting from these wars. Italy first felt the huge economic changes in Europe which led to the commercial revolution: the Republic of Venice was able to defeat the Byzantine Empire and finance the voyages of Marco Polo to Asia; the first universities were formed in Italian cities, and scholars such as Thomas Aquinas obtained international fame; Frederick I of Sicily made Italy the political-cultural centre of a reign that temporarily included the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of Jerusalem; capitalism and banking families emerged in Florence, where Dante and Giotto were active around 1300.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the south, Sicily had become an Arab Islamic emirate in the 9th century, thriving until the Italo-Normans conquered it in the late 11th century together with most of the Lombard and Byzantine principalities of southern Italy. Through a complex series of events, southern Italy developed as a unified kingdom, first under the House of Hohenstaufen, then under the Capetian House of Anjou and, from the 15th century, the House of Aragon. In Sardinia, the former Byzantine provinces became independent states known in Italian as Judicates, although some parts of the island fell under Genoese or Pisan rule until eventual Aragonese annexation in the 15th century. The Black Death pandemic of 1348 left its mark on Italy by killing perhaps one third of the population.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Italy was the birthplace and heart of the Renaissance during the 1400s and 1500s. The Italian Renaissance marked the transition from the medieval period to the modern age as Europe recovered, economically and culturally, from the crises of the Late Middle Ages and entered the Early Modern Period. The Italian polities were now regional states effectively ruled by Princes, de facto monarchs in control of trade and administration, and their courts became major centres of the arts and sciences. The Italian princedoms represented a first form of modern states as opposed to feudal monarchies and multinational empires. The princedoms were led by political dynasties and merchant families such as the Medici in Florence, the Visconti and Sforza in the Duchy of Milan, the Doria in the Republic of Genoa, the Loredan, Mocenigo and Barbarigo in the Republic of Venice, the Este in Ferrara, and the Gonzaga in Mantua. The Renaissance was therefore a result of the wealth accumulated by Italian merchant cities combined with the patronage of its dominant families. Italian Renaissance exercised a dominant influence on subsequent European painting and sculpture for centuries afterwards, with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giotto, Donatello, and Titian, and architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Palladio, and Donato Bramante.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Following the conclusion of the western schism in favour of Rome at the Council of Constance (1415–1417), the new Pope Martin V returned to the Papal States after a three years-long journey that touched many Italian cities and restored Italy as the sole centre of Western Christianity. During the course of this voyage, the Medici Bank was made the official credit institution of the Papacy, and several significant ties were established between the Church and the new political dynasties of the peninsula. The Popes' status as elective monarchs turned the conclaves and consistories of the Renaissance into political battles between the courts of Italy for primacy in the peninsula and access to the immense resources of the Catholic Church. In 1439, Pope Eugenius IV and the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos signed a reconciliation agreement between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church at the Council of Florence hosted by Cosimo the old de Medici. In 1453, Italian forces under Giovanni Giustiniani were sent by Pope Nicholas V to defend the Walls of Constantinople but the decisive battle was lost to the more advanced Turkish army equipped with cannons, and Byzantium fell to Sultan Mehmed II.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The fall of Constantinople led to the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy, fueling the rediscovery of Greco-Roman Humanism. Humanist rulers such as Federico da Montefeltro and Pope Pius II worked to establish ideal cities where man is the measure of all things, and therefore founded Urbino and Pienza respectively. Pico della Mirandola wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, considered the manifesto of Renaissance Humanism, in which he stressed the importance of free will in human beings. The humanist historian Leonardo Bruni was the first to divide human history in three periods: Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modernity. The second consequence of the Fall of Constantinople was the beginning of the Age of Discovery.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Italian explorers and navigators from the dominant maritime republics, eager to find an alternative route to the Indies in order to bypass the Ottoman Empire, offered their services to monarchs of Atlantic countries and played a key role in ushering the Age of Discovery and the European colonization of the Americas. The most notable among them were: Christopher Columbus (Italian: Cristoforo Colombo), colonizer in the name of Spain, who is credited with discovering the New World and the opening of the Americas for conquest and settlement by Europeans; John Cabot (Italian: Giovanni Caboto), sailing for England, who was the first European to set foot in \"New Found Land\" and explore parts of the North American continent in 1497; Amerigo Vespucci, sailing for Portugal, who first demonstrated in about 1501 that the New World (in particular Brazil) was not Asia as initially conjectured, but a fourth continent previously unknown to people of the Old World (America is named after him); and Giovanni da Verrazzano, at the service of France, renowned as the first European to explore the Atlantic coast of North America between Florida and New Brunswick in 1524.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Following the fall of Constantinople, the wars in Lombardy came to an end and a defensive alliance known as Italic League was formed between Venice, Naples, Florence, Milan, and the Papacy. Lorenzo the Magnificent de Medici was the greatest Florentine patron of the Renaissance and supporter of the Italic League. He notably avoided the collapse of the League in the aftermath of the Pazzi Conspiracy and during the aborted invasion of Italy by the Turks. However, the military campaign of Charles VIII of France in Italy caused the end of the Italic League and initiated the Italian Wars between the Valois and the Habsburgs. During the High Renaissance of the 1500s, Italy was therefore both the main European battleground and the cultural-economic centre of the continent. Popes such as Julius II (1503–1513) fought for the control of Italy against foreign monarchs, others such as Paul III (1534–1549) preferred to mediate between the European powers in order to secure peace in Italy. In the middle of this conflict, the Medici popes Leo X (1513–1521) and Clement VII (1523–1534) opposed the Protestant reformation and advanced the interests of their family. In 1559, at the end of the French invasions of Italy and of the Italian wars, the many states of northern Italy remained part of the Holy Roman Empire, indirectly subject to the Austrian Habsburgs, while all of Southern Italy (Naples, Sicily, Sardinia) and Milan were under Spanish Habsburg rule.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Papacy remained a powerful force and launched the Counter-reformation. Key events of the period include: the Council of Trent (1545–1563); the excommunication of Elizabeth I (1570) and the Battle of Lepanto (1571), both occurring during the pontificate of Pius V; the construction of the Gregorian observatory, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, and the Jesuit China mission of Matteo Ricci under Pope Gregory XIII; the French Wars of Religion; the Long Turkish War and the execution of Giordano Bruno in 1600, under Pope Clement VIII; the birth of the Lyncean Academy of the Papal States, of which the main figure was Galileo Galilei (later put on trial); the final phases of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) during the pontificates of Urban VIII and Innocent X; and the formation of the last Holy League by Innocent XI during the Great Turkish War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Italian economy declined during the 1600s and 1700s. Following the European wars of succession of the 18th century, the North fell under the influence of the Habsburg-Lorraine of Austria, while the south passed to a cadet branch of the Spanish Bourbons. During the Coalition Wars, northern and central Italy was reorganised by Napoleon in a number of Sister Republics of France and later as a Kingdom of Italy in personal union with the French Empire. The southern half of the peninsula was administered by Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law, who was crowned as King of Naples. The 1814 Congress of Vienna restored the situation of the late 18th century, but the ideals of the French Revolution could not be eradicated, and soon re-surfaced during the political upheavals that characterised the first part of the 19th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "During the Napoleonic era, in 1797, the first official adoption of the Italian tricolour as a national flag by a sovereign Italian state, the Cispadane Republic, a Napoleonic sister republic of Revolutionary France, took place, on the basis of the events following the French Revolution (1789–1799) which, among its ideals, advocated the national self-determination. This event is celebrated by the Tricolour Day. The Italian national colours appeared for the first time on a tricolour cockade in 1789, anticipating by seven years the first green, white and red Italian military war flag, which was adopted by the Lombard Legion in 1796.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The birth of the Kingdom of Italy was the result of efforts by Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy to establish a united kingdom encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula. By the mid-19th century, rising Italian nationalism, along with other social, economic, and military events, led to a period of revolutionary political upheaval. Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the political and social Italian unification movement, or Risorgimento, emerged to unite Italy consolidating the different states of the peninsula and liberate it from foreign control. A prominent radical figure was the patriotic journalist Giuseppe Mazzini, member of the secret revolutionary society Carbonari and founder of the influential political movement Young Italy in the early 1830s, who favoured a unitary republic and advocated a broad nationalist movement. His prolific output of propaganda helped the unification movement stay active.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In this context, in 1847, the first public performance of the song \"Il Canto degli Italiani\", the Italian national anthem since 1946, took place. Il Canto degli Italiani, written by Goffredo Mameli set to music by Michele Novaro, is also known as the Inno di Mameli, after the author of the lyrics, or Fratelli d'Italia, from its opening line.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The most famous member of Young Italy was the revolutionary and general Giuseppe Garibaldi, renowned for his extremely loyal followers, who led the Italian republican drive for unification in Southern Italy. However, the Northern Italy monarchy of the House of Savoy in the Kingdom of Sardinia, whose government was led by Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, also had ambitions of establishing a united Italian state. In the context of the 1848 liberal revolutions that swept through Europe, an unsuccessful first war of independence was declared on Austria. In 1855, the Kingdom of Sardinia became an ally of Britain and France in the Crimean War, giving Cavour's diplomacy legitimacy in the eyes of the great powers. The Kingdom of Sardinia again attacked the Austrian Empire in the Second Italian War of Independence of 1859, with the aid of France, resulting in liberating Lombardy. On the basis of the Plombières Agreement, the Kingdom of Sardinia ceded Savoy and Nice to France, an event that caused the Niçard exodus, that was the emigration of a quarter of the Niçard Italians to Italy, and the Niçard Vespers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1860–1861, Garibaldi led the drive for unification in Naples and Sicily (the Expedition of the Thousand), while the House of Savoy troops occupied the central territories of the Italian peninsula, except Rome and part of Papal States. Teano was the site of the famous meeting of 26 October 1860 between Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II, last King of Sardinia, in which Garibaldi shook Victor Emanuel's hand and hailed him as King of Italy; thus, Garibaldi sacrificed republican hopes for the sake of Italian unity under a monarchy. Cavour agreed to include Garibaldi's Southern Italy allowing it to join the union with the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1860. This allowed the Sardinian government to declare a united Italian kingdom on 17 March 1861. Victor Emmanuel II then became the first king of a united Italy, and the capital was moved from Turin to Florence. The title of \"King of Italy\" had been out of use since the abdication of Napoleon I of France on 6 April 1814.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 1866, Victor Emmanuel II allied with Prussia during the Austro-Prussian War, waging the Third Italian War of Independence which allowed Italy to annexe Venetia. Finally, in 1870, as France abandoned its garrisons in Rome during the disastrous Franco-Prussian War to keep the large Prussian Army at bay, the Italians rushed to fill the power gap by taking over the Papal States. Italian unification was completed and shortly afterwards Italy's capital was moved to Rome. Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi, Cavour, and Mazzini have been referred as Italy's Four Fathers of the Fatherland.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The new Kingdom of Italy obtained Great Power status. The Constitutional Law of the Kingdom of Sardinia the Albertine Statute of 1848, was extended to the whole Kingdom of Italy in 1861, and provided for basic freedoms of the new State, but electoral laws excluded the non-propertied and uneducated classes from voting. The government of the new kingdom took place in a framework of parliamentary constitutional monarchy dominated by liberal forces. As Northern Italy quickly industrialised, the South and rural areas of the North remained underdeveloped and overpopulated, forcing millions of people to migrate abroad and fuelling a large and influential diaspora. The Italian Socialist Party constantly increased in strength, challenging the traditional liberal and conservative establishment.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Starting in the last two decades of the 19th century, Italy developed into a colonial power by forcing under its rule Eritrea and Somalia in East Africa, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in North Africa (later unified in the colony of Libya) and the Dodecanese islands. From 2 November 1899 to 7 September 1901, Italy also participated as part of the Eight-Nation Alliance forces during the Boxer Rebellion in China; on 7 September 1901, a concession in Tientsin was ceded to the country, and on 7 June 1902, the concession was taken into Italian possession and administered by a consul. In 1913, male universal suffrage was adopted. The pre-war period dominated by Giovanni Giolitti, Prime Minister five times between 1892 and 1921, was characterised by the economic, industrial, and political-cultural modernization of Italian society.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Italy entered into the First World War in 1915 with the aim of completing national unity: for this reason, the Italian intervention in the First World War is also considered the Fourth Italian War of Independence, in a historiographical perspective that identifies in the latter the conclusion of the unification of Italy, whose military actions began during the revolutions of 1848 with the First Italian War of Independence.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Italy, nominally allied with the German Empire and the Empire of Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance, in 1915 joined the Allies into World War I with a promise of substantial territorial gains, that included western Inner Carniola, former Austrian Littoral, Dalmatia as well as parts of the Ottoman Empire. The country gave a fundamental contribution to the victory of the conflict as one of the \"Big Four\" top Allied powers. The war on the Italian Front was initially inconclusive, as the Italian army got stuck in a long attrition war in the Alps, making little progress and suffering heavy losses. However, the reorganization of the army and the conscription of the so-called '99 Boys (Ragazzi del '99, all males born in 1899 who were turning 18) led to more effective Italian victories in major battles, such as on Monte Grappa and in a series of battles on the Piave river. Eventually, in October 1918, the Italians launched a massive offensive, culminating in the victory of Vittorio Veneto. The Italian victory, which was announced by the Bollettino della Vittoria and the Bollettino della Vittoria Navale, marked the end of the war on the Italian Front, secured the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was chiefly instrumental in ending the First World War less than two weeks later. Italian armed forces were also involved in the African theatre, the Balkan theatre, the Middle Eastern theatre, and then took part in the Occupation of Constantinople.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "During the war, more than 650,000 Italian soldiers and as many civilians died, and the kingdom went to the brink of bankruptcy. The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919) and the Treaty of Rapallo (1920) allowed the annexation of Trentino Alto-Adige, the Julian March, Istria and the Kvarner Gulf, as well as the Dalmatian city of Zara. The subsequent Treaty of Rome (1924) led to the annexation of the city of Fiume by Italy. Italy did not receive other territories promised by the Treaty of London (1915), so this outcome was denounced as a \"mutilated victory\". The rhetoric of \"mutilated victory\" was adopted by Benito Mussolini and led to the rise of Italian fascism, becoming a key point in the propaganda of Fascist Italy. Historians regard \"mutilated victory\" as a \"political myth\", used by fascists to fuel Italian imperialism and obscure the successes of liberal Italy in the aftermath of World War I. Italy also gained a permanent seat in the League of Nations's executive council.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The socialist agitations that followed the devastation of the Great War, inspired by the Russian Revolution, led to counter-revolution and repression throughout Italy. The liberal establishment, fearing a Soviet-style revolution, started to endorse the small National Fascist Party, led by Benito Mussolini. In October 1922 the Blackshirts of the National Fascist Party attempted a mass demonstration and a coup named the \"March on Rome\" which failed but at the last minute, King Victor Emmanuel III refused to proclaim a state of siege and appointed Mussolini prime minister, thereby transferring political power to the fascists without armed conflict. Over the next few years, Mussolini banned all political parties and curtailed personal liberties, thus forming a dictatorship. These actions attracted international attention and eventually inspired similar dictatorships such as Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Italian Fascism is based upon Italian nationalism and imperialism, and in particular seeks to complete what it considers as the incomplete project of the unification of Italy by incorporating Italia Irredenta (unredeemed Italy) into the state of Italy. To the east of Italy, the Fascists claimed that Dalmatia was a land of Italian culture whose Italians, including those of Italianized South Slavic descent, had been driven out of Dalmatia and into exile in Italy, and supported the return of Italians of Dalmatian heritage. Mussolini identified Dalmatia as having strong Italian cultural roots for centuries, similarly to Istria, via the Roman Empire and the Republic of Venice. To the south of Italy, the Fascists claimed Malta, which belonged to the United Kingdom, and Corfu, which instead belonged to Greece; to the north claimed Italian Switzerland, while to the west claimed Corsica, Nice, and Savoy, which belonged to France. The Fascist regime produced literature on Corsica that presented evidence of the island's italianità. The Fascist regime produced literature on Nice that justified that Nice was an Italian land based on historic, ethnic, and linguistic grounds.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Armistice of Villa Giusti, which ended fighting between Italy and Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I, resulted in Italian annexation of neighbouring parts of Yugoslavia. During the interwar period, the fascist Italian government undertook a campaign of Italianisation in the areas it annexed, which suppressed Slavic language, schools, political parties, and cultural institutions. Between 1922 and the beginning of World War II, the affected people were also the German-speaking and Ladin-speaking populations of Trentino-Alto Adige, and the French- and Arpitan-speaking regions of the western Alps, such as the Aosta valley.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Mussolini promised to bring Italy back as a great power in Europe, building a \"New Roman Empire\" and holding power over the Mediterranean Sea. In propaganda, Fascists used the ancient Roman motto \"Mare Nostrum\" (Latin for \"Our Sea\") to describe the Mediterranean. For this reason the Fascist regime engaged in interventionist foreign policy. In 1923, the Greek island of Corfu was briefly occupied by Italy, after the assassination of General Tellini in Greek territory. In 1925, Italy forced Albania to become a de facto protectorate. In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and founded Italian East Africa, resulting in an international alienation and leading to Italy's withdrawal from the League of Nations; Italy allied with Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan and strongly supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Italy formally annexed Albania. Italy entered World War II on 10 June 1940. The Italians initially advanced in British Somaliland, Egypt, the Balkans (establishing the Governorate of Dalmatia and Montenegro, the Province of Ljubljana, and the puppet states Independent State of Croatia and Hellenic State), and eastern fronts. They were, however, subsequently defeated on the Eastern Front as well as in the East African campaign and the North African campaign, losing as a result their territories in Africa and in the Balkans.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "During World War II, Italian war crimes included extrajudicial killings and ethnic cleansing by deportation of about 25,000 people, mainly Jews, Croats, and Slovenians, to the Italian concentration camps, such as Rab, Gonars, Monigo, Renicci di Anghiari, and elsewhere. Yugoslav Partisans perpetrated their own crimes against the local ethnic Italian population (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) during and after the war, including the foibe massacres. In Italy and Yugoslavia, unlike in Germany, few war crimes were prosecuted.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "An Allied invasion of Sicily began in July 1943, leading to the collapse of the Fascist regime and the fall of Mussolini on 25 July. Mussolini was deposed and arrested by order of King Victor Emmanuel III in co-operation with the majority of the members of the Grand Council of Fascism, which passed a motion of no confidence. On 8 September, Italy signed the Armistice of Cassibile, ending its war with the Allies. Shortly thereafter, the Germans, with the assistance of the Italian fascists, succeeded in taking control of northern and central Italy. The country remained a battlefield for the rest of the war, with the Allies slowly moving up from the south.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In the north, the Germans set up the Italian Social Republic (RSI), a Nazi puppet state with Mussolini installed as leader after he was rescued by German paratroopers. Some Italian troops in the south were organised into the Italian Co-belligerent Army, which fought alongside the Allies for the rest of the war, while other Italian troops, loyal to Mussolini and his RSI, continued to fight alongside the Germans in the National Republican Army. Also, the post-armistice period saw the rise of a large anti-fascist resistance movement, the Resistenza. As result, the country descended into civil war; the Italian resistance fought a guerrilla war against the Nazi German occupiers and Italian Fascist forces, while clashes between the Fascist RSI Army and the Royalist Italian Co-Belligerent Army were rare. In late April 1945, with total defeat looming, Mussolini attempted to escape north, but was captured and summarily executed near Lake Como by Italian partisans. His body was then taken to Milan, where it was hung upside down at a service station for public viewing and to provide confirmation of his demise.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Hostilities ended on 29 April 1945, when the German forces in Italy surrendered. Nearly half a million Italians (including civilians) died in the conflict, society was divided and the Italian economy had been all but destroyed; per capita income in 1944 was at its lowest point since the beginning of the 20th century. The aftermath of World War II left Italy also with an anger against the monarchy for its endorsement of the Fascist regime for the previous twenty years. These frustrations contributed to a revival of the Italian republican movement.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Italy became a republic after the 1946 Italian institutional referendum held on 2 June, a day celebrated since as Festa della Repubblica. This was the first time Italian women voted at the national level. Victor Emmanuel III's son, Umberto II, was forced to abdicate and exiled. The Republican Constitution was approved in 1948. Under the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947, areas next to the Adriatic Sea were annexed by Yugoslavia causing the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus, which led to the emigration of between 230,000 and 350,000 of local ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians), the others being ethnic Slovenians, ethnic Croatians, and ethnic Istro-Romanians, choosing to maintain Italian citizenship. Later, the Free Territory of Trieste was divided between the two states. Italy lost all of its colonial possessions, formally ending the Italian Empire. The Italian border today has existed since 1975, when Trieste was formally re-annexed to Italy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Fears of a possible Communist takeover proved crucial for the 18 April 1948, when the Christian Democrats, under Alcide De Gasperi, obtained a landslide victory. Consequently, in 1949 Italy became a member of NATO. The Marshall Plan revived the Italian economy which, until the late 1960s, enjoyed a period of sustained economic growth commonly called the \"Economic Miracle\". In the 1950s, Italy became one of the six founding countries of the European Communities, a forerunner of the European Union.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "From the late 1960s until the early 80s, the country experienced the Years of Lead, a period characterised by economic crisis, especially after the 1973 oil crisis, widespread social conflicts and terrorist massacres.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In the 1980s, for the first time since 1945, two governments were led by non-Christian-Democrat premiers: one republican and one socialist; the Christian Democrats remained, however, the main government party. The economy recovered and Italy became the world's fifth-largest industrial nation after it gained entry into the G7 in the 1970s. However, the Italian national debt skyrocketed passing 100% of the country's GDP.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Italy faced terror attacks between 1992-93 perpetrated by the Sicilian Mafia as a consequence of new anti-mafia measures launched by the government. One year later (May–July 1993), tourist spots were attacked, leaving 10 dead and 93 injured and causing severe damage to cultural heritage such as the Uffizi Gallery. The Catholic Church openly condemned the Mafia and an anti-Mafia priest shot dead in Rome.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In the early 1990s, voters – disenchanted with political paralysis, massive public debt and extensive corruption (known as Tangentopoli) uncovered by the Clean Hands (Mani Pulite) investigation – demanded radical reforms. The scandals involved all major parties, but especially those in the government coalition: the Christian Democrats, who ruled for almost 50 years, underwent a severe crisis and eventually disbanded, splitting into several factions. The Communists reorganised as a social-democratic force. During the 1990s and 2000s, centre-right (dominated by media magnate Silvio Berlusconi) and centre-left coalitions (led by university professor Romano Prodi) alternately governed the country.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Amidst the Great Recession, Berlusconi resigned in 2011, and was replaced by the technocratic cabinet of Mario Monti. Following the 2013 general election, the Vice-Secretary of the Democratic Party Enrico Letta formed a new government at the head of a right-left Grand coalition. In 2014, challenged by the new Secretary of the PD Matteo Renzi, Letta resigned and was replaced by Renzi. The new government started constitutional reforms. On 4 December constitutional reform was rejected in a referendum and Renzi resigned; Paolo Gentiloni was appointed Prime Minister.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In the European migrant crisis of the 2010s, Italy was the entry point and leading destination for most asylum seekers entering the EU. Between 2013-18, the country took in over 700,000 migrants and refugees, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, which caused strain on the public purse and a surge in support for far-right or euro-sceptic parties. The 2018 general election was characterised by a strong showing of the Five Star Movement and the Lega. Professor Giuseppe Conte became Prime Minister at the head of a populist coalition between these two parties. After only fourteen months the League withdrew its support from Conte, who formed a new government coalition between the Five Star Movement and the centre-left.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In 2020, Italy was severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Conte's government imposed a national lockdown. With more than 155,000 confirmed victims, Italy was one of the countries with the highest deaths in the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic caused a severe economic disruption, in which Italy was one of the most affected countries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In February 2021, after a government crisis within his majority, Conte was forced to resign and Mario Draghi, former president of the European Central Bank, formed a national unity government supported by most of the main parties, pledging to oversee implementation of economic stimulus to face the crisis caused by the pandemic. On 22 October 2022, Giorgia Meloni was sworn in as Italy's first female prime minister. Her Brothers of Italy party formed a right-wing government with the far-right League and Berlusconi's Forza Italia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Italy, whose territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical region, is located in Southern Europe and it is also considered a part of western Europe, between latitudes 35° and 47° N, and longitudes 6° and 19° E. To the north, Italy borders France, Switzerland, Austria, and Slovenia and is roughly delimited by the Alpine watershed, enclosing the Po Valley and the Venetian Plain. To the south, it consists of the entirety of the Italian Peninsula and the two Mediterranean islands of Sicily and Sardinia (the two biggest islands of the Mediterranean), in addition to many smaller islands. The sovereign states of San Marino and the Vatican City are enclaves within Italy, while Campione d'Italia is an Italian exclave in Switzerland.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The country's total area is 301,230 square kilometres (116,306 sq mi), of which 294,020 km (113,522 sq mi) is land and 7,210 km (2,784 sq mi) is water. Including the islands, Italy has a coastline and border of 7,600 kilometres (4,722 miles) on the Adriatic, Ionian, Tyrrhenian seas, and borders shared with France (488 km (303 mi)), Austria (430 km (267 mi)), Slovenia (232 km (144 mi)) and Switzerland (740 km (460 mi)). San Marino (39 km (24 mi)) and Vatican City (3.2 km (2.0 mi)), both enclaves, account for the remainder.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Over 35% of the Italian territory is mountainous. The Apennine Mountains form the peninsula's backbone, and the Alps form most of its northern boundary, where Italy's highest point is located on Mont Blanc summit (Monte Bianco) (4,810 m or 15,780 ft). Other worldwide-known mountains in Italy include the Matterhorn (Monte Cervino), Monte Rosa, Gran Paradiso in the West Alps, and Bernina, Stelvio and Dolomites along the eastern side.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The Po, Italy's longest river (652 kilometres or 405 miles), flows from the Alps on the western border with France and crosses the Padan plain on its way to the Adriatic Sea. The Po Valley is the largest plain in Italy, with 46,000 km (18,000 sq mi), and it represents over 70% of the total plain area in the country.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Many elements of the Italian territory are of volcanic origin. Most of the small islands and archipelagos in the south, like Capraia, Ponza, Ischia, Eolie, Ustica and Pantelleria are volcanic islands. There are also active volcanoes: Mount Etna in Sicily (the largest active volcano in Europe), Vulcano, Stromboli, and Vesuvius (the only active volcano on mainland Europe).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The five largest lakes are, in order of diminishing size: Garda (367.94 km or 142 sq mi), Maggiore (212.51 km or 82 sq mi, whose minor northern part is part of Switzerland), Como (145.9 km or 56 sq mi), Trasimeno (124.29 km or 48 sq mi) and Bolsena (113.55 km or 44 sq mi). Four different seas surround the Italian Peninsula in the Mediterranean Sea from three sides: the Adriatic Sea in the east, the Ionian Sea in the south, and the Ligurian Sea and the Tyrrhenian Sea in the west. The longest Italian river is the Po, which flows for either 652 km (405 mi) or 682 km (424 mi). Most of the rivers of Italy drain either into the Adriatic Sea or the Tyrrhenian Sea.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Although the country includes the Italian peninsula, adjacent islands, and most of the southern Alpine basin, some of Italy's territory extends beyond the Alpine basin and some islands are located outside the Eurasian continental shelf. These territories are the comuni of: Livigno, Sexten, Innichen, Toblach (in part), Chiusaforte, Tarvisio, Graun im Vinschgau (in part), which are all part of the Danube's drainage basin, while the Val di Lei constitutes part of the Rhine's basin and the islands of Lampedusa and Lampione are on the African continental shelf.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "After its quick industrial growth, Italy took a long time to confront its environmental problems. After several improvements, it now ranks 84th in the world for ecological sustainability. National parks cover about 5% of the country, while the total area protected by national parks, regional parks and nature reserves covers about 10.5% of the Italian territory, to which must be added 12% of coasts protected by marine protected areas.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In the last decade, Italy has become one of the world's leading producers of renewable energy, ranking as the world's fourth largest holder of installed solar energy capacity and the sixth largest holder of wind power capacity in 2010. Renewable energies provided approximately 37% Italy's energy consumption in 2020. However, air pollution remains a severe problem, especially in the industrialised north, reaching the tenth highest level worldwide of industrial carbon dioxide emissions in the 1990s. Italy is the twelfth-largest carbon dioxide producer.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Extensive traffic and congestion in the largest metropolitan areas continue to cause severe environmental and health issues, even if smog levels have decreased dramatically since the 1970s and 1980s, and the presence of smog is becoming an increasingly rarer phenomenon and levels of sulphur dioxide are decreasing.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Many watercourses and coastal stretches have also been contaminated by industrial and agricultural activity, while because of rising water levels, Venice has been regularly flooded throughout recent years. Waste from industrial activity is not always disposed of by legal means and has led to permanent health effects on inhabitants of affected areas, as in the case of the Seveso disaster. The country has also operated several nuclear reactors between 1963 and 1990 but, after the Chernobyl disaster and a referendum on the issue the nuclear programme was terminated, a decision that was overturned by the government in 2008, planning to build up to four nuclear power plants with French technology. This was in turn struck down by a referendum following the Fukushima nuclear accident.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Deforestation, illegal building developments and poor land-management policies have led to significant erosion all over Italy's mountainous regions, leading to major ecological disasters like the 1963 Vajont Dam flood, the 1998 Sarno and 2009 Messina mudslides. The country had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 3.65/10, ranking it 142nd globally out of 172 countries.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Italy has probably the highest level of faunal biodiversity in Europe, with over 57,000 species recorded, representing more than a third of all European fauna, and the highest level of biodiversity of both animal and plant species within the European Union. Italy's varied geological structure contributes to its high climate and habitat diversity. The Italian peninsula is in the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, forming a corridor between central Europe and North Africa, and has 8,000 km (5,000 mi) of coastline. Italy also receives species from the Balkans, Eurasia, and the Middle East. Italy's varied geological structure, including the Alps and the Apennines, Central Italian woodlands, and Southern Italian Garigue and Maquis shrubland, also contribute to high climate and habitat diversity.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The fauna of Italy includes 4,777 endemic animal species, which include the Sardinian long-eared bat, Sardinian red deer, spectacled salamander, brown cave salamander, Italian newt, Italian frog, Apennine yellow-bellied toad, Italian wall lizard, Aeolian wall lizard, Sicilian wall lizard, Italian Aesculapian snake, and Sicilian pond turtle. In Italy there are 119 mammals species, 550 bird species, 69 reptile species, 39 amphibian species, 623 fish species and 56,213 invertebrate species, of which 37,303 insect species.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The flora of Italy was traditionally estimated to comprise about 5,500 vascular plant species. However, as of 2005, 6,759 species are recorded in the Data bank of Italian vascular flora. Italy has 1,371 endemic plant species and subspecies, which include Sicilian Fir, Barbaricina columbine, Sea marigold, Lavender cotton and Ucriana violet. Italy is a signatory to the Berne Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats and the Habitats Directive both affording protection to Italian fauna and flora.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Italy has many botanical gardens and historic gardens, some of which are known outside the country. The Italian garden is stylistically based on symmetry, axial geometry and on the principle of imposing order over nature. It influenced the history of gardening, especially French gardens and English gardens. The Italian garden was influenced by Roman gardens and Italian Renaissance gardens.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The Italian wolf is the national animal of Italy, while the national tree of the country is the strawberry tree. The reasons for this choice are related to the fact that the Italian wolf, which inhabits the Apennine Mountains and the Western Alps, features prominently in Latin and Italian cultures, such as in the legend of the founding of Rome, while the green leaves, white flowers and red berries of the strawberry tree, which is native to the Mediterranean region, recall the colours of the flag of Italy.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The climate of Italy is influenced by the large body of water of the Mediterranean Sea that surrounds Italy on every side except the north. These seas constitute a reservoir of heat and humidity for Italy. Within the southern temperate zone, they determine a Mediterranean climate with local differences due to the geomorphology of the territory, which tends to make its mitigating effects felt, especially in high pressure conditions.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Because of the length of the peninsula and the mostly mountainous hinterland, the climate of Italy is highly diverse. In most of the inland northern and central regions, the climate ranges from humid subtropical to humid continental and oceanic. The climate of the Po valley geographical region is mostly humid subtropical, with cool winters and hot summers. The coastal areas of Liguria, Tuscany and most of the South generally fit the Mediterranean climate stereotype (Köppen climate classification).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Conditions on the coast are different from those in the interior, particularly during winter months when the higher altitudes tend to be cold, wet, and often snowy. The coastal regions have mild winters and hot and generally dry summers; lowland valleys are hot in summer. Average winter temperatures vary from around 0 °C (32 °F) in the Alps to 12 °C (54 °F) in Sicily, so average summer temperatures range from 20 °C (68 °F) to over 25 °C (77 °F).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Winters can vary widely across the country with lingering cold, foggy and snowy periods in the north and milder, sunnier conditions in the south. Summers are hot across the country, except for at high altitude, particularly in the south. Northern and central areas can experience occasional strong thunderstorms from spring to autumn.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Italy has been a unitary parliamentary republic since 2 June 1946, when the monarchy was abolished by a constitutional referendum. The President of Italy (Presidente della Repubblica), currently Sergio Mattarella since 2015, is Italy's head of state. The President is elected for a single seven years mandate by the Parliament of Italy and some regional voters in joint session. Italy has a written democratic constitution, resulting from the work of a Constituent Assembly formed by the representatives of all the anti-fascist forces that contributed to the defeat of Nazi and Fascist forces during the Italian Civil War.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Italy has a parliamentary government based on a mixed proportional and majoritarian voting system. The parliament is perfectly bicameral: the two houses, the Chamber of Deputies that meets in Palazzo Montecitorio, and the Senate of the Republic that meets in Palazzo Madama, have the same powers. The Prime Minister, officially President of the Council of Ministers (Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri), is Italy's head of government. The Prime Minister and the cabinet are appointed by the President of the Republic of Italy and must pass a vote of confidence in Parliament to come into office. To remain the Prime Minister has to pass also eventual further votes of confidence or no confidence in Parliament.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The prime minister is the President of the Council of Ministers – which holds effective executive power – and must receive a vote of approval from it to execute most political activities. The office is similar to those in most other parliamentary systems, but the head of the Italian government is not authorised to request the dissolution of the Parliament of Italy.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Another difference with similar offices is that the overall political responsibility for intelligence is vested in the President of the Council of Ministers. By virtue of that, the Prime Minister has exclusive power to coordinate intelligence policies, determine the financial resources and strengthen national cyber security; apply and protect State secrets; authorise agents to carry out operations, in Italy or abroad, in violation of the law.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "A peculiarity of the Italian Parliament is the representation given to Italian citizens permanently living abroad: 8 Deputies and 4 Senators elected in four distinct overseas constituencies. In addition, the Italian Senate is characterised also by a small number of senators for life, appointed by the President \"for outstanding patriotic merits in the social, scientific, artistic or literary field\". Former Presidents of the Republic are ex officio life senators.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Italy's three major political parties are the Brothers of Italy, the Democratic Party and the Five Star Movement. During the 2022 general election, these three parties and their coalitions won 357 out of 400 seats available in the Chamber of Deputies and 187 out of 200 in the Senate. The centre-right coalition, which included Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, Matteo Salvini's League, Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Maurizio Lupi's Us Moderates, won a majority of the seats in parliament. The rest of the seats were taken by the centre-left coalition, which included Enrico Letta's Democratic Party, Angelo Bonelli's Greens and Left Alliance, Aosta Valley, Emma Bonino's More Europe & Luigi Di Maio's Civic Commitment, as well as by Giuseppe Conte's Five Star Movement, Carlo Calenda's Action - Italia Viva, Philipp Achammer and Philipp Achammer's South Tyrolean People's Party, Cateno De Luca's South Calls North and Ricardo Antonio Merlo's Associative Movement of Italians Abroad.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The law of Italy has a plurality of sources of production. These are arranged in a hierarchical scale, under which the rule of a lower source cannot conflict with the rule of an upper source (hierarchy of sources). The Constitution of 1948 is the main source. The judiciary of Italy is based on Roman law modified by the Napoleonic code and later statutes. The Supreme Court of Cassation is the highest court in Italy for both criminal and civil appeal cases. The Constitutional Court of Italy (Corte Costituzionale) rules on the conformity of laws with the constitution and is a post–World War II innovation.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Since their appearance in the middle of the 19th century, Italian organised crime and criminal organisations have infiltrated the social and economic life of many regions in Southern Italy, the most notorious of which being the Sicilian Mafia, which would later expand into some foreign countries including the United States. Mafia receipts may reach 9% of Italy's GDP.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "A 2009 report identified 610 comuni which have a strong Mafia presence, where 13 million Italians live and 14.6% of the Italian GDP is produced. The Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, nowadays probably the most powerful crime syndicate of Italy, accounts alone for 3% of the country's GDP. However, at 0.013 per 1,000 people, Italy has only the 47th highest murder rate compared to 61 countries and the 43rd highest number of rapes per 1,000 people compared to 64 countries in the world. These are relatively low figures among developed countries.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The Italian law enforcement system is complex, with multiple police forces. The national policing agencies are the Polizia di Stato (State Police), the Arma dei Carabinieri, the Guardia di Finanza (Financial Guard), and the Polizia Penitenziaria (Prison Police), as well as the Guardia Costiera (coast guard police). Although policing in Italy is primarily provided on a national basis, there also exists Polizia Provinciale (provincial police) and Polizia Municipale (municipal police).",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Italy is regarded as being behind other Western European nations with regards to LGBT rights. Additionally, Italy's law prohibiting torture is considered behind international standards.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Italy is a founding member of the European Economic Community (EEC), now the European Union (EU), and of NATO. Italy was admitted to the United Nations in 1955, and it is a member and a strong supporter of a wide number of international organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe, and the Central European Initiative. Its recent or upcoming turns in the rotating presidency of international organisations include the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2018, the G7 in 2017 and the EU Council from July to December 2014. Italy is also a recurrent non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, the most recently in 2017.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Italy strongly supports multilateral international politics, endorsing the United Nations and its international security activities. In 2013, Italy had 5,296 troops deployed abroad, engaged in 33 UN and NATO missions in 25 countries of the world. Italy deployed troops in support of UN peacekeeping missions in Somalia, Mozambique, and East Timor and provides support for NATO and UN operations in Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania. Italy deployed over 2,000 troops in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) from February 2003.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Italy supported international efforts to reconstruct and stabilise Iraq, but it had withdrawn its military contingent of some 3,200 troops by 2006, maintaining only humanitarian operators and other civilian personnel. In August 2006 Italy deployed about 2,450 troops in Lebanon for the United Nations' peacekeeping mission UNIFIL. Italy is one of the largest financiers of the Palestinian National Authority, contributing €60 million in 2013 alone.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "The Italian Army, Navy, Air Force and Carabinieri collectively form the Italian Armed Forces, under the command of the High Council of Defence, presided over by the President of Italy, as established by article 87 of the Constitution of Italy. According to article 78, the Parliament has the authority to declare a state of war and vest the necessary powers in the Government.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Despite not being a branch of the armed forces, the Guardia di Finanza (\"Financial Guard\") has military status and is organized along military lines. Since 2005, military service is voluntary. In 2010, the Italian military had 293,202 personnel on active duty, of which 114,778 are Carabinieri. As part of NATO's nuclear sharing strategy Italy also hosts 90 United States B61 nuclear bombs, located in the Ghedi and Aviano air bases.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The Italian Army is the national ground defence force. Its best-known combat vehicles are the Dardo infantry fighting vehicle, the Centauro tank destroyer and the Ariete tank, and among its aircraft the Mangusta attack helicopter, in the last years deployed in EU, NATO and UN missions. It also has at its disposal many Leopard 1 and M113 armoured vehicles. It was formed in 1946 from what remained of the Regio Esercito (\"Royal Army\", which was established on the occasion of the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, 1861) after World War II, when Italy became a republic following a referendum.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The Italian Navy is a blue-water navy. In modern times the Italian Navy, being a member of the EU and NATO, has taken part in many coalition peacekeeping operations around the world. It was formed in 1946 from what remained of the Regia Marina (\"Royal Navy\", which was established on the occasion of the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, 1861) after World War II, when Italy became a republic following a referendum. The Italian Navy in 2014 operates 154 vessels in service, including minor auxiliary vessels.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The Italian Air Force in 2021 operates 219 combat jets. A transport capability is guaranteed by a fleet of 27 C-130Js and C-27J Spartan. The Italian Air Force was founded as an independent service arm on 28 March 1923 by King Victor Emmanuel III as the Regia Aeronautica (\"Royal Air Force\"). After World War II, when Italy became a republic following a referendum, the Regia Aeronautica was given its current name. The acrobatic display team is the Frecce Tricolori (\"Tricolour Arrows\").",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "An autonomous corps of the military, the Carabinieri are the gendarmerie and military police of Italy, policing the military and civilian population alongside Italy's other police forces. While the different branches of the Carabinieri report to separate ministries for each of their individual functions, the corps reports to the Ministry of Internal Affairs when maintaining public order and security.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Italy is constituted by 20 regions (regioni)—five of these regions having a special autonomous status that enables them to enact legislation on additional matters, 107 provinces (province) or metropolitan cities (città metropolitane), and 7,904 municipalities (comuni). This is a list of regions in Italy:",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Italy has a major advanced capitalist mixed economy, ranking as the third-largest in the eurozone and the eighth-largest in the world by nominal GDP the ninth-largest national wealth and the third-largest central bank gold reserve. A founding member of the G7, the eurozone and the OECD, it is regarded as one of the world's most industrialised nations and a leading country in world trade and exports. It is a developed country, ranked 30th on the Human Development Index. It also performs well in life expectancy, healthcare and education. The country is well known for its creative and innovative business, a large and competitive agricultural sector (with the world's largest wine production), and for its influential and high-quality automobile, machinery, food, design and fashion industry.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Italy is the world's sixth-largest manufacturing country, characterised by a smaller number of global multinational corporations than other economies of comparable size and many dynamic small and medium-sized enterprises, notoriously clustered in several industrial districts, which are the backbone of the Italian industry. This has produced a manufacturing sector often focused on the export of niche market and luxury products, that if on one side is less capable to compete on the quantity, on the other side is more capable of facing the competition from China and other emerging Asian economies based on lower labour costs, with higher quality products. Italy was the world's tenth-largest exporter in 2019. Its closest trade ties are with the other countries of the European Union. Its largest export partners in 2019 were Germany (12%), France (11%), and the United States (10%).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "The automotive industry is a significant part of the Italian manufacturing sector, with over 144,000 firms and almost 485,000 employed people in 2015, and a contribution of 8.5% to Italian GDP. Stellantis is currently the world's fifth-largest auto maker. The country boasts a wide range of acclaimed products, from compact city cars to luxury supercars such as Maserati, Pagani, Lamborghini, and Ferrari.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "The Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena is the world's oldest or second oldest bank in continuous operation, depending on the definition, and the fourth-largest Italian commercial and retail bank. Italy has a strong cooperative sector, with the largest share of the population (4.5%) employed by a cooperative in the EU. The Val d'Agri area, Basilicata, hosts the largest onshore hydrocarbon field in Europe. Moderate natural gas reserves, mainly in the Po Valley and offshore Adriatic Sea, have been discovered in recent years and constitute the country's most important mineral resource. Italy is one of the world's leading producers of pumice, pozzolana, and feldspar. Another notable mineral resource is marble, especially the world-famous white Carrara marble from the Massa and Carrara quarries in Tuscany.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Italy is part of a monetary union, the eurozone, and of the European single market, which represents more than 500 million consumers. Several domestic commercial policies are determined by agreements among European Union (EU) members and by EU legislation. Italy introduced the common European currency, the euro in 2002. It is a member of the eurozone which represents around 330 million citizens. Its monetary policy is set by the European Central Bank.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Italy was hit hard by the financial crisis of 2007–08, that exacerbated the country's structural problems. Effectively, after a strong GDP growth of 5–6% per year from the 1950s to the early 1970s, and a progressive slowdown in the 1980–90s, the country virtually stagnated in the 2000s. The political efforts to revive growth with massive government spending eventually produced a severe rise in public debt, that stood at over 131.8% of GDP in 2017, ranking second in the EU only after the Greek one. For all that, the largest chunk of Italian public debt is owned by national subjects, a major difference between Italy and Greece, and the level of household debt is much lower than the OECD average.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "A gaping North–South divide is a major factor of socio-economic weakness. It can be noted by the huge difference in statistical income between the northern and southern regions and municipalities. The richest province, Alto Adige-South Tyrol, earns 152% of the national GDP per capita, while the poorest region, Calabria, 61%. The unemployment rate (11.1%) stands slightly above the eurozone average, but the disaggregated figure is 6.6% in the North and 19.2% in the South. The youth unemployment rate (31.7% in March 2018) is extremely high compared to EU standards.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "According to the last national agricultural census, there were 1.6 million farms in 2010 (−32.4% since 2000) covering 12,700,000 ha or 31,382,383 acres (63% of which are located in Southern Italy). The vast majority (99%) are family-operated and small, averaging only 8 ha (20 acres) in size. Of the total surface area in agricultural use (forestry excluded), grain fields take up 31%, olive tree orchards 8.2%, vineyards 5.4%, citrus orchards 3.8%, sugar beets 1.7%, and horticulture 2.4%. The remainder is primarily dedicated to pastures (25.9%) and feed grains (11.6%).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Italy is the world's largest wine producer, and one of the leading in olive oil, fruits (apples, olives, grapes, oranges, lemons, pears, apricots, hazelnuts, peaches, cherries, plums, strawberries and kiwifruits), and vegetables (especially artichokes and tomatoes). The most famous Italian wines are probably the Tuscan Chianti and the Piedmontese Barolo. Other famous wines are Barbaresco, Barbera d'Asti, Brunello di Montalcino, Frascati, Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, Morellino di Scansano, and the sparkling wines Franciacorta and Prosecco.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Quality goods in which Italy specialises, particularly the already mentioned wines and regional cheeses, are often protected under the quality assurance labels DOC/DOP. This geographical indication certificate, which is attributed by the European Union, is considered important in order to avoid confusion with low-quality mass-produced ersatz products.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Italy was the first country in the world to build motorways, the so-called autostrade, reserved for fast traffic and for motor vehicles only. Regarding the national road network, in 2002 there were 668,721 km (415,524 mi) of serviceable roads in Italy, including 6,487 km (4,031 mi) of motorways, state-owned but privately operated by Atlantia. In 2005, about 34,667,000 passenger cars (590 cars per 1,000 people) and 4,015,000 goods vehicles circulated on the national road network.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "The national railway network, state-owned and operated by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (FSI), in 2008 totalled 16,529 km (10,271 mi) of which 11,727 km (7,287 mi) is electrified, and on which 4,802 locomotives and railcars run. The main public operator of high-speed trains is Trenitalia, part of FSI. Higher-speed trains are divided into three categories: Frecciarossa (English: red arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 300 km/h on dedicated high-speed tracks; Frecciargento (English: silver arrow) trains operate at a maximum speed of 250 km/h on both high-speed and mainline tracks; and Frecciabianca (English: white arrow) trains operate on high-speed regional lines at a maximum speed of 200 km/h. Italy has 11 rail border crossings over the Alpine mountains with its neighbouring countries.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Italy is the fifth in Europe by the number of passengers by air transport, with about 148 million passengers or about 10% of the European total in 2011. In 2022 there were 45 civil airports in Italy, including the two hubs of Malpensa International Airport in Milan and Leonardo da Vinci International Airport in Rome. Since October 2021, Italy's flag carrier airline is ITA Airways, which took over the brand, the IATA ticketing code, and many assets belonging to the former flag carrier Alitalia, after its bankruptcy.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "In 2004 there were 43 major seaports, including the seaport of Genoa, the country's largest and second-largest in the Mediterranean Sea. In 2005 Italy maintained a civilian air fleet of about 389,000 units and a merchant fleet of 581 ships. The national inland waterways network has a length of 2,400 km (1,491 mi) for commercial traffic in 2012.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Italy has been the final destination of the Silk Road for many centuries. In particular, the construction of the Suez Canal intensified sea trade with East Africa and Asia from the 19th century. Since the end of the Cold War and increasing European integration, the trade relations, which were often interrupted in the 20th century, have intensified again and the northern Italian ports such as the deep-water port of Trieste in the northernmost part of the Mediterranean with its extensive rail connections to Central and Eastern Europe are once again the destination of government subsidies and significant foreign investment.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "In the last decade, Italy has become one of the world's largest producers of renewable energy, ranking as the second largest producer in the European Union and the ninth in the world. Wind power, hydroelectricity, and geothermal power are also significant sources of electricity in the country. Renewable sources account for 27.5% of all electricity produced in Italy, with hydro alone reaching 12.6%, followed by solar at 5.7%, wind at 4.1%, bioenergy at 3.5%, and geothermal at 1.6%. The rest of the national demand is covered by fossil fuels (38.2% natural gas, 13% coal, 8.4% oil) and by imports. Eni, with operations in 79 countries, is considered one of the seven \"Supermajor\" oil companies in the world, and one of the world's largest industrial companies.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Solar energy production alone accounted for almost 9% of the total electric production in the country in 2014, making Italy the country with the highest contribution from solar energy in the world. The Montalto di Castro Photovoltaic Power Station, completed in 2010, is the largest photovoltaic power station in Italy with 85 MW. Other examples of large PV plants in Italy are San Bellino (70.6 MW), Cellino san Marco (42.7 MW) and Sant' Alberto (34.6 MW). Italy was the first country in the world to exploit geothermal energy to produce electricity. Italy had managed four nuclear reactors until the 1980s. However, nuclear power in Italy has been abandoned following a 1987 referendum (in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Soviet Ukraine), though Italy still imports nuclear energy from Italy-owned reactors in foreign territories.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Through the centuries, Italy has fostered the scientific community that produced many major discoveries in physics and other sciences. During the Renaissance Italian polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) made contributions in a variety of fields, including biology, architecture, and engineering. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), an astronomer, physicist, engineer, and polymath, played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. He is considered the \"father\" of observational astronomy, modern physics, the scientific method, and modern science.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Other astronomers such as Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625–1712) and Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910) made discoveries about the Solar System. In mathematics, Joseph Louis Lagrange (born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia, 1736–1813) was active before leaving Italy. Fibonacci (c. 1170 – c. 1250), and Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) made fundamental advances in mathematics. Luca Pacioli established accounting to the world. Physicist Enrico Fermi (1901–1954), a Nobel prize laureate, led the team in Chicago that developed the first nuclear reactor. He is considered the \"architect of the nuclear age\" and the \"architect of the atomic bomb\". He, Emilio G. Segrè (1905–1989) who discovered the elements technetium and astatine, and the antiproton), Bruno Rossi (1905–1993) a pioneer in Cosmic Rays and X-ray astronomy) and a number of Italian physicists were forced to leave Italy in the 1930s by Fascist laws against Jews.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Other prominent physicists include: Amedeo Avogadro (most noted for his contributions to molecular theory, in particular, the Avogadro's law and the Avogadro constant), Evangelista Torricelli (inventor of barometer), Alessandro Volta (inventor of electric battery), Guglielmo Marconi (inventor of radio), Galileo Ferraris and Antonio Pacinotti, pioneers of the induction motor, Alessandro Cruto, pioneer of light bulb and Innocenzo Manzetti, eclectic pioneer of auto and robotics, Ettore Majorana (who discovered the Majorana fermions), Carlo Rubbia (1984 Nobel Prize in Physics for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN). Antonio Meucci is known for developing a voice-communication device which is often credited as the first telephone. Pier Giorgio Perotto in 1964 designed one of the first desktop programmable calculators, the Programma 101.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "In biology, Francesco Redi has been the first to challenge the theory of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that maggots come from eggs of flies and he described 180 parasites in detail and Marcello Malpighi founded microscopic anatomy, Lazzaro Spallanzani conducted research in bodily functions, animal reproduction, and cellular theory, Camillo Golgi, whose many achievements include the discovery of the Golgi complex, paved the way to the acceptance of the Neuron doctrine, Rita Levi-Montalcini discovered the nerve growth factor (awarded 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine). In chemistry, Giulio Natta received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963 for his work on high polymers. Giuseppe Occhialini received the Wolf Prize in Physics for the discovery of the pion or pi-meson decay in 1947. Ennio de Giorgi, a Wolf Prize in Mathematics recipient in 1990, solved Bernstein's problem about minimal surfaces and the 19th Hilbert problem on the regularity of solutions of Elliptic partial differential equations.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) is the largest underground research centre in the world. ELETTRA, Eurac Research, ESA Centre for Earth Observation, Institute for Scientific Interchange, International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics conduct basic research. Trieste has the highest percentage of researchers in Europe in relation to the population. Italy was ranked 26th in the Global Innovation Index in 2023. There are numerous technology parks in Italy such as the Science and Technology Parks Kilometro Rosso (Bergamo), the AREA Science Park (Trieste), The VEGA-Venice Gateway for Science and Technology (Venezia), the Toscana Life Sciences (Siena), the Technology Park of Lodi Cluster (Lodi), and the Technology Park of Navacchio (Pisa), as well as science museums such as the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, the Città della Scienza in Naples and the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Within this great Italian History of Science and Technology, modern times tell a different and more technologically divergent story. The North–South divide is a significant factor that leads to a vast difference in income between the Northern and Southern regions, which brings up the topic of the Digital Divide in Italy. The long history of this divided peninsula, now a unified nation-state, details the complex problems of underdeveloped areas in the South. As expected, these problems of underdevelopment and poverty still linger today, also reflected in the concept of the digital divide between the North and South. The Global digital divide is broadly described as the technological differences between underdeveloped and developed countries. While this does not necessarily mean that people have no access to technology, it is made clear that this equates to differences in technology, such as the Internet and household electronics. Digital inequalities between Northern and Southern Italy exist and are still prevalent, especially when related to education.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "People have visited Italy for centuries, yet the first to visit the peninsula for touristic reasons were aristocrats during the Grand Tour, beginning in the 17th century, and flourishing in the 18th and the 19th century. This was a period in which European aristocrats, many of whom were British, visited parts of Europe, with Italy as a key destination. For Italy, this was in order to study ancient architecture, local culture and to admire the natural beauties.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Nowadays Italy is the fifth most visited country in international tourism, with a total of 52.3 million international arrivals in 2016. The total contribution of travel & tourism to GDP (including wider effects from investment, the supply chain and induced income impacts) was EUR162.7bn in 2014 (10.1% of GDP) and generated 1,082,000 jobs directly in 2014 (4.8% of total employment).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "Factors of tourist interest in Italy are mainly culture, cuisine, history, fashion, architecture, art, religious sites and routes, wedding tourism, naturalistic beauties, nightlife, underwater sites and spas. Winter and summer tourism are present in many locations in the Alps and the Apennines, while seaside tourism is widespread in coastal locations on the Mediterranean Sea. Italy is the leading cruise tourism destination in the Mediterranean Sea. Small, historical and artistic Italian villages are promoted through the association I Borghi più belli d'Italia (literally \"The Most Beautiful Villages of Italy\").",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "The most visited regions of Italy, measured by nights spent in tourist accommodation establishments, are Veneto, Tuscany, Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna and Lazio. Rome is the 3rd most visited city in Europe and the 12th in the world, with 9.4 million arrivals in 2017 while Milan is the 27th worldwide with 6.8 million tourists. In addition, Venice and Florence are also among the world's top 100 destinations.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Italy is also the country with the highest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the world (58). Out of Italy's 58 heritage sites, 53 are cultural and 5 are natural. In Italy there is a broad variety of hotels, going from 1–5 stars. According to ISTAT, in 2017, there were 32,988 hotels with 1,133,452 rooms and 2,239,446 beds. As for non-hotel facilities (campsites, tourist villages, accommodations for rent, agritourism, etc.), in 2017 their number was 171,915 with 2,798,352 beds.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "At the beginning of 2020, Italy had 60,317,116 inhabitants. The resulting population density, at 202 inhabitants per square kilometre (520/sq mi), is higher than that of most Western European countries. However, the distribution of the population is widely uneven. The most densely populated areas are the Po Valley (that accounts for almost a half of the national population) and the metropolitan areas of Rome and Naples, while vast regions such as the Alps and Apennines highlands, the plateaus of Basilicata and the island of Sardinia, as well as much of Sicily, are sparsely populated.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "The population of Italy almost doubled during the 20th century, but the pattern of growth was extremely uneven because of large-scale internal migration from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North, a phenomenon which happened as a consequence of the Italian economic miracle of the 1950–1960s. High fertility and birth rates persisted until the 1970s, after which they started to decline. The population rapidly aged; by 2010, one in five Italians was over 65 years old, and the country currently has the fifth oldest population in the world, with a median age of 46.5 years. However, in recent years Italy has experienced significant growth in birth rates. The total fertility rate has also climbed from an all-time low of 1.18 children per woman in 1995 to 1.41 in 2008, albeit still below the replacement rate of 2.1 and considerably below the high of 5.06 children born per woman in 1883. Nevertheless, the total fertility rate is expected to reach 1.6–1.8 in 2030.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "From the late 19th century until the 1960s Italy was a country of mass emigration. Between 1898 and 1914, the peak years of Italian diaspora, approximately 750,000 Italians emigrated each year. The diaspora concerned more than 25 million Italians and it is considered the biggest mass migration of contemporary times. As a result, today more than 4.1 million Italian citizens are living abroad, while at least 60 million people of full or part Italian ancestry live outside of Italy, most notably in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, the United States, Canada, Australia and France.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "In 2021, Italy had about 5.17 million foreign residents, making up 8.7% of the total population. The figures include more than half a million children born in Italy to foreign nationals (second generation immigrants) but exclude foreign nationals who have subsequently acquired Italian citizenship; in 2016, about 201,000 people became Italian citizens. The official figures also exclude illegal immigrants, who estimated to number at least 670,000 as of 2008.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "Starting from the early 1980s, until then a linguistically and culturally homogeneous society, Italy begun to attract substantial flows of foreign immigrants. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and, more recently, the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union, large waves of migration originated from the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe (especially Romania, Albania, Ukraine and Poland). Another source of immigration is neighbouring North Africa (in particular, Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia), with soaring arrivals as a consequence of the Arab Spring. Furthermore, in recent years, growing migration fluxes from Asia-Pacific (notably China and the Philippines) and Latin America have been recorded.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "Currently, about one million Romanian citizens (around 10% of them being ethnic Romani people) are officially registered as living in Italy, representing the largest migrant population, followed by Albanians and Moroccans with about 500,000 people each. The number of unregistered Romanians is difficult to estimate, but the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network suggested in 2007 that there might have been half a million or more.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "As of 2010, the foreign born population of Italy was from the following regions: Europe (54%), Africa (22%), Asia (16%), the Americas (8%) and Oceania (0.06%). The distribution of foreign population is geographically varied in Italy: in 2020, 61.2% of foreign citizens lived in Northern Italy (in particular 36.1% in the North West and 25.1% in the North East), 24.2% in the centre, 10.8% in the South and 3.9% in the Islands.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "Italy's official language is Italian, as stated by the framework law no. 482/1999 and Trentino Alto-Adige's special Statute, which is adopted with a constitutional law. Around the world there are an estimated 64 million native Italian speakers and another 21 million who use it as a second language. Italian is often natively spoken in a regional variety, not to be confused with Italy's regional and minority languages; however, the establishment of a national education system led to a decrease in variation in the languages spoken across the country during the 20th century. Standardisation was further expanded in the 1950s and 1960s due to economic growth and the rise of mass media and television (the state broadcaster RAI helped set a standard Italian).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "Twelve \"historical minority languages\" (minoranze linguistiche storiche) are formally recognised: Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian. Four of these also enjoy a co-official status in their respective region: French in the Aosta Valley; German in South Tyrol, and Ladin as well in some parts of the same province and in parts of the neighbouring Trentino; and Slovene in the provinces of Trieste, Gorizia and Udine. A number of other Ethnologue, ISO and UNESCO languages are not recognised by Italian law. Like France, Italy has signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, but has not ratified it.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "Because of recent immigration, Italy has sizeable populations whose native language is not Italian, nor a regional language. According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, Romanian is the most common mother tongue among foreign residents in Italy: almost 800,000 people speak Romanian as their first language (21.9% of the foreign residents aged 6 and over). Other prevalent mother tongues are Arabic (spoken by over 475,000 people; 13.1% of foreign residents), Albanian (380,000 people) and Spanish (255,000 people).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "Religion in Italy according to the Ipsos survey, 2023 (approximately 1000 participants)",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Religiosity in Italy is rapidly declining, although it has been historically characterized by the dominance of Catholicism since the Great Schism. According to a 2023 Ipsos survey, 61% of the country's residents are Catholic, 4% are Protestants, 3% other Christians (68% are Christians overall), 28% are irreligious, 2% prefer not to say, 1% are Muslims, are 1% adhere to other religions. Most Catholics are nominal; the Associated Press describes Italian Catholicism as \"a faith that’s... nominally embraced but rarely lived.\" Italy has the world's fifth-largest Catholic population, the largest in Europe.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "In 2011, minority Christian faiths in Italy included an estimated 1.5 million Orthodox Christians. Protestantism has been growing in recent years. One of the longest-established minority religious faiths in Italy is Judaism. Italy has for centuries welcomed Jews expelled from other countries, notably Spain. However, about 20% of Italian Jews were killed during the Holocaust. This, together with the emigration which preceded and followed World War II, has left only around 28,400 Jews in Italy.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "The Holy See, the episcopal jurisdiction of Rome, contains the central government of the Catholic Church. It is recognised by other subjects of international law as a sovereign entity, headed by the Pope, who is also the Bishop of Rome, with which diplomatic relations can be maintained. Often incorrectly referred to as \"the Vatican\", the Holy See is not the same entity as the Vatican City State because the Holy See is the jurisdiction and administrative entity of the Pope. The Vatican City came into existence only in 1929. There are also 120,000 Hindus, 70,000 Sikhs and 22 gurdwaras across the country.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "Since 1985, Catholicism is no longer officially the state religion. However, the Italian state devolves shares of income tax to recognised religious communities, under a regime known as Eight per thousand. Donations are allowed to Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu communities; however, Islam remains excluded, since no Muslim communities have yet signed a concordat with the Italian state. Taxpayers who do not wish to fund a religion contribute their share to the state welfare system.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "Education in Italy is free and mandatory from ages six to sixteen, and consists of five stages: kindergarten (scuola dell'infanzia), primary school (scuola primaria), lower secondary school (scuola secondaria di primo grado), upper secondary school (scuola secondaria di secondo grado) and university (università).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Primary education lasts eight years. Students are given a basic education in Italian, English, mathematics, natural sciences, history, geography, social studies, physical education and visual and musical arts. Secondary education lasts for five years and includes three traditional types of schools focused on different academic levels: the liceo prepares students for university studies with a classical or scientific curriculum, while the istituto tecnico and the Istituto professionale prepare pupils for vocational education.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "In 2018, the Italian secondary education was evaluated as below the OECD average. Italy scored below the OECD average in reading and science, and near OECD average in mathematics. Mean performance in Italy declined in reading and science, and remained stable in mathematics. Trento and Bolzano scored at an above the national average in reading. Compared to school children in other OECD countries, children in Italy missed out on a greater amount of learning due to absences and indiscipline in classrooms. A wide gap exists between northern schools, which perform near average, and schools in the South, that had much poorer results.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "Tertiary education in Italy is divided between public universities, private universities and the prestigious and selective superior graduate schools, such as the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. 33 Italian universities were ranked among the world's top 500 in 2019, the third-largest number in Europe after the United Kingdom and Germany. Bologna University, founded in 1088, is the oldest university in continuous operation, as well as one of the leading academic institutions in Italy and Europe. The Bocconi University, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, LUISS, Polytechnic University of Turin, Polytechnic University of Milan, Sapienza University of Rome, and University of Milan are also ranked among the best in the world.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "Life expectancy in the country is 80 for males and 85 for females, placing the country 5th in the world. In comparison to other Western countries, Italy has a relatively low rate of adult obesity (below 10%), as there are several health benefits of the Mediterranean diet. The proportion of daily smokers was 22% in 2012, down from 24.4% in 2000 but still slightly above the OECD average. Smoking in public places including bars, restaurants, night clubs and offices has been restricted to specially ventilated rooms since 2005. In 2013, UNESCO added the Mediterranean diet to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of Italy (promoter), Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus and Croatia.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "The Italian state runs a universal public healthcare system since 1978. However, healthcare is provided to all citizens and residents by a mixed public-private system. The public part is the Servizio Sanitario Nazionale, which is organised under the Ministry of Health and administered on a devolved regional basis. Healthcare spending accounted for 9.7% of GDP in 2020. Italy's healthcare system is consistently ranked among the best in the world. In 2018 Italy's healthcare is ranked 20th in Europe in the Euro Health Consumer Index.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "Italy is considered one of the birthplaces of western civilization and a cultural superpower. Divided by politics and geography for centuries until its eventual unification in 1861, Italy's culture has been shaped by a multitude of regional customs and local centres of power and patronage. Italy has had a central role in Western culture for centuries and is still recognised for its cultural traditions and artists. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a number of courts competed to attract architects, artists and scholars, thus producing a legacy of monuments, paintings, music and literature. Despite the political and social isolation of these courts, Italy has made a substantial contribution to the cultural and historical heritage of Europe.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "Italy is known for its considerable architectural achievements, such as the construction of arches, domes and similar structures during ancient Rome, the founding of the Renaissance architectural movement in the late-14th to 16th centuries, and being the homeland of Palladianism, a style of construction which inspired movements such as that of Neoclassical architecture, and influenced the designs which noblemen built their country houses all over the world, notably in the UK, Australia and the US during the late 17th to early 20th centuries.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "Along with pre-historic architecture, the first people in Italy to truly begin a sequence of designs were the Greeks and the Etruscans, progressing to classical Roman, then to the revival of the classical Roman era during the Renaissance and evolving into the Baroque era. The Christian concept of a Basilica, a style of church architecture that came to dominate the early Middle Ages, was invented in Rome. They were known for being long, rectangular buildings, which were built in an almost ancient Roman style, often rich in mosaics and decorations. The early Christians' art and architecture were also widely inspired by that of the pagan Romans; statues, mosaics and paintings decorated all their churches.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "The Romanesque movement, which went from approximately 800 AD to 1100 AD, was one of the most fruitful and creative periods in Italian architecture, when several masterpieces, such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the Piazza dei Miracoli, and the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan were built. It was known for its usage of Roman arches, stained glass windows, and also its curved columns which commonly featured in cloisters. The main innovation of Italian Romanesque architecture was the vault, which had never been seen before in the history of Western architecture.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "A flowering of Italian architecture took place during the Renaissance. Filippo Brunelleschi contributed to architectural design with his dome for the Cathedral of Florence, a feat of engineering that had not been accomplished since antiquity. A popular achievement of Italian Renaissance architecture was St. Peter's Basilica, originally designed by Donato Bramante in the early 16th century. Also, Andrea Palladio influenced architects throughout Western Europe with the villas and palaces he designed in the middle and late 16th century; the city of Vicenza, with its twenty-three buildings designed by Palladio, and twenty-four Palladian Villas of the Veneto are listed by UNESCO as part of a World Heritage Site named City of Vicenza and the Palladian Villas of the Veneto.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "The Baroque period produced several outstanding Italian architects in the 17th century, especially those known for their churches. The most original work of all late Baroque and Rococo architecture is the Palazzina di caccia di Stupinigi, dating back to the 18th century. Luigi Vanvitelli began in 1752 the construction of the Royal Palace of Caserta. In this large complex, the grandiose Baroque-style interiors and gardens are opposed to a more sober building envelope. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries Italy was affected by the Neoclassical architectural movement. Villas, palaces, gardens, interiors and art began to be based on Roman and Greek themes.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 156,
"text": "During the Fascist period, the so-called \"Novecento movement\" flourished, based on the rediscovery of imperial Rome, with figures such as Gio Ponti and Giovanni Muzio. Marcello Piacentini, responsible for the urban transformations of several cities in Italy and remembered for the disputed Via della Conciliazione in Rome, devised a form of simplified Neoclassicism.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 157,
"text": "The history of Italian visual arts is significant to the history of Western painting. Roman art was influenced by Greece and can in part be taken as a descendant of ancient Greek painting. Roman painting does have its own unique characteristics. The only surviving Roman paintings are wall paintings, many from villas in Campania, in Southern Italy. Such paintings can be grouped into four main \"styles\" or periods and may contain the first examples of trompe-l'œil, pseudo-perspective, and pure landscape.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 158,
"text": "The Italian Renaissance is said by many to be the golden age of painting; roughly spanning the 14th through the mid-17th centuries with a significant influence also out of the borders of modern Italy. In Italy artists like Paolo Uccello, Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo Lippi, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini, and Titian took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective, the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of refined drawing and painting techniques. Michelangelo was active as a sculptor from about 1500 to 1520; his works include his David, Pietà, Moses. Other Renaissance sculptors include Lorenzo Ghiberti, Luca Della Robbia, Donatello, Filippo Brunelleschi and Andrea del Verrocchio.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 159,
"text": "In the 15th and 16th centuries, the High Renaissance gave rise to a stylised art known as Mannerism. In place of the balanced compositions and rational approach to perspective that characterised art at the dawn of the 16th century, the Mannerists sought instability, artifice, and doubt. The unperturbed faces and gestures of Piero della Francesca and the calm Virgins of Raphael are replaced by the troubled expressions of Pontormo and the emotional intensity of El Greco.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 160,
"text": "In the 17th century, among the greatest painters of Italian Baroque are Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Artemisia Gentileschi, Mattia Preti, Carlo Saraceni and Bartolomeo Manfredi. Subsequently, in the 18th century, Italian Rococo was mainly inspired by French Rococo, since France was the founding nation of that particular style, with artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Canaletto. Italian Neoclassical sculpture focused, with Antonio Canova's nudes, on the idealist aspect of the movement.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 161,
"text": "In the 19th century, major Italian Romantic painters were Francesco Hayez, Giuseppe Bezzuoli and Francesco Podesti. Impressionism was brought from France to Italy by the Macchiaioli, led by Giovanni Fattori, and Giovanni Boldini; Realism by Gioacchino Toma and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. In the 20th century, with Futurism, primarily through the works of Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, Italy rose again as a seminal country for artistic evolution in painting and sculpture. Futurism was succeeded by the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, who exerted a strong influence on the Surrealists and generations of artists to follow like Bruno Caruso and Renato Guttuso.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 162,
"text": "Formal Latin literature began in 240 BC, when the first stage play was performed in Rome. Latin literature was, and still is, highly influential in the world, with numerous writers, poets, philosophers, and historians, such as Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid and Livy. The Romans were also famous for their oral tradition, poetry, drama and epigrams. In early years of the 13th century, Francis of Assisi was considered the first Italian poet by literary critics, with his religious song Canticle of the Sun.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 163,
"text": "Another Italian voice originated in Sicily. At the court of Emperor Frederick II, who ruled the Sicilian kingdom during the first half of the 13th century, lyrics modelled on Provençal forms and themes were written in a refined version of the local vernacular. One of these poets was the notary Giacomo da Lentini, inventor of the sonnet form, though the most famous early sonneteer was Petrarch.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 164,
"text": "Guido Guinizelli is considered the founder of the Dolce Stil Novo, a school that added a philosophical dimension to traditional love poetry. This new understanding of love, expressed in a smooth, pure style, influenced Guido Cavalcanti and the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, who established the basis of the modern Italian language; his greatest work, the Divine Comedy, is considered among the finest works of world literature; furthermore, the poet invented the difficult terza rima. Two major writers of the 14th century, Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, sought out and imitated the works of antiquity and cultivated their own artistic personalities. Petrarch achieved fame through his collection of poems, Il Canzoniere. Petrarch's love poetry served as a model for centuries. Equally influential was Boccaccio's The Decameron, one of the most popular collections of short stories ever written.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 165,
"text": "Italian Renaissance authors produced works including Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, an essay on political science and modern philosophy in which the \"effectual truth\" is taken to be more important than any abstract ideal; Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's unfinished romance Orlando Innamorato; and Baldassare Castiglione's dialogue The Book of the Courtier which describes the ideal of the perfect court gentleman and of spiritual beauty. The lyric poet Torquato Tasso in Jerusalem Delivered wrote a Christian epic in ottava rima, with attention to the Aristotelian canons of unity.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 166,
"text": "Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, who have written The Facetious Nights of Straparola (1550–1555) and the Pentamerone (1634) respectively, printed some of the first known versions of fairy tales in Europe. In the early 17th century, some literary masterpieces were created, such as Giambattista Marino's long mythological poem, L'Adone. The Baroque period also produced the clear scientific prose of Galileo as well as Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun, a description of a perfect society ruled by a philosopher-priest. At the end of the 17th century, the Arcadians began a movement to restore simplicity and classical restraint to poetry, as in Metastasio's heroic melodramas. In the 18th century, playwright Carlo Goldoni created full-written plays, many portraying the middle class of his day.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 167,
"text": "Romanticism coincided with some ideas of the Risorgimento, the patriotic movement that brought Italy political unity and freedom from foreign domination. Italian writers embraced Romanticism in the early 19th century. The time of Italy's rebirth was heralded by the poets Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, and Giacomo Leopardi. The works by Alessandro Manzoni, the leading Italian Romantic, are a symbol of the Italian unification for their patriotic message and because of his efforts in the development of the modern, unified Italian language; his novel The Betrothed was the first Italian historical novel to glorify Christian values of justice and Providence, and it is generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 168,
"text": "In the late 19th century, a realistic literary movement called Verismo played a major role in Italian literature; Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana were its main exponents. In the same period, Emilio Salgari, writer of action-adventure swashbucklers and a pioneer of science fiction, published his Sandokan series. In 1883, Carlo Collodi also published the novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, the most celebrated children's classic by an Italian author and one of the most translated non-religious books in the world. A movement called Futurism influenced Italian literature in the early 20th century. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote Manifesto of Futurism, called for the use of language and metaphors that glorified the speed, dynamism, and violence of the machine age.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 169,
"text": "Modern literary figures and Nobel laureates are Gabriele D'Annunzio from 1889 to 1910, nationalist poet Giosuè Carducci in 1906, realist writer Grazia Deledda in 1926, modern theatre author Luigi Pirandello in 1936, short stories writer Italo Calvino in 1960, poets Salvatore Quasimodo in 1959 and Eugenio Montale in 1975, Umberto Eco in 1980, and satirist and theatre author Dario Fo in 1997.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 170,
"text": "Over the ages, Italian philosophy and literature had a vast influence on Western philosophy, beginning with the Greeks and Romans, and going onto Renaissance humanism, the Age of Enlightenment and modern philosophy. Philosophy was brought to Italy by Pythagoras, founder of the Italian school of philosophy in Crotone, Magna Graecia. Major Italian philosophers of the Greek period include Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles and Gorgias. Roman philosophers include Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca the Younger, Musonius Rufus, Plutarch, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Clement of Alexandria, Sextus Empiricus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Augustine of Hippo, Philoponus of Alexandria and Boethius.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 171,
"text": "Italian Medieval philosophy was mainly Christian, and included philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism, who reintroduced Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity. Notable Renaissance philosophers include: Giordano Bruno, one of the major scientific figures of the western world; Marsilio Ficino, one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the period; and Niccolò Machiavelli, one of the main founders of modern political science. Machiavelli's most famous work was The Prince, whose contribution to the history of political thought is the fundamental break between political realism and political idealism. Italy was also affected by the Enlightenment, a movement which was a consequence of the Renaissance. University cities such as Padua, Bologna and Naples remained centres of scholarship and the intellect, with several philosophers such as Giambattista Vico (widely regarded as being the founder of modern Italian philosophy) and Antonio Genovesi. Cesare Beccaria was a significant Enlightenment figure and is now considered one of the fathers of classical criminal theory as well as modern penology. Beccaria is famous for his On Crimes and Punishments (1764), a treatise that served as one of the earliest prominent condemnations of torture and the death penalty and thus a landmark work in anti-death penalty philosophy.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 172,
"text": "Italy also had a renowned philosophical movement in the 1800s, with Idealism, Sensism and Empiricism. The main Sensist Italian philosophers were Melchiorre Gioja and Gian Domenico Romagnosi. Criticism of the Sensist movement came from other philosophers such as Pasquale Galluppi (1770–1846), who affirmed that a priori relationships were synthetic. Antonio Rosmini, instead, was the founder of Italian idealism. During the late 19th and 20th centuries, there were also several other movements which gained some form of popularity in Italy, such as Ontologism (whose main philosopher was Vincenzo Gioberti), anarchism, communism, socialism, futurism, fascism and Christian democracy. Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce were two of the most significant 20th-century Idealist philosophers. Anarcho-communism first fully formed into its modern strain within the Italian section of the First International. Antonio Gramsci remains a relevant philosopher within Marxist and communist theory, credited with creating the theory of cultural hegemony. Italian philosophers were also influential in the development of the non-Marxist liberal socialism philosophy, including Carlo Rosselli, Norberto Bobbio, Piero Gobetti and Aldo Capitini. In the 1960s, many Italian left-wing activists adopted the anti-authoritarian pro-working class leftist theories that would become known as autonomism and operaismo.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 173,
"text": "Early Italian feminists include Sibilla Aleramo, Alaide Gualberta Beccari, and Anna Maria Mozzoni, though proto-feminist philosophies had previously been touched upon by earlier Italian writers such as Christine de Pizan, Moderata Fonte, and Lucrezia Marinella. Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori is credited with the creation of the philosophy of education that bears her name, an educational philosophy now practised throughout the world. Giuseppe Peano was one of the founders of analytic philosophy and the contemporary philosophy of mathematics. Recent analytic philosophers include Carlo Penco, Gloria Origgi, Pieranna Garavaso and Luciano Floridi.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 174,
"text": "Italian theatre originates from the Middle Ages, with its background dating back to the times of the ancient Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, in Southern Italy, the theatre of the Italic peoples and the theatre of ancient Rome. It can therefore be assumed that there were two main lines of which the ancient Italian theatre developed in the Middle Ages. The first, consisting of the dramatization of Catholic liturgies and of which more documentation is retained, and the second, formed by pagan forms of spectacle such as the staging for city festivals, the court preparations of the jesters and the songs of the troubadours. The Renaissance theatre marked the beginning of the modern theatre due to the rediscovery and study of the classics, the ancient theatrical texts were recovered and translated, which were soon staged at the court and in the curtensi halls, and then moved to real theatre. In this way the idea of theatre came close to that of today: a performance in a designated place in which the public participates. In the late 15th century two cities were important centres for the rediscovery and renewal of theatrical art: Ferrara and Rome. The first, vital centre of art in the second half of the fifteenth century, saw the staging of some of the most famous Latin works by Plautus, rigorously translated into Italian.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 175,
"text": "During the 16th century and on into the 18th century, Commedia dell'arte was a form of improvisational theatre, and it is still performed today. Travelling troupes of players would set up an outdoor stage and provide amusement in the form of juggling, acrobatics and, more typically, humorous plays based on a repertoire of established characters with a rough storyline, called canovaccio. Plays did not originate from written drama but from scenarios called lazzi, which were loose frameworks that provided the situations, complications, and outcome of the action, around which the actors would improvise. The characters of the commedia usually represent fixed social types and stock characters, each of which has a distinct costume, such as foolish old men, devious servants, or military officers full of false bravado. The main categories of these characters include servants, old men, lovers, and captains.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 176,
"text": "The first recorded Commedia dell'arte performances came from Rome as early as 1551, and was performed outdoors in temporary venues by professional actors who were costumed and masked, as opposed to commedia erudita, which were written comedies, presented indoors by untrained and unmasked actors. By the mid-16th century, specific troupes of commedia performers began to coalesce, and by 1568 the Gelosi became a distinct company. Commedia often performed inside in court theatres or halls, and also in some fixed theatres such as Teatro Baldrucca in Florence. Flaminio Scala, who had been a minor performer in the Gelosi published the scenarios of the Commedia dell'arte around the start of the 17th century, really in an effort to legitimise the form—and ensure its legacy. These scenari are highly structured and built around the symmetry of the various types in duet: two zanni, vecchi, inamorate and inamorati, among others.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 177,
"text": "In Commedia dell'arte, female roles were played by women, documented as early as the 1560s, making them the first known professional actresses in Europe since antiquity. Lucrezia Di Siena, whose name is on a contract of actors from 10 October 1564, has been referred to as the first Italian actress known by name, with Vincenza Armani and Barbara Flaminia as the first primadonnas and the first well-documented actresses in Europe.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 178,
"text": "The Ballet dance genre also originated in Italy. It began during the Italian Renaissance court as an outgrowth of court pageantry, where aristocratic weddings were lavish celebrations. Court musicians and dancers collaborated to provide elaborate entertainment for them. At first, ballets were woven into the midst of an opera to allow the audience a moment of relief from the dramatic intensity. By the mid-seventeenth century, Italian ballets in their entirety were performed in between the acts of an opera. Over time, Italian ballets became part of theatrical life: ballet companies in Italy's major opera houses employed an average of four to twelve dancers; in 1815 many companies employed anywhere from eighty to one hundred dancers.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 179,
"text": "The Teatro di San Carlo in Naples is the oldest continuously active venue for public opera in the world, opening in 1737, decades before both Milan's La Scala and Venice's La Fenice theatres.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 180,
"text": "From folk music to classical, music is an intrinsic part of Italian culture. Instruments associated with classical music, including the piano and violin, were invented in Italy, and many of the prevailing classical music forms, such as the symphony, concerto, and sonata, can trace their roots back to innovations of 16th- and 17th-century Italian music.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 181,
"text": "Italy's most famous composers include the Renaissance composers Palestrina, Monteverdi and Gesualdo, the Baroque composers Scarlatti, Corelli and Vivaldi, the Classical composers Paisiello, Paganini and Rossini, and the Romantic composers Verdi and Puccini. Modern Italian composers such as Berio and Nono proved significant in the development of experimental and electronic music. While the classical music tradition still holds strong in Italy, as evidenced by the fame of its innumerable opera houses, such as La Scala of Milan and San Carlo of Naples (the oldest continuously active venue for public opera in the world), and performers such as the pianist Maurizio Pollini and tenor Luciano Pavarotti, Italians have been no less appreciative of their thriving contemporary music scene.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 182,
"text": "Italy is widely known for being the birthplace of opera. Italian opera was believed to have been founded in the early 17th century, in cities such as Mantua and Venice. Later, works and pieces composed by native Italian composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini, are among the most famous operas ever written and today are performed in opera houses across the world. La Scala opera house in Milan is also renowned as one of the best in the world. Famous Italian opera singers include Enrico Caruso and Alessandro Bonci.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 183,
"text": "Introduced in the early 1920s, jazz took a particularly strong foothold in Italy, and remained popular despite the xenophobic cultural policies of the Fascist regime. Today, the most notable centres of jazz music in Italy include Milan, Rome, and Sicily. Later, Italy was at the forefront of the progressive rock and pop movement of the 1970s, with bands like PFM, Banco del Mutuo Soccorso, Le Orme, Goblin, and Pooh. The same period saw diversification in the cinema of Italy, and Cinecittà films included complex scores by composers including Ennio Morricone, Armando Trovaioli, Piero Piccioni and Piero Umiliani. In the early 1980s, the first star to emerge from the Italian hip hop scene was singer Jovanotti. Italian metal bands include Rhapsody of Fire, Lacuna Coil, Elvenking, Forgotten Tomb, and Fleshgod Apocalypse.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 184,
"text": "Italy contributed to the development of disco and electronic music, with Italo disco, known for its futuristic sound and prominent use of synthesisers and drum machines, being one of the earliest electronic dance genres, as well as European forms of disco aside from Euro disco (which later went on to influence several genres such as Eurodance and Nu-disco).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 185,
"text": "Producers such as Giorgio Moroder, who won three Academy Awards and four Golden Globes for his music, were highly influential in the development of electronic dance music. Today, Italian pop music is represented annually with the Sanremo Music Festival, which served as inspiration for the Eurovision song contest, and the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. Singers such as Mina, Andrea Bocelli, Grammy winner Laura Pausini, Zucchero, Eros Ramazzotti, Elisa, Tiziano Ferro and Mahmood have attained international acclaim.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 186,
"text": "Gigliola Cinquetti, Toto Cutugno, and Måneskin won the Eurovision Song Contest, in 1964, 1990, and 2021 respectively.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 187,
"text": "The history of Italian cinema began a few months after the Lumière brothers began motion picture exhibitions. The first Italian director is considered to be Vittorio Calcina, a collaborator of the Lumière Brothers, who filmed Pope Leo XIII in 1896. In the 1910s the Italian film industry developed rapidly. In 1912, the year of the greatest expansion, 569 films were produced in Turin, 420 in Rome and 120 in Milan. Cabiria, a 1914 Italian epic film directed by Giovanni Pastrone, is considered the most famous Italian silent film. It was also the first film in history to be shown in the White House. The oldest European avant-garde cinema movement, Italian futurism, took place in the late 1910s.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 188,
"text": "After a period of decline in the 1920s, the Italian film industry was revitalized in the 1930s with the arrival of sound film. A popular Italian genre during this period, the Telefoni Bianchi, consisted of comedies with glamorous backgrounds. Calligrafismo was instead in a sharp contrast to Telefoni Bianchi-American style comedies and is rather artistic, highly formalistic, expressive in complexity and deals mainly with contemporary literary material. Cinema was later used by Benito Mussolini, who founded Rome's renowned Cinecittà studio also for the production of Fascist propaganda until World War II.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 189,
"text": "After the war, Italian film was widely recognised and exported until an artistic decline around the 1980s. Notable Italian film directors from this period include Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Dussio Tessari and Roberto Rossellini; some of these are recognised among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. Movies include world cinema treasures such as Bicycle Thieves, La dolce vita, 8½, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West. The mid-1940s to the early 1950s was the heyday of neorealist films, reflecting the poor condition of post-war Italy.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 190,
"text": "As the country grew wealthier in the 1950s, a form of neorealism known as pink neorealism succeeded, and starting from the 1950s through the Commedia all'italiana genre, and other film genres, such as sword-and-sandal followed as Spaghetti Westerns, were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. Actresses such as Sophia Loren, Giulietta Masina and Gina Lollobrigida achieved international stardom during this period. Erotic Italian thrillers, or giallos, produced by directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento in the 1970s, also influenced the horror genre worldwide. In recent years, the Italian scene has received only occasional international attention, with movies like Cinema Paradiso written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, Mediterraneo directed by Gabriele Salvatores, Life Is Beautiful directed by Roberto Benigni, Il Postino: The Postman with Massimo Troisi and The Great Beauty directed by Paolo Sorrentino.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 191,
"text": "The aforementioned Cinecittà studio is today the largest film and television production facility in Europe, where many international box office hits were filmed. In the 1950s, the number of international productions being made there led to Rome's being dubbed \"Hollywood on the Tiber\". More than 3,000 productions have been made on its lot, of which 90 received an Academy Award nomination and 47 of these won it, from some cinema classics to recent rewarded features (such as Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur, Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, The English Patient, The Passion of the Christ, and Gangs of New York).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 192,
"text": "Italy is the most awarded country at the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, with 14 awards won, 3 Special Awards and 28 nominations. As of 2016, Italian films have also won 12 Palmes d'Or, 11 Golden Lions and 7 Golden Bears. The list of the 100 Italian films to be saved was created with the aim to report \"100 films that have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978\".",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 193,
"text": "The most popular sport in Italy is football. Italy's national football team is one of the world's most successful teams with four FIFA World Cup victories (1934, 1938, 1982 and 2006). Italian clubs have won 48 major European trophies, making Italy the second most successful country in European football. Italy's top-flight club football league is named Serie A and is followed by millions of fans around the world.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 194,
"text": "Other popular team sports in Italy include basketball, volleyball and rugby. Italy's male and female national volleyball teams are often featured among the world's best. The Italian national basketball team's best results were gold at Eurobasket 1983 and EuroBasket 1999, as well as silver at the Olympics in 2004. Lega Basket Serie A is widely considered one of the most competitive in Europe. Italy's rugby national team competes in the Six Nations Championship, and is a regular at the Rugby World Cup. The men's volleyball team won three consecutive World Championships (in 1990, 1994, and 1998) and earned the Olympic silver medal in 1996, 2004, and 2016.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 195,
"text": "Italy has a long and successful tradition in individual sports as well. Bicycle racing is a familiar sport in the country. Italians have won the UCI World Championships more than any other country, except Belgium. The Giro d'Italia is a cycling race held every May and constitutes one of the three Grand Tours. Alpine skiing is also a widespread sport in Italy, and the country is a popular international skiing destination, known for its ski resorts. Italian skiers achieved good results in Winter Olympic Games, Alpine Ski World Cup, and tennis has a significant following in Italy, ranking as the fourth most practised sport in the country. The Rome Masters, founded in 1930, is one of the most prestigious tennis tournaments in the world. Italian professional tennis players won the Davis Cup in 1976 and the Fed Cup in 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2013.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 196,
"text": "Motorsports are also extremely popular in Italy. Italy has won, by far, the most MotoGP World Championships. Italian Scuderia Ferrari is the oldest surviving team in Grand Prix racing, having competed since 1948, and statistically the most successful Formula One team in history with a record of 232 wins. The Italian Grand Prix of Formula 1 is the fifth oldest surviving Grand Prix, having been held since 1921. It is also one of the two Grand Prix present in every championship since the first one in 1950. Every Formula 1 Grand Prix (except for the 1980) has been held at Autodromo Nazionale Monza. Formula 1 was also held at Imola (1980–2006, 2020) and Mugello (2020). Other successful Italian car manufacturers in motorsports are Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Maserati and Fiat.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 197,
"text": "Historically, Italy has been successful in the Olympic Games, taking part from the first Olympiad and in 47 Games out of 48, not having officially participated in the 1904 Summer Olympics. Italian sportsmen have won 522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, and another 106 at the Winter Olympic Games, for a combined total of 628 medals with 235 golds, which makes them the fifth most successful nation in Olympic history for total medals. The country hosted two Winter Olympics and will host a third (in 1956, 2006, and 2026), and one Summer games (in 1960).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 198,
"text": "Italian fashion has a long tradition. Milan, Florence and Rome are Italy's main fashion capitals. According to Top Global Fashion Capital Rankings 2013 by Global Language Monitor, Rome ranked sixth worldwide while Milan was twelfth. Previously, in 2009, Milan was declared the \"fashion capital of the world\" by Global Language Monitor itself. Major Italian fashion labels, such as Gucci, Armani, Prada, Versace, Valentino, Dolce & Gabbana, Missoni, Fendi, Moschino, Max Mara, Trussardi, and Ferragamo, to name a few, are regarded as among the finest fashion houses in the world. Jewellers like Bvlgari, Damiani and Buccellati have been founded in Italy. Also, the fashion magazine Vogue Italia, is considered one of the most prestigious fashion magazines in the world. The talent of young, creative fashion is also promoted, as in the ITS young fashion designer competition in Trieste.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 199,
"text": "Italy is also prominent in the field of design, notably interior design, architectural design, industrial design and urban design. The country has produced some well-known furniture designers, such as Gio Ponti and Ettore Sottsass, and Italian phrases such as \"Bel Disegno\" and \"Linea Italiana\" have entered the vocabulary of furniture design. Examples of classic pieces of Italian white goods and pieces of furniture include Zanussi's washing machines and fridges, the \"New Tone\" sofas by Atrium, and the post-modern bookcase by Ettore Sottsass, inspired by Bob Dylan's song \"Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again\". Today, Milan and Turin are the nation's leaders in architectural design and industrial design. The city of Milan hosts Fiera Milano, Europe's largest design fair. Milan also hosts major design and architecture-related events and venues, such as the \"Fuori Salone\" and the Salone del Mobile, and has been home to the designers Bruno Munari, Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 200,
"text": "The Italian cuisine has developed through centuries of social and political changes, with roots as far back as the 4th century BC. Italian cuisine in itself takes heavy influences, including Etruscan, ancient Greek, ancient Roman, Byzantine, and Jewish. Significant changes occurred with the discovery of the New World with the introduction of items such as potatoes, tomatoes, bell peppers and maize, now central to the cuisine but not introduced in quantity until the 18th century. Italian cuisine is noted for its regional diversity, abundance of difference in taste, and is known to be one of the most popular in the world, wielding strong influence abroad.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 201,
"text": "The Mediterranean diet forms the basis of Italian cuisine, rich in pasta, fish, fruits and vegetables and characterised by its extreme simplicity and variety, with many dishes having only four to eight ingredients. Italian cooks rely chiefly on the quality of the ingredients rather than on elaborate preparation. Dishes and recipes are often derivatives from local and familial tradition rather than created by chefs, so many recipes are ideally suited for home cooking, this being one of the main reasons behind the ever-increasing worldwide popularity of Italian cuisine, from America to Asia. Ingredients and dishes vary widely by region.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 202,
"text": "Italian cuisine relies heavily on traditional products; the country has a large number of traditional specialities protected under EU law. Cheese, cold cuts and wine are central to Italian cuisine, with many regional declinations and Protected Designation of Origin or Protected Geographical Indication labels, and along with pizza and coffee (especially espresso) form part of Italian gastronomic culture. Desserts have a long tradition of merging local flavours such as citrus fruits, pistachio and almonds with sweet cheeses like mascarpone and ricotta or exotic tastes as cocoa, vanilla and cinnamon. Gelato, tiramisù and cassata are among the most famous examples of Italian desserts, cakes and patisserie.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 203,
"text": "Italian meal structure is typical of the European Mediterranean region and differs from North, Central, and Eastern European meal structure, though it still often consists of breakfast (colazione), lunch (pranzo), and dinner (cena). However, much less emphasis is placed on breakfast, and breakfast itself is often skipped or involves lighter meal portions than are seen in non-Mediterranean Western countries. Late-morning and mid-afternoon snacks, called merenda (plural merende), are also often included in this meal structure.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 204,
"text": "The marketing phenomenon consisting of words and images, colour combinations (the Italian tricolour) and geographical references for brands that are evocative of Italy to promote and market agri-food products that have nothing to do with Italian cuisine is known by the name of Italian Sounding.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 205,
"text": "Public holidays celebrated in Italy include religious, national and regional observances. Italy's National Day, the Festa della Repubblica (Republic Day), is celebrated on 2 June each year, with the main celebration taking place in Rome, and commemorates the birth of the Italian Republic in 1946. The ceremony of the event organized in Rome includes the deposition of a laurel wreath as a tribute to the Italian Unknown Soldier at the Altare della Patria by the President of the Italian Republic and a military parade along Via dei Fori Imperiali in Rome.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 206,
"text": "The Saint Lucy's Day, which takes place on 13 December, is popular among children in some Italian regions, where she plays a role similar to Santa Claus. In addition, the Epiphany in Italy is associated with the folkloristic figure of the Befana, a broomstick-riding old woman who, in the night between 5 and 6 January, bringing good children gifts and sweets, and bad ones charcoal or bags of ashes. The Assumption of Mary coincides with Ferragosto on 15 August, the summer vacation period which may be a long weekend or most of the month.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 207,
"text": "The Italian national patronal day, on 4 October, celebrates Saints Francis and Catherine. Each city or town also celebrates a public holiday on the occasion of the festival of the local patron saint, for example: Rome on 29 June (Saints Peter and Paul), Milan on 7 December (Saint Ambrose), Naples on 19 September (Saint Januarius), Venice on 25 April (Saint Mark the Evangelist) and Florence on 24 June (Saint John the Baptist).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 208,
"text": "There are many festivals and festivities in Italy. Some of them include the Palio di Siena horse race, Holy Week rites, Saracen Joust of Arezzo, Saint Ubaldo Day in Gubbio, Giostra della Quintana in Foligno, and the Calcio Fiorentino. In 2013, UNESCO has included among the intangible cultural heritage some Italian festivals and pasos (in Italian \"macchine a spalla\"), such as the Varia di Palmi, the Macchina di Santa Rosa in Viterbo, the Festa dei Gigli in Nola, and faradda di li candareri in Sassari.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 209,
"text": "Other festivals include the carnivals in Venice, Viareggio, Satriano di Lucania, Mamoiada, and Ivrea, mostly known for its Battle of the Oranges. The Venice International Film Festival, awarding the \"Golden Lion\" and held annually since 1932, is the oldest film festival in the world and one of the \"Big Three\" alongside Cannes and Berlin.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 210,
"text": "43°N 12°E / 43°N 12°E / 43; 12",
"title": "External links"
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| Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern and Western Europe. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, it consists of a peninsula delimited by the Alps and surrounded by several islands.
Italy shares land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. It has a territorial exclave in Switzerland (Campione) and an archipelago in the African Plate. Italy covers an area of 301,340 km2 (116,350 sq mi), with a population of nearly 60 million; it is the tenth-largest country by land area in the European continent and the third-most populous member state of the European Union. Its capital and largest city is Rome. The Italian peninsula was historically the native place and destination of numerous ancient peoples. The Latin city of Rome in central Italy, founded as a Kingdom, became a Republic that conquered the Mediterranean world and ruled it for centuries as an Empire. With the spread of Christianity, Rome became the seat of the Catholic Church and of the Papacy. During the Early Middle Ages, Italy experienced the fall of the Western Roman Empire and inward migration from Germanic tribes. By the 11th century, Italian city-states and maritime republics expanded, bringing renewed prosperity through commerce and laying the groundwork for modern capitalism. The Italian Renaissance flourished in Florence during the 15th and 16th centuries and spread to the rest of Europe. Italian explorers also discovered new routes to the Far East and the New World, helping to usher in the European Age of Discovery. However, centuries of rivalry and infighting between the Italian city-states among other factors left the peninsula divided into numerous states until the late modern period. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Italian economic and commercial importance significantly waned. After centuries of political and territorial divisions, Italy was almost entirely unified in 1861 following Wars of independence and the Expedition of the Thousand, establishing the Kingdom of Italy. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, Italy rapidly industrialised, mainly in the north, and acquired a colonial empire, while the south remained largely impoverished and excluded from industrialisation, fuelling a large immigrant diaspora. From 1915 to 1918, Italy took part in World War I on the side of the Entente and against the Central Powers. In 1922, following a period of crisis and turmoil, the Italian fascist dictatorship was established. During World War II, Italy was first part of the Axis until it surrendered to the Allied powers (1940-1943) and then, as part of its territory was occupied by Nazi Germany with fascist collaboration, a co-belligerent of the Allies during the Italian resistance and the liberation of Italy (1943-1945). Following the end of the war, the country replaced the monarchy with a republic via referendum and enjoyed a prolonged economic boom, becoming a major advanced economy. Italy has the eighth-largest nominal GDP in the world, the second-largest manufacturing industry in Europe. The country has a significant role in regional and global economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic affairs. Italy is a founding and leading member of the European Union, and it is in numerous international institutions including NATO, the G7, the Mediterranean Union, the Latin Union, and many more. The source of many inventions and discoveries, the country is considered a cultural superpower and has long been a global centre of art, music, literature, cuisine, science and technology and fashion. It has the world's largest number of World Heritage Sites (58), and is the world's fifth-most visited country. | 2001-11-12T10:44:31Z | 2023-12-25T20:09:27Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy |
14,533 | India | India, officially the Republic of India (ISO: Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area; the most populous country as of June 2023; and from the time of its independence in 1947, the world's most populous democracy. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia.
Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago. Their long occupation, initially in varying forms of isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse, second only to Africa in human genetic diversity. Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE. By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest. Its evidence today is found in the hymns of the Rigveda. Preserved by an oral tradition that was resolutely vigilant, the Rigveda records the dawning of Hinduism in India. The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the northern and western regions. By 400 BCE, stratification and exclusion by caste had emerged within Hinduism, and Buddhism and Jainism had arisen, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity. Early political consolidations gave rise to the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires based in the Ganges Basin. Their collective era was suffused with wide-ranging creativity, but also marked by the declining status of women, and the incorporation of untouchability into an organised system of belief. In South India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian-languages scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia.
In the early medieval era, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism became established on India's southern and western coasts. Muslim armies from Central Asia intermittently overran India's northern plains, eventually founding the Delhi Sultanate, and drawing northern India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam. In the 15th century, the Vijayanagara Empire created a long-lasting composite Hindu culture in south India. In the Punjab, Sikhism emerged, rejecting institutionalised religion. The Mughal Empire, in 1526, ushered in two centuries of relative peace, leaving a legacy of luminous architecture. Gradually expanding rule of the British East India Company followed, turning India into a colonial economy, but also consolidating its sovereignty. British Crown rule began in 1858. The rights promised to Indians were granted slowly, but technological changes were introduced, and modern ideas of education and the public life took root. A pioneering and influential nationalist movement emerged, which was noted for nonviolent resistance and became the major factor in ending British rule. In 1947 the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two independent dominions, a Hindu-majority Dominion of India and a Muslim-majority Dominion of Pakistan, amid large-scale loss of life and an unprecedented migration.
India has been a federal republic since 1950, governed through a democratic parliamentary system. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society. India's population grew from 361 million in 1951 to almost 1.4 billion in 2022. During the same time, its nominal per capita income increased from US$64 annually to US$2,601, and its literacy rate from 16.6% to 74%. From being a comparatively destitute country in 1951, India has become a fast-growing major economy and a hub for information technology services, with an expanding middle class. India has a space programme with several planned or completed extraterrestrial missions. It is the fourth country to land a craft on the moon and the first to do so within 600 kilometres (370 mi) of the Lunar south pole. Indian movies, music, and spiritual teachings play an increasing role in global culture. India has substantially reduced its rate of poverty, though at the cost of increasing economic inequality. India is a nuclear-weapon state, which ranks high in military expenditure. It has disputes over Kashmir with its neighbours, Pakistan and China, unresolved since the mid-20th century. Among the socio-economic challenges India faces are gender inequality, child malnutrition, and rising levels of air pollution. India's land is megadiverse, with four biodiversity hotspots. Its forest cover comprises 21.7% of its area. India's wildlife, which has traditionally been viewed with tolerance in India's culture, is supported among these forests, and elsewhere, in protected habitats.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (third edition 2009), the name "India" is derived from the Classical Latin India, a reference to South Asia and an uncertain region to its east. In turn the name "India" derived successively from Hellenistic Greek India ( Ἰνδία), ancient Greek Indos ( Ἰνδός), Old Persian Hindush (an eastern province of the Achaemenid Empire), and ultimately its cognate, the Sanskrit Sindhu, or "river", specifically the Indus River and, by implication, its well-settled southern basin. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi (Ἰνδοί), which translates as "The people of the Indus".
The term Bharat (Bhārat; pronounced [ˈbʱaːɾət] ), mentioned in both Indian epic poetry and the Constitution of India, is used in its variations by many Indian languages. A modern rendering of the historical name Bharatavarsha, which applied originally to North India, Bharat gained increased currency from the mid-19th century as a native name for India.
Hindustan ([ɦɪndʊˈstaːn] ) is a Middle Persian name for India that became popular by the 13th century, and was used widely since the era of the Mughal Empire. The meaning of Hindustan has varied, referring to a region encompassing present-day northern India and Pakistan or to India in its near entirety.
By 55,000 years ago, the first modern humans, or Homo sapiens, had arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa, where they had earlier evolved. The earliest known modern human remains in South Asia date to about 30,000 years ago. After 6500 BCE, evidence for domestication of food crops and animals, construction of permanent structures, and storage of agricultural surplus appeared in Mehrgarh and other sites in Balochistan, Pakistan. These gradually developed into the Indus Valley Civilisation, the first urban culture in South Asia, which flourished during 2500–1900 BCE in Pakistan and western India. Centred around cities such as Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira, and Kalibangan, and relying on varied forms of subsistence, the civilisation engaged robustly in crafts production and wide-ranging trade.
During the period 2000–500 BCE, many regions of the subcontinent transitioned from the Chalcolithic cultures to the Iron Age ones. The Vedas, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism, were composed during this period, and historians have analysed these to posit a Vedic culture in the Punjab region and the upper Gangetic Plain. Most historians also consider this period to have encompassed several waves of Indo-Aryan migration into the subcontinent from the north-west. The caste system, which created a hierarchy of priests, warriors, and free peasants, but which excluded indigenous peoples by labelling their occupations impure, arose during this period. On the Deccan Plateau, archaeological evidence from this period suggests the existence of a chiefdom stage of political organisation. In South India, a progression to sedentary life is indicated by the large number of megalithic monuments dating from this period, as well as by nearby traces of agriculture, irrigation tanks, and craft traditions.
In the late Vedic period, around the 6th century BCE, the small states and chiefdoms of the Ganges Plain and the north-western regions had consolidated into 16 major oligarchies and monarchies that were known as the mahajanapadas. The emerging urbanisation gave rise to non-Vedic religious movements, two of which became independent religions. Jainism came into prominence during the life of its exemplar, Mahavira. Buddhism, based on the teachings of Gautama Buddha, attracted followers from all social classes excepting the middle class; chronicling the life of the Buddha was central to the beginnings of recorded history in India. In an age of increasing urban wealth, both religions held up renunciation as an ideal, and both established long-lasting monastic traditions. Politically, by the 3rd century BCE, the kingdom of Magadha had annexed or reduced other states to emerge as the Mauryan Empire. The empire was once thought to have controlled most of the subcontinent except the far south, but its core regions are now thought to have been separated by large autonomous areas. The Mauryan kings are known as much for their empire-building and determined management of public life as for Ashoka's renunciation of militarism and far-flung advocacy of the Buddhist dhamma.
The Sangam literature of the Tamil language reveals that, between 200 BCE and 200 CE, the southern peninsula was ruled by the Cheras, the Cholas, and the Pandyas, dynasties that traded extensively with the Roman Empire and with West and Southeast Asia. In North India, Hinduism asserted patriarchal control within the family, leading to increased subordination of women. By the 4th and 5th centuries, the Gupta Empire had created a complex system of administration and taxation in the greater Ganges Plain; this system became a model for later Indian kingdoms. Under the Guptas, a renewed Hinduism based on devotion, rather than the management of ritual, began to assert itself. This renewal was reflected in a flowering of sculpture and architecture, which found patrons among an urban elite. Classical Sanskrit literature flowered as well, and Indian science, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics made significant advances.
The Indian early medieval age, from 600 to 1200 CE, is defined by regional kingdoms and cultural diversity. When Harsha of Kannauj, who ruled much of the Indo-Gangetic Plain from 606 to 647 CE, attempted to expand southwards, he was defeated by the Chalukya ruler of the Deccan. When his successor attempted to expand eastwards, he was defeated by the Pala king of Bengal. When the Chalukyas attempted to expand southwards, they were defeated by the Pallavas from farther south, who in turn were opposed by the Pandyas and the Cholas from still farther south. No ruler of this period was able to create an empire and consistently control lands much beyond their core region. During this time, pastoral peoples, whose land had been cleared to make way for the growing agricultural economy, were accommodated within caste society, as were new non-traditional ruling classes. The caste system consequently began to show regional differences.
In the 6th and 7th centuries, the first devotional hymns were created in the Tamil language. They were imitated all over India and led to both the resurgence of Hinduism and the development of all modern languages of the subcontinent. Indian royalty, big and small, and the temples they patronised drew citizens in great numbers to the capital cities, which became economic hubs as well. Temple towns of various sizes began to appear everywhere as India underwent another urbanisation. By the 8th and 9th centuries, the effects were felt in Southeast Asia, as South Indian culture and political systems were exported to lands that became part of modern-day Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Brunei, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Indian merchants, scholars, and sometimes armies were involved in this transmission; Southeast Asians took the initiative as well, with many sojourning in Indian seminaries and translating Buddhist and Hindu texts into their languages.
After the 10th century, Muslim Central Asian nomadic clans, using swift-horse cavalry and raising vast armies united by ethnicity and religion, repeatedly overran South Asia's north-western plains, leading eventually to the establishment of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate in 1206. The sultanate was to control much of North India and to make many forays into South India. Although at first disruptive for the Indian elites, the sultanate largely left its vast non-Muslim subject population to its own laws and customs. By repeatedly repulsing Mongol raiders in the 13th century, the sultanate saved India from the devastation visited on West and Central Asia, setting the scene for centuries of migration of fleeing soldiers, learned men, mystics, traders, artists, and artisans from that region into the subcontinent, thereby creating a syncretic Indo-Islamic culture in the north. The sultanate's raiding and weakening of the regional kingdoms of South India paved the way for the indigenous Vijayanagara Empire. Embracing a strong Shaivite tradition and building upon the military technology of the sultanate, the empire came to control much of peninsular India, and was to influence South Indian society for long afterwards.
In the early 16th century, northern India, then under mainly Muslim rulers, fell again to the superior mobility and firepower of a new generation of Central Asian warriors. The resulting Mughal Empire did not stamp out the local societies it came to rule. Instead, it balanced and pacified them through new administrative practices and diverse and inclusive ruling elites, leading to more systematic, centralised, and uniform rule. Eschewing tribal bonds and Islamic identity, especially under Akbar, the Mughals united their far-flung realms through loyalty, expressed through a Persianised culture, to an emperor who had near-divine status. The Mughal state's economic policies, deriving most revenues from agriculture and mandating that taxes be paid in the well-regulated silver currency, caused peasants and artisans to enter larger markets. The relative peace maintained by the empire during much of the 17th century was a factor in India's economic expansion, resulting in greater patronage of painting, literary forms, textiles, and architecture. Newly coherent social groups in northern and western India, such as the Marathas, the Rajputs, and the Sikhs, gained military and governing ambitions during Mughal rule, which, through collaboration or adversity, gave them both recognition and military experience. Expanding commerce during Mughal rule gave rise to new Indian commercial and political elites along the coasts of southern and eastern India. As the empire disintegrated, many among these elites were able to seek and control their own affairs.
By the early 18th century, with the lines between commercial and political dominance being increasingly blurred, a number of European trading companies, including the English East India Company, had established coastal outposts. The East India Company's control of the seas, greater resources, and more advanced military training and technology led it to increasingly assert its military strength and caused it to become attractive to a portion of the Indian elite; these factors were crucial in allowing the company to gain control over the Bengal region by 1765 and sideline the other European companies. Its further access to the riches of Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annex or subdue most of India by the 1820s. India was then no longer exporting manufactured goods as it long had, but was instead supplying the British Empire with raw materials. Many historians consider this to be the onset of India's colonial period. By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and having effectively been made an arm of British administration, the East India Company began more consciously to enter non-economic arenas, including education, social reform, and culture.
Historians consider India's modern age to have begun sometime between 1848 and 1885. The appointment in 1848 of Lord Dalhousie as Governor General of the East India Company set the stage for changes essential to a modern state. These included the consolidation and demarcation of sovereignty, the surveillance of the population, and the education of citizens. Technological changes—among them, railways, canals, and the telegraph—were introduced not long after their introduction in Europe. However, disaffection with the company also grew during this time and set off the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Fed by diverse resentments and perceptions, including invasive British-style social reforms, harsh land taxes, and summary treatment of some rich landowners and princes, the rebellion rocked many regions of northern and central India and shook the foundations of Company rule. Although the rebellion was suppressed by 1858, it led to the dissolution of the East India Company and the direct administration of India by the British government. Proclaiming a unitary state and a gradual but limited British-style parliamentary system, the new rulers also protected princes and landed gentry as a feudal safeguard against future unrest. In the decades following, public life gradually emerged all over India, leading eventually to the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885.
The rush of technology and the commercialisation of agriculture in the second half of the 19th century was marked by economic setbacks, and many small farmers became dependent on the whims of far-away markets. There was an increase in the number of large-scale famines, and, despite the risks of infrastructure development borne by Indian taxpayers, little industrial employment was generated for Indians. There were also salutary effects: commercial cropping, especially in the newly canalled Punjab, led to increased food production for internal consumption. The railway network provided critical famine relief, notably reduced the cost of moving goods, and helped nascent Indian-owned industry.
After World War I, in which approximately one million Indians served, a new period began. It was marked by British reforms but also repressive legislation, by more strident Indian calls for self-rule, and by the beginnings of a nonviolent movement of non-co-operation, of which Mahatma Gandhi would become the leader and enduring symbol. During the 1930s, slow legislative reform was enacted by the British; the Indian National Congress won victories in the resulting elections. The next decade was beset with crises: Indian participation in World War II, the Congress's final push for non-co-operation, and an upsurge of Muslim nationalism. All were capped by the advent of independence in 1947, but tempered by the partition of India into two states: India and Pakistan.
Vital to India's self-image as an independent nation was its constitution, completed in 1950, which put in place a secular and democratic republic. Per the London Declaration, India retained its membership of the Commonwealth, becoming the first republic within it. Economic liberalisation, which began in the 1980s and the collaboration with Soviet Union for technical know-how, has created a large urban middle class, transformed India into one of the world's fastest-growing economies, and increased its geopolitical clout. Yet, India is also shaped by seemingly unyielding poverty, both rural and urban; by religious and caste-related violence; by Maoist-inspired Naxalite insurgencies; and by separatism in Jammu and Kashmir and in Northeast India. It has unresolved territorial disputes with China and with Pakistan. India's sustained democratic freedoms are unique among the world's newer nations; however, in spite of its recent economic successes, freedom from want for its disadvantaged population remains a goal yet to be achieved.
India accounts for the bulk of the Indian subcontinent, lying atop the Indian tectonic plate, a part of the Indo-Australian Plate. India's defining geological processes began 75 million years ago when the Indian Plate, then part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, began a north-eastward drift caused by seafloor spreading to its south-west, and later, south and south-east. Simultaneously, the vast Tethyan oceanic crust, to its northeast, began to subduct under the Eurasian Plate. These dual processes, driven by convection in the Earth's mantle, both created the Indian Ocean and caused the Indian continental crust eventually to under-thrust Eurasia and to uplift the Himalayas. Immediately south of the emerging Himalayas, plate movement created a vast crescent-shaped trough that rapidly filled with river-borne sediment and now constitutes the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The original Indian plate makes its first appearance above the sediment in the ancient Aravalli range, which extends from the Delhi Ridge in a southwesterly direction. To the west lies the Thar Desert, the eastern spread of which is checked by the Aravallis.
The remaining Indian Plate survives as peninsular India, the oldest and geologically most stable part of India. It extends as far north as the Satpura and Vindhya ranges in central India. These parallel chains run from the Arabian Sea coast in Gujarat in the west to the coal-rich Chota Nagpur Plateau in Jharkhand in the east. To the south, the remaining peninsular landmass, the Deccan Plateau, is flanked on the west and east by coastal ranges known as the Western and Eastern Ghats; the plateau contains the country's oldest rock formations, some over one billion years old. Constituted in such fashion, India lies to the north of the equator between 6° 44′ and 35° 30′ north latitude and 68° 7′ and 97° 25′ east longitude.
India's coastline measures 7,517 kilometres (4,700 mi) in length; of this distance, 5,423 kilometres (3,400 mi) belong to peninsular India and 2,094 kilometres (1,300 mi) to the Andaman, Nicobar, and Lakshadweep island chains. According to the Indian naval hydrographic charts, the mainland coastline consists of the following: 43% sandy beaches; 11% rocky shores, including cliffs; and 46% mudflats or marshy shores.
Major Himalayan-origin rivers that substantially flow through India include the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, both of which drain into the Bay of Bengal. Important tributaries of the Ganges include the Yamuna and the Kosi; the latter's extremely low gradient, caused by long-term silt deposition, leads to severe floods and course changes. Major peninsular rivers, whose steeper gradients prevent their waters from flooding, include the Godavari, the Mahanadi, the Kaveri, and the Krishna, which also drain into the Bay of Bengal; and the Narmada and the Tapti, which drain into the Arabian Sea. Coastal features include the marshy Rann of Kutch of western India and the alluvial Sundarbans delta of eastern India; the latter is shared with Bangladesh. India has two archipelagos: the Lakshadweep, coral atolls off India's south-western coast; and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a volcanic chain in the Andaman Sea.
Indian climate is strongly influenced by the Himalayas and the Thar Desert, both of which drive the economically and culturally pivotal summer and winter monsoons. The Himalayas prevent cold Central Asian katabatic winds from blowing in, keeping the bulk of the Indian subcontinent warmer than most locations at similar latitudes. The Thar Desert plays a crucial role in attracting the moisture-laden south-west summer monsoon winds that, between June and October, provide the majority of India's rainfall. Four major climatic groupings predominate in India: tropical wet, tropical dry, subtropical humid, and montane.
Temperatures in India have risen by 0.7 °C (1.3 °F) between 1901 and 2018. Climate change in India is often thought to be the cause. The retreat of Himalayan glaciers has adversely affected the flow rate of the major Himalayan rivers, including the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. According to some current projections, the number and severity of droughts in India will have markedly increased by the end of the present century.
India is a megadiverse country, a term employed for 17 countries which display high biological diversity and contain many species exclusively indigenous, or endemic, to them. India is a habitat for 8.6% of all mammal species, 13.7% of bird species, 7.9% of reptile species, 6% of amphibian species, 12.2% of fish species, and 6.0% of all flowering plant species. Fully a third of Indian plant species are endemic. India also contains four of the world's 34 biodiversity hotspots, or regions that display significant habitat loss in the presence of high endemism.
According to official statistics, India's forest cover is 713,789 km (275,595 sq mi), which is 21.71% of the country's total land area. It can be subdivided further into broad categories of canopy density, or the proportion of the area of a forest covered by its tree canopy. Very dense forest, whose canopy density is greater than 70%, occupies 3.02% of India's land area. It predominates in the tropical moist forest of the Andaman Islands, the Western Ghats, and Northeast India. Moderately dense forest, whose canopy density is between 40% and 70%, occupies 9.39% of India's land area. It predominates in the temperate coniferous forest of the Himalayas, the moist deciduous sal forest of eastern India, and the dry deciduous teak forest of central and southern India. Open forest, whose canopy density is between 10% and 40%, occupies 9.26% of India's land area. India has two natural zones of thorn forest, one in the Deccan Plateau, immediately east of the Western Ghats, and the other in the western part of the Indo-Gangetic plain, now turned into rich agricultural land by irrigation, its features no longer visible.
Among the Indian subcontinent's notable indigenous trees are the astringent Azadirachta indica, or neem, which is widely used in rural Indian herbal medicine, and the luxuriant Ficus religiosa, or peepul, which is displayed on the ancient seals of Mohenjo-daro, and under which the Buddha is recorded in the Pali canon to have sought enlightenment.
Many Indian species have descended from those of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent from which India separated more than 100 million years ago. India's subsequent collision with Eurasia set off a mass exchange of species. However, volcanism and climatic changes later caused the extinction of many endemic Indian forms. Still later, mammals entered India from Asia through two zoogeographical passes flanking the Himalayas. This had the effect of lowering endemism among India's mammals, which stands at 12.6%, contrasting with 45.8% among reptiles and 55.8% among amphibians. Among endemics are the vulnerable hooded leaf monkey and the threatened Beddome's toad of the Western Ghats.
India contains 172 IUCN-designated threatened animal species, or 2.9% of endangered forms. These include the endangered Bengal tiger and the Ganges river dolphin. Critically endangered species include the gharial, a crocodilian; the great Indian bustard; and the Indian white-rumped vulture, which has become nearly extinct by having ingested the carrion of diclofenac-treated cattle. Before they were extensively used for agriculture and cleared for human settlement, the thorn forests of Punjab were mingled at intervals with open grasslands that were grazed by large herds of blackbuck preyed on by the Asiatic cheetah; the blackbuck, no longer extant in Punjab, is now severely endangered in India, and the cheetah is extinct. The pervasive and ecologically devastating human encroachment of recent decades has critically endangered Indian wildlife. In response, the system of national parks and protected areas, first established in 1935, was expanded substantially. In 1972, India enacted the Wildlife Protection Act and Project Tiger to safeguard crucial wilderness; the Forest Conservation Act was enacted in 1980 and amendments added in 1988. India hosts more than five hundred wildlife sanctuaries and eighteen biosphere reserves, four of which are part of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves; seventy-five wetlands are registered under the Ramsar Convention.
A parliamentary republic with a multi-party system, India has six recognised national parties, including the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and more than 50 regional parties. The Congress is considered centre-left in Indian political culture, and the BJP right-wing. For most of the period between 1950—when India first became a republic—and the late 1980s, the Congress held a majority in the Parliament. Since then, however, it has increasingly shared the political stage with the BJP, as well as with powerful regional parties which have often forced the creation of multi-party coalition governments at the centre.
In the Republic of India's first three general elections, in 1951, 1957, and 1962, the Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru-led Congress won easy victories. On Nehru's death in 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri briefly became prime minister; he was succeeded, after his own unexpected death in 1966, by Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi, who went on to lead the Congress to election victories in 1967 and 1971. Following public discontent with the state of emergency she declared in 1975, the Congress was voted out of power in 1977; the then-new Janata Party, which had opposed the emergency, was voted in. Its government lasted just over two years. There were two prime ministers during this period; Morarji Desai and Charan Singh. Voted back into power in 1980, the Congress saw a change in leadership in 1984, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated; she was succeeded by her son Rajiv Gandhi, who won an easy victory in the general elections later that year. The Congress was voted out again in 1989 when a National Front coalition, led by the newly formed Janata Dal in alliance with the Left Front, won the elections; that government too proved relatively short-lived, lasting just under two years. There were two prime ministers during this period; V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar. Elections were held again in 1991; no party won an absolute majority. The Congress, as the largest single party, was able to form a minority government led by P. V. Narasimha Rao.
A two-year period of political turmoil followed the general election of 1996. Several short-lived alliances shared power at the centre. The BJP formed a government briefly in 1996; it was followed by two comparatively long-lasting United Front coalitions, which depended on external support. There were two prime ministers during this period; H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral. In 1998, the BJP was able to form a successful coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the NDA became the first non-Congress, coalition government to complete a five-year term. Again in the 2004 Indian general elections, no party won an absolute majority, but the Congress emerged as the largest single party, forming another successful coalition: the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). It had the support of left-leaning parties and MPs who opposed the BJP. The UPA returned to power in the 2009 general election with increased numbers, and it no longer required external support from India's communist parties. That year, Manmohan Singh became the first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru in 1957 and 1962 to be re-elected to a consecutive five-year term. In the 2014 general election, the BJP became the first political party since 1984 to win a majority and govern without the support of other parties. In the 2019 general election, the BJP was victorious again. The incumbent prime minister is Narendra Modi, a former chief minister of Gujarat. On 22 July 2022, Droupadi Murmu was elected India's 15th president and took the oath of office on 25 July 2022.
India is a federation with a parliamentary system governed under the Constitution of India—the country's supreme legal document. It is a constitutional republic.
Federalism in India defines the power distribution between the union and the states. The Constitution of India, which came into effect on 26 January 1950, originally stated India to be a "sovereign, democratic republic;" this characterisation was amended in 1971 to "a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic". India's form of government, traditionally described as "quasi-federal" with a strong centre and weak states, has grown increasingly federal since the late 1990s as a result of political, economic, and social changes.
The Government of India comprises three branches:
India is a federal union comprising 28 states and 8 union territories. All states, as well as the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir, Puducherry and the National Capital Territory of Delhi, have elected legislatures and governments following the Westminster system of governance. The remaining five union territories are directly ruled by the central government through appointed administrators. In 1956, under the States Reorganisation Act, states were reorganised on a linguistic basis. There are over a quarter of a million local government bodies at city, town, block, district and village levels.
In the 1950s, India strongly supported decolonisation in Africa and Asia and played a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement. After initially cordial relations with neighbouring China, India went to war with China in 1962 and was widely thought to have been humiliated. This was followed by another military conflict in 1967 in which India successfully repelled Chinese attack. India has had tense relations with neighbouring Pakistan; the two nations have gone to war four times: in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999. Three of these wars were fought over the disputed territory of Kashmir, while the third, the 1971 war, followed from India's support for the independence of Bangladesh. In the late 1980s, the Indian military twice intervened abroad at the invitation of the host country: a peace-keeping operation in Sri Lanka between 1987 and 1990; and an armed intervention to prevent a 1988 coup d'état attempt in the Maldives. After the 1965 war with Pakistan, India began to pursue close military and economic ties with the Soviet Union; by the late 1960s, the Soviet Union was its largest arms supplier.
Aside from its ongoing special relationship with Russia, India has wide-ranging defence relations with Israel and France. In recent years, it has played key roles in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and the World Trade Organization. The nation has provided 100,000 military and police personnel to serve in 35 UN peacekeeping operations across four continents. It participates in the East Asia Summit, the G8+5, and other multilateral forums. India has close economic ties with countries in South America, Asia, and Africa; it pursues a "Look East" policy that seeks to strengthen partnerships with the ASEAN nations, Japan, and South Korea that revolve around many issues, but especially those involving economic investment and regional security.
China's nuclear test of 1964, as well as its repeated threats to intervene in support of Pakistan in the 1965 war, convinced India to develop nuclear weapons. India conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 1974 and carried out additional underground testing in 1998. Despite criticism and military sanctions, India has signed neither the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty nor the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, considering both to be flawed and discriminatory. India maintains a "no first use" nuclear policy and is developing a nuclear triad capability as a part of its "Minimum Credible Deterrence" doctrine. It is developing a ballistic missile defence shield and, a fifth-generation fighter jet. Other indigenous military projects involve the design and implementation of Vikrant-class aircraft carriers and Arihant-class nuclear submarines.
Since the end of the Cold War, India has increased its economic, strategic, and military co-operation with the United States and the European Union. In 2008, a civilian nuclear agreement was signed between India and the United States. Although India possessed nuclear weapons at the time and was not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it received waivers from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, ending earlier restrictions on India's nuclear technology and commerce. As a consequence, India became the sixth de facto nuclear weapons state. India subsequently signed co-operation agreements involving civilian nuclear energy with Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
The President of India is the supreme commander of the nation's armed forces; with 1.45 million active troops, they compose the world's second-largest military. It comprises the Indian Army, the Indian Navy, the Indian Air Force, and the Indian Coast Guard. The official Indian defence budget for 2011 was US$36.03 billion, or 1.83% of GDP. Defence expenditure was pegged at US$70.12 billion for fiscal year 2022–23 and, increased 9.8% than previous fiscal year. India is the world's second-largest arms importer; between 2016 and 2020, it accounted for 9.5% of the total global arms imports. Much of the military expenditure was focused on defence against Pakistan and countering growing Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean. In May 2017, the Indian Space Research Organisation launched the South Asia Satellite, a gift from India to its neighbouring SAARC countries. In October 2018, India signed a US$5.43 billion (over ₹400 billion) agreement with Russia to procure four S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile defence systems, Russia's most advanced long-range missile defence system.
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Indian economy in 2022 was nominally worth $3.46 trillion; it was the fifth-largest economy by market exchange rates and is, around $11.6 trillion, the third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). With its average annual GDP growth rate of 5.8% over the past two decades, and reaching 6.1% during 2011–2012, India is one of the world's fastest-growing economies. However, the country ranks 139th in the world in nominal GDP per capita and 118th in GDP per capita at PPP. Until 1991, all Indian governments followed protectionist policies that were influenced by socialist economics. Widespread state intervention and regulation largely walled the economy off from the outside world. An acute balance of payments crisis in 1991 forced the nation to liberalise its economy; since then, it has moved increasingly towards a free-market system by emphasising both foreign trade and direct investment inflows. India has been a member of World Trade Organization since 1 January 1995.
The 522-million-worker Indian labour force is the world's second-largest, as of 2017. The service sector makes up 55.6% of GDP, the industrial sector 26.3% and the agricultural sector 18.1%. India's foreign exchange remittances of US$100 billion in 2022, highest in the world, were contributed to its economy by 32 million Indians working in foreign countries. Major agricultural products include rice, wheat, oilseed, cotton, jute, tea, sugarcane, and potatoes. Major industries include textiles, telecommunications, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, food processing, steel, transport equipment, cement, mining, petroleum, machinery, and software. In 2006, the share of external trade in India's GDP stood at 24%, up from 6% in 1985. In 2008, India's share of world trade was 1.7%; In 2021, India was the world's ninth-largest importer and the sixteenth-largest exporter. Major exports include petroleum products, textile goods, jewellery, software, engineering goods, chemicals, and manufactured leather goods. Major imports include crude oil, machinery, gems, fertiliser, and chemicals. Between 2001 and 2011, the contribution of petrochemical and engineering goods to total exports grew from 14% to 42%. India was the world's second-largest textile exporter after China in the 2013 calendar year.
Averaging an economic growth rate of 7.5% for several years prior to 2007, India has more than doubled its hourly wage rates during the first decade of the 21st century. Some 431 million Indians have left poverty since 1985; India's middle classes are projected to number around 580 million by 2030. Though ranking 68th in global competitiveness, as of 2010, India ranks 17th in financial market sophistication, 24th in the banking sector, 44th in business sophistication, and 39th in innovation, ahead of several advanced economies. With seven of the world's top 15 information technology outsourcing companies based in India, as of 2009, the country is viewed as the second-most favourable outsourcing destination after the United States. India is ranked 40th in the Global Innovation Index in 2023. As of 2023, India's consumer market was the world's fifth-largest.
Driven by growth, India's nominal GDP per capita increased steadily from US$308 in 1991, when economic liberalisation began, to US$1,380 in 2010, to an estimated US$1,730 in 2016. It is expected to grow to US$2,466 by 2022. However, it has remained lower than those of other Asian developing countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, and is expected to remain so in the near future.
According to a 2011 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report, India's GDP at purchasing power parity could overtake that of the United States by 2045. During the next four decades, Indian GDP is expected to grow at an annualised average of 8%, making it potentially the world's fastest-growing major economy until 2050. The report highlights key growth factors: a young and rapidly growing working-age population; growth in the manufacturing sector because of rising education and engineering skill levels; and sustained growth of the consumer market driven by a rapidly growing middle-class. The World Bank cautions that, for India to achieve its economic potential, it must continue to focus on public sector reform, transport infrastructure, agricultural and rural development, removal of labour regulations, education, energy security, and public health and nutrition.
According to the Worldwide Cost of Living Report 2017 released by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) which was created by comparing more than 400 individual prices across 160 products and services, four of the cheapest cities were in India: Bangalore (3rd), Mumbai (5th), Chennai (5th) and New Delhi (8th).
India's telecommunication industry is the second-largest in the world with over 1.2 billion subscribers. It contributes 6.5% to India's GDP. After the third quarter of 2017, India surpassed the US to become the second-largest smartphone market in the world after China.
The Indian automotive industry, the world's second-fastest growing, increased domestic sales by 26% during 2009–2010, and exports by 36% during 2008–2009. In 2022, India became the world's third-largest vehicle market after China and the United States, surpassing Japan. At the end of 2011, the Indian IT industry employed 2.8 million professionals, generated revenues close to US$100 billion equalling 7.5% of Indian GDP, and contributed 26% of India's merchandise exports.
The pharmaceutical industry in India emerged as a global player. As of 2021, with 3000 pharmaceutical companies and 10,500 manufacturing units India is the world's third-largest pharmaceutical producer, largest producer of generic medicines and supply up to 50—60% of global vaccines demand, these all contribute up to US$24.44 billions in exports and India's local pharmaceutical market is estimated up to US$42 billion. India is among the top 12 biotech destinations in the world. The Indian biotech industry grew by 15.1% in 2012–2013, increasing its revenues from ₹204.4 billion (Indian rupees) to ₹235.24 billion (US$3.94 billion at June 2013 exchange rates).
India's capacity to generate electrical power is 300 gigawatts, of which 42 gigawatts is renewable. The country's usage of coal is a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions by India but its renewable energy is competing strongly. India emits about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This equates to about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year, which is half the world average. Increasing access to electricity and clean cooking with liquefied petroleum gas have been priorities for energy in India.
Despite economic growth during recent decades, India continues to face socio-economic challenges. In 2006, India contained the largest number of people living below the World Bank's international poverty line of US$1.25 per day. The proportion decreased from 60% in 1981 to 42% in 2005. Under the World Bank's later revised poverty line, it was 21% in 2011. 30.7% of India's children under the age of five are underweight. According to a Food and Agriculture Organization report in 2015, 15% of the population is undernourished. The Midday Meal Scheme attempts to lower these rates.
A 2018 Walk Free Foundation report estimated that nearly 8 million people in India were living in different forms of modern slavery, such as bonded labour, child labour, human trafficking, and forced begging, among others. According to the 2011 census, there were 10.1 million child labourers in the country, a decline of 2.6 million from 12.6 million in 2001.
Since 1991, economic inequality between India's states has consistently grown: the per-capita net state domestic product of the richest states in 2007 was 3.2 times that of the poorest. Corruption in India is perceived to have decreased. According to the Corruption Perceptions Index, India ranked 78th out of 180 countries in 2018 with a score of 41 out of 100, an improvement from 85th in 2014.
Epidemic and pandemic diseases have long been a major factor, including COVID-19 and cholera.
With 1,210,193,422 residents reported in the 2011 provisional census report, India was the world's second-most populous country. Its population grew by 17.64% from 2001 to 2011, compared to 21.54% growth in the previous decade (1991–2001). The human sex ratio, according to the 2011 census, is 940 females per 1,000 males. The median age was 28.7 as of 2020. The first post-colonial census, conducted in 1951, counted 361 million people. Medical advances made in the last 50 years as well as increased agricultural productivity brought about by the "Green Revolution" have caused India's population to grow rapidly.
The life expectancy in India is at 70 years—71.5 years for women, 68.7 years for men. There are around 93 physicians per 100,000 people. Migration from rural to urban areas has been an important dynamic in India's recent history. The number of people living in urban areas grew by 31.2% between 1991 and 2001. Yet, in 2001, over 70% still lived in rural areas. The level of urbanisation increased further from 27.81% in the 2001 Census to 31.16% in the 2011 Census. The slowing down of the overall population growth rate was due to the sharp decline in the growth rate in rural areas since 1991. According to the 2011 census, there are 53 million-plus urban agglomerations in India; among them Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, in decreasing order by population. The literacy rate in 2011 was 74.04%: 65.46% among females and 82.14% among males. The rural-urban literacy gap, which was 21.2 percentage points in 2001, dropped to 16.1 percentage points in 2011. The improvement in the rural literacy rate is twice that of urban areas. Kerala is the most literate state with 93.91% literacy; while Bihar the least with 63.82%.
Among speakers of the Indian languages, 74% speak Indo-Aryan languages, the easternmost branch of the Indo-European languages; 24% speak Dravidian languages, indigenous to South Asia and spoken widely before the spread of Indo-Aryan languages and 2% speak Austroasiatic languages or the Sino-Tibetan languages. India has no national language. Hindi, with the largest number of speakers, is the official language of the government. English is used extensively in business and administration and has the status of a "subsidiary official language"; it is important in education, especially as a medium of higher education. Each state and union territory has one or more official languages, and the constitution recognises in particular 22 "scheduled languages".
The 2011 census reported the religion in India with the largest number of followers was Hinduism (79.80% of the population), followed by Islam (14.23%); the remaining were Christianity (2.30%), Sikhism (1.72%), Buddhism (0.70%), Jainism (0.36%) and others (0.9%). India has the third-largest Muslim population—the largest for a non-Muslim majority country.
Indian cultural history spans more than 4,500 years. During the Vedic period (c. 1700 BCE – c. 500 BCE), the foundations of Hindu philosophy, mythology, theology and literature were laid, and many beliefs and practices which still exist today, such as dhárma, kárma, yóga, and mokṣa, were established. India is notable for its religious diversity, with Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, and Jainism among the nation's major religions. The predominant religion, Hinduism, has been shaped by various historical schools of thought, including those of the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras, the Bhakti movement, and by Buddhist philosophy.
India has a very ancient tradition of art, which has exchanged many influences with the rest of Eurasia, especially in the first millennium, when Buddhist art spread with Indian religions to Central, East and Southeast Asia, the last also greatly influenced by Hindu art. Thousands of seals from the Indus Valley Civilization of the third millennium BCE have been found, usually carved with animals, but a few with human figures. The "Pashupati" seal, excavated in Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan, in 1928–29, is the best known. After this there is a long period with virtually nothing surviving. Almost all surviving ancient Indian art thereafter is in various forms of religious sculpture in durable materials, or coins. There was probably originally far more in wood, which is lost. In north India Mauryan art is the first imperial movement. In the first millennium CE, Buddhist art spread with Indian religions to Central, East and Southeast Asia, the last also greatly influenced by Hindu art. Over the following centuries a distinctly Indian style of sculpting the human figure developed, with less interest in articulating precise anatomy than ancient Greek sculpture but showing smoothly flowing forms expressing prana ("breath" or life-force). This is often complicated by the need to give figures multiple arms or heads, or represent different genders on the left and right of figures, as with the Ardhanarishvara form of Shiva and Parvati.
Most of the earliest large sculpture is Buddhist, either excavated from Buddhist stupas such as Sanchi, Sarnath and Amaravati, or is rock cut reliefs at sites such as Ajanta, Karla and Ellora. Hindu and Jain sites appear rather later. In spite of this complex mixture of religious traditions, generally, the prevailing artistic style at any time and place has been shared by the major religious groups, and sculptors probably usually served all communities. Gupta art, at its peak c. 300 CE – c. 500 CE, is often regarded as a classical period whose influence lingered for many centuries after; it saw a new dominance of Hindu sculpture, as at the Elephanta Caves. Across the north, this became rather stiff and formulaic after c. 800 CE, though rich with finely carved detail in the surrounds of statues. But in the South, under the Pallava and Chola dynasties, sculpture in both stone and bronze had a sustained period of great achievement; the large bronzes with Shiva as Nataraja have become an iconic symbol of India.
Ancient painting has only survived at a few sites, of which the crowded scenes of court life in the Ajanta Caves are by far the most important, but it was evidently highly developed, and is mentioned as a courtly accomplishment in Gupta times. Painted manuscripts of religious texts survive from Eastern India about the 10th century onwards, most of the earliest being Buddhist and later Jain. No doubt the style of these was used in larger paintings. The Persian-derived Deccan painting, starting just before the Mughal miniature, between them give the first large body of secular painting, with an emphasis on portraits, and the recording of princely pleasures and wars. The style spread to Hindu courts, especially among the Rajputs, and developed a variety of styles, with the smaller courts often the most innovative, with figures such as Nihâl Chand and Nainsukh. As a market developed among European residents, it was supplied by Company painting by Indian artists with considerable Western influence. In the 19th century, cheap Kalighat paintings of gods and everyday life, done on paper, were urban folk art from Calcutta, which later saw the Bengal School of Art, reflecting the art colleges founded by the British, the first movement in modern Indian painting.
Much of Indian architecture, including the Taj Mahal, other works of Indo-Islamic Mughal architecture, and South Indian architecture, blends ancient local traditions with imported styles. Vernacular architecture is also regional in its flavours. Vastu shastra, literally "science of construction" or "architecture" and ascribed to Mamuni Mayan, explores how the laws of nature affect human dwellings; it employs precise geometry and directional alignments to reflect perceived cosmic constructs. As applied in Hindu temple architecture, it is influenced by the Shilpa Shastras, a series of foundational texts whose basic mythological form is the Vastu-Purusha mandala, a square that embodied the "absolute". The Taj Mahal, built in Agra between 1631 and 1648 by orders of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife, has been described in the UNESCO World Heritage List as "the jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world's heritage". Indo-Saracenic Revival architecture, developed by the British in the late 19th century, drew on Indo-Islamic architecture.
The earliest literature in India, composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 CE, was in the Sanskrit language. Major works of Sanskrit literature include the Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE – c. 1200 BCE), the epics: Mahābhārata (c. 400 BCE – c. 400 CE) and the Ramayana (c. 300 BCE and later); Abhijñānaśākuntalam (The Recognition of Śakuntalā, and other dramas of Kālidāsa (c. 5th century CE) and Mahākāvya poetry. In Tamil literature, the Sangam literature (c. 600 BCE – c. 300 BCE) consisting of 2,381 poems, composed by 473 poets, is the earliest work. From the 14th to the 18th centuries, India's literary traditions went through a period of drastic change because of the emergence of devotional poets like Kabīr, Tulsīdās, and Guru Nānak. This period was characterised by a varied and wide spectrum of thought and expression; as a consequence, medieval Indian literary works differed significantly from classical traditions. In the 19th century, Indian writers took a new interest in social questions and psychological descriptions. In the 20th century, Indian literature was influenced by the works of the Bengali poet, author and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Indian music ranges over various traditions and regional styles. Classical music encompasses two genres and their various folk offshoots: the northern Hindustani and the southern Carnatic schools. Regionalised popular forms include filmi and folk music; the syncretic tradition of the bauls is a well-known form of the latter. Indian dance also features diverse folk and classical forms. Among the better-known folk dances are: bhangra of Punjab, bihu of Assam, Jhumair and chhau of Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal, garba and dandiya of Gujarat, ghoomar of Rajasthan, and lavani of Maharashtra. Eight dance forms, many with narrative forms and mythological elements, have been accorded classical dance status by India's National Academy of Music, Dance, and Drama. These are: bharatanatyam of the state of Tamil Nadu, kathak of Uttar Pradesh, kathakali and mohiniyattam of Kerala, kuchipudi of Andhra Pradesh, manipuri of Manipur, odissi of Odisha, and the sattriya of Assam.
Theatre in India melds music, dance, and improvised or written dialogue. Often based on Hindu mythology, but also borrowing from medieval romances or social and political events, Indian theatre includes: the bhavai of Gujarat, the jatra of West Bengal, the nautanki and ramlila of North India, tamasha of Maharashtra, burrakatha of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, terukkuttu of Tamil Nadu, and the yakshagana of Karnataka. India has a theatre training institute the National School of Drama (NSD) that is situated at New Delhi. It is an autonomous organisation under the Ministry of culture, Government of India. The Indian film industry produces the world's most-watched cinema. Established regional cinematic traditions exist in the Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Odia, Tamil, and Telugu languages. The Hindi language film industry (Bollywood) is the largest sector representing 43% of box office revenue, followed by the South Indian Telugu and Tamil film industries which represent 36% combined.
Television broadcasting began in India in 1959 as a state-run medium of communication and expanded slowly for more than two decades. The state monopoly on television broadcast ended in the 1990s. Since then, satellite channels have increasingly shaped the popular culture of Indian society. Today, television is the most penetrative media in India; industry estimates indicate that as of 2012 there are over 554 million TV consumers, 462 million with satellite or cable connections compared to other forms of mass media such as the press (350 million), radio (156 million) or internet (37 million).
Traditional Indian society is sometimes defined by social hierarchy. The Indian caste system embodies much of the social stratification and many of the social restrictions found on the Indian subcontinent. Social classes are defined by thousands of endogamous hereditary groups, often termed as jātis, or "castes". India abolished untouchability in 1950 with the adoption of the constitution and has since enacted other anti-discriminatory laws and social welfare initiatives.
Family values are important in the Indian tradition, and multi-generational patrilineal joint families have been the norm in India, though nuclear families are becoming common in urban areas. An overwhelming majority of Indians, with their consent, have their marriages arranged by their parents or other family elders. Marriage is thought to be for life, and the divorce rate is extremely low, with less than one in a thousand marriages ending in divorce. Child marriages are common, especially in rural areas; many women wed before reaching 18, which is their legal marriageable age. Female infanticide in India, and lately female foeticide, have created skewed gender ratios; the number of missing women in the country quadrupled from 15 million to 63 million in the 50-year period ending in 2014, faster than the population growth during the same period, and constituting 20 percent of India's female electorate. According to an Indian government study, an additional 21 million girls are unwanted and do not receive adequate care. Despite a government ban on sex-selective foeticide, the practice remains commonplace in India, the result of a preference for boys in a patriarchal society. The payment of dowry, although illegal, remains widespread across class lines. Deaths resulting from dowry, mostly from bride burning, are on the rise, despite stringent anti-dowry laws.
Many Indian festivals are religious in origin. The best known include Diwali, Ganesh Chaturthi, Thai Pongal, Holi, Durga Puja, Eid ul-Fitr, Bakr-Id, Christmas, and Vaisakhi.
In the 2011 census, about 73% of the population was literate, with 81% for men and 65% for women. This compares to 1981 when the respective rates were 41%, 53% and 29%. In 1951 the rates were 18%, 27% and 9%. In 1921 the rates 7%, 12% and 2%. In 1891 they were 5%, 9% and 1%, According to Latika Chaudhary, in 1911 there were under three primary schools for every ten villages. Statistically, more caste and religious diversity reduced private spending. Primary schools taught literacy, so local diversity limited its growth.
The education system of India is the world's second-largest. India has over 900 universities, 40,000 colleges and 1.5 million schools. In India's higher education system, a significant number of seats are reserved under affirmative action policies for the historically disadvantaged. In recent decades India's improved education system is often cited as one of the main contributors to its economic development.
From ancient times until the advent of the modern, the most widely worn traditional dress in India was draped. For women it took the form of a sari, a single piece of cloth many yards long. The sari was traditionally wrapped around the lower body and the shoulder. In its modern form, it is combined with an underskirt, or Indian petticoat, and tucked in the waist band for more secure fastening. It is also commonly worn with an Indian blouse, or choli, which serves as the primary upper-body garment, the sari's end—passing over the shoulder—serving to cover the midriff and obscure the upper body's contours. For men, a similar but shorter length of cloth, the dhoti, has served as a lower-body garment.
The use of stitched clothes became widespread after Muslim rule was established at first by the Delhi sultanate (c. 1300 CE) and then continued by the Mughal Empire (c. 1525 CE). Among the garments introduced during this time and still commonly worn are: the shalwars and pyjamas, both styles of trousers, and the tunics kurta and kameez. In southern India, the traditional draped garments were to see much longer continuous use.
Shalwars are atypically wide at the waist but narrow to a cuffed bottom. They are held up by a drawstring, which causes them to become pleated around the waist. The pants can be wide and baggy, or they can be cut quite narrow, on the bias, in which case they are called churidars. When they are ordinarily wide at the waist and their bottoms are hemmed but not cuffed, they are called pyjamas. The kameez is a long shirt or tunic, its side seams left open below the waist-line. The kurta is traditionally collarless and made of cotton or silk; it is worn plain or with embroidered decoration, such as chikan; and typically falls to either just above or just below the wearer's knees.
In the last 50 years, fashions have changed a great deal in India. Increasingly, in urban northern India, the sari is no longer the apparel of everyday wear, though they remain popular on formal occasions. The traditional shalwar kameez is rarely worn by younger urban women, who favour churidars or jeans. In white-collar office settings, ubiquitous air conditioning allows men to wear sports jackets year-round. For weddings and formal occasions, men in the middle- and upper classes often wear bandgala, or short Nehru jackets, with pants, with the groom and his groomsmen sporting sherwanis and churidars. The dhoti, once the universal garment of Hindu males, the wearing of which in the homespun and handwoven khadi allowed Gandhi to bring Indian nationalism to the millions, is seldom seen in the cities.
The foundation of a typical Indian meal is a cereal cooked in a plain fashion and complemented with flavourful savoury dishes. The cooked cereal could be steamed rice; chapati, a thin unleavened bread made from wheat flour, or occasionally cornmeal, and griddle-cooked dry; the idli, a steamed breakfast cake, or dosa, a griddled pancake, both leavened and made from a batter of rice- and gram meal. The savoury dishes might include lentils, pulses and vegetables commonly spiced with ginger and garlic, but also with a combination of spices that may include coriander, cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamon and others as informed by culinary conventions. They might also include poultry, fish, or meat dishes. In some instances, the ingredients might be mixed during the process of cooking.
A platter, or thali, used for eating usually has a central place reserved for the cooked cereal, and peripheral ones for the flavourful accompaniments, which are often served in small bowls. The cereal and its accompaniments are eaten simultaneously rather than a piecemeal manner. This is accomplished by mixing—for example of rice and lentils—or folding, wrapping, scooping or dipping—such as chapati and cooked vegetables or lentils.
India has distinctive vegetarian cuisines, each a feature of the geographical and cultural histories of its adherents. The appearance of ahimsa, or the avoidance of violence toward all forms of life in many religious orders early in Indian history, especially Upanishadic Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, is thought to have contributed to the predominance of vegetarianism among a large segment of India's Hindu population, especially in southern India, Gujarat, the Hindi-speaking belt of north-central India, as well as among Jains. Although meat is eaten widely in India, the proportional consumption of meat in the overall diet is low. Unlike China, which has increased its per capita meat consumption substantially in its years of increased economic growth, in India the strong dietary traditions have contributed to dairy, rather than meat, becoming the preferred form of animal protein consumption.
The most significant import of cooking techniques into India during the last millennium occurred during the Mughal Empire. Dishes such as the pilaf, developed in the Abbasid caliphate, and cooking techniques such as the marinating of meat in yogurt, spread into northern India from regions to its northwest. To the simple yogurt marinade of Persia, onions, garlic, almonds, and spices began to be added in India. Rice was partially cooked and layered alternately with the sauteed meat, the pot sealed tightly, and slow cooked according to another Persian cooking technique, to produce what has today become the Indian biryani, a feature of festive dining in many parts of India. In the food served in Indian restaurants worldwide the diversity of Indian food has been partially concealed by the dominance of Punjabi cuisine. The popularity of tandoori chicken—cooked in the tandoor oven, which had traditionally been used for baking bread in the rural Punjab and the Delhi region, especially among Muslims, but which is originally from Central Asia—dates to the 1950s, and was caused in large part by an entrepreneurial response among people from the Punjab who had been displaced by the 1947 partition of India.
Several traditional indigenous sports such as kabaddi, kho kho, pehlwani and gilli-danda, and also martial arts such as Kalarippayattu and marma adi, remain popular. Chess is commonly held to have originated in India as chaturaṅga; in recent years, there has been a rise in the number of Indian grandmasters. Viswanathan Anand became the Chess World Champion in 2007 and held the status until 2013. He also won the Chess World Cup in 2000 and 2002. In 2023, R Praggnanandhaa finished as runners up in the tournament. Parcheesi is derived from Pachisi, another traditional Indian pastime, which in early modern times was played on a giant marble court by Mughal emperor Akbar the Great.
Cricket is the most popular sport in India. Major domestic leagues include the Indian Premier League. Professional leagues in other sports include the Indian Super League (football) and the Pro Kabaddi league.
India has won two Cricket World Cups, the 1983 edition and the 2011 edition, as well as becoming the inaugural T20 World Cup Champions in 2007. India has also won the Champions Trophy twice, in 2002 and 2013. The only edition of the World Championship of Cricket was won by India in 1985.
India also has eight field hockey gold medals in the summer olympics. The improved results garnered by the Indian Davis Cup team and other tennis players in the early 2010s have made tennis increasingly popular in the country. India has a comparatively strong presence in shooting sports, and has won several medals at the Olympics, the World Shooting Championships, and the Commonwealth Games. Other sports in which Indians have succeeded internationally include badminton (Saina Nehwal and P. V. Sindhu are two of the top-ranked female badminton players in the world), boxing, and wrestling. Football is popular in West Bengal, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and the north-eastern states.India has traditionally been the dominant country at the South Asian Games. An example of this dominance is the basketball competition where the Indian team won four out of five tournaments to date.
India has hosted or co-hosted several international sporting events: the 1951 and 1982 Asian Games; the 1987, 1996, 2011 and 2023 ICC Men's Cricket World Cup tournaments (and is also scheduled to host it in 2031); the 1978, 1997 and 2013 ICC Women's Cricket World Cup tournaments (and is also scheduled to host it in 2025); the 1987, 1985 and 2016 South Asian Games; the 1990-91 Men's Asia Cup; the 2002 Chess World Cup; the 2003 Afro-Asian Games; the 2006 ICC Cricket Champion's Trophy (and is also scheduled to host it in 2029); the 2006 Women's Asia Cup; the 2009 World Badminton Championships; the 2010 Hockey World Cup; the 2010 Commonwealth Games; the 2016 ICC Men's Cricket T20 World Cup (and is also scheduled to host it in 2026); the 2016 ICC Women's Cricket T20 World Cup and the 2017 FIFA U-17 World Cup. Major international sporting events held annually in India include the Maharashtra Open, the Mumbai Marathon, the Delhi Half Marathon, and the Indian Masters. The first Formula 1 Indian Grand Prix featured in late 2011 but has been discontinued from the F1 season calendar since 2014.
Overview
Etymology
History
Geography
Biodiversity
Politics
Foreign relations and military
Economy
Demographics
Art
Culture
Government
General information
21°N 78°E / 21°N 78°E / 21; 78 | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "India, officially the Republic of India (ISO: Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area; the most populous country as of June 2023; and from the time of its independence in 1947, the world's most populous democracy. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago. Their long occupation, initially in varying forms of isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse, second only to Africa in human genetic diversity. Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE. By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest. Its evidence today is found in the hymns of the Rigveda. Preserved by an oral tradition that was resolutely vigilant, the Rigveda records the dawning of Hinduism in India. The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the northern and western regions. By 400 BCE, stratification and exclusion by caste had emerged within Hinduism, and Buddhism and Jainism had arisen, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity. Early political consolidations gave rise to the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires based in the Ganges Basin. Their collective era was suffused with wide-ranging creativity, but also marked by the declining status of women, and the incorporation of untouchability into an organised system of belief. In South India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian-languages scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In the early medieval era, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism became established on India's southern and western coasts. Muslim armies from Central Asia intermittently overran India's northern plains, eventually founding the Delhi Sultanate, and drawing northern India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam. In the 15th century, the Vijayanagara Empire created a long-lasting composite Hindu culture in south India. In the Punjab, Sikhism emerged, rejecting institutionalised religion. The Mughal Empire, in 1526, ushered in two centuries of relative peace, leaving a legacy of luminous architecture. Gradually expanding rule of the British East India Company followed, turning India into a colonial economy, but also consolidating its sovereignty. British Crown rule began in 1858. The rights promised to Indians were granted slowly, but technological changes were introduced, and modern ideas of education and the public life took root. A pioneering and influential nationalist movement emerged, which was noted for nonviolent resistance and became the major factor in ending British rule. In 1947 the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two independent dominions, a Hindu-majority Dominion of India and a Muslim-majority Dominion of Pakistan, amid large-scale loss of life and an unprecedented migration.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "India has been a federal republic since 1950, governed through a democratic parliamentary system. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society. India's population grew from 361 million in 1951 to almost 1.4 billion in 2022. During the same time, its nominal per capita income increased from US$64 annually to US$2,601, and its literacy rate from 16.6% to 74%. From being a comparatively destitute country in 1951, India has become a fast-growing major economy and a hub for information technology services, with an expanding middle class. India has a space programme with several planned or completed extraterrestrial missions. It is the fourth country to land a craft on the moon and the first to do so within 600 kilometres (370 mi) of the Lunar south pole. Indian movies, music, and spiritual teachings play an increasing role in global culture. India has substantially reduced its rate of poverty, though at the cost of increasing economic inequality. India is a nuclear-weapon state, which ranks high in military expenditure. It has disputes over Kashmir with its neighbours, Pakistan and China, unresolved since the mid-20th century. Among the socio-economic challenges India faces are gender inequality, child malnutrition, and rising levels of air pollution. India's land is megadiverse, with four biodiversity hotspots. Its forest cover comprises 21.7% of its area. India's wildlife, which has traditionally been viewed with tolerance in India's culture, is supported among these forests, and elsewhere, in protected habitats.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "According to the Oxford English Dictionary (third edition 2009), the name \"India\" is derived from the Classical Latin India, a reference to South Asia and an uncertain region to its east. In turn the name \"India\" derived successively from Hellenistic Greek India ( Ἰνδία), ancient Greek Indos ( Ἰνδός), Old Persian Hindush (an eastern province of the Achaemenid Empire), and ultimately its cognate, the Sanskrit Sindhu, or \"river\", specifically the Indus River and, by implication, its well-settled southern basin. The ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi (Ἰνδοί), which translates as \"The people of the Indus\".",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The term Bharat (Bhārat; pronounced [ˈbʱaːɾət] ), mentioned in both Indian epic poetry and the Constitution of India, is used in its variations by many Indian languages. A modern rendering of the historical name Bharatavarsha, which applied originally to North India, Bharat gained increased currency from the mid-19th century as a native name for India.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Hindustan ([ɦɪndʊˈstaːn] ) is a Middle Persian name for India that became popular by the 13th century, and was used widely since the era of the Mughal Empire. The meaning of Hindustan has varied, referring to a region encompassing present-day northern India and Pakistan or to India in its near entirety.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "By 55,000 years ago, the first modern humans, or Homo sapiens, had arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa, where they had earlier evolved. The earliest known modern human remains in South Asia date to about 30,000 years ago. After 6500 BCE, evidence for domestication of food crops and animals, construction of permanent structures, and storage of agricultural surplus appeared in Mehrgarh and other sites in Balochistan, Pakistan. These gradually developed into the Indus Valley Civilisation, the first urban culture in South Asia, which flourished during 2500–1900 BCE in Pakistan and western India. Centred around cities such as Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira, and Kalibangan, and relying on varied forms of subsistence, the civilisation engaged robustly in crafts production and wide-ranging trade.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During the period 2000–500 BCE, many regions of the subcontinent transitioned from the Chalcolithic cultures to the Iron Age ones. The Vedas, the oldest scriptures associated with Hinduism, were composed during this period, and historians have analysed these to posit a Vedic culture in the Punjab region and the upper Gangetic Plain. Most historians also consider this period to have encompassed several waves of Indo-Aryan migration into the subcontinent from the north-west. The caste system, which created a hierarchy of priests, warriors, and free peasants, but which excluded indigenous peoples by labelling their occupations impure, arose during this period. On the Deccan Plateau, archaeological evidence from this period suggests the existence of a chiefdom stage of political organisation. In South India, a progression to sedentary life is indicated by the large number of megalithic monuments dating from this period, as well as by nearby traces of agriculture, irrigation tanks, and craft traditions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the late Vedic period, around the 6th century BCE, the small states and chiefdoms of the Ganges Plain and the north-western regions had consolidated into 16 major oligarchies and monarchies that were known as the mahajanapadas. The emerging urbanisation gave rise to non-Vedic religious movements, two of which became independent religions. Jainism came into prominence during the life of its exemplar, Mahavira. Buddhism, based on the teachings of Gautama Buddha, attracted followers from all social classes excepting the middle class; chronicling the life of the Buddha was central to the beginnings of recorded history in India. In an age of increasing urban wealth, both religions held up renunciation as an ideal, and both established long-lasting monastic traditions. Politically, by the 3rd century BCE, the kingdom of Magadha had annexed or reduced other states to emerge as the Mauryan Empire. The empire was once thought to have controlled most of the subcontinent except the far south, but its core regions are now thought to have been separated by large autonomous areas. The Mauryan kings are known as much for their empire-building and determined management of public life as for Ashoka's renunciation of militarism and far-flung advocacy of the Buddhist dhamma.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Sangam literature of the Tamil language reveals that, between 200 BCE and 200 CE, the southern peninsula was ruled by the Cheras, the Cholas, and the Pandyas, dynasties that traded extensively with the Roman Empire and with West and Southeast Asia. In North India, Hinduism asserted patriarchal control within the family, leading to increased subordination of women. By the 4th and 5th centuries, the Gupta Empire had created a complex system of administration and taxation in the greater Ganges Plain; this system became a model for later Indian kingdoms. Under the Guptas, a renewed Hinduism based on devotion, rather than the management of ritual, began to assert itself. This renewal was reflected in a flowering of sculpture and architecture, which found patrons among an urban elite. Classical Sanskrit literature flowered as well, and Indian science, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics made significant advances.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Indian early medieval age, from 600 to 1200 CE, is defined by regional kingdoms and cultural diversity. When Harsha of Kannauj, who ruled much of the Indo-Gangetic Plain from 606 to 647 CE, attempted to expand southwards, he was defeated by the Chalukya ruler of the Deccan. When his successor attempted to expand eastwards, he was defeated by the Pala king of Bengal. When the Chalukyas attempted to expand southwards, they were defeated by the Pallavas from farther south, who in turn were opposed by the Pandyas and the Cholas from still farther south. No ruler of this period was able to create an empire and consistently control lands much beyond their core region. During this time, pastoral peoples, whose land had been cleared to make way for the growing agricultural economy, were accommodated within caste society, as were new non-traditional ruling classes. The caste system consequently began to show regional differences.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In the 6th and 7th centuries, the first devotional hymns were created in the Tamil language. They were imitated all over India and led to both the resurgence of Hinduism and the development of all modern languages of the subcontinent. Indian royalty, big and small, and the temples they patronised drew citizens in great numbers to the capital cities, which became economic hubs as well. Temple towns of various sizes began to appear everywhere as India underwent another urbanisation. By the 8th and 9th centuries, the effects were felt in Southeast Asia, as South Indian culture and political systems were exported to lands that became part of modern-day Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Brunei, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Indian merchants, scholars, and sometimes armies were involved in this transmission; Southeast Asians took the initiative as well, with many sojourning in Indian seminaries and translating Buddhist and Hindu texts into their languages.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After the 10th century, Muslim Central Asian nomadic clans, using swift-horse cavalry and raising vast armies united by ethnicity and religion, repeatedly overran South Asia's north-western plains, leading eventually to the establishment of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate in 1206. The sultanate was to control much of North India and to make many forays into South India. Although at first disruptive for the Indian elites, the sultanate largely left its vast non-Muslim subject population to its own laws and customs. By repeatedly repulsing Mongol raiders in the 13th century, the sultanate saved India from the devastation visited on West and Central Asia, setting the scene for centuries of migration of fleeing soldiers, learned men, mystics, traders, artists, and artisans from that region into the subcontinent, thereby creating a syncretic Indo-Islamic culture in the north. The sultanate's raiding and weakening of the regional kingdoms of South India paved the way for the indigenous Vijayanagara Empire. Embracing a strong Shaivite tradition and building upon the military technology of the sultanate, the empire came to control much of peninsular India, and was to influence South Indian society for long afterwards.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the early 16th century, northern India, then under mainly Muslim rulers, fell again to the superior mobility and firepower of a new generation of Central Asian warriors. The resulting Mughal Empire did not stamp out the local societies it came to rule. Instead, it balanced and pacified them through new administrative practices and diverse and inclusive ruling elites, leading to more systematic, centralised, and uniform rule. Eschewing tribal bonds and Islamic identity, especially under Akbar, the Mughals united their far-flung realms through loyalty, expressed through a Persianised culture, to an emperor who had near-divine status. The Mughal state's economic policies, deriving most revenues from agriculture and mandating that taxes be paid in the well-regulated silver currency, caused peasants and artisans to enter larger markets. The relative peace maintained by the empire during much of the 17th century was a factor in India's economic expansion, resulting in greater patronage of painting, literary forms, textiles, and architecture. Newly coherent social groups in northern and western India, such as the Marathas, the Rajputs, and the Sikhs, gained military and governing ambitions during Mughal rule, which, through collaboration or adversity, gave them both recognition and military experience. Expanding commerce during Mughal rule gave rise to new Indian commercial and political elites along the coasts of southern and eastern India. As the empire disintegrated, many among these elites were able to seek and control their own affairs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "By the early 18th century, with the lines between commercial and political dominance being increasingly blurred, a number of European trading companies, including the English East India Company, had established coastal outposts. The East India Company's control of the seas, greater resources, and more advanced military training and technology led it to increasingly assert its military strength and caused it to become attractive to a portion of the Indian elite; these factors were crucial in allowing the company to gain control over the Bengal region by 1765 and sideline the other European companies. Its further access to the riches of Bengal and the subsequent increased strength and size of its army enabled it to annex or subdue most of India by the 1820s. India was then no longer exporting manufactured goods as it long had, but was instead supplying the British Empire with raw materials. Many historians consider this to be the onset of India's colonial period. By this time, with its economic power severely curtailed by the British parliament and having effectively been made an arm of British administration, the East India Company began more consciously to enter non-economic arenas, including education, social reform, and culture.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Historians consider India's modern age to have begun sometime between 1848 and 1885. The appointment in 1848 of Lord Dalhousie as Governor General of the East India Company set the stage for changes essential to a modern state. These included the consolidation and demarcation of sovereignty, the surveillance of the population, and the education of citizens. Technological changes—among them, railways, canals, and the telegraph—were introduced not long after their introduction in Europe. However, disaffection with the company also grew during this time and set off the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Fed by diverse resentments and perceptions, including invasive British-style social reforms, harsh land taxes, and summary treatment of some rich landowners and princes, the rebellion rocked many regions of northern and central India and shook the foundations of Company rule. Although the rebellion was suppressed by 1858, it led to the dissolution of the East India Company and the direct administration of India by the British government. Proclaiming a unitary state and a gradual but limited British-style parliamentary system, the new rulers also protected princes and landed gentry as a feudal safeguard against future unrest. In the decades following, public life gradually emerged all over India, leading eventually to the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The rush of technology and the commercialisation of agriculture in the second half of the 19th century was marked by economic setbacks, and many small farmers became dependent on the whims of far-away markets. There was an increase in the number of large-scale famines, and, despite the risks of infrastructure development borne by Indian taxpayers, little industrial employment was generated for Indians. There were also salutary effects: commercial cropping, especially in the newly canalled Punjab, led to increased food production for internal consumption. The railway network provided critical famine relief, notably reduced the cost of moving goods, and helped nascent Indian-owned industry.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After World War I, in which approximately one million Indians served, a new period began. It was marked by British reforms but also repressive legislation, by more strident Indian calls for self-rule, and by the beginnings of a nonviolent movement of non-co-operation, of which Mahatma Gandhi would become the leader and enduring symbol. During the 1930s, slow legislative reform was enacted by the British; the Indian National Congress won victories in the resulting elections. The next decade was beset with crises: Indian participation in World War II, the Congress's final push for non-co-operation, and an upsurge of Muslim nationalism. All were capped by the advent of independence in 1947, but tempered by the partition of India into two states: India and Pakistan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Vital to India's self-image as an independent nation was its constitution, completed in 1950, which put in place a secular and democratic republic. Per the London Declaration, India retained its membership of the Commonwealth, becoming the first republic within it. Economic liberalisation, which began in the 1980s and the collaboration with Soviet Union for technical know-how, has created a large urban middle class, transformed India into one of the world's fastest-growing economies, and increased its geopolitical clout. Yet, India is also shaped by seemingly unyielding poverty, both rural and urban; by religious and caste-related violence; by Maoist-inspired Naxalite insurgencies; and by separatism in Jammu and Kashmir and in Northeast India. It has unresolved territorial disputes with China and with Pakistan. India's sustained democratic freedoms are unique among the world's newer nations; however, in spite of its recent economic successes, freedom from want for its disadvantaged population remains a goal yet to be achieved.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "India accounts for the bulk of the Indian subcontinent, lying atop the Indian tectonic plate, a part of the Indo-Australian Plate. India's defining geological processes began 75 million years ago when the Indian Plate, then part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, began a north-eastward drift caused by seafloor spreading to its south-west, and later, south and south-east. Simultaneously, the vast Tethyan oceanic crust, to its northeast, began to subduct under the Eurasian Plate. These dual processes, driven by convection in the Earth's mantle, both created the Indian Ocean and caused the Indian continental crust eventually to under-thrust Eurasia and to uplift the Himalayas. Immediately south of the emerging Himalayas, plate movement created a vast crescent-shaped trough that rapidly filled with river-borne sediment and now constitutes the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The original Indian plate makes its first appearance above the sediment in the ancient Aravalli range, which extends from the Delhi Ridge in a southwesterly direction. To the west lies the Thar Desert, the eastern spread of which is checked by the Aravallis.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The remaining Indian Plate survives as peninsular India, the oldest and geologically most stable part of India. It extends as far north as the Satpura and Vindhya ranges in central India. These parallel chains run from the Arabian Sea coast in Gujarat in the west to the coal-rich Chota Nagpur Plateau in Jharkhand in the east. To the south, the remaining peninsular landmass, the Deccan Plateau, is flanked on the west and east by coastal ranges known as the Western and Eastern Ghats; the plateau contains the country's oldest rock formations, some over one billion years old. Constituted in such fashion, India lies to the north of the equator between 6° 44′ and 35° 30′ north latitude and 68° 7′ and 97° 25′ east longitude.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "India's coastline measures 7,517 kilometres (4,700 mi) in length; of this distance, 5,423 kilometres (3,400 mi) belong to peninsular India and 2,094 kilometres (1,300 mi) to the Andaman, Nicobar, and Lakshadweep island chains. According to the Indian naval hydrographic charts, the mainland coastline consists of the following: 43% sandy beaches; 11% rocky shores, including cliffs; and 46% mudflats or marshy shores.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Major Himalayan-origin rivers that substantially flow through India include the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, both of which drain into the Bay of Bengal. Important tributaries of the Ganges include the Yamuna and the Kosi; the latter's extremely low gradient, caused by long-term silt deposition, leads to severe floods and course changes. Major peninsular rivers, whose steeper gradients prevent their waters from flooding, include the Godavari, the Mahanadi, the Kaveri, and the Krishna, which also drain into the Bay of Bengal; and the Narmada and the Tapti, which drain into the Arabian Sea. Coastal features include the marshy Rann of Kutch of western India and the alluvial Sundarbans delta of eastern India; the latter is shared with Bangladesh. India has two archipelagos: the Lakshadweep, coral atolls off India's south-western coast; and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a volcanic chain in the Andaman Sea.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Indian climate is strongly influenced by the Himalayas and the Thar Desert, both of which drive the economically and culturally pivotal summer and winter monsoons. The Himalayas prevent cold Central Asian katabatic winds from blowing in, keeping the bulk of the Indian subcontinent warmer than most locations at similar latitudes. The Thar Desert plays a crucial role in attracting the moisture-laden south-west summer monsoon winds that, between June and October, provide the majority of India's rainfall. Four major climatic groupings predominate in India: tropical wet, tropical dry, subtropical humid, and montane.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Temperatures in India have risen by 0.7 °C (1.3 °F) between 1901 and 2018. Climate change in India is often thought to be the cause. The retreat of Himalayan glaciers has adversely affected the flow rate of the major Himalayan rivers, including the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. According to some current projections, the number and severity of droughts in India will have markedly increased by the end of the present century.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "India is a megadiverse country, a term employed for 17 countries which display high biological diversity and contain many species exclusively indigenous, or endemic, to them. India is a habitat for 8.6% of all mammal species, 13.7% of bird species, 7.9% of reptile species, 6% of amphibian species, 12.2% of fish species, and 6.0% of all flowering plant species. Fully a third of Indian plant species are endemic. India also contains four of the world's 34 biodiversity hotspots, or regions that display significant habitat loss in the presence of high endemism.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "According to official statistics, India's forest cover is 713,789 km (275,595 sq mi), which is 21.71% of the country's total land area. It can be subdivided further into broad categories of canopy density, or the proportion of the area of a forest covered by its tree canopy. Very dense forest, whose canopy density is greater than 70%, occupies 3.02% of India's land area. It predominates in the tropical moist forest of the Andaman Islands, the Western Ghats, and Northeast India. Moderately dense forest, whose canopy density is between 40% and 70%, occupies 9.39% of India's land area. It predominates in the temperate coniferous forest of the Himalayas, the moist deciduous sal forest of eastern India, and the dry deciduous teak forest of central and southern India. Open forest, whose canopy density is between 10% and 40%, occupies 9.26% of India's land area. India has two natural zones of thorn forest, one in the Deccan Plateau, immediately east of the Western Ghats, and the other in the western part of the Indo-Gangetic plain, now turned into rich agricultural land by irrigation, its features no longer visible.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Among the Indian subcontinent's notable indigenous trees are the astringent Azadirachta indica, or neem, which is widely used in rural Indian herbal medicine, and the luxuriant Ficus religiosa, or peepul, which is displayed on the ancient seals of Mohenjo-daro, and under which the Buddha is recorded in the Pali canon to have sought enlightenment.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Many Indian species have descended from those of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent from which India separated more than 100 million years ago. India's subsequent collision with Eurasia set off a mass exchange of species. However, volcanism and climatic changes later caused the extinction of many endemic Indian forms. Still later, mammals entered India from Asia through two zoogeographical passes flanking the Himalayas. This had the effect of lowering endemism among India's mammals, which stands at 12.6%, contrasting with 45.8% among reptiles and 55.8% among amphibians. Among endemics are the vulnerable hooded leaf monkey and the threatened Beddome's toad of the Western Ghats.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "India contains 172 IUCN-designated threatened animal species, or 2.9% of endangered forms. These include the endangered Bengal tiger and the Ganges river dolphin. Critically endangered species include the gharial, a crocodilian; the great Indian bustard; and the Indian white-rumped vulture, which has become nearly extinct by having ingested the carrion of diclofenac-treated cattle. Before they were extensively used for agriculture and cleared for human settlement, the thorn forests of Punjab were mingled at intervals with open grasslands that were grazed by large herds of blackbuck preyed on by the Asiatic cheetah; the blackbuck, no longer extant in Punjab, is now severely endangered in India, and the cheetah is extinct. The pervasive and ecologically devastating human encroachment of recent decades has critically endangered Indian wildlife. In response, the system of national parks and protected areas, first established in 1935, was expanded substantially. In 1972, India enacted the Wildlife Protection Act and Project Tiger to safeguard crucial wilderness; the Forest Conservation Act was enacted in 1980 and amendments added in 1988. India hosts more than five hundred wildlife sanctuaries and eighteen biosphere reserves, four of which are part of the World Network of Biosphere Reserves; seventy-five wetlands are registered under the Ramsar Convention.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "A parliamentary republic with a multi-party system, India has six recognised national parties, including the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and more than 50 regional parties. The Congress is considered centre-left in Indian political culture, and the BJP right-wing. For most of the period between 1950—when India first became a republic—and the late 1980s, the Congress held a majority in the Parliament. Since then, however, it has increasingly shared the political stage with the BJP, as well as with powerful regional parties which have often forced the creation of multi-party coalition governments at the centre.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In the Republic of India's first three general elections, in 1951, 1957, and 1962, the Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru-led Congress won easy victories. On Nehru's death in 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri briefly became prime minister; he was succeeded, after his own unexpected death in 1966, by Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi, who went on to lead the Congress to election victories in 1967 and 1971. Following public discontent with the state of emergency she declared in 1975, the Congress was voted out of power in 1977; the then-new Janata Party, which had opposed the emergency, was voted in. Its government lasted just over two years. There were two prime ministers during this period; Morarji Desai and Charan Singh. Voted back into power in 1980, the Congress saw a change in leadership in 1984, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated; she was succeeded by her son Rajiv Gandhi, who won an easy victory in the general elections later that year. The Congress was voted out again in 1989 when a National Front coalition, led by the newly formed Janata Dal in alliance with the Left Front, won the elections; that government too proved relatively short-lived, lasting just under two years. There were two prime ministers during this period; V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar. Elections were held again in 1991; no party won an absolute majority. The Congress, as the largest single party, was able to form a minority government led by P. V. Narasimha Rao.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "A two-year period of political turmoil followed the general election of 1996. Several short-lived alliances shared power at the centre. The BJP formed a government briefly in 1996; it was followed by two comparatively long-lasting United Front coalitions, which depended on external support. There were two prime ministers during this period; H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral. In 1998, the BJP was able to form a successful coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the NDA became the first non-Congress, coalition government to complete a five-year term. Again in the 2004 Indian general elections, no party won an absolute majority, but the Congress emerged as the largest single party, forming another successful coalition: the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). It had the support of left-leaning parties and MPs who opposed the BJP. The UPA returned to power in the 2009 general election with increased numbers, and it no longer required external support from India's communist parties. That year, Manmohan Singh became the first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru in 1957 and 1962 to be re-elected to a consecutive five-year term. In the 2014 general election, the BJP became the first political party since 1984 to win a majority and govern without the support of other parties. In the 2019 general election, the BJP was victorious again. The incumbent prime minister is Narendra Modi, a former chief minister of Gujarat. On 22 July 2022, Droupadi Murmu was elected India's 15th president and took the oath of office on 25 July 2022.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "India is a federation with a parliamentary system governed under the Constitution of India—the country's supreme legal document. It is a constitutional republic.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Federalism in India defines the power distribution between the union and the states. The Constitution of India, which came into effect on 26 January 1950, originally stated India to be a \"sovereign, democratic republic;\" this characterisation was amended in 1971 to \"a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic\". India's form of government, traditionally described as \"quasi-federal\" with a strong centre and weak states, has grown increasingly federal since the late 1990s as a result of political, economic, and social changes.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Government of India comprises three branches:",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "India is a federal union comprising 28 states and 8 union territories. All states, as well as the union territories of Jammu and Kashmir, Puducherry and the National Capital Territory of Delhi, have elected legislatures and governments following the Westminster system of governance. The remaining five union territories are directly ruled by the central government through appointed administrators. In 1956, under the States Reorganisation Act, states were reorganised on a linguistic basis. There are over a quarter of a million local government bodies at city, town, block, district and village levels.",
"title": "Politics and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In the 1950s, India strongly supported decolonisation in Africa and Asia and played a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement. After initially cordial relations with neighbouring China, India went to war with China in 1962 and was widely thought to have been humiliated. This was followed by another military conflict in 1967 in which India successfully repelled Chinese attack. India has had tense relations with neighbouring Pakistan; the two nations have gone to war four times: in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999. Three of these wars were fought over the disputed territory of Kashmir, while the third, the 1971 war, followed from India's support for the independence of Bangladesh. In the late 1980s, the Indian military twice intervened abroad at the invitation of the host country: a peace-keeping operation in Sri Lanka between 1987 and 1990; and an armed intervention to prevent a 1988 coup d'état attempt in the Maldives. After the 1965 war with Pakistan, India began to pursue close military and economic ties with the Soviet Union; by the late 1960s, the Soviet Union was its largest arms supplier.",
"title": "Foreign, economic and strategic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Aside from its ongoing special relationship with Russia, India has wide-ranging defence relations with Israel and France. In recent years, it has played key roles in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and the World Trade Organization. The nation has provided 100,000 military and police personnel to serve in 35 UN peacekeeping operations across four continents. It participates in the East Asia Summit, the G8+5, and other multilateral forums. India has close economic ties with countries in South America, Asia, and Africa; it pursues a \"Look East\" policy that seeks to strengthen partnerships with the ASEAN nations, Japan, and South Korea that revolve around many issues, but especially those involving economic investment and regional security.",
"title": "Foreign, economic and strategic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "China's nuclear test of 1964, as well as its repeated threats to intervene in support of Pakistan in the 1965 war, convinced India to develop nuclear weapons. India conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 1974 and carried out additional underground testing in 1998. Despite criticism and military sanctions, India has signed neither the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty nor the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, considering both to be flawed and discriminatory. India maintains a \"no first use\" nuclear policy and is developing a nuclear triad capability as a part of its \"Minimum Credible Deterrence\" doctrine. It is developing a ballistic missile defence shield and, a fifth-generation fighter jet. Other indigenous military projects involve the design and implementation of Vikrant-class aircraft carriers and Arihant-class nuclear submarines.",
"title": "Foreign, economic and strategic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Since the end of the Cold War, India has increased its economic, strategic, and military co-operation with the United States and the European Union. In 2008, a civilian nuclear agreement was signed between India and the United States. Although India possessed nuclear weapons at the time and was not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it received waivers from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, ending earlier restrictions on India's nuclear technology and commerce. As a consequence, India became the sixth de facto nuclear weapons state. India subsequently signed co-operation agreements involving civilian nuclear energy with Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada.",
"title": "Foreign, economic and strategic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The President of India is the supreme commander of the nation's armed forces; with 1.45 million active troops, they compose the world's second-largest military. It comprises the Indian Army, the Indian Navy, the Indian Air Force, and the Indian Coast Guard. The official Indian defence budget for 2011 was US$36.03 billion, or 1.83% of GDP. Defence expenditure was pegged at US$70.12 billion for fiscal year 2022–23 and, increased 9.8% than previous fiscal year. India is the world's second-largest arms importer; between 2016 and 2020, it accounted for 9.5% of the total global arms imports. Much of the military expenditure was focused on defence against Pakistan and countering growing Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean. In May 2017, the Indian Space Research Organisation launched the South Asia Satellite, a gift from India to its neighbouring SAARC countries. In October 2018, India signed a US$5.43 billion (over ₹400 billion) agreement with Russia to procure four S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile defence systems, Russia's most advanced long-range missile defence system.",
"title": "Foreign, economic and strategic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Indian economy in 2022 was nominally worth $3.46 trillion; it was the fifth-largest economy by market exchange rates and is, around $11.6 trillion, the third-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). With its average annual GDP growth rate of 5.8% over the past two decades, and reaching 6.1% during 2011–2012, India is one of the world's fastest-growing economies. However, the country ranks 139th in the world in nominal GDP per capita and 118th in GDP per capita at PPP. Until 1991, all Indian governments followed protectionist policies that were influenced by socialist economics. Widespread state intervention and regulation largely walled the economy off from the outside world. An acute balance of payments crisis in 1991 forced the nation to liberalise its economy; since then, it has moved increasingly towards a free-market system by emphasising both foreign trade and direct investment inflows. India has been a member of World Trade Organization since 1 January 1995.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The 522-million-worker Indian labour force is the world's second-largest, as of 2017. The service sector makes up 55.6% of GDP, the industrial sector 26.3% and the agricultural sector 18.1%. India's foreign exchange remittances of US$100 billion in 2022, highest in the world, were contributed to its economy by 32 million Indians working in foreign countries. Major agricultural products include rice, wheat, oilseed, cotton, jute, tea, sugarcane, and potatoes. Major industries include textiles, telecommunications, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, food processing, steel, transport equipment, cement, mining, petroleum, machinery, and software. In 2006, the share of external trade in India's GDP stood at 24%, up from 6% in 1985. In 2008, India's share of world trade was 1.7%; In 2021, India was the world's ninth-largest importer and the sixteenth-largest exporter. Major exports include petroleum products, textile goods, jewellery, software, engineering goods, chemicals, and manufactured leather goods. Major imports include crude oil, machinery, gems, fertiliser, and chemicals. Between 2001 and 2011, the contribution of petrochemical and engineering goods to total exports grew from 14% to 42%. India was the world's second-largest textile exporter after China in the 2013 calendar year.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Averaging an economic growth rate of 7.5% for several years prior to 2007, India has more than doubled its hourly wage rates during the first decade of the 21st century. Some 431 million Indians have left poverty since 1985; India's middle classes are projected to number around 580 million by 2030. Though ranking 68th in global competitiveness, as of 2010, India ranks 17th in financial market sophistication, 24th in the banking sector, 44th in business sophistication, and 39th in innovation, ahead of several advanced economies. With seven of the world's top 15 information technology outsourcing companies based in India, as of 2009, the country is viewed as the second-most favourable outsourcing destination after the United States. India is ranked 40th in the Global Innovation Index in 2023. As of 2023, India's consumer market was the world's fifth-largest.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Driven by growth, India's nominal GDP per capita increased steadily from US$308 in 1991, when economic liberalisation began, to US$1,380 in 2010, to an estimated US$1,730 in 2016. It is expected to grow to US$2,466 by 2022. However, it has remained lower than those of other Asian developing countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, and is expected to remain so in the near future.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "According to a 2011 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report, India's GDP at purchasing power parity could overtake that of the United States by 2045. During the next four decades, Indian GDP is expected to grow at an annualised average of 8%, making it potentially the world's fastest-growing major economy until 2050. The report highlights key growth factors: a young and rapidly growing working-age population; growth in the manufacturing sector because of rising education and engineering skill levels; and sustained growth of the consumer market driven by a rapidly growing middle-class. The World Bank cautions that, for India to achieve its economic potential, it must continue to focus on public sector reform, transport infrastructure, agricultural and rural development, removal of labour regulations, education, energy security, and public health and nutrition.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "According to the Worldwide Cost of Living Report 2017 released by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) which was created by comparing more than 400 individual prices across 160 products and services, four of the cheapest cities were in India: Bangalore (3rd), Mumbai (5th), Chennai (5th) and New Delhi (8th).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "India's telecommunication industry is the second-largest in the world with over 1.2 billion subscribers. It contributes 6.5% to India's GDP. After the third quarter of 2017, India surpassed the US to become the second-largest smartphone market in the world after China.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Indian automotive industry, the world's second-fastest growing, increased domestic sales by 26% during 2009–2010, and exports by 36% during 2008–2009. In 2022, India became the world's third-largest vehicle market after China and the United States, surpassing Japan. At the end of 2011, the Indian IT industry employed 2.8 million professionals, generated revenues close to US$100 billion equalling 7.5% of Indian GDP, and contributed 26% of India's merchandise exports.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The pharmaceutical industry in India emerged as a global player. As of 2021, with 3000 pharmaceutical companies and 10,500 manufacturing units India is the world's third-largest pharmaceutical producer, largest producer of generic medicines and supply up to 50—60% of global vaccines demand, these all contribute up to US$24.44 billions in exports and India's local pharmaceutical market is estimated up to US$42 billion. India is among the top 12 biotech destinations in the world. The Indian biotech industry grew by 15.1% in 2012–2013, increasing its revenues from ₹204.4 billion (Indian rupees) to ₹235.24 billion (US$3.94 billion at June 2013 exchange rates).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "India's capacity to generate electrical power is 300 gigawatts, of which 42 gigawatts is renewable. The country's usage of coal is a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions by India but its renewable energy is competing strongly. India emits about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This equates to about 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year, which is half the world average. Increasing access to electricity and clean cooking with liquefied petroleum gas have been priorities for energy in India.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Despite economic growth during recent decades, India continues to face socio-economic challenges. In 2006, India contained the largest number of people living below the World Bank's international poverty line of US$1.25 per day. The proportion decreased from 60% in 1981 to 42% in 2005. Under the World Bank's later revised poverty line, it was 21% in 2011. 30.7% of India's children under the age of five are underweight. According to a Food and Agriculture Organization report in 2015, 15% of the population is undernourished. The Midday Meal Scheme attempts to lower these rates.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "A 2018 Walk Free Foundation report estimated that nearly 8 million people in India were living in different forms of modern slavery, such as bonded labour, child labour, human trafficking, and forced begging, among others. According to the 2011 census, there were 10.1 million child labourers in the country, a decline of 2.6 million from 12.6 million in 2001.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Since 1991, economic inequality between India's states has consistently grown: the per-capita net state domestic product of the richest states in 2007 was 3.2 times that of the poorest. Corruption in India is perceived to have decreased. According to the Corruption Perceptions Index, India ranked 78th out of 180 countries in 2018 with a score of 41 out of 100, an improvement from 85th in 2014.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Epidemic and pandemic diseases have long been a major factor, including COVID-19 and cholera.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "With 1,210,193,422 residents reported in the 2011 provisional census report, India was the world's second-most populous country. Its population grew by 17.64% from 2001 to 2011, compared to 21.54% growth in the previous decade (1991–2001). The human sex ratio, according to the 2011 census, is 940 females per 1,000 males. The median age was 28.7 as of 2020. The first post-colonial census, conducted in 1951, counted 361 million people. Medical advances made in the last 50 years as well as increased agricultural productivity brought about by the \"Green Revolution\" have caused India's population to grow rapidly.",
"title": "Demographics, languages and religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The life expectancy in India is at 70 years—71.5 years for women, 68.7 years for men. There are around 93 physicians per 100,000 people. Migration from rural to urban areas has been an important dynamic in India's recent history. The number of people living in urban areas grew by 31.2% between 1991 and 2001. Yet, in 2001, over 70% still lived in rural areas. The level of urbanisation increased further from 27.81% in the 2001 Census to 31.16% in the 2011 Census. The slowing down of the overall population growth rate was due to the sharp decline in the growth rate in rural areas since 1991. According to the 2011 census, there are 53 million-plus urban agglomerations in India; among them Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, in decreasing order by population. The literacy rate in 2011 was 74.04%: 65.46% among females and 82.14% among males. The rural-urban literacy gap, which was 21.2 percentage points in 2001, dropped to 16.1 percentage points in 2011. The improvement in the rural literacy rate is twice that of urban areas. Kerala is the most literate state with 93.91% literacy; while Bihar the least with 63.82%.",
"title": "Demographics, languages and religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Among speakers of the Indian languages, 74% speak Indo-Aryan languages, the easternmost branch of the Indo-European languages; 24% speak Dravidian languages, indigenous to South Asia and spoken widely before the spread of Indo-Aryan languages and 2% speak Austroasiatic languages or the Sino-Tibetan languages. India has no national language. Hindi, with the largest number of speakers, is the official language of the government. English is used extensively in business and administration and has the status of a \"subsidiary official language\"; it is important in education, especially as a medium of higher education. Each state and union territory has one or more official languages, and the constitution recognises in particular 22 \"scheduled languages\".",
"title": "Demographics, languages and religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The 2011 census reported the religion in India with the largest number of followers was Hinduism (79.80% of the population), followed by Islam (14.23%); the remaining were Christianity (2.30%), Sikhism (1.72%), Buddhism (0.70%), Jainism (0.36%) and others (0.9%). India has the third-largest Muslim population—the largest for a non-Muslim majority country.",
"title": "Demographics, languages and religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Indian cultural history spans more than 4,500 years. During the Vedic period (c. 1700 BCE – c. 500 BCE), the foundations of Hindu philosophy, mythology, theology and literature were laid, and many beliefs and practices which still exist today, such as dhárma, kárma, yóga, and mokṣa, were established. India is notable for its religious diversity, with Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, and Jainism among the nation's major religions. The predominant religion, Hinduism, has been shaped by various historical schools of thought, including those of the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras, the Bhakti movement, and by Buddhist philosophy.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "India has a very ancient tradition of art, which has exchanged many influences with the rest of Eurasia, especially in the first millennium, when Buddhist art spread with Indian religions to Central, East and Southeast Asia, the last also greatly influenced by Hindu art. Thousands of seals from the Indus Valley Civilization of the third millennium BCE have been found, usually carved with animals, but a few with human figures. The \"Pashupati\" seal, excavated in Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan, in 1928–29, is the best known. After this there is a long period with virtually nothing surviving. Almost all surviving ancient Indian art thereafter is in various forms of religious sculpture in durable materials, or coins. There was probably originally far more in wood, which is lost. In north India Mauryan art is the first imperial movement. In the first millennium CE, Buddhist art spread with Indian religions to Central, East and Southeast Asia, the last also greatly influenced by Hindu art. Over the following centuries a distinctly Indian style of sculpting the human figure developed, with less interest in articulating precise anatomy than ancient Greek sculpture but showing smoothly flowing forms expressing prana (\"breath\" or life-force). This is often complicated by the need to give figures multiple arms or heads, or represent different genders on the left and right of figures, as with the Ardhanarishvara form of Shiva and Parvati.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Most of the earliest large sculpture is Buddhist, either excavated from Buddhist stupas such as Sanchi, Sarnath and Amaravati, or is rock cut reliefs at sites such as Ajanta, Karla and Ellora. Hindu and Jain sites appear rather later. In spite of this complex mixture of religious traditions, generally, the prevailing artistic style at any time and place has been shared by the major religious groups, and sculptors probably usually served all communities. Gupta art, at its peak c. 300 CE – c. 500 CE, is often regarded as a classical period whose influence lingered for many centuries after; it saw a new dominance of Hindu sculpture, as at the Elephanta Caves. Across the north, this became rather stiff and formulaic after c. 800 CE, though rich with finely carved detail in the surrounds of statues. But in the South, under the Pallava and Chola dynasties, sculpture in both stone and bronze had a sustained period of great achievement; the large bronzes with Shiva as Nataraja have become an iconic symbol of India.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Ancient painting has only survived at a few sites, of which the crowded scenes of court life in the Ajanta Caves are by far the most important, but it was evidently highly developed, and is mentioned as a courtly accomplishment in Gupta times. Painted manuscripts of religious texts survive from Eastern India about the 10th century onwards, most of the earliest being Buddhist and later Jain. No doubt the style of these was used in larger paintings. The Persian-derived Deccan painting, starting just before the Mughal miniature, between them give the first large body of secular painting, with an emphasis on portraits, and the recording of princely pleasures and wars. The style spread to Hindu courts, especially among the Rajputs, and developed a variety of styles, with the smaller courts often the most innovative, with figures such as Nihâl Chand and Nainsukh. As a market developed among European residents, it was supplied by Company painting by Indian artists with considerable Western influence. In the 19th century, cheap Kalighat paintings of gods and everyday life, done on paper, were urban folk art from Calcutta, which later saw the Bengal School of Art, reflecting the art colleges founded by the British, the first movement in modern Indian painting.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Much of Indian architecture, including the Taj Mahal, other works of Indo-Islamic Mughal architecture, and South Indian architecture, blends ancient local traditions with imported styles. Vernacular architecture is also regional in its flavours. Vastu shastra, literally \"science of construction\" or \"architecture\" and ascribed to Mamuni Mayan, explores how the laws of nature affect human dwellings; it employs precise geometry and directional alignments to reflect perceived cosmic constructs. As applied in Hindu temple architecture, it is influenced by the Shilpa Shastras, a series of foundational texts whose basic mythological form is the Vastu-Purusha mandala, a square that embodied the \"absolute\". The Taj Mahal, built in Agra between 1631 and 1648 by orders of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife, has been described in the UNESCO World Heritage List as \"the jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world's heritage\". Indo-Saracenic Revival architecture, developed by the British in the late 19th century, drew on Indo-Islamic architecture.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The earliest literature in India, composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 CE, was in the Sanskrit language. Major works of Sanskrit literature include the Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE – c. 1200 BCE), the epics: Mahābhārata (c. 400 BCE – c. 400 CE) and the Ramayana (c. 300 BCE and later); Abhijñānaśākuntalam (The Recognition of Śakuntalā, and other dramas of Kālidāsa (c. 5th century CE) and Mahākāvya poetry. In Tamil literature, the Sangam literature (c. 600 BCE – c. 300 BCE) consisting of 2,381 poems, composed by 473 poets, is the earliest work. From the 14th to the 18th centuries, India's literary traditions went through a period of drastic change because of the emergence of devotional poets like Kabīr, Tulsīdās, and Guru Nānak. This period was characterised by a varied and wide spectrum of thought and expression; as a consequence, medieval Indian literary works differed significantly from classical traditions. In the 19th century, Indian writers took a new interest in social questions and psychological descriptions. In the 20th century, Indian literature was influenced by the works of the Bengali poet, author and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Indian music ranges over various traditions and regional styles. Classical music encompasses two genres and their various folk offshoots: the northern Hindustani and the southern Carnatic schools. Regionalised popular forms include filmi and folk music; the syncretic tradition of the bauls is a well-known form of the latter. Indian dance also features diverse folk and classical forms. Among the better-known folk dances are: bhangra of Punjab, bihu of Assam, Jhumair and chhau of Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal, garba and dandiya of Gujarat, ghoomar of Rajasthan, and lavani of Maharashtra. Eight dance forms, many with narrative forms and mythological elements, have been accorded classical dance status by India's National Academy of Music, Dance, and Drama. These are: bharatanatyam of the state of Tamil Nadu, kathak of Uttar Pradesh, kathakali and mohiniyattam of Kerala, kuchipudi of Andhra Pradesh, manipuri of Manipur, odissi of Odisha, and the sattriya of Assam.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Theatre in India melds music, dance, and improvised or written dialogue. Often based on Hindu mythology, but also borrowing from medieval romances or social and political events, Indian theatre includes: the bhavai of Gujarat, the jatra of West Bengal, the nautanki and ramlila of North India, tamasha of Maharashtra, burrakatha of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, terukkuttu of Tamil Nadu, and the yakshagana of Karnataka. India has a theatre training institute the National School of Drama (NSD) that is situated at New Delhi. It is an autonomous organisation under the Ministry of culture, Government of India. The Indian film industry produces the world's most-watched cinema. Established regional cinematic traditions exist in the Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Odia, Tamil, and Telugu languages. The Hindi language film industry (Bollywood) is the largest sector representing 43% of box office revenue, followed by the South Indian Telugu and Tamil film industries which represent 36% combined.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Television broadcasting began in India in 1959 as a state-run medium of communication and expanded slowly for more than two decades. The state monopoly on television broadcast ended in the 1990s. Since then, satellite channels have increasingly shaped the popular culture of Indian society. Today, television is the most penetrative media in India; industry estimates indicate that as of 2012 there are over 554 million TV consumers, 462 million with satellite or cable connections compared to other forms of mass media such as the press (350 million), radio (156 million) or internet (37 million).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Traditional Indian society is sometimes defined by social hierarchy. The Indian caste system embodies much of the social stratification and many of the social restrictions found on the Indian subcontinent. Social classes are defined by thousands of endogamous hereditary groups, often termed as jātis, or \"castes\". India abolished untouchability in 1950 with the adoption of the constitution and has since enacted other anti-discriminatory laws and social welfare initiatives.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Family values are important in the Indian tradition, and multi-generational patrilineal joint families have been the norm in India, though nuclear families are becoming common in urban areas. An overwhelming majority of Indians, with their consent, have their marriages arranged by their parents or other family elders. Marriage is thought to be for life, and the divorce rate is extremely low, with less than one in a thousand marriages ending in divorce. Child marriages are common, especially in rural areas; many women wed before reaching 18, which is their legal marriageable age. Female infanticide in India, and lately female foeticide, have created skewed gender ratios; the number of missing women in the country quadrupled from 15 million to 63 million in the 50-year period ending in 2014, faster than the population growth during the same period, and constituting 20 percent of India's female electorate. According to an Indian government study, an additional 21 million girls are unwanted and do not receive adequate care. Despite a government ban on sex-selective foeticide, the practice remains commonplace in India, the result of a preference for boys in a patriarchal society. The payment of dowry, although illegal, remains widespread across class lines. Deaths resulting from dowry, mostly from bride burning, are on the rise, despite stringent anti-dowry laws.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Many Indian festivals are religious in origin. The best known include Diwali, Ganesh Chaturthi, Thai Pongal, Holi, Durga Puja, Eid ul-Fitr, Bakr-Id, Christmas, and Vaisakhi.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In the 2011 census, about 73% of the population was literate, with 81% for men and 65% for women. This compares to 1981 when the respective rates were 41%, 53% and 29%. In 1951 the rates were 18%, 27% and 9%. In 1921 the rates 7%, 12% and 2%. In 1891 they were 5%, 9% and 1%, According to Latika Chaudhary, in 1911 there were under three primary schools for every ten villages. Statistically, more caste and religious diversity reduced private spending. Primary schools taught literacy, so local diversity limited its growth.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The education system of India is the world's second-largest. India has over 900 universities, 40,000 colleges and 1.5 million schools. In India's higher education system, a significant number of seats are reserved under affirmative action policies for the historically disadvantaged. In recent decades India's improved education system is often cited as one of the main contributors to its economic development.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "From ancient times until the advent of the modern, the most widely worn traditional dress in India was draped. For women it took the form of a sari, a single piece of cloth many yards long. The sari was traditionally wrapped around the lower body and the shoulder. In its modern form, it is combined with an underskirt, or Indian petticoat, and tucked in the waist band for more secure fastening. It is also commonly worn with an Indian blouse, or choli, which serves as the primary upper-body garment, the sari's end—passing over the shoulder—serving to cover the midriff and obscure the upper body's contours. For men, a similar but shorter length of cloth, the dhoti, has served as a lower-body garment.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The use of stitched clothes became widespread after Muslim rule was established at first by the Delhi sultanate (c. 1300 CE) and then continued by the Mughal Empire (c. 1525 CE). Among the garments introduced during this time and still commonly worn are: the shalwars and pyjamas, both styles of trousers, and the tunics kurta and kameez. In southern India, the traditional draped garments were to see much longer continuous use.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Shalwars are atypically wide at the waist but narrow to a cuffed bottom. They are held up by a drawstring, which causes them to become pleated around the waist. The pants can be wide and baggy, or they can be cut quite narrow, on the bias, in which case they are called churidars. When they are ordinarily wide at the waist and their bottoms are hemmed but not cuffed, they are called pyjamas. The kameez is a long shirt or tunic, its side seams left open below the waist-line. The kurta is traditionally collarless and made of cotton or silk; it is worn plain or with embroidered decoration, such as chikan; and typically falls to either just above or just below the wearer's knees.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In the last 50 years, fashions have changed a great deal in India. Increasingly, in urban northern India, the sari is no longer the apparel of everyday wear, though they remain popular on formal occasions. The traditional shalwar kameez is rarely worn by younger urban women, who favour churidars or jeans. In white-collar office settings, ubiquitous air conditioning allows men to wear sports jackets year-round. For weddings and formal occasions, men in the middle- and upper classes often wear bandgala, or short Nehru jackets, with pants, with the groom and his groomsmen sporting sherwanis and churidars. The dhoti, once the universal garment of Hindu males, the wearing of which in the homespun and handwoven khadi allowed Gandhi to bring Indian nationalism to the millions, is seldom seen in the cities.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The foundation of a typical Indian meal is a cereal cooked in a plain fashion and complemented with flavourful savoury dishes. The cooked cereal could be steamed rice; chapati, a thin unleavened bread made from wheat flour, or occasionally cornmeal, and griddle-cooked dry; the idli, a steamed breakfast cake, or dosa, a griddled pancake, both leavened and made from a batter of rice- and gram meal. The savoury dishes might include lentils, pulses and vegetables commonly spiced with ginger and garlic, but also with a combination of spices that may include coriander, cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamon and others as informed by culinary conventions. They might also include poultry, fish, or meat dishes. In some instances, the ingredients might be mixed during the process of cooking.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "A platter, or thali, used for eating usually has a central place reserved for the cooked cereal, and peripheral ones for the flavourful accompaniments, which are often served in small bowls. The cereal and its accompaniments are eaten simultaneously rather than a piecemeal manner. This is accomplished by mixing—for example of rice and lentils—or folding, wrapping, scooping or dipping—such as chapati and cooked vegetables or lentils.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "India has distinctive vegetarian cuisines, each a feature of the geographical and cultural histories of its adherents. The appearance of ahimsa, or the avoidance of violence toward all forms of life in many religious orders early in Indian history, especially Upanishadic Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, is thought to have contributed to the predominance of vegetarianism among a large segment of India's Hindu population, especially in southern India, Gujarat, the Hindi-speaking belt of north-central India, as well as among Jains. Although meat is eaten widely in India, the proportional consumption of meat in the overall diet is low. Unlike China, which has increased its per capita meat consumption substantially in its years of increased economic growth, in India the strong dietary traditions have contributed to dairy, rather than meat, becoming the preferred form of animal protein consumption.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The most significant import of cooking techniques into India during the last millennium occurred during the Mughal Empire. Dishes such as the pilaf, developed in the Abbasid caliphate, and cooking techniques such as the marinating of meat in yogurt, spread into northern India from regions to its northwest. To the simple yogurt marinade of Persia, onions, garlic, almonds, and spices began to be added in India. Rice was partially cooked and layered alternately with the sauteed meat, the pot sealed tightly, and slow cooked according to another Persian cooking technique, to produce what has today become the Indian biryani, a feature of festive dining in many parts of India. In the food served in Indian restaurants worldwide the diversity of Indian food has been partially concealed by the dominance of Punjabi cuisine. The popularity of tandoori chicken—cooked in the tandoor oven, which had traditionally been used for baking bread in the rural Punjab and the Delhi region, especially among Muslims, but which is originally from Central Asia—dates to the 1950s, and was caused in large part by an entrepreneurial response among people from the Punjab who had been displaced by the 1947 partition of India.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Several traditional indigenous sports such as kabaddi, kho kho, pehlwani and gilli-danda, and also martial arts such as Kalarippayattu and marma adi, remain popular. Chess is commonly held to have originated in India as chaturaṅga; in recent years, there has been a rise in the number of Indian grandmasters. Viswanathan Anand became the Chess World Champion in 2007 and held the status until 2013. He also won the Chess World Cup in 2000 and 2002. In 2023, R Praggnanandhaa finished as runners up in the tournament. Parcheesi is derived from Pachisi, another traditional Indian pastime, which in early modern times was played on a giant marble court by Mughal emperor Akbar the Great.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Cricket is the most popular sport in India. Major domestic leagues include the Indian Premier League. Professional leagues in other sports include the Indian Super League (football) and the Pro Kabaddi league.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "India has won two Cricket World Cups, the 1983 edition and the 2011 edition, as well as becoming the inaugural T20 World Cup Champions in 2007. India has also won the Champions Trophy twice, in 2002 and 2013. The only edition of the World Championship of Cricket was won by India in 1985.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "India also has eight field hockey gold medals in the summer olympics. The improved results garnered by the Indian Davis Cup team and other tennis players in the early 2010s have made tennis increasingly popular in the country. India has a comparatively strong presence in shooting sports, and has won several medals at the Olympics, the World Shooting Championships, and the Commonwealth Games. Other sports in which Indians have succeeded internationally include badminton (Saina Nehwal and P. V. Sindhu are two of the top-ranked female badminton players in the world), boxing, and wrestling. Football is popular in West Bengal, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and the north-eastern states.India has traditionally been the dominant country at the South Asian Games. An example of this dominance is the basketball competition where the Indian team won four out of five tournaments to date.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "India has hosted or co-hosted several international sporting events: the 1951 and 1982 Asian Games; the 1987, 1996, 2011 and 2023 ICC Men's Cricket World Cup tournaments (and is also scheduled to host it in 2031); the 1978, 1997 and 2013 ICC Women's Cricket World Cup tournaments (and is also scheduled to host it in 2025); the 1987, 1985 and 2016 South Asian Games; the 1990-91 Men's Asia Cup; the 2002 Chess World Cup; the 2003 Afro-Asian Games; the 2006 ICC Cricket Champion's Trophy (and is also scheduled to host it in 2029); the 2006 Women's Asia Cup; the 2009 World Badminton Championships; the 2010 Hockey World Cup; the 2010 Commonwealth Games; the 2016 ICC Men's Cricket T20 World Cup (and is also scheduled to host it in 2026); the 2016 ICC Women's Cricket T20 World Cup and the 2017 FIFA U-17 World Cup. Major international sporting events held annually in India include the Maharashtra Open, the Mumbai Marathon, the Delhi Half Marathon, and the Indian Masters. The first Formula 1 Indian Grand Prix featured in late 2011 but has been discontinued from the F1 season calendar since 2014.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Overview",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Etymology",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "History",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Geography",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Biodiversity",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Politics",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Foreign relations and military",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Economy",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Demographics",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Art",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Culture",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Government",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "General information",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "21°N 78°E / 21°N 78°E / 21; 78",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| India, officially the Republic of India (ISO: Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area; the most populous country as of June 2023; and from the time of its independence in 1947, the world's most populous democracy. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia. Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago.
Their long occupation, initially in varying forms of isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse, second only to Africa in human genetic diversity. Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE.
By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest. Its evidence today is found in the hymns of the Rigveda. Preserved by an oral tradition that was resolutely vigilant, the Rigveda records the dawning of Hinduism in India. The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the northern and western regions.
By 400 BCE, stratification and exclusion by caste had emerged within Hinduism,
and Buddhism and Jainism had arisen, proclaiming social orders unlinked to heredity.
Early political consolidations gave rise to the loose-knit Maurya and Gupta Empires based in the Ganges Basin.
Their collective era was suffused with wide-ranging creativity, but also marked by the declining status of women, and the incorporation of untouchability into an organised system of belief. In South India, the Middle kingdoms exported Dravidian-languages scripts and religious cultures to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia. In the early medieval era, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism became established on India's southern and western coasts.
Muslim armies from Central Asia intermittently overran India's northern plains,
eventually founding the Delhi Sultanate, and drawing northern India into the cosmopolitan networks of medieval Islam.
In the 15th century, the Vijayanagara Empire created a long-lasting composite Hindu culture in south India.
In the Punjab, Sikhism emerged, rejecting institutionalised religion.
The Mughal Empire, in 1526, ushered in two centuries of relative peace,
leaving a legacy of luminous architecture.
Gradually expanding rule of the British East India Company followed, turning India into a colonial economy, but also consolidating its sovereignty. British Crown rule began in 1858. The rights promised to Indians were granted slowly, but technological changes were introduced, and modern ideas of education and the public life took root. A pioneering and influential nationalist movement emerged, which was noted for nonviolent resistance and became the major factor in ending British rule. In 1947 the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two independent dominions, a Hindu-majority Dominion of India and a Muslim-majority Dominion of Pakistan, amid large-scale loss of life and an unprecedented migration. India has been a federal republic since 1950, governed through a democratic parliamentary system. It is a pluralistic, multilingual and multi-ethnic society. India's population grew from 361 million in 1951 to almost 1.4 billion in 2022.
During the same time, its nominal per capita income increased from US$64 annually to US$2,601, and its literacy rate from 16.6% to 74%. From being a comparatively destitute country in 1951, India has become a fast-growing major economy and a hub for information technology services, with an expanding middle class. India has a space programme with several planned or completed extraterrestrial missions. It is the fourth country to land a craft on the moon and the first to do so within 600 kilometres (370 mi) of the Lunar south pole. Indian movies, music, and spiritual teachings play an increasing role in global culture. India has substantially reduced its rate of poverty, though at the cost of increasing economic inequality. India is a nuclear-weapon state, which ranks high in military expenditure. It has disputes over Kashmir with its neighbours, Pakistan and China, unresolved since the mid-20th century. Among the socio-economic challenges India faces are gender inequality, child malnutrition, and rising levels of air pollution. India's land is megadiverse, with four biodiversity hotspots. Its forest cover comprises 21.7% of its area. India's wildlife, which has traditionally been viewed with tolerance in India's culture, is supported among these forests, and elsewhere, in protected habitats. | 2001-10-26T17:25:25Z | 2023-12-30T04:30:42Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India |
14,535 | Music of India | Owing to India's vastness and diversity, Indian music encompasses numerous genres in multiple varieties and forms which include classical music, folk, rock, and pop. It has a history spanning several millennia and developed over several geo-locations spanning the sub-continent. Music in India began as an integral part of socio-religious life.
The 30,000-year-old paleolithic and neolithic cave paintings at the UNESCO world heritage site at Bhimbetka rock shelters in Madhya Pradesh show a type of dance. Mesolithic and chalcolithic cave art of Bhimbetka illustrates musical instruments such as Gongs, Bowed Lyre, daf etc.
Chalcolithic era (4000 BCE onward) narrow bar shaped polished stone celts like music instruments, one of the earlier musical instrument in India, were excavated at Sankarjang in the Angul district of Odisha. There is historical evidence in the form of sculptural evidence, i.e. musical instruments, singing and dancing postures of damsels in the Ranigumpha Caves in Khandagiri and Udayagiri at Bhubaneswar.
Dancing Girl sculpture (2500 BCE) was found from the Indus Valley civilization (IVC) site. There are IVC-era paintings on pottery of a man with a dhol hanging from his neck and a woman holding a drum under her left arm.
Vedas (c. 1500 – c. 800 BCE Vedic period) document rituals with performing arts and play. For example, Shatapatha Brahmana (~800–700 BCE) has verses in chapter 13.2 written in the form of a play between two actors. Tala or taal is an ancient music concept traceable to Vedic era texts of Hinduism, such as the Samaveda and methods for singing the Vedic hymns. Smriti (500 BCE to 100 BCE ) post-vedic Hindu texts include Valmiki's Ramayana (500 BCE to 100 BCE) which mentions dance and music (dance by Apsaras such as Urvashi, Rambha, Menaka, Tilottama Panchāpsaras, and Ravana's wives excelling in nrityageeta or "singing and dancing" and nritavaditra or "playing musical instruments"), music and singing by Gandharvas, several string instruments (vina, tantri, bīn, vipanci and vallaki similar to veena), wind instruments (shankha, venu and venugana – likely a mouth organ made by tying several flutes together), raga (including kaushika such as raag kaushik dhwani), vocal registers (seven svara or sur, ana or ekashurti drag note, murchana the regulated rise and fall of voice in matra and tripramana three-fold teen taal laya such as drut or quick, madhya or middle, and vilambit or slow), poetry recitation in Bala Kanda and also in Uttara Kanda by Luv and Kusha in marga style.
Starting from the earliest known work Tholkappiyam (500 BCE), there are several references to music and Panns in the ancient pre-Sangam and Sangam literature starting from the earliest known work Tholkappiyam (500 BCE). Among Sangam literature, Mathuraikkanci refers to women singing sevvazhi pann to invoke the mercy of God during childbirth. In Tolkappiyam, the five landscapes of the Sangam literature had each an associated Pann, each describing the mood of the song associated with that landscape. Among the numerous panns that find mention in the ancient Tamil literature are, Ambal Pann, which is suitable to be played on the flute, sevvazhi pann on the Yazh (lute), Nottiram and Sevvazhi expressing pathos, the captivating Kurinji pann and the invigorating Murudappann. Pann(Tamil: பண்) is the melodic mode used by the Tamil people in their music since the ancient times. The ancient panns over centuries evolved first into a pentatonic scale and later into the seven note Carnatic Sargam. But from the earliest times, Tamil Music is heptatonic and known as Ezhisai (ஏழிசை).
sanskrit saint-poet Jayadeva, who was the great composer and illustrious master of classical music, shaped Odra-Magadhi style music and had great influence on Odissi Sangita.
Śārṅgadeva composed Sangita-Ratnakara, one of the most important Sanskrit musicological texts from India, which is regarded as the definitive text in both Hindustani music and Carnatic music traditions of Indian classical music.
Assamese poet Madhava Kandali, writer of Saptakanda Ramayana, lists several instruments in his version of "Ramayana", such as mardala, khumuchi, bhemachi, dagar, gratal, ramtal, tabal, jhajhar, jinjiri, bheri mahari, tokari, dosari, kendara, dotara, vina, rudra-vipanchi, etc. (meaning that these instruments existed since his time in the 14th century or earlier). The Indian system of notation is perhaps the world's oldest and most elaborate.
In the early 14th century under the Khiljis, there were concerts and competitions between Hindustani and Carnatic musicians.
From the 16th century onwards, treatises written on music were Sangitamava Chandrika, Gita Prakasha, Sangita Kalalata and Natya Manorama.
In the early 1960s Jazz pioneers such as John Coltrane and George Harrison collaborated with Indian instrumentalists and started to use Indian instruments such as sitar in their songs. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, rock and roll fusions with Indian music were well known throughout Europe and North America. In the late 1980s, Indian-British artists fused Indian and Western traditions to make the Asian Underground. In the new millennium, American hip-hop has featured Indian filmi and bhangra. Mainstream hip-hop artists have sampled songs from Bollywood movies and have collaborated with Indian artists, such as Timbaland's "Indian Flute"
In 2010, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons collaborated with the Dharohar Project.
The two main traditions of Indian classical music are Carnatic music, which is practised predominantly in the peninsular (southern) regions, and Hindustani music, which is found in the northern, eastern and central regions. The basic concepts of this music includes Shruti (microtones), Swaras (notes), Alankar (ornamentations), Raga (melodies improvised from basic grammars), and Tala (rhythmic patterns used in percussion). Its tonal system divides the octave into 22 segments called Shrutis, not all equal but each roughly equal to a quarter of a whole tone of the Western music. Both the classical music are standing on the fundamentals of The seven notes of Indian Classical music. These seven notes are also called as Sapta svara or Sapta Sur. These seven svaras are Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni respectively. These Sapta Svaras are spelt as Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni, but these are shortforms of Shadja (षड्ज), Rishabha (ऋषभ), Gandhara (गान्धार), Madhyama (मध्यम), Panchama (पंचम), Dhaivata (धैवत) and Nishada (निषाद) respectively. These are also equivalent to Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti. Only these seven svaras built up the Hindustani classical music and the Carnatic classical music. These seven svaras are the fundamentals of a raga. This seven svaras without any variations in them, are called as Shuddha svaras. Variations in these svaras cause them to be Komal and Tivra svaras. All the other svaras except Sadja(Sa) and Pancham (Pa) can be Komal or Tivra svaras but Sa and Pa are always Shuddha svaras. And hence svaras Sa and Pa are called Achal Svaras, since these svaras don't move from their original position while svaras Ra, Ga, Ma, Dha, Ni are called Chal Svaras, since these svaras move from their original position.
Sangeet Natak Academy recognizes eight classical dance and music forms, namely Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Kuchipudi, Odissi, Kathakali, Sattriya, Manipuri and Mohiniyattam. Additionally, India's Ministry of culture also includes Chhau in its classical list.
Carnatic music can be traced to the 14th - 15th centuries AD and thereafter. It originated in South India during the rule of Vijayanagar Empire through the Keerthanas composed by Purandara Dasa. Like Hindustani music, it is melodic, with improvised variations, but tends to have more fixed compositions. It consists of a composition with improvised embellishments added to the piece in the forms of Raga Alapana, Kalpanaswaram, Neraval and, in the case of more advanced students, Ragam Thanam Pallavi. The main emphasis is on the vocals as most compositions are written to be sung, and even when played on instruments, they are meant to be performed in a singing style (known as gāyaki). Around 300 ragams are in use today. Annamayya is the first known composer in Carnatic music. He is widely regarded as the Andhra Pada kavitā Pitāmaha (Godfather of Telugu song-writing). Purandara Dasa is considered the father of Carnatic music, while the later musicians Tyagaraja, Shyama Shastry and Muthuswami Dikshitar are considered the trinity of Carnatic music.
Noted artists of Carnatic music include Tiger Varadachariyar, M D Ramanathan, Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar (the father of the current concert format), Palghat Mani Iyer, Madurai Mani Iyer, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Nedunuri Krishnamurthy Alathur Brothers, MS Subbulakshmi, Lalgudi Jayaraman, Balamuralikrishna, TN Seshagopalan, K J Yesudas, N. Ramani, Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman, Sanjay Subrahmanyan, TM Krishna, Bombay Jayashri, T S Nandakumar, Aruna Sairam, Mysore Manjunath,
Every December, the city of Chennai in India has its eight-week-long Music Season, which is the world's largest cultural event.
Carnatic music has served as the foundation for most music in South India, including folk music, festival music and has also extended its influence to film music in the past 100–150 years or so.
The tradition of Hindustani music dates back to Vedic times where the hymns in the Sama Veda, an ancient religious text, were sung as Samagana and not chanted. It diverged from Carnatic music around the 13th–14th centuries CE, primarily due to Islamic influences. Developing a strong and diverse tradition over several centuries, it has contemporary traditions established primarily in India but also in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In contrast to Carnatic music, the other main Indian classical music tradition originating from the South, Hindustani music was not only influenced by ancient Hindu musical traditions, historical Vedic philosophy and native Indian sounds but also enriched by the Persian performance practices of the Mughals. Classical genres are dhrupad, dhamar, khyal, tarana and sadra, and there are also several semi-classical forms.
The root of the name C(K)arnatic music is derived from Sanskrit. Karnam means ears and Atakam means that which is sweet or that which lingers on.
There are many types of music which comes under the category of light classical or semi-classical. Some of the forms are Thumri, Dadra, Bhajan, Ghazal, Chaiti, Kajri, Tappa, Natya Sangeet and Qawwali. These forms place emphasis on explicitly seeking emotion from the audience, as opposed to the classical forms.
This is a musical genre of the Tamang people and popular amongst the Nepali speaking community in West Bengal, Sikkim, India and around the world. It is accompanied by Tamang instruments, the Madal, Damphu and Tungna, although nowadays musicians have taken to modern instruments. A Tamang Selo can be catchy and lively or slow and melodious, and is usually sung to convey sorrow, love, happiness or day-to-day incidents and stories of folklore.
Hira Devi Waiba is hailed as the pioneer of Nepali folk songs and Tamang Selo. Her song 'Chura ta Hoina Astura' (चुरा त होइन अस्तुरा) is said to be the first Tamang Selo ever recorded. She has sung nearly 300 songs through her musical career spanning 40 years. After Waiba's death in 2011, her son Satya Aditya Waiba (producer/manager) and Navneet Aditya Waiba (singer) collaborated and re-recorded her most iconic songs and released an album titled Ama Lai Shraddhanjali (आमालाई श्रद्धाञ्जली-Tribute to Mother). The duo are the only individuals in the Nepali folk music genre who produce authentic traditional Nepali folk songs without adulteration or modernisation.
Bhangra (Punjabi: ਭੰਗੜਾ) is a form of dance-oriented folk music of Punjab. The present musical
style is derived from non-traditional musical accompaniment to the riffs of Punjab called by the same name. The female dance of Punjab region is known as Giddha (Punjabi: ਗਿੱਧਾ).
Bihu (Assamese: বিহু) is the festival of New Year of Assam falling on mid-April. This is a festival of nature and mother earth where the first day is for the cows and buffaloes. The second day of the festival is for the man. Bihu dances and songs accompanied by traditional drums and wind instruments are an essential part of this festival. Bihu songs are energetic and with beats to welcome the festive spring. Assamese drums (dhol), Pepa(usually made from buffalo horn), Gogona are major instruments used.
Borgeets (Assamese: বৰগীত) are lyrical songs that are set to specific ragas but not necessarily to any tala. These songs, composed by Srimanta Sankardeva and Madhavdeva in the 15th–16th centuries, are used to begin prayer services in monasteries, e.g. Satra and Namghar associated with the Ekasarana Dharma; and they also belong to the repertoire of Music of Assam outside the religious context. They are a lyrical strain that express the religious sentiments of the poets reacting to different situations, and differ from other lyrics associated with the Ekasarana Dharma.
Prominent instruments used in borgeets are Negera,Taal, Khols etc.
Dandiya or Raas is a form of Gujarati cultural dance that is performed with sticks. The present musical style is derived from the traditional musical accompaniment to the folk dance. It is practiced mainly in the state of Gujarat. There is also another type of dance and music associated with Dandiya/Raas called Garba.
Gaana is a rap-like "collection of rhythms, beats and sensibilities native to the Dalits of Chennai." It evolved over the past two centuries, combining influences from the siddhars (tantric adepts) of ancient Tamilakam, Tamil Sufi saints, and more. Gaana songs are performed at weddings, stage shows, political rallies, and funerals. Performers sing about a wide range of topics, but the essence of gaana is said to be "angst and melancholy" based in life's struggles. In the past few decades, the genre has entered the music of the mainstream Tamil film industry and gained popularity. Contemporary gaana bands like The Casteless Collective are bringing the genre to new audiences while using it for social activism, especially against caste discrimination.
Haryana folk music has two main forms: classical folk music of Haryana and desi folk music of Haryana (country music of Haryana). They take the form of ballads and pangs of parting of lovers, valor and bravery, harvest and happiness. Haryana is rich in musical tradition and even places have been named after ragas, for example Charkhi Dadri district has many villages named as Nandyam, Sarangpur, Bilawala, Brindabana, Todi, Asaveri, Jaisri, Malakoshna, Hindola, Bhairvi and Gopi Kalyana.
Himachal's folk music varies according to the event or the festival. One of the most popular style of music is Nati Music, where nati being the traditional dance that is done on the song. Nati Music is usually celebratory, and done in fairs or other occasions such as marriages.
Jhumair and Domkach are Nagpuri folk music. The musical instruments used in folk music and dance are Dhol, Mandar, Bansi, Nagara, Dhak, Shehnai, Khartal, Narsinga etc.
Lavani comes from the word Lavanya which means "beauty". This is one of the most popular forms of dance and music that is practiced all over Maharashtra. It has, in fact, become a necessary part of the Maharashtrian folk dance performances. Traditionally, the songs are sung by female artists, but male artists may occasionally sing Lavanis. The dance format associated with Lavani is known as Tamasha. Lavani is a combination of traditional song and dance, which particularly performed to the enchanting beats of 'Dholaki', a drum-like instrument. The dance is performed by attractive women wearing nine-yard saris. They are sung in a quick tempo. Lavani originated in the arid region of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.
Music of Manipur and Manipuri dance are heritage of Manipuri people. According to tradition of the Manipuri people in the Himalayan foothills and valleys connecting India to Burma, they are the Gandharvas (celestial musicians and dancers) in the Vedic texts, and historic texts of Manipuri people calls the region as Gandharva-desa. The Vedic Usha, the goddess of the dawn, is a cultural motif for Manipuri women, and in the Indian tradition, it was Usha who created and taught the art of feminine dance to girls. This oral tradition of women's dance is celebrated as Chingkheirol in the Manipuri tradition.
The ancient Sanskrit texts such as the Mahabharata epic mentions Manipur, where Arjuna meets and falls in love with Chitragada. Dance is called Jagoi in a major Meitei language of the region and it traces a long tradition in Manipur. Lai Haraoba dance likely has ancient roots and shares many similarities with dance postures of Nataraja and his legendary disciple called Tandu (locally called Tangkhu). Similarly, as does the dance related to commoner Khamba and princess Thoibi – who perform as pan-Indian Shiva and Parvati, in the legendary tragic love story of Khamba-Thoibi found in the Manipuri epic Moirang Parba.
Hadrani Marfa, or simply Marfa music, introduced during the 18th century in Hyderabad State by the East African Siddi community from Afro-Arab music of Hadhramawt in Yemen, is a form of celebratory rhythmic music and dance among the Hyderabadi Muslims, played with high tempo using Marfa instrument, daff, Dhol, sticks, steel pots and wooden strips called thapi.
Mizo Music originated when couplets were developed during the settlement of Thantlang in Burma between 1300 and 1400 CE, and folk songs developed during this period were dar hla (songs on gong); Bawh hla (War chants), Hlado (Chants of hunting); Nauawih hla (Cradle songs) A greater development of songs can be seen from the settlement of Lentlang in Burma, estimated between late 15th to 17th Century CE. The Mizo occupied the present Mizoram from the late 17th century. The pre-colonial period, that is from the 18th to 19th century was another important era in the history of Mizo folk literature. Prior to the annexation by the British Government, the Mizo occupied the present Mizoram for two centuries. In comparison with the folk songs of Thantlang and Lentlang settlement, the songs of this period are more developed in its number, form and contents. The languages are more polished and the flows also better. Most of the songs of this period are named after the composers.
Jayadeva, the 12th century sanskrit saint-poet, the great composer and illustrious master of classical music, has immense contribution to Odissi music. During his time Odra-Magadhi style music got shaped and achieved its classical status. He indicated the classical ragas prevailing at that time in which these were to be sung. Prior to that there was the tradition of Chhanda which was simple in musical outline. From the 16th century onwards, treatises on music were Sangitamava Chandrika, Gita Prakasha, Sangita Kalalata and Natya Manorama. A couple of treatise namely, Sangita Sarani and Sangi Narayana, were also written in the early path of the 19th century.
Odissi Sangita comprises four classes of music namely Dhruvapada, Chitrapada, Chitrakala and Panchal, described in the ancient oriya music texts. The chief Odissi and Shokabaradi. Odissi Sangita (music) is a synthesis of four classes of music, i.e. Dhruvapada, Chitrapada, Chitrakala and Panchal, described in the above-mentioned texts.
The great exponents of Odissi music in modern times are the Late Singhari Shyamasundara Kar, Markandeya Mahapatra, Kashinath Pujapanda, Balakrushna Das, Gopal Chandra Panda, Ramhari Das, Bhubaneswari Misra, Shymamani Devi and Sunanda Patnaik, who have achieved eminence in classical music.
Rabindra Sangeet (Bengali: রবীন্দ্রসঙ্গীত Robindro Shonggit, Bengali pronunciation: [ɾobindɾo ʃoŋɡit]), also known as Tagore songs, are songs written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore. They have distinctive characteristics in the music of Bengal, popular in India and Bangladesh. "Sangeet" means music, "Rabindra Sangeet" means music (or more aptly songs) of Rabindra.
Tagore wrote some 2,230 songs in Bengali, now known as Rabindra Sangeet, using classical music and traditional folk music as sources.
Tagore wrote national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and influenced the national anthem of Sri Lanka.
Rajasthan has a very diverse cultural collection of musician castes, including Langas, Sapera, Bhopa, Jogi and Manganiyar (lit. "the ones who ask/beg"). Rajasthan Diary quotes it as a soulful, full-throated music with harmonious diversity. The melodies of Rajasthan come from a variety of instruments. The stringed variety includes the Sarangi, Ravanahatha, Kamayacha, Morsing and Ektara. Percussion instruments come in all shapes and sizes from the huge Nagaras and Dhols to the tiny Damrus. The Daf and Chang are a favorite of Holi (the festival of colours) revelers. Flutes and bagpipers come in local flavors such as Shehnai, Poongi, Algoza, Tarpi, Been and Bankia.
Rajasthani music is derived from a combination of string instruments, percussion instruments and wind instruments accompanied by renditions of folk singers. It enjoys a respectable presence in Bollywood music as well.
Sufi folk rock contains elements of modern hard rock and traditional folk music with Sufi poetry. While it was pioneered by bands like Junoon in Pakistan it became very popular, especially in northern India.
Uttarakhandi folk music had its root in the lap of nature and the hilly terrain of the region. Common themes in the folk music of Uttarakhand are the beauty of nature, various seasons, festivals, religious traditions, cultural practices, folk stories, historical characters, and the bravery of ancestors. The folk songs of Uttarakhand are a reflection of the cultural heritage and the way people live their lives in the Himalayas. Musical instruments used in Uttarakhand music include the Dhol, Damoun, Hudka, Turri, Ransingha, Dholki, Daur, Thali, Bhankora and Masakbhaja. Tabla and Harmonium are also sometimes used, especially in recorded folk music from the 1960s onwards. Generic Indian and global musical instruments have been incorporated in modern popular folks by singers like Mohan Upreti, Narendra Singh Negi, Gopal Babu Goswami, and Chandra Singh Rahi.
Dance music, more popularly called "DJ music", is mostly played at nightclubs, parties, weddings and other celebrations. It is more popular among youths. It is mostly based on Indian movie music as well as Indian pop music, both of which tend to borrow and modernise the classical and folk dance songs with modern instruments and other innovations.
The biggest form of Indian popular music is filmi, or songs from Indian films, it makes up 72% of the music sales in India. The film industry of India supported music by according reverence to classical music while utilising the western orchestration to support Indian melodies. Music composers, like R. D. Burman, Shankar Jaikishan, S. D. Burman, Laxmikant–Pyarelal, Madan Mohan, Bhupen Hazarika, Naushad Ali, O. P. Nayyar, Hemant Kumar, C. Ramchandra, Salil Chowdhury, Kalyanji Anandji, Ilaiyaraaja, A. R. Rahman, Jatin–Lalit, Anu Malik, Nadeem-Shravan, Harris Jayaraj, Himesh Reshammiya, Vidyasagar, Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy, Salim–Sulaiman, Pritam, M.S. Viswanathan, K. V. Mahadevan, Ghantasala and S. D. Batish employed the principles of harmony while retaining classical and folk flavor. Reputed names in the domain of Indian classical music like Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, Ali Akbar Khan and Ram Narayan have also composed music for films. Traditionally, in Indian films, the voice for the songs is not provided by the actors, they are provided by the professional playback singers, to sound more developed, melodious and soulful, while actors lipsynch on the screen. In the past, only a handful of singers provided the voice in films. These include Kishore Kumar, K. J. Yesudas, Mohammed Rafi, Mukesh, S.P. Balasubrahmanyam, T.M. Soundararajan, Hemant Kumar, Manna Dey, P. Susheela, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhonsle, K.S. Chitra, Geeta Dutt, S. Janaki, Shamshad Begum, Suraiya, Noorjahan and Suman Kalyanpur. Recent playback singers include Udit Narayan, Kumar Sanu, Kailash Kher, Alisha Chinai, KK, Shaan, SPB Charan, Madhushree, Shreya Ghoshal, Nihira Joshi, Kavita Krishnamurthy, Hariharan (singer), Ilaiyaraaja, A.R. Rahman, Sonu Nigam, Sukhwinder Singh, Kunal Ganjawala, Anu Malik, Sunidhi Chauhan, Anushka Manchanda, Raja Hasan, Arijit Singh and Alka Yagnik. Rock bands like Indus Creed, Indian Ocean, Silk Route and Euphoria have gained mass appeal with the advent of cable music television.
Indian pop music is based on an amalgamation of Indian folk and classical music, and modern beats from different parts of the world. Pop music really started in the South Asian region with the playback singer Ahmed Rushdi's song ‘Ko Ko Korina’ in 1966, then by Kishore Kumar in the early 1970s.
After that, much of Indian Pop music comes from the Indian Film Industry, and until the 1990s, few singers like Usha Uthup, Sharon Prabhakar, and Peenaz Masani outside it were popular. Since then, pop singers in the latter group have included Daler Mehndi, Baba Sehgal, Alisha Chinai, KK, Shantanu Mukherjee a.k.a. Shaan, Sagarika, Colonial Cousins (Hariharan, Lesle Lewis), Lucky Ali, and Sonu Nigam, and music composers like Zila Khan or Jawahar Wattal, who made top selling albums with, Daler Mehndi, Shubha Mudgal, Baba Sehgal, Shweta Shetty and Hans Raj Hans.
Besides those listed above, popular Indi-pop singers include Sanam (Band), Gurdas Maan, Sukhwinder Singh, Papon, Zubeen Garg, Raghav Sachar Rageshwari, Vandana Vishwas, Devika Chawla, Bombay Vikings, Asha Bhosle, Sunidhi Chauhan, Anushka Manchanda, Bombay Rockers, Anu Malik, Jazzy B, Malkit Singh, Raghav, Jay Sean, Juggy D, Rishi Rich, Udit Swaraj, Sheila Chandra, Bally Sagoo, Punjabi MC, Beno, Bhangra Knights, Mehnaz, Sanober and Vaishali Samant.
Recently, Indian pop has taken an interesting turn with the "remixing" of songs from past Indian movie songs, new beats being added to them.
Patriotic feelings have been instigated within Indians through music since the era of the freedom struggle. Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem of India by Rabindranath Tagore, is largely credited for uniting India through music and Vande Mataram by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay as the national song of India. Patriotic songs were also written in many regional languages such as Biswo Bizoyi No Zuwan in Assamese. Post-independence songs such as Aye mere watan ke logo, Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, Ab Tumhare Hawale Watan Saathiyo, Maa Tujhe Salaam by A.R. Rahman have been responsible for consolidating feelings of national integration and unity in diversity.
Western world's music has been adopted in India, by creating fusion music in India which in turn have enriched and created global genres of western music.
Goa trance, an electronic music style that originated during the late 1980s in Goa in India, has funky, drone-like basslines, similar to the techno minimalism of 21st century psytrance. Psychedelic trance developed from Goa trance. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Goa became popular as a hippie capital, which resulted in evolution of Goa trance throughout the 1980s by mixing the spiritual culture of India with western musical elements of industrial music, new beat and electronic body music (EBM), and the actual Goa trance style became established by the early 1990s.
Jazz in India was first performed regularly in the metropoles Calcutta and Bombay in the early or middle 1920s. From the 1930s to the 1950s is called as the golden age of jazz in India, when jazz musicians like Leon Abbey, Crickett Smith, Creighton Thompson, Ken Mac, Roy Butler, Teddy Weatherford (who recorded with Louis Armstrong), and Rudy Jackson who toured India to avoid the racial discrimination they faced in the United States. In the 1930s, jazz musicians played in the nightclubs of Bombay, such as at the Taj Mahal hotel ballroom, many of these musicians were Goans most whom also worked in the Bollywood film industry and were responsible for the introduction of genres like jazz and swing to Hindi film music.
Indian blues is less prevalent in India than jazz. Interest in the blues in India has only been incidental due to the shared ancestry with jazz.
The rock music scene in India is small compared to the filmi or fusion musicality scenes. Rock music in India has its origins in the 1960s when international stars such as the Beatles visited India and brought their music with them. These artists' collaboration with Indian musicians such as Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain have led to the development of raga rock. International shortwave radio stations such as The Voice of America, BBC, and Radio Ceylon played a major part in bringing Western pop, folk, and rock music to the masses. Indian rock bands began to gain prominence only much later, around the late 1980s.
It was around this time that the rock band Indus Creed formerly known as The Rock Machine got itself noticed on the international stage with hits like Rock N Roll Renegade. Other bands quickly followed. With the introduction of MTV in the early 1990s, Indians began to be exposed to various forms of rock such as grunge and speed metal, impacting the national scene. The cities of the North Eastern Region, mainly Guwahati and Shillong, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore have emerged as major melting pots for rock and metal enthusiasts. Bangalore has been the hub for rock and metal movement in India. Some prominent bands include Nicotine, Voodoo Child, Indian Ocean, Kryptos, Thermal and a Quarter, Demonic Resurrection, Motherjane, Avial, Bloodywood and Parikrama. Rock-specific labels such as DogmaTone Records and Eastern Fare Music Foundation have since emerged, supporting Indian rock acts.
From Central India, Nicotine, an Indore-based metal band, has been credited with pioneering metal music in the region.
Raga rock is rock or pop music with a heavy Indian influence, either in its construction, its timbre, or its use of instrumentation, such as the sitar and tabla. Raga and other forms of classical Indian music began to influence many rock groups during the 1960s; most famously the Beatles. The first traces of "raga rock" can be heard on songs such as "See My Friends" by the Kinks and the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul", released the previous month, featured a sitar-like riff by guitarist Jeff Beck. The Beatles song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)", which first appeared on the band's 1965 album Rubber Soul, was the first western pop song to actually incorporate the sitar (played by lead guitarist George Harrison). The Byrds' March 1966 single "Eight Miles High" and its B-side "Why" were also influential in originating the musical subgenre. Indeed, the term "raga rock" was coined by The Byrds' publicist in the press releases for the single and was first used in print by journalist Sally Kempton in her review of "Eight Miles High" for The Village Voice. George Harrison's interest in Indian music, popularised the genre in the mid-1960s with songs such as "Love You To", "Tomorrow Never Knows" (credited to Lennon-McCartney), "Within You Without You" and "The Inner Light". The rock acts of the sixties both in turn influenced British and American groups and Indian acts to develop a later form of Indian rock.
Despite more than a century of exposure to Western classical music and two centuries of British colonialism, classical music in India has never gained significant popularity..
However, Western classical music education has improved with the help of certain institutions in India, including KM Music Conservatory (founded by Oscar-winning Composer A.R. Rahman), Calcutta School of Music, Eastern Fare Music Foundation, In 1930, Mehli Mehta set up the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. His son Zubin Mehta has enjoyed a long international conducting career. The Bombay Chamber Orchestra (BCO) was founded in 1962. Delhi School of Music, Delhi Music Academy, Guitarmonk and others supporting Western classical music.. In 2006, the Symphony Orchestra of India was founded, housed at the NCPA in Mumbai. It is today the only professional symphony orchestra in India and presents two concert seasons per year, with world-renowned conductors and soloists.
As per UN, the Indian diaspora is world's largest overseas diaspora with 17.5 million Indian-origin international migrants across the world, who help spread the global soft power of India.
With expansion of Indosphere cultural influence of Greater India, through transmission of Hinduism in Southeast Asia and the Silk Road transmission of Buddhism leading to Indianization of Southeast Asia through formation of non-Indian southeast Asian native Indianized kingdoms which adopted sanskritized language and other Indian elements such as the honorific titles, naming of people, naming of places, mottos of organisations and educational institutes as well as adoption of Indian architecture, martial arts, Indian music and dance, traditional Indian clothing, and Indian cuisine, a process which has also been aided by the ongoing historic expansion of Indian diaspora.
In Indonesian and Malaysian music, the Dangdut a genre of folk music is partly derived and fused from Hindustani music. It is a very popular because of its melodious instrumentation and vocals. Dangdut features a tabla and gendang beat. Indonesians dance in somewhat similar to the ghoomar while listening to dangdut music, but in a much slower version.
Thai literature and drama draws great inspiration from Indian arts and Hindu legends. Epic of Ramayana is as popular in Thailand as the Ramakien. Two of the most popular classical thai dances the Khon, performed by men wearing ferocious masks, and the Lakhon (Lakhon nai, Lakhon chatri and Lakhon nok), performed by women who play both male and female roles draws inspiration primarily from the Ramakien. Percussion instruments and Piphat, a type of woodwind accompany the dance. Nang talung, a Thai shadow play inspired by South Indian Bommalattam, has shadows made from the pieces of cow or water buffalo hide cut to represent human figures with movable arms and legs are thrown on a screen for the entertainment of spectators.
Sometimes, the music of India is fused with the native traditional music of other countries. For example, Delhi 2 Dublin, a band based in Canada, is known for fusing Indian and Irish music, and Bhangraton is a fusion of Bhangra music with reggaeton.
Indian film composer A. R. Rahman wrote the music for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams, and a musical version of Hum Aapke Hain Koun was staged in London's West End. The Bollywood sports film Lagaan (2001) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and two other Bollywood films (2002's Devdas and 2006's Rang De Basanti) were nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language.
Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008) was inspired by Bollywood films.
Bhangraton is a fusion of Bhangra music with reggaeton, which itself is a fusion of hip hop, reggae, and traditional Latin American music.
In early 1960s Jazz pioneers such as John Coltrane—who recorded a composition entitled 'India' during the November 1961 sessions for his album Live at the Village Vanguard (the track was not released until 1963 on Coltrane's album Impressions)—also embraced this fusion. George Harrison (of the Beatles) played the sitar on the song "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" in 1965, which sparked interest from Shankar, who subsequently took Harrison as his apprentice. Jazz innovator Miles Davis recorded and performed with musicians like Khalil Balakrishna, Bihari Sharma, and Badal Roy in his post-1968 electric ensembles. Virtuoso jazz guitarist John McLaughlin spent several years in Madurai learning Carnatic music and incorporated it into many of his acts including Shakti which featured prominent Indian musicians. Other Western artists such as the Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, the Rolling Stones, the Move and Traffic soon incorporated Indian influences and instruments, and added Indian performers. Legendary Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia joined guitarist Sanjay Mishra on his classic CD "Blue Incantation" (1995). Mishra also wrote an original score for French Director Eric Heumann for his film Port Djema (1996) which won best score at Hamptons film festival and The Golden Bear at Berlin. in 2000 he recorded Rescue with drummer Dennis Chambers (Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin et al.) and in 2006 Chateau Benares with guests DJ Logic and Keller Williams (guitar and bass).
Since the early 2000s, Bollywood began influencing musical films in the Western world and was instrumental role in reviving the American musical film. Baz Luhrmann said that his musical film, Moulin Rouge! (2001), was inspired by Bollywood musicals; the film incorporated a Bollywood-style dance scene with a song from the film China Gate. The critical and financial success of Moulin Rouge! began a renaissance of Western musical films such as Chicago, Rent, and Dreamgirls.
Psychedelic trance developed from Goa trance.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, rock and roll fusions with Indian music were well known throughout Europe and North America. Ali Akbar Khan's 1955 performance in the United States was perhaps the beginning of this trend. In 1985, a beat-oriented, Raga Rock hybrid called Sitar Power by Ashwin Batish reintroduced sitar in western nations. Sitar Power drew the attention of a number of record labels and was snapped up by Shanachie Records of New Jersey to head their World Beat Ethno Pop division.
The influence of filmi may be seen in popular music worldwide. Technopop pioneers Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto of the Yellow Magic Orchestra produced a 1978 electronic album, Cochin Moon, based on an experimental fusion of electronic music and Bollywood-inspired Indian music. Truth Hurts' 2002 song "Addictive", produced by DJ Quik and Dr. Dre, was taken from Lata Mangeshkar's "Thoda Resham Lagta Hai" in Jyoti (1981). The Black Eyed Peas' Grammy Award winning 2005 song "Don't Phunk with My Heart" was inspired by two 1970s Bollywood songs: "Ye Mera Dil Yaar Ka Diwana" from Don (1978) and "Ae Nujawan Hai Sub" from Apradh (1972). Both songs were composed by Kalyanji Anandji, sung by Asha Bhosle, and featured the dancer Helen.
Some prominent Indians in Western classical music are:
Bollywood has been a significant form of soft power for India, increasing its influence and changing overseas perceptions of India. According to author Roopa Swaminathan, "Bollywood cinema is one of the strongest global cultural ambassadors of a new India." Its role in expanding India's global influence is comparable to Hollywood's similar role with American influence.
Kishore Kumar is popular in Egypt and Somalia.
Hindi films were originally distributed to some parts of Africa by Lebanese businessmen, and Mother India (1957) continued to be screened in Nigeria decades after its release. Indian movies have influenced Hausa clothing, songs have been covered by Hausa singers, and stories have influenced Nigerian novelists. Stickers of Indian films and stars decorate taxis and buses in Nigeria's Northern Region, and posters of Indian films hang on the walls of tailoring shops and mechanics' garages.
In South Africa, film imports from India were watched by black and Indian audiences. Several Bollywood figures have travelled to Africa for films and off-camera projects. Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav (2005) was filmed in South Africa. Dil Jo Bhi Kahey... (2005) was also filmed almost entirely in Mauritius, which has a large ethnic-Indian population.
In Egypt, Bollywood films were popular during the 1970s and 1980s. Amitabh Bachchan has remained popular in the country and Indian tourists visiting Egypt are asked, "Do you know Amitabh Bachchan?"
Indo-Caribbean music of Indo-Caribbean people in Caribbean is most common in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Jamaica, and Suriname, which reflects their Bhojpuri heritage. Main instrumentation are dhantal, metal rod, clapper, dholak, two-headed barrel drum. Women sing Hindu bhajans and folk songs from the music of Bhojpur on various important life events, rituals, celebrations, festivals like phagwah and holi. Indo-Caribbean contributions to popular music are very important. The most well-known is the Indo-Trinidadian chutney music tradition. Chutney is a form of popular dance music that developed in the mid-to late 20th century. Baithak Gana is a similar popular form originating in Suriname.
There is significant Indian diaspora communities in Suriname and Guyana, Indian music and Hindi-language movies are popular. In 2006, Dhoom 2 became the first Bollywood film to be shot in Rio de Janeiro.
In the new millennium, American hip-hop has featured Indian filmi and bhangra. Mainstream hip-hop artists have sampled songs from Bollywood movies and have collaborated with Indian artists. Examples include Timbaland's "Indian Flute", Erick Sermon and Redman's "React", Slum Village's "Disco", and Truth Hurts' hit song "Addictive", which sampled a Lata Mangeshkar song, and The Black Eyed Peas sampled Asha Bhosle's song "Yeh Mera Dil" in their hit single "Don't Phunk With My Heart". In 1997, the British band Cornershop paid tribute to Asha Bhosle with their song Brimful of Asha, which became an international hit. British-born Indian artist Panjabi MC also had a Bhangra hit in the US with "Mundian To Bach Ke" which featured rapper Jay-Z. Asian Dub Foundation are not huge mainstream stars, but their politically charged rap and punk rock influenced sound has a multi-racial audience in their native UK. In 2008, international star Snoop Dogg appeared in a song in the film Singh Is Kinng. In 2007, hip-hop producer Madlib released Beat Konducta Vol 3–4: Beat Konducta in India; an album which heavily samples and is inspired by the music of India.
Due to shared cultural heritage and language, Indian music and Bollywood films are also popular in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, where Hindustani is widely understood.
Already covered in earlier section Ancient influence on Southeast Asian music genre.
West Asia has large Indian diaspora population, who mainly consume Indian music. Indian music is also popular with native middle eastern people. 85% of Qatar's and 75% of UAE's total population are Indian citizens. Hindi films and music have become popular in Arab countries, and imported Indian films are usually subtitled in Arabic when they are released. Bollywood has progressed in Israel since the early 2000s, with channels dedicated to Indian films on cable television;
In Germany, Indian stereotypes included bullock carts, beggars, sacred cows, corrupt politicians, and catastrophes before Bollywood and the IT industry transformed global perceptions of India.
In the late 1980s, Indian-British artists fused Indian and Western traditions to make the Asian Underground. Since the 1990s, Canadian born musician Nadaka who has spent most of his life in India, has been creating music that is an acoustic fusion of Indian classical music with western styles. One such singer who has merged the Bhakti sangeet tradition of India with the western non-Indian music is Krishna Das and sells music records of his musical sadhana. Another example is the Indo-Canadian musician Vandana Vishwas who has experimented with western music in her 2013 album Monologues.
In a more recent example of Indian-British fusion, Laura Marling along with Mumford and Sons collaborated in 2010 with the Dharohar Project on a four-song EP. The British band Bombay Bicycle Club also sampled the song "Man Dole Mera Tan Dole" for their single "Feel". Laxmikant-Pyarelal
Due to large Indian diaspora population, Indian music and movies are very popular in Fiji especially among Indo-Fijians.
Australia and New Zealand have 2 percent Indian population, as well as other a large South Asian diaspora, and Bollywood music and movies are popular amongst non-Asians in the country as well.
Sangeet Natak Akademi is the national level academy for performing arts set up by the Government of India in 1952, which bestows Sangeet Natak Akademi Award as the highest official Indian government's recognition given to practicing artists, It has established several institutions including the Manipur Dance Academy in Imphal, Ravindra Rangshala Centers, Sattriya Centre, Kathak Kendra (National Institute of Kathak Dance) at New Delhi, Centre for Kutiyattam at Thiruvananthapuram, Chhau Centre at Baripada in Jamshedpur, Banaras Music Akademi, Varanasi, and the Northeast Centre. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Owing to India's vastness and diversity, Indian music encompasses numerous genres in multiple varieties and forms which include classical music, folk, rock, and pop. It has a history spanning several millennia and developed over several geo-locations spanning the sub-continent. Music in India began as an integral part of socio-religious life.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The 30,000-year-old paleolithic and neolithic cave paintings at the UNESCO world heritage site at Bhimbetka rock shelters in Madhya Pradesh show a type of dance. Mesolithic and chalcolithic cave art of Bhimbetka illustrates musical instruments such as Gongs, Bowed Lyre, daf etc.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Chalcolithic era (4000 BCE onward) narrow bar shaped polished stone celts like music instruments, one of the earlier musical instrument in India, were excavated at Sankarjang in the Angul district of Odisha. There is historical evidence in the form of sculptural evidence, i.e. musical instruments, singing and dancing postures of damsels in the Ranigumpha Caves in Khandagiri and Udayagiri at Bhubaneswar.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Dancing Girl sculpture (2500 BCE) was found from the Indus Valley civilization (IVC) site. There are IVC-era paintings on pottery of a man with a dhol hanging from his neck and a woman holding a drum under her left arm.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Vedas (c. 1500 – c. 800 BCE Vedic period) document rituals with performing arts and play. For example, Shatapatha Brahmana (~800–700 BCE) has verses in chapter 13.2 written in the form of a play between two actors. Tala or taal is an ancient music concept traceable to Vedic era texts of Hinduism, such as the Samaveda and methods for singing the Vedic hymns. Smriti (500 BCE to 100 BCE ) post-vedic Hindu texts include Valmiki's Ramayana (500 BCE to 100 BCE) which mentions dance and music (dance by Apsaras such as Urvashi, Rambha, Menaka, Tilottama Panchāpsaras, and Ravana's wives excelling in nrityageeta or \"singing and dancing\" and nritavaditra or \"playing musical instruments\"), music and singing by Gandharvas, several string instruments (vina, tantri, bīn, vipanci and vallaki similar to veena), wind instruments (shankha, venu and venugana – likely a mouth organ made by tying several flutes together), raga (including kaushika such as raag kaushik dhwani), vocal registers (seven svara or sur, ana or ekashurti drag note, murchana the regulated rise and fall of voice in matra and tripramana three-fold teen taal laya such as drut or quick, madhya or middle, and vilambit or slow), poetry recitation in Bala Kanda and also in Uttara Kanda by Luv and Kusha in marga style.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Starting from the earliest known work Tholkappiyam (500 BCE), there are several references to music and Panns in the ancient pre-Sangam and Sangam literature starting from the earliest known work Tholkappiyam (500 BCE). Among Sangam literature, Mathuraikkanci refers to women singing sevvazhi pann to invoke the mercy of God during childbirth. In Tolkappiyam, the five landscapes of the Sangam literature had each an associated Pann, each describing the mood of the song associated with that landscape. Among the numerous panns that find mention in the ancient Tamil literature are, Ambal Pann, which is suitable to be played on the flute, sevvazhi pann on the Yazh (lute), Nottiram and Sevvazhi expressing pathos, the captivating Kurinji pann and the invigorating Murudappann. Pann(Tamil: பண்) is the melodic mode used by the Tamil people in their music since the ancient times. The ancient panns over centuries evolved first into a pentatonic scale and later into the seven note Carnatic Sargam. But from the earliest times, Tamil Music is heptatonic and known as Ezhisai (ஏழிசை).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "sanskrit saint-poet Jayadeva, who was the great composer and illustrious master of classical music, shaped Odra-Magadhi style music and had great influence on Odissi Sangita.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Śārṅgadeva composed Sangita-Ratnakara, one of the most important Sanskrit musicological texts from India, which is regarded as the definitive text in both Hindustani music and Carnatic music traditions of Indian classical music.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Assamese poet Madhava Kandali, writer of Saptakanda Ramayana, lists several instruments in his version of \"Ramayana\", such as mardala, khumuchi, bhemachi, dagar, gratal, ramtal, tabal, jhajhar, jinjiri, bheri mahari, tokari, dosari, kendara, dotara, vina, rudra-vipanchi, etc. (meaning that these instruments existed since his time in the 14th century or earlier). The Indian system of notation is perhaps the world's oldest and most elaborate.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the early 14th century under the Khiljis, there were concerts and competitions between Hindustani and Carnatic musicians.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "From the 16th century onwards, treatises written on music were Sangitamava Chandrika, Gita Prakasha, Sangita Kalalata and Natya Manorama.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In the early 1960s Jazz pioneers such as John Coltrane and George Harrison collaborated with Indian instrumentalists and started to use Indian instruments such as sitar in their songs. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, rock and roll fusions with Indian music were well known throughout Europe and North America. In the late 1980s, Indian-British artists fused Indian and Western traditions to make the Asian Underground. In the new millennium, American hip-hop has featured Indian filmi and bhangra. Mainstream hip-hop artists have sampled songs from Bollywood movies and have collaborated with Indian artists, such as Timbaland's \"Indian Flute\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 2010, Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons collaborated with the Dharohar Project.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The two main traditions of Indian classical music are Carnatic music, which is practised predominantly in the peninsular (southern) regions, and Hindustani music, which is found in the northern, eastern and central regions. The basic concepts of this music includes Shruti (microtones), Swaras (notes), Alankar (ornamentations), Raga (melodies improvised from basic grammars), and Tala (rhythmic patterns used in percussion). Its tonal system divides the octave into 22 segments called Shrutis, not all equal but each roughly equal to a quarter of a whole tone of the Western music. Both the classical music are standing on the fundamentals of The seven notes of Indian Classical music. These seven notes are also called as Sapta svara or Sapta Sur. These seven svaras are Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni respectively. These Sapta Svaras are spelt as Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha and Ni, but these are shortforms of Shadja (षड्ज), Rishabha (ऋषभ), Gandhara (गान्धार), Madhyama (मध्यम), Panchama (पंचम), Dhaivata (धैवत) and Nishada (निषाद) respectively. These are also equivalent to Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti. Only these seven svaras built up the Hindustani classical music and the Carnatic classical music. These seven svaras are the fundamentals of a raga. This seven svaras without any variations in them, are called as Shuddha svaras. Variations in these svaras cause them to be Komal and Tivra svaras. All the other svaras except Sadja(Sa) and Pancham (Pa) can be Komal or Tivra svaras but Sa and Pa are always Shuddha svaras. And hence svaras Sa and Pa are called Achal Svaras, since these svaras don't move from their original position while svaras Ra, Ga, Ma, Dha, Ni are called Chal Svaras, since these svaras move from their original position.",
"title": "Classical music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Sangeet Natak Academy recognizes eight classical dance and music forms, namely Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Kuchipudi, Odissi, Kathakali, Sattriya, Manipuri and Mohiniyattam. Additionally, India's Ministry of culture also includes Chhau in its classical list.",
"title": "Classical music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Carnatic music can be traced to the 14th - 15th centuries AD and thereafter. It originated in South India during the rule of Vijayanagar Empire through the Keerthanas composed by Purandara Dasa. Like Hindustani music, it is melodic, with improvised variations, but tends to have more fixed compositions. It consists of a composition with improvised embellishments added to the piece in the forms of Raga Alapana, Kalpanaswaram, Neraval and, in the case of more advanced students, Ragam Thanam Pallavi. The main emphasis is on the vocals as most compositions are written to be sung, and even when played on instruments, they are meant to be performed in a singing style (known as gāyaki). Around 300 ragams are in use today. Annamayya is the first known composer in Carnatic music. He is widely regarded as the Andhra Pada kavitā Pitāmaha (Godfather of Telugu song-writing). Purandara Dasa is considered the father of Carnatic music, while the later musicians Tyagaraja, Shyama Shastry and Muthuswami Dikshitar are considered the trinity of Carnatic music.",
"title": "Classical music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Noted artists of Carnatic music include Tiger Varadachariyar, M D Ramanathan, Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar (the father of the current concert format), Palghat Mani Iyer, Madurai Mani Iyer, Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Nedunuri Krishnamurthy Alathur Brothers, MS Subbulakshmi, Lalgudi Jayaraman, Balamuralikrishna, TN Seshagopalan, K J Yesudas, N. Ramani, Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman, Sanjay Subrahmanyan, TM Krishna, Bombay Jayashri, T S Nandakumar, Aruna Sairam, Mysore Manjunath,",
"title": "Classical music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Every December, the city of Chennai in India has its eight-week-long Music Season, which is the world's largest cultural event.",
"title": "Classical music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Carnatic music has served as the foundation for most music in South India, including folk music, festival music and has also extended its influence to film music in the past 100–150 years or so.",
"title": "Classical music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The tradition of Hindustani music dates back to Vedic times where the hymns in the Sama Veda, an ancient religious text, were sung as Samagana and not chanted. It diverged from Carnatic music around the 13th–14th centuries CE, primarily due to Islamic influences. Developing a strong and diverse tradition over several centuries, it has contemporary traditions established primarily in India but also in Pakistan and Bangladesh. In contrast to Carnatic music, the other main Indian classical music tradition originating from the South, Hindustani music was not only influenced by ancient Hindu musical traditions, historical Vedic philosophy and native Indian sounds but also enriched by the Persian performance practices of the Mughals. Classical genres are dhrupad, dhamar, khyal, tarana and sadra, and there are also several semi-classical forms.",
"title": "Classical music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The root of the name C(K)arnatic music is derived from Sanskrit. Karnam means ears and Atakam means that which is sweet or that which lingers on.",
"title": "Classical music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "There are many types of music which comes under the category of light classical or semi-classical. Some of the forms are Thumri, Dadra, Bhajan, Ghazal, Chaiti, Kajri, Tappa, Natya Sangeet and Qawwali. These forms place emphasis on explicitly seeking emotion from the audience, as opposed to the classical forms.",
"title": "Classical music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "This is a musical genre of the Tamang people and popular amongst the Nepali speaking community in West Bengal, Sikkim, India and around the world. It is accompanied by Tamang instruments, the Madal, Damphu and Tungna, although nowadays musicians have taken to modern instruments. A Tamang Selo can be catchy and lively or slow and melodious, and is usually sung to convey sorrow, love, happiness or day-to-day incidents and stories of folklore.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Hira Devi Waiba is hailed as the pioneer of Nepali folk songs and Tamang Selo. Her song 'Chura ta Hoina Astura' (चुरा त होइन अस्तुरा) is said to be the first Tamang Selo ever recorded. She has sung nearly 300 songs through her musical career spanning 40 years. After Waiba's death in 2011, her son Satya Aditya Waiba (producer/manager) and Navneet Aditya Waiba (singer) collaborated and re-recorded her most iconic songs and released an album titled Ama Lai Shraddhanjali (आमालाई श्रद्धाञ्जली-Tribute to Mother). The duo are the only individuals in the Nepali folk music genre who produce authentic traditional Nepali folk songs without adulteration or modernisation.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Bhangra (Punjabi: ਭੰਗੜਾ) is a form of dance-oriented folk music of Punjab. The present musical",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "style is derived from non-traditional musical accompaniment to the riffs of Punjab called by the same name. The female dance of Punjab region is known as Giddha (Punjabi: ਗਿੱਧਾ).",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Bihu (Assamese: বিহু) is the festival of New Year of Assam falling on mid-April. This is a festival of nature and mother earth where the first day is for the cows and buffaloes. The second day of the festival is for the man. Bihu dances and songs accompanied by traditional drums and wind instruments are an essential part of this festival. Bihu songs are energetic and with beats to welcome the festive spring. Assamese drums (dhol), Pepa(usually made from buffalo horn), Gogona are major instruments used.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Borgeets (Assamese: বৰগীত) are lyrical songs that are set to specific ragas but not necessarily to any tala. These songs, composed by Srimanta Sankardeva and Madhavdeva in the 15th–16th centuries, are used to begin prayer services in monasteries, e.g. Satra and Namghar associated with the Ekasarana Dharma; and they also belong to the repertoire of Music of Assam outside the religious context. They are a lyrical strain that express the religious sentiments of the poets reacting to different situations, and differ from other lyrics associated with the Ekasarana Dharma.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Prominent instruments used in borgeets are Negera,Taal, Khols etc.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Dandiya or Raas is a form of Gujarati cultural dance that is performed with sticks. The present musical style is derived from the traditional musical accompaniment to the folk dance. It is practiced mainly in the state of Gujarat. There is also another type of dance and music associated with Dandiya/Raas called Garba.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Gaana is a rap-like \"collection of rhythms, beats and sensibilities native to the Dalits of Chennai.\" It evolved over the past two centuries, combining influences from the siddhars (tantric adepts) of ancient Tamilakam, Tamil Sufi saints, and more. Gaana songs are performed at weddings, stage shows, political rallies, and funerals. Performers sing about a wide range of topics, but the essence of gaana is said to be \"angst and melancholy\" based in life's struggles. In the past few decades, the genre has entered the music of the mainstream Tamil film industry and gained popularity. Contemporary gaana bands like The Casteless Collective are bringing the genre to new audiences while using it for social activism, especially against caste discrimination.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Haryana folk music has two main forms: classical folk music of Haryana and desi folk music of Haryana (country music of Haryana). They take the form of ballads and pangs of parting of lovers, valor and bravery, harvest and happiness. Haryana is rich in musical tradition and even places have been named after ragas, for example Charkhi Dadri district has many villages named as Nandyam, Sarangpur, Bilawala, Brindabana, Todi, Asaveri, Jaisri, Malakoshna, Hindola, Bhairvi and Gopi Kalyana.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Himachal's folk music varies according to the event or the festival. One of the most popular style of music is Nati Music, where nati being the traditional dance that is done on the song. Nati Music is usually celebratory, and done in fairs or other occasions such as marriages.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Jhumair and Domkach are Nagpuri folk music. The musical instruments used in folk music and dance are Dhol, Mandar, Bansi, Nagara, Dhak, Shehnai, Khartal, Narsinga etc.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Lavani comes from the word Lavanya which means \"beauty\". This is one of the most popular forms of dance and music that is practiced all over Maharashtra. It has, in fact, become a necessary part of the Maharashtrian folk dance performances. Traditionally, the songs are sung by female artists, but male artists may occasionally sing Lavanis. The dance format associated with Lavani is known as Tamasha. Lavani is a combination of traditional song and dance, which particularly performed to the enchanting beats of 'Dholaki', a drum-like instrument. The dance is performed by attractive women wearing nine-yard saris. They are sung in a quick tempo. Lavani originated in the arid region of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Music of Manipur and Manipuri dance are heritage of Manipuri people. According to tradition of the Manipuri people in the Himalayan foothills and valleys connecting India to Burma, they are the Gandharvas (celestial musicians and dancers) in the Vedic texts, and historic texts of Manipuri people calls the region as Gandharva-desa. The Vedic Usha, the goddess of the dawn, is a cultural motif for Manipuri women, and in the Indian tradition, it was Usha who created and taught the art of feminine dance to girls. This oral tradition of women's dance is celebrated as Chingkheirol in the Manipuri tradition.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The ancient Sanskrit texts such as the Mahabharata epic mentions Manipur, where Arjuna meets and falls in love with Chitragada. Dance is called Jagoi in a major Meitei language of the region and it traces a long tradition in Manipur. Lai Haraoba dance likely has ancient roots and shares many similarities with dance postures of Nataraja and his legendary disciple called Tandu (locally called Tangkhu). Similarly, as does the dance related to commoner Khamba and princess Thoibi – who perform as pan-Indian Shiva and Parvati, in the legendary tragic love story of Khamba-Thoibi found in the Manipuri epic Moirang Parba.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Hadrani Marfa, or simply Marfa music, introduced during the 18th century in Hyderabad State by the East African Siddi community from Afro-Arab music of Hadhramawt in Yemen, is a form of celebratory rhythmic music and dance among the Hyderabadi Muslims, played with high tempo using Marfa instrument, daff, Dhol, sticks, steel pots and wooden strips called thapi.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Mizo Music originated when couplets were developed during the settlement of Thantlang in Burma between 1300 and 1400 CE, and folk songs developed during this period were dar hla (songs on gong); Bawh hla (War chants), Hlado (Chants of hunting); Nauawih hla (Cradle songs) A greater development of songs can be seen from the settlement of Lentlang in Burma, estimated between late 15th to 17th Century CE. The Mizo occupied the present Mizoram from the late 17th century. The pre-colonial period, that is from the 18th to 19th century was another important era in the history of Mizo folk literature. Prior to the annexation by the British Government, the Mizo occupied the present Mizoram for two centuries. In comparison with the folk songs of Thantlang and Lentlang settlement, the songs of this period are more developed in its number, form and contents. The languages are more polished and the flows also better. Most of the songs of this period are named after the composers.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Jayadeva, the 12th century sanskrit saint-poet, the great composer and illustrious master of classical music, has immense contribution to Odissi music. During his time Odra-Magadhi style music got shaped and achieved its classical status. He indicated the classical ragas prevailing at that time in which these were to be sung. Prior to that there was the tradition of Chhanda which was simple in musical outline. From the 16th century onwards, treatises on music were Sangitamava Chandrika, Gita Prakasha, Sangita Kalalata and Natya Manorama. A couple of treatise namely, Sangita Sarani and Sangi Narayana, were also written in the early path of the 19th century.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Odissi Sangita comprises four classes of music namely Dhruvapada, Chitrapada, Chitrakala and Panchal, described in the ancient oriya music texts. The chief Odissi and Shokabaradi. Odissi Sangita (music) is a synthesis of four classes of music, i.e. Dhruvapada, Chitrapada, Chitrakala and Panchal, described in the above-mentioned texts.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The great exponents of Odissi music in modern times are the Late Singhari Shyamasundara Kar, Markandeya Mahapatra, Kashinath Pujapanda, Balakrushna Das, Gopal Chandra Panda, Ramhari Das, Bhubaneswari Misra, Shymamani Devi and Sunanda Patnaik, who have achieved eminence in classical music.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Rabindra Sangeet (Bengali: রবীন্দ্রসঙ্গীত Robindro Shonggit, Bengali pronunciation: [ɾobindɾo ʃoŋɡit]), also known as Tagore songs, are songs written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore. They have distinctive characteristics in the music of Bengal, popular in India and Bangladesh. \"Sangeet\" means music, \"Rabindra Sangeet\" means music (or more aptly songs) of Rabindra.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Tagore wrote some 2,230 songs in Bengali, now known as Rabindra Sangeet, using classical music and traditional folk music as sources.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Tagore wrote national anthems of India and Bangladesh, and influenced the national anthem of Sri Lanka.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Rajasthan has a very diverse cultural collection of musician castes, including Langas, Sapera, Bhopa, Jogi and Manganiyar (lit. \"the ones who ask/beg\"). Rajasthan Diary quotes it as a soulful, full-throated music with harmonious diversity. The melodies of Rajasthan come from a variety of instruments. The stringed variety includes the Sarangi, Ravanahatha, Kamayacha, Morsing and Ektara. Percussion instruments come in all shapes and sizes from the huge Nagaras and Dhols to the tiny Damrus. The Daf and Chang are a favorite of Holi (the festival of colours) revelers. Flutes and bagpipers come in local flavors such as Shehnai, Poongi, Algoza, Tarpi, Been and Bankia.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Rajasthani music is derived from a combination of string instruments, percussion instruments and wind instruments accompanied by renditions of folk singers. It enjoys a respectable presence in Bollywood music as well.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Sufi folk rock contains elements of modern hard rock and traditional folk music with Sufi poetry. While it was pioneered by bands like Junoon in Pakistan it became very popular, especially in northern India.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Uttarakhandi folk music had its root in the lap of nature and the hilly terrain of the region. Common themes in the folk music of Uttarakhand are the beauty of nature, various seasons, festivals, religious traditions, cultural practices, folk stories, historical characters, and the bravery of ancestors. The folk songs of Uttarakhand are a reflection of the cultural heritage and the way people live their lives in the Himalayas. Musical instruments used in Uttarakhand music include the Dhol, Damoun, Hudka, Turri, Ransingha, Dholki, Daur, Thali, Bhankora and Masakbhaja. Tabla and Harmonium are also sometimes used, especially in recorded folk music from the 1960s onwards. Generic Indian and global musical instruments have been incorporated in modern popular folks by singers like Mohan Upreti, Narendra Singh Negi, Gopal Babu Goswami, and Chandra Singh Rahi.",
"title": "Folk music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Dance music, more popularly called \"DJ music\", is mostly played at nightclubs, parties, weddings and other celebrations. It is more popular among youths. It is mostly based on Indian movie music as well as Indian pop music, both of which tend to borrow and modernise the classical and folk dance songs with modern instruments and other innovations.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The biggest form of Indian popular music is filmi, or songs from Indian films, it makes up 72% of the music sales in India. The film industry of India supported music by according reverence to classical music while utilising the western orchestration to support Indian melodies. Music composers, like R. D. Burman, Shankar Jaikishan, S. D. Burman, Laxmikant–Pyarelal, Madan Mohan, Bhupen Hazarika, Naushad Ali, O. P. Nayyar, Hemant Kumar, C. Ramchandra, Salil Chowdhury, Kalyanji Anandji, Ilaiyaraaja, A. R. Rahman, Jatin–Lalit, Anu Malik, Nadeem-Shravan, Harris Jayaraj, Himesh Reshammiya, Vidyasagar, Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy, Salim–Sulaiman, Pritam, M.S. Viswanathan, K. V. Mahadevan, Ghantasala and S. D. Batish employed the principles of harmony while retaining classical and folk flavor. Reputed names in the domain of Indian classical music like Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan, Ali Akbar Khan and Ram Narayan have also composed music for films. Traditionally, in Indian films, the voice for the songs is not provided by the actors, they are provided by the professional playback singers, to sound more developed, melodious and soulful, while actors lipsynch on the screen. In the past, only a handful of singers provided the voice in films. These include Kishore Kumar, K. J. Yesudas, Mohammed Rafi, Mukesh, S.P. Balasubrahmanyam, T.M. Soundararajan, Hemant Kumar, Manna Dey, P. Susheela, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhonsle, K.S. Chitra, Geeta Dutt, S. Janaki, Shamshad Begum, Suraiya, Noorjahan and Suman Kalyanpur. Recent playback singers include Udit Narayan, Kumar Sanu, Kailash Kher, Alisha Chinai, KK, Shaan, SPB Charan, Madhushree, Shreya Ghoshal, Nihira Joshi, Kavita Krishnamurthy, Hariharan (singer), Ilaiyaraaja, A.R. Rahman, Sonu Nigam, Sukhwinder Singh, Kunal Ganjawala, Anu Malik, Sunidhi Chauhan, Anushka Manchanda, Raja Hasan, Arijit Singh and Alka Yagnik. Rock bands like Indus Creed, Indian Ocean, Silk Route and Euphoria have gained mass appeal with the advent of cable music television.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Indian pop music is based on an amalgamation of Indian folk and classical music, and modern beats from different parts of the world. Pop music really started in the South Asian region with the playback singer Ahmed Rushdi's song ‘Ko Ko Korina’ in 1966, then by Kishore Kumar in the early 1970s.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "After that, much of Indian Pop music comes from the Indian Film Industry, and until the 1990s, few singers like Usha Uthup, Sharon Prabhakar, and Peenaz Masani outside it were popular. Since then, pop singers in the latter group have included Daler Mehndi, Baba Sehgal, Alisha Chinai, KK, Shantanu Mukherjee a.k.a. Shaan, Sagarika, Colonial Cousins (Hariharan, Lesle Lewis), Lucky Ali, and Sonu Nigam, and music composers like Zila Khan or Jawahar Wattal, who made top selling albums with, Daler Mehndi, Shubha Mudgal, Baba Sehgal, Shweta Shetty and Hans Raj Hans.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Besides those listed above, popular Indi-pop singers include Sanam (Band), Gurdas Maan, Sukhwinder Singh, Papon, Zubeen Garg, Raghav Sachar Rageshwari, Vandana Vishwas, Devika Chawla, Bombay Vikings, Asha Bhosle, Sunidhi Chauhan, Anushka Manchanda, Bombay Rockers, Anu Malik, Jazzy B, Malkit Singh, Raghav, Jay Sean, Juggy D, Rishi Rich, Udit Swaraj, Sheila Chandra, Bally Sagoo, Punjabi MC, Beno, Bhangra Knights, Mehnaz, Sanober and Vaishali Samant.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Recently, Indian pop has taken an interesting turn with the \"remixing\" of songs from past Indian movie songs, new beats being added to them.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Patriotic feelings have been instigated within Indians through music since the era of the freedom struggle. Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem of India by Rabindranath Tagore, is largely credited for uniting India through music and Vande Mataram by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay as the national song of India. Patriotic songs were also written in many regional languages such as Biswo Bizoyi No Zuwan in Assamese. Post-independence songs such as Aye mere watan ke logo, Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, Ab Tumhare Hawale Watan Saathiyo, Maa Tujhe Salaam by A.R. Rahman have been responsible for consolidating feelings of national integration and unity in diversity.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Western world's music has been adopted in India, by creating fusion music in India which in turn have enriched and created global genres of western music.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Goa trance, an electronic music style that originated during the late 1980s in Goa in India, has funky, drone-like basslines, similar to the techno minimalism of 21st century psytrance. Psychedelic trance developed from Goa trance. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Goa became popular as a hippie capital, which resulted in evolution of Goa trance throughout the 1980s by mixing the spiritual culture of India with western musical elements of industrial music, new beat and electronic body music (EBM), and the actual Goa trance style became established by the early 1990s.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Jazz in India was first performed regularly in the metropoles Calcutta and Bombay in the early or middle 1920s. From the 1930s to the 1950s is called as the golden age of jazz in India, when jazz musicians like Leon Abbey, Crickett Smith, Creighton Thompson, Ken Mac, Roy Butler, Teddy Weatherford (who recorded with Louis Armstrong), and Rudy Jackson who toured India to avoid the racial discrimination they faced in the United States. In the 1930s, jazz musicians played in the nightclubs of Bombay, such as at the Taj Mahal hotel ballroom, many of these musicians were Goans most whom also worked in the Bollywood film industry and were responsible for the introduction of genres like jazz and swing to Hindi film music.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Indian blues is less prevalent in India than jazz. Interest in the blues in India has only been incidental due to the shared ancestry with jazz.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The rock music scene in India is small compared to the filmi or fusion musicality scenes. Rock music in India has its origins in the 1960s when international stars such as the Beatles visited India and brought their music with them. These artists' collaboration with Indian musicians such as Ravi Shankar and Zakir Hussain have led to the development of raga rock. International shortwave radio stations such as The Voice of America, BBC, and Radio Ceylon played a major part in bringing Western pop, folk, and rock music to the masses. Indian rock bands began to gain prominence only much later, around the late 1980s.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "It was around this time that the rock band Indus Creed formerly known as The Rock Machine got itself noticed on the international stage with hits like Rock N Roll Renegade. Other bands quickly followed. With the introduction of MTV in the early 1990s, Indians began to be exposed to various forms of rock such as grunge and speed metal, impacting the national scene. The cities of the North Eastern Region, mainly Guwahati and Shillong, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore have emerged as major melting pots for rock and metal enthusiasts. Bangalore has been the hub for rock and metal movement in India. Some prominent bands include Nicotine, Voodoo Child, Indian Ocean, Kryptos, Thermal and a Quarter, Demonic Resurrection, Motherjane, Avial, Bloodywood and Parikrama. Rock-specific labels such as DogmaTone Records and Eastern Fare Music Foundation have since emerged, supporting Indian rock acts.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "From Central India, Nicotine, an Indore-based metal band, has been credited with pioneering metal music in the region.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Raga rock is rock or pop music with a heavy Indian influence, either in its construction, its timbre, or its use of instrumentation, such as the sitar and tabla. Raga and other forms of classical Indian music began to influence many rock groups during the 1960s; most famously the Beatles. The first traces of \"raga rock\" can be heard on songs such as \"See My Friends\" by the Kinks and the Yardbirds' \"Heart Full of Soul\", released the previous month, featured a sitar-like riff by guitarist Jeff Beck. The Beatles song \"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)\", which first appeared on the band's 1965 album Rubber Soul, was the first western pop song to actually incorporate the sitar (played by lead guitarist George Harrison). The Byrds' March 1966 single \"Eight Miles High\" and its B-side \"Why\" were also influential in originating the musical subgenre. Indeed, the term \"raga rock\" was coined by The Byrds' publicist in the press releases for the single and was first used in print by journalist Sally Kempton in her review of \"Eight Miles High\" for The Village Voice. George Harrison's interest in Indian music, popularised the genre in the mid-1960s with songs such as \"Love You To\", \"Tomorrow Never Knows\" (credited to Lennon-McCartney), \"Within You Without You\" and \"The Inner Light\". The rock acts of the sixties both in turn influenced British and American groups and Indian acts to develop a later form of Indian rock.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Despite more than a century of exposure to Western classical music and two centuries of British colonialism, classical music in India has never gained significant popularity..",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "However, Western classical music education has improved with the help of certain institutions in India, including KM Music Conservatory (founded by Oscar-winning Composer A.R. Rahman), Calcutta School of Music, Eastern Fare Music Foundation, In 1930, Mehli Mehta set up the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. His son Zubin Mehta has enjoyed a long international conducting career. The Bombay Chamber Orchestra (BCO) was founded in 1962. Delhi School of Music, Delhi Music Academy, Guitarmonk and others supporting Western classical music.. In 2006, the Symphony Orchestra of India was founded, housed at the NCPA in Mumbai. It is today the only professional symphony orchestra in India and presents two concert seasons per year, with world-renowned conductors and soloists.",
"title": "Popular music in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "As per UN, the Indian diaspora is world's largest overseas diaspora with 17.5 million Indian-origin international migrants across the world, who help spread the global soft power of India.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "With expansion of Indosphere cultural influence of Greater India, through transmission of Hinduism in Southeast Asia and the Silk Road transmission of Buddhism leading to Indianization of Southeast Asia through formation of non-Indian southeast Asian native Indianized kingdoms which adopted sanskritized language and other Indian elements such as the honorific titles, naming of people, naming of places, mottos of organisations and educational institutes as well as adoption of Indian architecture, martial arts, Indian music and dance, traditional Indian clothing, and Indian cuisine, a process which has also been aided by the ongoing historic expansion of Indian diaspora.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In Indonesian and Malaysian music, the Dangdut a genre of folk music is partly derived and fused from Hindustani music. It is a very popular because of its melodious instrumentation and vocals. Dangdut features a tabla and gendang beat. Indonesians dance in somewhat similar to the ghoomar while listening to dangdut music, but in a much slower version.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Thai literature and drama draws great inspiration from Indian arts and Hindu legends. Epic of Ramayana is as popular in Thailand as the Ramakien. Two of the most popular classical thai dances the Khon, performed by men wearing ferocious masks, and the Lakhon (Lakhon nai, Lakhon chatri and Lakhon nok), performed by women who play both male and female roles draws inspiration primarily from the Ramakien. Percussion instruments and Piphat, a type of woodwind accompany the dance. Nang talung, a Thai shadow play inspired by South Indian Bommalattam, has shadows made from the pieces of cow or water buffalo hide cut to represent human figures with movable arms and legs are thrown on a screen for the entertainment of spectators.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Sometimes, the music of India is fused with the native traditional music of other countries. For example, Delhi 2 Dublin, a band based in Canada, is known for fusing Indian and Irish music, and Bhangraton is a fusion of Bhangra music with reggaeton.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Indian film composer A. R. Rahman wrote the music for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams, and a musical version of Hum Aapke Hain Koun was staged in London's West End. The Bollywood sports film Lagaan (2001) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and two other Bollywood films (2002's Devdas and 2006's Rang De Basanti) were nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008) was inspired by Bollywood films.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Bhangraton is a fusion of Bhangra music with reggaeton, which itself is a fusion of hip hop, reggae, and traditional Latin American music.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In early 1960s Jazz pioneers such as John Coltrane—who recorded a composition entitled 'India' during the November 1961 sessions for his album Live at the Village Vanguard (the track was not released until 1963 on Coltrane's album Impressions)—also embraced this fusion. George Harrison (of the Beatles) played the sitar on the song \"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)\" in 1965, which sparked interest from Shankar, who subsequently took Harrison as his apprentice. Jazz innovator Miles Davis recorded and performed with musicians like Khalil Balakrishna, Bihari Sharma, and Badal Roy in his post-1968 electric ensembles. Virtuoso jazz guitarist John McLaughlin spent several years in Madurai learning Carnatic music and incorporated it into many of his acts including Shakti which featured prominent Indian musicians. Other Western artists such as the Grateful Dead, Incredible String Band, the Rolling Stones, the Move and Traffic soon incorporated Indian influences and instruments, and added Indian performers. Legendary Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia joined guitarist Sanjay Mishra on his classic CD \"Blue Incantation\" (1995). Mishra also wrote an original score for French Director Eric Heumann for his film Port Djema (1996) which won best score at Hamptons film festival and The Golden Bear at Berlin. in 2000 he recorded Rescue with drummer Dennis Chambers (Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin et al.) and in 2006 Chateau Benares with guests DJ Logic and Keller Williams (guitar and bass).",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Since the early 2000s, Bollywood began influencing musical films in the Western world and was instrumental role in reviving the American musical film. Baz Luhrmann said that his musical film, Moulin Rouge! (2001), was inspired by Bollywood musicals; the film incorporated a Bollywood-style dance scene with a song from the film China Gate. The critical and financial success of Moulin Rouge! began a renaissance of Western musical films such as Chicago, Rent, and Dreamgirls.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Psychedelic trance developed from Goa trance.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In the late 1970s and early 1980s, rock and roll fusions with Indian music were well known throughout Europe and North America. Ali Akbar Khan's 1955 performance in the United States was perhaps the beginning of this trend. In 1985, a beat-oriented, Raga Rock hybrid called Sitar Power by Ashwin Batish reintroduced sitar in western nations. Sitar Power drew the attention of a number of record labels and was snapped up by Shanachie Records of New Jersey to head their World Beat Ethno Pop division.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The influence of filmi may be seen in popular music worldwide. Technopop pioneers Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto of the Yellow Magic Orchestra produced a 1978 electronic album, Cochin Moon, based on an experimental fusion of electronic music and Bollywood-inspired Indian music. Truth Hurts' 2002 song \"Addictive\", produced by DJ Quik and Dr. Dre, was taken from Lata Mangeshkar's \"Thoda Resham Lagta Hai\" in Jyoti (1981). The Black Eyed Peas' Grammy Award winning 2005 song \"Don't Phunk with My Heart\" was inspired by two 1970s Bollywood songs: \"Ye Mera Dil Yaar Ka Diwana\" from Don (1978) and \"Ae Nujawan Hai Sub\" from Apradh (1972). Both songs were composed by Kalyanji Anandji, sung by Asha Bhosle, and featured the dancer Helen.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Some prominent Indians in Western classical music are:",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Bollywood has been a significant form of soft power for India, increasing its influence and changing overseas perceptions of India. According to author Roopa Swaminathan, \"Bollywood cinema is one of the strongest global cultural ambassadors of a new India.\" Its role in expanding India's global influence is comparable to Hollywood's similar role with American influence.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Kishore Kumar is popular in Egypt and Somalia.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Hindi films were originally distributed to some parts of Africa by Lebanese businessmen, and Mother India (1957) continued to be screened in Nigeria decades after its release. Indian movies have influenced Hausa clothing, songs have been covered by Hausa singers, and stories have influenced Nigerian novelists. Stickers of Indian films and stars decorate taxis and buses in Nigeria's Northern Region, and posters of Indian films hang on the walls of tailoring shops and mechanics' garages.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In South Africa, film imports from India were watched by black and Indian audiences. Several Bollywood figures have travelled to Africa for films and off-camera projects. Padmashree Laloo Prasad Yadav (2005) was filmed in South Africa. Dil Jo Bhi Kahey... (2005) was also filmed almost entirely in Mauritius, which has a large ethnic-Indian population.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "In Egypt, Bollywood films were popular during the 1970s and 1980s. Amitabh Bachchan has remained popular in the country and Indian tourists visiting Egypt are asked, \"Do you know Amitabh Bachchan?\"",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Indo-Caribbean music of Indo-Caribbean people in Caribbean is most common in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Jamaica, and Suriname, which reflects their Bhojpuri heritage. Main instrumentation are dhantal, metal rod, clapper, dholak, two-headed barrel drum. Women sing Hindu bhajans and folk songs from the music of Bhojpur on various important life events, rituals, celebrations, festivals like phagwah and holi. Indo-Caribbean contributions to popular music are very important. The most well-known is the Indo-Trinidadian chutney music tradition. Chutney is a form of popular dance music that developed in the mid-to late 20th century. Baithak Gana is a similar popular form originating in Suriname.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "There is significant Indian diaspora communities in Suriname and Guyana, Indian music and Hindi-language movies are popular. In 2006, Dhoom 2 became the first Bollywood film to be shot in Rio de Janeiro.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "In the new millennium, American hip-hop has featured Indian filmi and bhangra. Mainstream hip-hop artists have sampled songs from Bollywood movies and have collaborated with Indian artists. Examples include Timbaland's \"Indian Flute\", Erick Sermon and Redman's \"React\", Slum Village's \"Disco\", and Truth Hurts' hit song \"Addictive\", which sampled a Lata Mangeshkar song, and The Black Eyed Peas sampled Asha Bhosle's song \"Yeh Mera Dil\" in their hit single \"Don't Phunk With My Heart\". In 1997, the British band Cornershop paid tribute to Asha Bhosle with their song Brimful of Asha, which became an international hit. British-born Indian artist Panjabi MC also had a Bhangra hit in the US with \"Mundian To Bach Ke\" which featured rapper Jay-Z. Asian Dub Foundation are not huge mainstream stars, but their politically charged rap and punk rock influenced sound has a multi-racial audience in their native UK. In 2008, international star Snoop Dogg appeared in a song in the film Singh Is Kinng. In 2007, hip-hop producer Madlib released Beat Konducta Vol 3–4: Beat Konducta in India; an album which heavily samples and is inspired by the music of India.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Due to shared cultural heritage and language, Indian music and Bollywood films are also popular in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal, where Hindustani is widely understood.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Already covered in earlier section Ancient influence on Southeast Asian music genre.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "West Asia has large Indian diaspora population, who mainly consume Indian music. Indian music is also popular with native middle eastern people. 85% of Qatar's and 75% of UAE's total population are Indian citizens. Hindi films and music have become popular in Arab countries, and imported Indian films are usually subtitled in Arabic when they are released. Bollywood has progressed in Israel since the early 2000s, with channels dedicated to Indian films on cable television;",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In Germany, Indian stereotypes included bullock carts, beggars, sacred cows, corrupt politicians, and catastrophes before Bollywood and the IT industry transformed global perceptions of India.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In the late 1980s, Indian-British artists fused Indian and Western traditions to make the Asian Underground. Since the 1990s, Canadian born musician Nadaka who has spent most of his life in India, has been creating music that is an acoustic fusion of Indian classical music with western styles. One such singer who has merged the Bhakti sangeet tradition of India with the western non-Indian music is Krishna Das and sells music records of his musical sadhana. Another example is the Indo-Canadian musician Vandana Vishwas who has experimented with western music in her 2013 album Monologues.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "In a more recent example of Indian-British fusion, Laura Marling along with Mumford and Sons collaborated in 2010 with the Dharohar Project on a four-song EP. The British band Bombay Bicycle Club also sampled the song \"Man Dole Mera Tan Dole\" for their single \"Feel\". Laxmikant-Pyarelal",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Due to large Indian diaspora population, Indian music and movies are very popular in Fiji especially among Indo-Fijians.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Australia and New Zealand have 2 percent Indian population, as well as other a large South Asian diaspora, and Bollywood music and movies are popular amongst non-Asians in the country as well.",
"title": "Globalization of Indian music"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Sangeet Natak Akademi is the national level academy for performing arts set up by the Government of India in 1952, which bestows Sangeet Natak Akademi Award as the highest official Indian government's recognition given to practicing artists, It has established several institutions including the Manipur Dance Academy in Imphal, Ravindra Rangshala Centers, Sattriya Centre, Kathak Kendra (National Institute of Kathak Dance) at New Delhi, Centre for Kutiyattam at Thiruvananthapuram, Chhau Centre at Baripada in Jamshedpur, Banaras Music Akademi, Varanasi, and the Northeast Centre.",
"title": "Organisations promoting Indian music"
}
]
| Owing to India's vastness and diversity, Indian music encompasses numerous genres in multiple varieties and forms which include classical music, folk, rock, and pop. It has a history spanning several millennia and developed over several geo-locations spanning the sub-continent. Music in India began as an integral part of socio-religious life. | 2001-03-07T19:24:29Z | 2023-11-24T14:34:52Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_India |
14,536 | List of Indian musical instruments | Indian musical instruments can be broadly classified according to the Hornbostel–Sachs system into four categories: chordophones (string instruments), aerophones (wind instruments), membranophones (drums) and idiophones (non-drum percussion instruments).
Dwarkanath Ghose (Dwarkin) modified the French pedal harmonium. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Indian musical instruments can be broadly classified according to the Hornbostel–Sachs system into four categories: chordophones (string instruments), aerophones (wind instruments), membranophones (drums) and idiophones (non-drum percussion instruments).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Dwarkanath Ghose (Dwarkin) modified the French pedal harmonium.",
"title": "Hand harmonium"
}
]
| Indian musical instruments can be broadly classified according to the Hornbostel–Sachs system into four categories: chordophones, aerophones, membranophones (drums) and idiophones. | 2001-11-01T12:31:32Z | 2023-12-10T08:58:24Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_musical_instruments |
14,537 | IRIX | IRIX (/ˈaɪrɪks/ EYE-ricks) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system and the industry-standard OpenGL graphics system.
SGI originated the IRIX name in the 1988 release 3.0 of the operating system for the SGI IRIS 4D series of workstations and servers. Previous releases are identified only by the release number prefixed by "4D1-", such as "4D1-2.2". The "4D1-" prefix continued to be used in official documentation to prefix IRIX release numbers. Prior to the IRIS 4D, SGI bundled the GL2 operating system, based on UniSoft UniPlus System V Unix, and using the proprietary MEX (Multiple EXposure) windowing system.
IRIX 3.x is based on UNIX System V Release 3 with 4.3BSD enhancements, and incorporates the 4Sight windowing system, based on NeWS and IRIS GL. SGI's own Extent File System (EFS) replaces the System V filesystem.
IRIX 4.0, released in 1991, replaces 4Sight with the X Window System (X11R4), the 4Dwm window manager providing a similar look and feel to 4Sight.
IRIX 5.0, released in 1993, incorporates certain features of UNIX System V Release 4, including ELF executables. IRIX 5.3 introduced the XFS journaling file system.
In 1994, IRIX 6.0 added support for the 64-bit MIPS R8000 processor, but is otherwise similar to IRIX 5.2. Later 6.x releases support other members of the MIPS processor family in 64-bit mode. IRIX 6.3 was released for the SGI O2 workstation only. IRIX 6.4 improved multiprocessor scalability for the Octane, Origin 2000, and Onyx2 systems. The Origin 2000 and Onyx2 IRIX 6.4 was marketed as "Cellular IRIX", although it only incorporates some features from the original Cellular IRIX distributed operating system project.
The last major version of IRIX is 6.5, released in May 1998. New minor versions of IRIX 6.5 were released every quarter until 2005, and then four minor releases. Through version 6.5.22, there are two branches of each release: a maintenance release (identified by an "m" suffix) that includes only fixes to the original IRIX 6.5 code, and a feature release (with an "f" suffix) that includes improvements and enhancements. An overlay upgrade from 6.5.x to the 6.5.22 maintenance release was available as a free download, whereas versions 6.5.23 and higher required an active Silicon Graphics support contract.
A 2001 Computerworld review found IRIX in a "critical" state. SGI had been moving its efforts to Linux and the Windows-based SGI Visual Workstation but MIPS and IRIX customers convinced SGI to continue to support its platform through 2006. On September 6, 2006, an SGI press release announced the end of the MIPS and IRIX product lines. Production ended on December 29, 2006, with final deliveries in March 2007, except by special arrangement. Support for these products ended in December 2013 and they will receive no further updates.
Much of IRIX's core technology has been open sourced and ported by SGI to Linux, including XFS.
In 2009, SGI filed bankruptcy and then was purchased by Rackable Systems, which was later purchased by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2016. All SGI hardware produced after 2007 is based on either IA-64 or x86-64 architecture, so it is incapable of running IRIX and is instead intended for Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. HPE has not stated any plans for IRIX development or source code release.
IRIX 6.5 is compliant with UNIX System V Release 4, UNIX 95, and POSIX (including 1e/2c draft 15 ACLs and Capabilities).
In the early 1990s, IRIX was a leader in Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP), scalable from 1 to more than 1024 processors with a single system image. IRIX has strong support for real-time disk and graphics I/O. IRIX was widely used for the 1990s and 2000s in the computer animation and scientific visualization industries, due to its large application base and high performance. It still is relevant in a few legacy applications.
IRIX is one of the first Unix versions to feature a graphical user interface for the main desktop environment. IRIX Interactive Desktop uses the 4Dwm X window manager with a custom look designed using the Motif widget toolkit. IRIX is the originator of the industry standard OpenGL for graphics chips and Image processing libraries.
IRIX uses the MIPSPro Compiler for both its front end and back end. The compiler, also known in earlier versions as IDO (IRIS Development Option) was released in many versions, many of which are coupled to the OS version. The last version was 7.4.4m, designed for 6.5.19 or later. The compiler is designed to support parallel POSIX programming in C/C++, Fortran 77/90, and Ada. The Workshop GUI IDE is used for development. Other tools include Speedshop for performance tuning, and Performance Co-Pilot. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "IRIX (/ˈaɪrɪks/ EYE-ricks) is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system and the industry-standard OpenGL graphics system.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "SGI originated the IRIX name in the 1988 release 3.0 of the operating system for the SGI IRIS 4D series of workstations and servers. Previous releases are identified only by the release number prefixed by \"4D1-\", such as \"4D1-2.2\". The \"4D1-\" prefix continued to be used in official documentation to prefix IRIX release numbers. Prior to the IRIS 4D, SGI bundled the GL2 operating system, based on UniSoft UniPlus System V Unix, and using the proprietary MEX (Multiple EXposure) windowing system.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "IRIX 3.x is based on UNIX System V Release 3 with 4.3BSD enhancements, and incorporates the 4Sight windowing system, based on NeWS and IRIS GL. SGI's own Extent File System (EFS) replaces the System V filesystem.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "IRIX 4.0, released in 1991, replaces 4Sight with the X Window System (X11R4), the 4Dwm window manager providing a similar look and feel to 4Sight.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "IRIX 5.0, released in 1993, incorporates certain features of UNIX System V Release 4, including ELF executables. IRIX 5.3 introduced the XFS journaling file system.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1994, IRIX 6.0 added support for the 64-bit MIPS R8000 processor, but is otherwise similar to IRIX 5.2. Later 6.x releases support other members of the MIPS processor family in 64-bit mode. IRIX 6.3 was released for the SGI O2 workstation only. IRIX 6.4 improved multiprocessor scalability for the Octane, Origin 2000, and Onyx2 systems. The Origin 2000 and Onyx2 IRIX 6.4 was marketed as \"Cellular IRIX\", although it only incorporates some features from the original Cellular IRIX distributed operating system project.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The last major version of IRIX is 6.5, released in May 1998. New minor versions of IRIX 6.5 were released every quarter until 2005, and then four minor releases. Through version 6.5.22, there are two branches of each release: a maintenance release (identified by an \"m\" suffix) that includes only fixes to the original IRIX 6.5 code, and a feature release (with an \"f\" suffix) that includes improvements and enhancements. An overlay upgrade from 6.5.x to the 6.5.22 maintenance release was available as a free download, whereas versions 6.5.23 and higher required an active Silicon Graphics support contract.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A 2001 Computerworld review found IRIX in a \"critical\" state. SGI had been moving its efforts to Linux and the Windows-based SGI Visual Workstation but MIPS and IRIX customers convinced SGI to continue to support its platform through 2006. On September 6, 2006, an SGI press release announced the end of the MIPS and IRIX product lines. Production ended on December 29, 2006, with final deliveries in March 2007, except by special arrangement. Support for these products ended in December 2013 and they will receive no further updates.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Much of IRIX's core technology has been open sourced and ported by SGI to Linux, including XFS.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 2009, SGI filed bankruptcy and then was purchased by Rackable Systems, which was later purchased by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2016. All SGI hardware produced after 2007 is based on either IA-64 or x86-64 architecture, so it is incapable of running IRIX and is instead intended for Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. HPE has not stated any plans for IRIX development or source code release.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "IRIX 6.5 is compliant with UNIX System V Release 4, UNIX 95, and POSIX (including 1e/2c draft 15 ACLs and Capabilities).",
"title": "Features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In the early 1990s, IRIX was a leader in Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP), scalable from 1 to more than 1024 processors with a single system image. IRIX has strong support for real-time disk and graphics I/O. IRIX was widely used for the 1990s and 2000s in the computer animation and scientific visualization industries, due to its large application base and high performance. It still is relevant in a few legacy applications.",
"title": "Features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "IRIX is one of the first Unix versions to feature a graphical user interface for the main desktop environment. IRIX Interactive Desktop uses the 4Dwm X window manager with a custom look designed using the Motif widget toolkit. IRIX is the originator of the industry standard OpenGL for graphics chips and Image processing libraries.",
"title": "Features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "IRIX uses the MIPSPro Compiler for both its front end and back end. The compiler, also known in earlier versions as IDO (IRIS Development Option) was released in many versions, many of which are coupled to the OS version. The last version was 7.4.4m, designed for 6.5.19 or later. The compiler is designed to support parallel POSIX programming in C/C++, Fortran 77/90, and Ada. The Workshop GUI IDE is used for development. Other tools include Speedshop for performance tuning, and Performance Co-Pilot.",
"title": "Features"
}
]
| IRIX is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is based on UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system and the industry-standard OpenGL graphics system. | 2001-03-06T15:05:15Z | 2023-11-20T23:13:32Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX |
14,539 | Internet | The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.
The origins of the Internet date back to research to enable time-sharing of computer resources and the development of packet switching in the 1960s. The set of rules (communication protocols) to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States and in the United Kingdom and France. The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. The funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, encouraged worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and the merger of many networks using DARPA's Internet protocol suite. The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web, marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, and generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network. Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the 1980s, subsequent commercialization is what incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life.
Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, and newspapers, are reshaped, redefined, or even bypassed by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephone, Internet television, online music, digital newspapers, and video streaming websites. Newspaper, book, and other print publishing have adapted to website technology or have been reshaped into blogging, web feeds, and online news aggregators. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has grown exponentially for major retailers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their "brick and mortar" presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and services entirely online. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.
The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the Internet, the Internet Protocol address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Today's list of the New Seven Wonders.
The word internetted was used as early as 1849, meaning interconnected or interwoven. The word Internet was used in 1945 by the United States War Department in a radio operator's manual, and in 1974 as the shorthand form of Internetwork. Today, the term Internet most commonly refers to the global system of interconnected computer networks, though it may also refer to any group of smaller networks.
When it came into common use, most publications treated the word Internet as a capitalized proper noun; this has become less common. This reflects the tendency in English to capitalize new terms and move them to lowercase as they become familiar. The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global internet from smaller networks, though many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online sources, "Internet" was capitalized in 54% of cases.
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably; it is common to speak of "going on the Internet" when using a web browser to view web pages. However, the World Wide Web, or the Web, is only one of a large number of Internet services, a collection of documents (web pages) and other web resources linked by hyperlinks and URLs.
In the 1960s, computer scientists began developing systems for time-sharing of computer resources. J. C. R. Licklider proposed the idea of a universal network while working at Bolt Beranek & Newman and, later, leading the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense (DoD). Research into packet switching, one of the fundamental Internet technologies, started in the work of Paul Baran in the early 1960s and, independently, Donald Davies in 1965. After the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967, packet switching from the proposed NPL network was incorporated into the design of the ARPANET, an experimental resource sharing network proposed by ARPA.
ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and SRI International (SRI) on 29 October 1969. The third site was at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah. In a sign of future growth, 15 sites were connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing. Thereafter, the ARPANET gradually developed into a decentralized communications network, connecting remote centers and military bases in the United States. Other user networks and research networks, such as the Merit Network and CYCLADES, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Early international collaborations for the ARPANET were rare. Connections were made in 1973 to the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR), and to Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London, which provided a gateway to British academic networks, forming the first internetwork for resource sharing. ARPA projects, international working groups and commercial initiatives led to the development of various protocols and standards by which multiple separate networks could become a single network or "a network of networks". In 1974, Vint Cerf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at DARPA published a proposal for "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". They used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork in RFC 675, and later RFCs repeated this use. Cerf and Kahn credit Louis Pouzin with important influences on the resulting TCP/IP design. National PTTs and commercial providers developed the X.25 standard and deployed it on public data networks.
Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks. TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States for researchers, first at speeds of 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. The NSFNet expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89. Although other network protocols such as UUCP and PTT public data networks had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of the Internet as an intercontinental network. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.
Steady advances in semiconductor technology and optical networking created new economic opportunities for commercial involvement in the expansion of the network in its core and for delivering services to the public. In mid-1989, MCI Mail and Compuserve established connections to the Internet, delivering email and public access products to the half million users of the Internet. Just months later, on 1 January 1990, PSInet launched an alternate Internet backbone for commercial use; one of the networks that added to the core of the commercial Internet of later years. In March 1990, the first high-speed T1 (1.5 Mbit/s) link between the NSFNET and Europe was installed between Cornell University and CERN, allowing much more robust communications than were capable with satellites. Six months later Tim Berners-Lee would begin writing WorldWideWeb, the first web browser, after two years of lobbying CERN management. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (which was also an HTML editor and could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server, and the first Web pages that described the project itself. In 1991 the Commercial Internet eXchange was founded, allowing PSInet to communicate with the other commercial networks CERFnet and Alternet. Stanford Federal Credit Union was the first financial institution to offer online Internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994. In 1996, OP Financial Group, also a cooperative bank, became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. By 1995, the Internet was fully commercialized in the U.S. when the NSFNet was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.
As technology advanced and commercial opportunities fueled reciprocal growth, the volume of Internet traffic started experiencing similar characteristics as that of the scaling of MOS transistors, exemplified by Moore's law, doubling every 18 months. This growth, formalized as Edholm's law, was catalyzed by advances in MOS technology, laser light wave systems, and noise performance.
Since 1995, the Internet has tremendously impacted culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by email, instant messaging, telephony (Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP), two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking services, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, or more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever-greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking services. During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%. This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network. As of 31 March 2011, the estimated total number of Internet users was 2.095 billion (30of world population). It is estimated that in 1993 the Internet carried only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunication. By 2000 this figure had grown to 51%, and by 2007 more than 97% of all telecommunicated information was carried over the Internet.
The Internet is a global network that comprises many voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks. It operates without a central governing body. The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. To maintain interoperability, the principal name spaces of the Internet are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is governed by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet technical, business, academic, and other non-commercial communities. ICANN coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers for use on the Internet, including domain names, IP addresses, application port numbers in the transport protocols, and many other parameters. Globally unified name spaces are essential for maintaining the global reach of the Internet. This role of ICANN distinguishes it as perhaps the only central coordinating body for the global Internet.
Regional Internet registries (RIRs) were established for five regions of the world. The African Network Information Center (AfriNIC) for Africa, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) for North America, the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) for Asia and the Pacific region, the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) for Latin America and the Caribbean region, and the Réseaux IP Européens – Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) for Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia were delegated to assign IP address blocks and other Internet parameters to local registries, such as Internet service providers, from a designated pool of addresses set aside for each region.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce, had final approval over changes to the DNS root zone until the IANA stewardship transition on 1 October 2016. The Internet Society (ISOC) was founded in 1992 with a mission to "assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world". Its members include individuals (anyone may join) as well as corporations, organizations, governments, and universities. Among other activities ISOC provides an administrative home for a number of less formally organized groups that are involved in developing and managing the Internet, including: the IETF, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG). On 16 November 2005, the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss Internet-related issues.
The communications infrastructure of the Internet consists of its hardware components and a system of software layers that control various aspects of the architecture. As with any computer network, the Internet physically consists of routers, media (such as cabling and radio links), repeaters, modems etc. However, as an example of internetworking, many of the network nodes are not necessarily Internet equipment per se, the internet packets are carried by other full-fledged networking protocols with the Internet acting as a homogeneous networking standard, running across heterogeneous hardware, with the packets guided to their destinations by IP routers.
Internet service providers (ISPs) establish the worldwide connectivity between individual networks at various levels of scope. End-users who only access the Internet when needed to perform a function or obtain information, represent the bottom of the routing hierarchy. At the top of the routing hierarchy are the tier 1 networks, large telecommunication companies that exchange traffic directly with each other via very high speed fiber-optic cables and governed by peering agreements. Tier 2 and lower-level networks buy Internet transit from other providers to reach at least some parties on the global Internet, though they may also engage in peering. An ISP may use a single upstream provider for connectivity, or implement multihoming to achieve redundancy and load balancing. Internet exchange points are major traffic exchanges with physical connections to multiple ISPs. Large organizations, such as academic institutions, large enterprises, and governments, may perform the same function as ISPs, engaging in peering and purchasing transit on behalf of their internal networks. Research networks tend to interconnect with large subnetworks such as GEANT, GLORIAD, Internet2, and the UK's national research and education network, JANET.
Common methods of Internet access by users include dial-up with a computer modem via telephone circuits, broadband over coaxial cable, fiber optics or copper wires, Wi-Fi, satellite, and cellular telephone technology (e.g. 3G, 4G). The Internet may often be accessed from computers in libraries and Internet cafés. Internet access points exist in many public places such as airport halls and coffee shops. Various terms are used, such as public Internet kiosk, public access terminal, and Web payphone. Many hotels also have public terminals that are usually fee-based. These terminals are widely accessed for various usages, such as ticket booking, bank deposit, or online payment. Wi-Fi provides wireless access to the Internet via local computer networks. Hotspots providing such access include Wi-Fi cafés, where users need to bring their own wireless devices, such as a laptop or PDA. These services may be free to all, free to customers only, or fee-based.
Grassroots efforts have led to wireless community networks. Commercial Wi-Fi services that cover large areas are available in many cities, such as New York, London, Vienna, Toronto, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and Pittsburgh, where the Internet can then be accessed from places such as a park bench. Experiments have also been conducted with proprietary mobile wireless networks like Ricochet, various high-speed data services over cellular networks, and fixed wireless services. Modern smartphones can also access the Internet through the cellular carrier network. For Web browsing, these devices provide applications such as Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and a wide variety of other Internet software may be installed from app stores. Internet usage by mobile and tablet devices exceeded desktop worldwide for the first time in October 2016.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimated that, by the end of 2017, 48% of individual users regularly connect to the Internet, up from 34% in 2012. Mobile Internet connectivity has played an important role in expanding access in recent years, especially in Asia and the Pacific and in Africa. The number of unique mobile cellular subscriptions increased from 3.9 billion in 2012 to 4.8 billion in 2016, two-thirds of the world's population, with more than half of subscriptions located in Asia and the Pacific. The number of subscriptions was predicted to rise to 5.7 billion users in 2020. As of 2018, 80% of the world's population were covered by a 4G network. The limits that users face on accessing information via mobile applications coincide with a broader process of fragmentation of the Internet. Fragmentation restricts access to media content and tends to affect the poorest users the most.
Zero-rating, the practice of Internet service providers allowing users free connectivity to access specific content or applications without cost, has offered opportunities to surmount economic hurdles but has also been accused by its critics as creating a two-tiered Internet. To address the issues with zero-rating, an alternative model has emerged in the concept of 'equal rating' and is being tested in experiments by Mozilla and Orange in Africa. Equal rating prevents prioritization of one type of content and zero-rates all content up to a specified data cap. In a study published by Chatham House, 15 out of 19 countries researched in Latin America had some kind of hybrid or zero-rated product offered. Some countries in the region had a handful of plans to choose from (across all mobile network operators) while others, such as Colombia, offered as many as 30 pre-paid and 34 post-paid plans.
A study of eight countries in the Global South found that zero-rated data plans exist in every country, although there is a great range in the frequency with which they are offered and actually used in each. The study looked at the top three to five carriers by market share in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru and Philippines. Across the 181 plans examined, 13 percent were offering zero-rated services. Another study, covering Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, found Facebook's Free Basics and Wikipedia Zero to be the most commonly zero-rated content.
The Internet standards describe a framework known as the Internet protocol suite (also called TCP/IP, based on the first two components.) This is a suite of protocols that are ordered into a set of four conceptional layers by the scope of their operation, originally documented in RFC 1122 and RFC 1123. At the top is the application layer, where communication is described in terms of the objects or data structures most appropriate for each application. For example, a web browser operates in a client–server application model and exchanges information with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and an application-germane data structure, such as the HyperText Markup Language (HTML).
Below this top layer, the transport layer connects applications on different hosts with a logical channel through the network. It provides this service with a variety of possible characteristics, such as ordered, reliable delivery (TCP), and an unreliable datagram service (UDP).
Underlying these layers are the networking technologies that interconnect networks at their borders and exchange traffic across them. The Internet layer implements the Internet Protocol (IP) which enables computers to identify and locate each other by IP address and route their traffic via intermediate (transit) networks. The Internet Protocol layer code is independent of the type of network that it is physically running over.
At the bottom of the architecture is the link layer, which connects nodes on the same physical link, and contains protocols that do not require routers for traversal to other links. The protocol suite does not explicitly specify hardware methods to transfer bits, or protocols to manage such hardware, but assumes that appropriate technology is available. Examples of that technology include Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and DSL.
The most prominent component of the Internet model is the Internet Protocol (IP). IP enables internetworking and, in essence, establishes the Internet itself. Two versions of the Internet Protocol exist, IPv4 and IPv6.
For locating individual computers on the network, the Internet provides IP addresses. IP addresses are used by the Internet infrastructure to direct internet packets to their destinations. They consist of fixed-length numbers, which are found within the packet. IP addresses are generally assigned to equipment either automatically via DHCP, or are configured.
However, the network also supports other addressing systems. Users generally enter domain names (e.g. "en.wikipedia.org") instead of IP addresses because they are easier to remember; they are converted by the Domain Name System (DNS) into IP addresses which are more efficient for routing purposes.
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. IPv4 is the initial version used on the first generation of the Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed to address up to ≈4.3 billion (10) hosts. However, the explosive growth of the Internet has led to IPv4 address exhaustion, which entered its final stage in 2011, when the global IPv4 address allocation pool was exhausted.
Because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP IPv6, was developed in the mid-1990s, which provides vastly larger addressing capabilities and more efficient routing of Internet traffic. IPv6 uses 128 bits for the IP address and was standardized in 1998. IPv6 deployment has been ongoing since the mid-2000s and is currently in growing deployment around the world, since Internet address registries (RIRs) began to urge all resource managers to plan rapid adoption and conversion.
IPv6 is not directly interoperable by design with IPv4. In essence, it establishes a parallel version of the Internet not directly accessible with IPv4 software. Thus, translation facilities must exist for internetworking or nodes must have duplicate networking software for both networks. Essentially all modern computer operating systems support both versions of the Internet Protocol. Network infrastructure, however, has been lagging in this development. Aside from the complex array of physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is facilitated by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contracts, e.g., peering agreements, and by technical specifications or protocols that describe the exchange of data over the network. Indeed, the Internet is defined by its interconnections and routing policies.
A subnetwork or subnet is a logical subdivision of an IP network. The practice of dividing a network into two or more networks is called subnetting.
Computers that belong to a subnet are addressed with an identical most-significant bit-group in their IP addresses. This results in the logical division of an IP address into two fields, the network number or routing prefix and the rest field or host identifier. The rest field is an identifier for a specific host or network interface.
The routing prefix may be expressed in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation written as the first address of a network, followed by a slash character (/), and ending with the bit-length of the prefix. For example, 198.51.100.0/24 is the prefix of the Internet Protocol version 4 network starting at the given address, having 24 bits allocated for the network prefix, and the remaining 8 bits reserved for host addressing. Addresses in the range 198.51.100.0 to 198.51.100.255 belong to this network. The IPv6 address specification 2001:db8::/32 is a large address block with 2 addresses, having a 32-bit routing prefix.
For IPv4, a network may also be characterized by its subnet mask or netmask, which is the bitmask that when applied by a bitwise AND operation to any IP address in the network, yields the routing prefix. Subnet masks are also expressed in dot-decimal notation like an address. For example, 255.255.255.0 is the subnet mask for the prefix 198.51.100.0/24.
Traffic is exchanged between subnetworks through routers when the routing prefixes of the source address and the destination address differ. A router serves as a logical or physical boundary between the subnets.
The benefits of subnetting an existing network vary with each deployment scenario. In the address allocation architecture of the Internet using CIDR and in large organizations, it is necessary to allocate address space efficiently. Subnetting may also enhance routing efficiency or have advantages in network management when subnetworks are administratively controlled by different entities in a larger organization. Subnets may be arranged logically in a hierarchical architecture, partitioning an organization's network address space into a tree-like routing structure.
Computers and routers use routing tables in their operating system to direct IP packets to reach a node on a different subnetwork. Routing tables are maintained by manual configuration or automatically by routing protocols. End-nodes typically use a default route that points toward an ISP providing transit, while ISP routers use the Border Gateway Protocol to establish the most efficient routing across the complex connections of the global Internet. The default gateway is the node that serves as the forwarding host (router) to other networks when no other route specification matches the destination IP address of a packet.
While the hardware components in the Internet infrastructure can often be used to support other software systems, it is the design and the standardization process of the software that characterizes the Internet and provides the foundation for its scalability and success. The responsibility for the architectural design of the Internet software systems has been assumed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The IETF conducts standard-setting work groups, open to any individual, about the various aspects of Internet architecture. The resulting contributions and standards are published as Request for Comments (RFC) documents on the IETF web site. The principal methods of networking that enable the Internet are contained in specially designated RFCs that constitute the Internet Standards. Other less rigorous documents are simply informative, experimental, or historical, or document the best current practices (BCP) when implementing Internet technologies.
The Internet carries many applications and services, most prominently the World Wide Web, including social media, electronic mail, mobile applications, multiplayer online games, Internet telephony, file sharing, and streaming media services.
Most servers that provide these services are today hosted in data centers, and content is often accessed through high-performance content delivery networks.
The World Wide Web is a global collection of documents, images, multimedia, applications, and other resources, logically interrelated by hyperlinks and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which provide a global system of named references. URIs symbolically identify services, web servers, databases, and the documents and resources that they can provide. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main access protocol of the World Wide Web. Web services also use HTTP for communication between software systems for information transfer, sharing and exchanging business data and logistics and is one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet.
World Wide Web browser software, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer/Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome, enable users to navigate from one web page to another via the hyperlinks embedded in the documents. These documents may also contain any combination of computer data, including graphics, sounds, text, video, multimedia and interactive content that runs while the user is interacting with the page. Client-side software can include animations, games, office applications and scientific demonstrations. Through keyword-driven Internet research using search engines like Yahoo!, Bing and Google, users worldwide have easy, instant access to a vast and diverse amount of online information. Compared to printed media, books, encyclopedias and traditional libraries, the World Wide Web has enabled the decentralization of information on a large scale.
The Web has enabled individuals and organizations to publish ideas and information to a potentially large audience online at greatly reduced expense and time delay. Publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website involves little initial cost and many cost-free services are available. However, publishing and maintaining large, professional web sites with attractive, diverse and up-to-date information is still a difficult and expensive proposition. Many individuals and some companies and groups use web logs or blogs, which are largely used as easily updatable online diaries. Some commercial organizations encourage staff to communicate advice in their areas of specialization in the hope that visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free information and be attracted to the corporation as a result.
Advertising on popular web pages can be lucrative, and e-commerce, which is the sale of products and services directly via the Web, continues to grow. Online advertising is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. It includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising (including web banner advertising), and mobile advertising. In 2011, Internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable television and nearly exceeded those of broadcast television. Many common online advertising practices are controversial and increasingly subject to regulation.
When the Web developed in the 1990s, a typical web page was stored in completed form on a web server, formatted in HTML, ready for transmission to a web browser in response to a request. Over time, the process of creating and serving web pages has become dynamic, creating a flexible design, layout, and content. Websites are often created using content management software with, initially, very little content. Contributors to these systems, who may be paid staff, members of an organization or the public, fill underlying databases with content using editing pages designed for that purpose while casual visitors view and read this content in HTML form. There may or may not be editorial, approval and security systems built into the process of taking newly entered content and making it available to the target visitors.
Email is an important communications service available via the Internet. The concept of sending electronic text messages between parties, analogous to mailing letters or memos, predates the creation of the Internet. Pictures, documents, and other files are sent as email attachments. Email messages can be cc-ed to multiple email addresses.
Internet telephony is a common communications service realized with the Internet. The name of the principal internetworking protocol, the Internet Protocol, lends its name to voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The idea began in the early 1990s with walkie-talkie-like voice applications for personal computers. VoIP systems now dominate many markets and are as easy to use and as convenient as a traditional telephone. The benefit has been substantial cost savings over traditional telephone calls, especially over long distances. Cable, ADSL, and mobile data networks provide Internet access in customer premises and inexpensive VoIP network adapters provide the connection for traditional analog telephone sets. The voice quality of VoIP often exceeds that of traditional calls. Remaining problems for VoIP include the situation that emergency services may not be universally available and that devices rely on a local power supply, while older traditional phones are powered from the local loop, and typically operate during a power failure.
File sharing is an example of transferring large amounts of data across the Internet. A computer file can be emailed to customers, colleagues and friends as an attachment. It can be uploaded to a website or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server for easy download by others. It can be put into a "shared location" or onto a file server for instant use by colleagues. The load of bulk downloads to many users can be eased by the use of "mirror" servers or peer-to-peer networks. In any of these cases, access to the file may be controlled by user authentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured by encryption, and money may change hands for access to the file. The price can be paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example, a credit card whose details are also passed—usually fully encrypted—across the Internet. The origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by digital signatures or by MD5 or other message digests. These simple features of the Internet, over a worldwide basis, are changing the production, sale, and distribution of anything that can be reduced to a computer file for transmission. This includes all manner of print publications, software products, news, music, film, video, photography, graphics and the other arts. This in turn has caused seismic shifts in each of the existing industries that previously controlled the production and distribution of these products.
Streaming media is the real-time delivery of digital media for immediate consumption or enjoyment by end users. Many radio and television broadcasters provide Internet feeds of their live audio and video productions. They may also allow time-shift viewing or listening such as Preview, Classic Clips and Listen Again features. These providers have been joined by a range of pure Internet "broadcasters" who never had on-air licenses. This means that an Internet-connected device, such as a computer or something more specific, can be used to access online media in much the same way as was previously possible only with a television or radio receiver. The range of available types of content is much wider, from specialized technical webcasts to on-demand popular multimedia services. Podcasting is a variation on this theme, where—usually audio—material is downloaded and played back on a computer or shifted to a portable media player to be listened to on the move. These techniques using simple equipment allow anybody, with little censorship or licensing control, to broadcast audio-visual material worldwide.
Digital media streaming increases the demand for network bandwidth. For example, standard image quality needs 1 Mbit/s link speed for SD 480p, HD 720p quality requires 2.5 Mbit/s, and the top-of-the-line HDX quality needs 4.5 Mbit/s for 1080p.
Webcams are a low-cost extension of this phenomenon. While some webcams can give full-frame-rate video, the picture either is usually small or updates slowly. Internet users can watch animals around an African waterhole, ships in the Panama Canal, traffic at a local roundabout or monitor their own premises, live and in real time. Video chat rooms and video conferencing are also popular with many uses being found for personal webcams, with and without two-way sound. YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and is now the leading website for free streaming video with more than two billion users. It uses an HTML5 based web player by default to stream and show video files. Registered users may upload an unlimited amount of video and build their own personal profile. YouTube claims that its users watch hundreds of millions, and upload hundreds of thousands of videos daily.
The Internet has enabled new forms of social interaction, activities, and social associations. This phenomenon has given rise to the scholarly study of the sociology of the Internet.
The early Internet left an impact on some writers who used symbolism to write about it, such as describing the Internet as a "means to connect individuals in a vast invisible net over all the earth."
Between 2000-09, the number of Internet users globally rose from 390 million to 1.9 billion. By 2010, 22% of the world's population had access to computers with 1 billion Google searches every day, 300 million Internet users reading blogs, and 2 billion videos viewed daily on YouTube. In 2014 the world's Internet users surpassed 3 billion or 44 percent of world population, but two-thirds came from the richest countries, with 78 percent of Europeans using the Internet, followed by 57 percent of the Americas. However, by 2018, Asia alone accounted for 51% of all Internet users, with 2.2 billion out of the 4.3 billion Internet users in the world. China's Internet users surpassed a major milestone in 2018, when the country's Internet regulatory authority, China Internet Network Information Centre, announced that China had 802 million users. China was followed by India, with some 700 million users, with the United States third with 275 million users. However, in terms of penetration, in 2022 China had a 70% penetration rate compared to India's 28% and the United States's 90%. In 2022, 54% of the world's Internet users were based in Asia, 14% in Europe, 7% in North America, 10% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 11% in Africa, 4% in the Middle East and 1% in Oceania. In 2019, Kuwait, Qatar, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda and Iceland had the highest Internet penetration by the number of users, with 93% or more of the population with access. As of 2022, it was estimated that 5.4 billion people use the Internet, more than two-thirds of the world's population.
The prevalent language for communication via the Internet has always been English. This may be a result of the origin of the Internet, as well as the language's role as a lingua franca and as a world language. Early computer systems were limited to the characters in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a subset of the Latin alphabet. After English (27%), the most requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese (25%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German (4% each), Arabic, French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%). The Internet's technologies have developed enough in recent years, especially in the use of Unicode, that good facilities are available for development and communication in the world's widely used languages. However, some glitches such as mojibake (incorrect display of some languages' characters) still remain.
In a US study in 2005, the percentage of men using the Internet was very slightly ahead of the percentage of women, although this difference reversed in those under 30. Men logged on more often, spent more time online, and were more likely to be broadband users, whereas women tended to make more use of opportunities to communicate (such as email). Men were more likely to use the Internet to pay bills, participate in auctions, and for recreation such as downloading music and videos. Men and women were equally likely to use the Internet for shopping and banking. In 2008, women significantly outnumbered men on most social networking services, such as Facebook and Myspace, although the ratios varied with age. Women watched more streaming content, whereas men downloaded more. Men were more likely to blog. Among those who blog, men were more likely to have a professional blog, whereas women were more likely to have a personal blog.
Several neologisms exist that refer to Internet users: Netizen (as in "citizen of the net") refers to those actively involved in improving online communities, the Internet in general or surrounding political affairs and rights such as free speech, Internaut refers to operators or technically highly capable users of the Internet, digital citizen refers to a person using the Internet in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation.
The Internet allows greater flexibility in working hours and location, especially with the spread of unmetered high-speed connections. The Internet can be accessed almost anywhere by numerous means, including through mobile Internet devices. Mobile phones, datacards, handheld game consoles and cellular routers allow users to connect to the Internet wirelessly. Within the limitations imposed by small screens and other limited facilities of such pocket-sized devices, the services of the Internet, including email and the web, may be available. Service providers may restrict the services offered and mobile data charges may be significantly higher than other access methods.
Educational material at all levels from pre-school to post-doctoral is available from websites. Examples range from CBeebies, through school and high-school revision guides and virtual universities, to access to top-end scholarly literature through the likes of Google Scholar. For distance education, help with homework and other assignments, self-guided learning, whiling away spare time or just looking up more detail on an interesting fact, it has never been easier for people to access educational information at any level from anywhere. The Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular are important enablers of both formal and informal education. Further, the Internet allows researchers (especially those from the social and behavioral sciences) to conduct research remotely via virtual laboratories, with profound changes in reach and generalizability of findings as well as in communication between scientists and in the publication of results.
The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills have made collaborative work dramatically easier, with the help of collaborative software. Not only can a group cheaply communicate and share ideas but the wide reach of the Internet allows such groups more easily to form. An example of this is the free software movement, which has produced, among other things, Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org (later forked into LibreOffice). Internet chat, whether using an IRC chat room, an instant messaging system, or a social networking service, allows colleagues to stay in touch in a very convenient way while working at their computers during the day. Messages can be exchanged even more quickly and conveniently than via email. These systems may allow files to be exchanged, drawings and images to be shared, or voice and video contact between team members.
Content management systems allow collaborating teams to work on shared sets of documents simultaneously without accidentally destroying each other's work. Business and project teams can share calendars as well as documents and other information. Such collaboration occurs in a wide variety of areas including scientific research, software development, conference planning, political activism and creative writing. Social and political collaboration is also becoming more widespread as both Internet access and computer literacy spread.
The Internet allows computer users to remotely access other computers and information stores easily from any access point. Access may be with computer security, i.e. authentication and encryption technologies, depending on the requirements. This is encouraging new ways of remote work, collaboration and information sharing in many industries. An accountant sitting at home can audit the books of a company based in another country, on a server situated in a third country that is remotely maintained by IT specialists in a fourth. These accounts could have been created by home-working bookkeepers, in other remote locations, based on information emailed to them from offices all over the world. Some of these things were possible before the widespread use of the Internet, but the cost of private leased lines would have made many of them infeasible in practice. An office worker away from their desk, perhaps on the other side of the world on a business trip or a holiday, can access their emails, access their data using cloud computing, or open a remote desktop session into their office PC using a secure virtual private network (VPN) connection on the Internet. This can give the worker complete access to all of their normal files and data, including email and other applications, while away from the office. It has been referred to among system administrators as the Virtual Private Nightmare, because it extends the secure perimeter of a corporate network into remote locations and its employees' homes.
By late 2010s Internet has been described as "the main source of scientific information "for the majority of the global North population".
Many people use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports reports, to plan and book vacations and to pursue their personal interests. People use chat, messaging and email to make and stay in touch with friends worldwide, sometimes in the same way as some previously had pen pals. Social networking services such as Facebook have created new ways to socialize and interact. Users of these sites are able to add a wide variety of information to pages, pursue common interests, and connect with others. It is also possible to find existing acquaintances, to allow communication among existing groups of people. Sites like LinkedIn foster commercial and business connections. YouTube and Flickr specialize in users' videos and photographs. Social networking services are also widely used by businesses and other organizations to promote their brands, to market to their customers and to encourage posts to "go viral". "Black hat" social media techniques are also employed by some organizations, such as spam accounts and astroturfing.
A risk for both individuals and organizations writing posts (especially public posts) on social networking services, is that especially foolish or controversial posts occasionally lead to an unexpected and possibly large-scale backlash on social media from other Internet users. This is also a risk in relation to controversial offline behavior, if it is widely made known. The nature of this backlash can range widely from counter-arguments and public mockery, through insults and hate speech, to, in extreme cases, rape and death threats. The online disinhibition effect describes the tendency of many individuals to behave more stridently or offensively online than they would in person. A significant number of feminist women have been the target of various forms of harassment in response to posts they have made on social media, and Twitter in particular has been criticised in the past for not doing enough to aid victims of online abuse.
For organizations, such a backlash can cause overall brand damage, especially if reported by the media. However, this is not always the case, as any brand damage in the eyes of people with an opposing opinion to that presented by the organization could sometimes be outweighed by strengthening the brand in the eyes of others. Furthermore, if an organization or individual gives in to demands that others perceive as wrong-headed, that can then provoke a counter-backlash.
Some websites, such as Reddit, have rules forbidding the posting of personal information of individuals (also known as doxxing), due to concerns about such postings leading to mobs of large numbers of Internet users directing harassment at the specific individuals thereby identified. In particular, the Reddit rule forbidding the posting of personal information is widely understood to imply that all identifying photos and names must be censored in Facebook screenshots posted to Reddit. However, the interpretation of this rule in relation to public Twitter posts is less clear, and in any case, like-minded people online have many other ways they can use to direct each other's attention to public social media posts they disagree with.
Children also face dangers online such as cyberbullying and approaches by sexual predators, who sometimes pose as children themselves. Children may also encounter material that they may find upsetting, or material that their parents consider to be not age-appropriate. Due to naivety, they may also post personal information about themselves online, which could put them or their families at risk unless warned not to do so. Many parents choose to enable Internet filtering or supervise their children's online activities in an attempt to protect their children from inappropriate material on the Internet. The most popular social networking services, such as Facebook and Twitter, commonly forbid users under the age of 13. However, these policies are typically trivial to circumvent by registering an account with a false birth date, and a significant number of children aged under 13 join such sites anyway. Social networking services for younger children, which claim to provide better levels of protection for children, also exist.
The Internet has been a major outlet for leisure activity since its inception, with entertaining social experiments such as MUDs and MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much traffic. Many Internet forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos. The Internet pornography and online gambling industries have taken advantage of the World Wide Web. Although many governments have attempted to restrict both industries' use of the Internet, in general, this has failed to stop their widespread popularity.
Another area of leisure activity on the Internet is multiplayer gaming. This form of recreation creates communities, where people of all ages and origins enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person shooters, from role-playing video games to online gambling. While online gaming has been around since the 1970s, modern modes of online gaming began with subscription services such as GameSpy and MPlayer. Non-subscribers were limited to certain types of game play or certain games. Many people use the Internet to access and download music, movies and other works for their enjoyment and relaxation. Free and fee-based services exist for all of these activities, using centralized servers and distributed peer-to-peer technologies. Some of these sources exercise more care with respect to the original artists' copyrights than others.
Internet usage has been correlated to users' loneliness. Lonely people tend to use the Internet as an outlet for their feelings and to share their stories with others, such as in the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread.
A 2017 book claimed that the Internet consolidates most aspects of human endeavor into singular arenas of which all of humanity are potential members and competitors, with fundamentally negative impacts on mental health as a result. While successes in each field of activity are pervasively visible and trumpeted, they are reserved for an extremely thin sliver of the world's most exceptional, leaving everyone else behind. Whereas, before the Internet, expectations of success in any field were supported by reasonable probabilities of achievement at the village, suburb, city or even state level, the same expectations in the Internet world are virtually certain to bring disappointment today: there is always someone else, somewhere on the planet, who can do better and take the now one-and-only top spot.
Cybersectarianism is a new organizational form that involves, "highly dispersed small groups of practitioners that may remain largely anonymous within the larger social context and operate in relative secrecy, while still linked remotely to a larger network of believers who share a set of practices and texts, and often a common devotion to a particular leader. Overseas supporters provide funding and support; domestic practitioners distribute tracts, participate in acts of resistance, and share information on the internal situation with outsiders. Collectively, members and practitioners of such sects construct viable virtual communities of faith, exchanging personal testimonies and engaging in the collective study via email, online chat rooms, and web-based message boards." In particular, the British government has raised concerns about the prospect of young British Muslims being indoctrinated into Islamic extremism by material on the Internet, being persuaded to join terrorist groups such as the so-called "Islamic State", and then potentially committing acts of terrorism on returning to Britain after fighting in Syria or Iraq.
Cyberslacking can become a drain on corporate resources; the average UK employee spent 57 minutes a day surfing the Web while at work, according to a 2003 study by Peninsula Business Services. Internet addiction disorder is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. Nicholas G. Carr believes that Internet use has other effects on individuals, for instance improving skills of scan-reading and interfering with the deep thinking that leads to true creativity.
Electronic business (e-business) encompasses business processes spanning the entire value chain: purchasing, supply chain management, marketing, sales, customer service, and business relationship. E-commerce seeks to add revenue streams using the Internet to build and enhance relationships with clients and partners. According to International Data Corporation, the size of worldwide e-commerce, when global business-to-business and -consumer transactions are combined, equate to $16 trillion for 2013. A report by Oxford Economics added those two together to estimate the total size of the digital economy at $20.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly 13.8% of global sales.
While much has been written of the economic advantages of Internet-enabled commerce, there is also evidence that some aspects of the Internet such as maps and location-aware services may serve to reinforce economic inequality and the digital divide. Electronic commerce may be responsible for consolidation and the decline of mom-and-pop, brick and mortar businesses resulting in increases in income inequality.
Author Andrew Keen, a long-time critic of the social transformations caused by the Internet, has focused on the economic effects of consolidation from Internet businesses. Keen cites a 2013 Institute for Local Self-Reliance report saying brick-and-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every $10 million in sales while Amazon employs only 14. Similarly, the 700-employee room rental start-up Airbnb was valued at $10 billion in 2014, about half as much as Hilton Worldwide, which employs 152,000 people. At that time, Uber employed 1,000 full-time employees and was valued at $18.2 billion, about the same valuation as Avis Rent a Car and The Hertz Corporation combined, which together employed almost 60,000 people.
Remote work is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videotelephony, and VoIP so that work may be performed from any location, most conveniently the worker's home. It can be efficient and useful for companies as it allows workers to communicate over long distances, saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. More workers have adequate bandwidth at home to use these tools to link their home to their corporate intranet and internal communication networks.
Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries. In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing, strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work. The United States Patent and Trademark Office uses a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to examination of pending patent applications. Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park. The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web and ranks in the top 10 among all sites in terms of traffic.
The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool. The presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States was notable for its success in soliciting donation via the Internet. Many political groups use the Internet to achieve a new method of organizing for carrying out their mission, having given rise to Internet activism. The New York Times suggested that social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, helped people organize the political revolutions in Egypt, by helping activists organize protests, communicate grievances, and disseminate information.
Many have understood the Internet as an extension of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, observing how network communication technologies provide something like a global civic forum. However, incidents of politically motivated Internet censorship have now been recorded in many countries, including western democracies.
E-government is the use of technological communications devices, such as the Internet, to provide public services to citizens and other persons in a country or region. E-government offers opportunities for more direct and convenient citizen access to government and for government provision of services directly to citizens.
The spread of low-cost Internet access in developing countries has opened up new possibilities for peer-to-peer charities, which allow individuals to contribute small amounts to charitable projects for other individuals. Websites, such as DonorsChoose and GlobalGiving, allow small-scale donors to direct funds to individual projects of their choice. A popular twist on Internet-based philanthropy is the use of peer-to-peer lending for charitable purposes. Kiva pioneered this concept in 2005, offering the first web-based service to publish individual loan profiles for funding. Kiva raises funds for local intermediary microfinance organizations that post stories and updates on behalf of the borrowers. Lenders can contribute as little as $25 to loans of their choice and receive their money back as borrowers repay. Kiva falls short of being a pure peer-to-peer charity, in that loans are disbursed before being funded by lenders and borrowers do not communicate with lenders themselves.
Internet resources, hardware, and software components are the target of criminal or malicious attempts to gain unauthorized control to cause interruptions, commit fraud, engage in blackmail or access private information.
Malware is malicious software used and distributed via the Internet. It includes computer viruses which are copied with the help of humans, computer worms which copy themselves automatically, software for denial of service attacks, ransomware, botnets, and spyware that reports on the activity and typing of users. Usually, these activities constitute cybercrime. Defense theorists have also speculated about the possibilities of hackers using cyber warfare using similar methods on a large scale.
Malware poses serious problems to individuals and businesses on the Internet. According to Symantec's 2018 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), malware variants number has increased to 669,947,865 in 2017, which is twice as many malware variants as in 2016. Cybercrime, which includes malware attacks as well as other crimes committed by computer, was predicted to cost the world economy $6 trillion USD in 2021, and is increasing at a rate of 15% per year. Since 2021, malware has been designed to target computer systems that run critical infrastructure such as the electricity distribution network. Malware can be designed to evade antivirus software detection algorithms.
The vast majority of computer surveillance involves the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet. In the United States for example, under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband Internet traffic (emails, web traffic, instant messaging, etc.) are required to be available for unimpeded real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement agencies. Packet capture is the monitoring of data traffic on a computer network. Computers communicate over the Internet by breaking up messages (emails, images, videos, web pages, files, etc.) into small chunks called "packets", which are routed through a network of computers, until they reach their destination, where they are assembled back into a complete "message" again. Packet Capture Appliance intercepts these packets as they are traveling through the network, in order to examine their contents using other programs. A packet capture is an information gathering tool, but not an analysis tool. That is it gathers "messages" but it does not analyze them and figure out what they mean. Other programs are needed to perform traffic analysis and sift through intercepted data looking for important/useful information. Under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act all U.S. telecommunications providers are required to install packet sniffing technology to allow Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to intercept all of their customers' broadband Internet and VoIP traffic.
The large amount of data gathered from packet capturing requires surveillance software that filters and reports relevant information, such as the use of certain words or phrases, the access of certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with certain parties. Agencies, such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, GCHQ and the FBI, spend billions of dollars per year to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems for interception and analysis of data. Similar systems are operated by Iranian secret police to identify and suppress dissidents. The required hardware and software were allegedly installed by German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia.
Some governments, such as those of Burma, Iran, North Korea, Mainland China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, restrict access to content on the Internet within their territories, especially to political and religious content, with domain name and keyword filters.
In Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, major Internet service providers have voluntarily agreed to restrict access to sites listed by authorities. While this list of forbidden resources is supposed to contain only known child pornography sites, the content of the list is secret. Many countries, including the United States, have enacted laws against the possession or distribution of certain material, such as child pornography, via the Internet, but do not mandate filter software. Many free or commercially available software programs, called content-control software are available to users to block offensive websites on individual computers or networks, in order to limit access by children to pornographic material or depiction of violence.
As the Internet is a heterogeneous network, the physical characteristics, including for example the data transfer rates of connections, vary widely. It exhibits emergent phenomena that depend on its large-scale organization.
The volume of Internet traffic is difficult to measure because no single point of measurement exists in the multi-tiered, non-hierarchical topology. Traffic data may be estimated from the aggregate volume through the peering points of the Tier 1 network providers, but traffic that stays local in large provider networks may not be accounted for.
An Internet blackout or outage can be caused by local signaling interruptions. Disruptions of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas, such as in the 2008 submarine cable disruption. Less-developed countries are more vulnerable due to a small number of high-capacity links. Land cables are also vulnerable, as in 2011 when a woman digging for scrap metal severed most connectivity for the nation of Armenia. Internet blackouts affecting almost entire countries can be achieved by governments as a form of Internet censorship, as in the blockage of the Internet in Egypt, whereby approximately 93% of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests.
Estimates of the Internet's electricity usage have been the subject of controversy, according to a 2014 peer-reviewed research paper that found claims differing by a factor of 20,000 published in the literature during the preceding decade, ranging from 0.0064 kilowatt hours per gigabyte transferred (kWh/GB) to 136 kWh/GB. The researchers attributed these discrepancies mainly to the year of reference (i.e. whether efficiency gains over time had been taken into account) and to whether "end devices such as personal computers and servers are included" in the analysis.
In 2011, academic researchers estimated the overall energy used by the Internet to be between 170 and 307 GW, less than two percent of the energy used by humanity. This estimate included the energy needed to build, operate, and periodically replace the estimated 750 million laptops, a billion smart phones and 100 million servers worldwide as well as the energy that routers, cell towers, optical switches, Wi-Fi transmitters and cloud storage devices use when transmitting Internet traffic. According to a non-peer reviewed study published in 2018 by The Shift Project (a French think tank funded by corporate sponsors), nearly 4% of global CO2 emissions could be attributed to global data transfer and the necessary infrastructure. The study also said that online video streaming alone accounted for 60% of this data transfer and therefore contributed to over 300 million tons of CO2 emission per year, and argued for new "digital sobriety" regulations restricting the use and size of video files. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The origins of the Internet date back to research to enable time-sharing of computer resources and the development of packet switching in the 1960s. The set of rules (communication protocols) to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States and in the United Kingdom and France. The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. The funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, encouraged worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and the merger of many networks using DARPA's Internet protocol suite. The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web, marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, and generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network. Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the 1980s, subsequent commercialization is what incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, and newspapers, are reshaped, redefined, or even bypassed by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephone, Internet television, online music, digital newspapers, and video streaming websites. Newspaper, book, and other print publishing have adapted to website technology or have been reshaped into blogging, web feeds, and online news aggregators. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has grown exponentially for major retailers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their \"brick and mortar\" presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and services entirely online. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the Internet, the Internet Protocol address (IP address) space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Today's list of the New Seven Wonders.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The word internetted was used as early as 1849, meaning interconnected or interwoven. The word Internet was used in 1945 by the United States War Department in a radio operator's manual, and in 1974 as the shorthand form of Internetwork. Today, the term Internet most commonly refers to the global system of interconnected computer networks, though it may also refer to any group of smaller networks.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "When it came into common use, most publications treated the word Internet as a capitalized proper noun; this has become less common. This reflects the tendency in English to capitalize new terms and move them to lowercase as they become familiar. The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global internet from smaller networks, though many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online sources, \"Internet\" was capitalized in 54% of cases.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably; it is common to speak of \"going on the Internet\" when using a web browser to view web pages. However, the World Wide Web, or the Web, is only one of a large number of Internet services, a collection of documents (web pages) and other web resources linked by hyperlinks and URLs.",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the 1960s, computer scientists began developing systems for time-sharing of computer resources. J. C. R. Licklider proposed the idea of a universal network while working at Bolt Beranek & Newman and, later, leading the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense (DoD). Research into packet switching, one of the fundamental Internet technologies, started in the work of Paul Baran in the early 1960s and, independently, Donald Davies in 1965. After the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967, packet switching from the proposed NPL network was incorporated into the design of the ARPANET, an experimental resource sharing network proposed by ARPA.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "ARPANET development began with two network nodes which were interconnected between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and SRI International (SRI) on 29 October 1969. The third site was at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah. In a sign of future growth, 15 sites were connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing. Thereafter, the ARPANET gradually developed into a decentralized communications network, connecting remote centers and military bases in the United States. Other user networks and research networks, such as the Merit Network and CYCLADES, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Early international collaborations for the ARPANET were rare. Connections were made in 1973 to the Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR), and to Peter Kirstein's research group at University College London, which provided a gateway to British academic networks, forming the first internetwork for resource sharing. ARPA projects, international working groups and commercial initiatives led to the development of various protocols and standards by which multiple separate networks could become a single network or \"a network of networks\". In 1974, Vint Cerf at Stanford University and Bob Kahn at DARPA published a proposal for \"A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication\". They used the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork in RFC 675, and later RFCs repeated this use. Cerf and Kahn credit Louis Pouzin with important influences on the resulting TCP/IP design. National PTTs and commercial providers developed the X.25 standard and deployed it on public data networks.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks. TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States for researchers, first at speeds of 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. The NSFNet expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89. Although other network protocols such as UUCP and PTT public data networks had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of the Internet as an intercontinental network. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Steady advances in semiconductor technology and optical networking created new economic opportunities for commercial involvement in the expansion of the network in its core and for delivering services to the public. In mid-1989, MCI Mail and Compuserve established connections to the Internet, delivering email and public access products to the half million users of the Internet. Just months later, on 1 January 1990, PSInet launched an alternate Internet backbone for commercial use; one of the networks that added to the core of the commercial Internet of later years. In March 1990, the first high-speed T1 (1.5 Mbit/s) link between the NSFNET and Europe was installed between Cornell University and CERN, allowing much more robust communications than were capable with satellites. Six months later Tim Berners-Lee would begin writing WorldWideWeb, the first web browser, after two years of lobbying CERN management. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 0.9, the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first Web browser (which was also an HTML editor and could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files), the first HTTP server software (later known as CERN httpd), the first web server, and the first Web pages that described the project itself. In 1991 the Commercial Internet eXchange was founded, allowing PSInet to communicate with the other commercial networks CERFnet and Alternet. Stanford Federal Credit Union was the first financial institution to offer online Internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994. In 1996, OP Financial Group, also a cooperative bank, became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. By 1995, the Internet was fully commercialized in the U.S. when the NSFNet was decommissioned, removing the last restrictions on use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "As technology advanced and commercial opportunities fueled reciprocal growth, the volume of Internet traffic started experiencing similar characteristics as that of the scaling of MOS transistors, exemplified by Moore's law, doubling every 18 months. This growth, formalized as Edholm's law, was catalyzed by advances in MOS technology, laser light wave systems, and noise performance.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Since 1995, the Internet has tremendously impacted culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by email, instant messaging, telephony (Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP), two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking services, and online shopping sites. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s, or more. The Internet continues to grow, driven by ever-greater amounts of online information and knowledge, commerce, entertainment and social networking services. During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%. This growth is often attributed to the lack of central administration, which allows organic growth of the network, as well as the non-proprietary nature of the Internet protocols, which encourages vendor interoperability and prevents any one company from exerting too much control over the network. As of 31 March 2011, the estimated total number of Internet users was 2.095 billion (30of world population). It is estimated that in 1993 the Internet carried only 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunication. By 2000 this figure had grown to 51%, and by 2007 more than 97% of all telecommunicated information was carried over the Internet.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Internet is a global network that comprises many voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks. It operates without a central governing body. The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. To maintain interoperability, the principal name spaces of the Internet are administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is governed by an international board of directors drawn from across the Internet technical, business, academic, and other non-commercial communities. ICANN coordinates the assignment of unique identifiers for use on the Internet, including domain names, IP addresses, application port numbers in the transport protocols, and many other parameters. Globally unified name spaces are essential for maintaining the global reach of the Internet. This role of ICANN distinguishes it as perhaps the only central coordinating body for the global Internet.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Regional Internet registries (RIRs) were established for five regions of the world. The African Network Information Center (AfriNIC) for Africa, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) for North America, the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) for Asia and the Pacific region, the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC) for Latin America and the Caribbean region, and the Réseaux IP Européens – Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) for Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia were delegated to assign IP address blocks and other Internet parameters to local registries, such as Internet service providers, from a designated pool of addresses set aside for each region.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the United States Department of Commerce, had final approval over changes to the DNS root zone until the IANA stewardship transition on 1 October 2016. The Internet Society (ISOC) was founded in 1992 with a mission to \"assure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world\". Its members include individuals (anyone may join) as well as corporations, organizations, governments, and universities. Among other activities ISOC provides an administrative home for a number of less formally organized groups that are involved in developing and managing the Internet, including: the IETF, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and Internet Research Steering Group (IRSG). On 16 November 2005, the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) to discuss Internet-related issues.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The communications infrastructure of the Internet consists of its hardware components and a system of software layers that control various aspects of the architecture. As with any computer network, the Internet physically consists of routers, media (such as cabling and radio links), repeaters, modems etc. However, as an example of internetworking, many of the network nodes are not necessarily Internet equipment per se, the internet packets are carried by other full-fledged networking protocols with the Internet acting as a homogeneous networking standard, running across heterogeneous hardware, with the packets guided to their destinations by IP routers.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Internet service providers (ISPs) establish the worldwide connectivity between individual networks at various levels of scope. End-users who only access the Internet when needed to perform a function or obtain information, represent the bottom of the routing hierarchy. At the top of the routing hierarchy are the tier 1 networks, large telecommunication companies that exchange traffic directly with each other via very high speed fiber-optic cables and governed by peering agreements. Tier 2 and lower-level networks buy Internet transit from other providers to reach at least some parties on the global Internet, though they may also engage in peering. An ISP may use a single upstream provider for connectivity, or implement multihoming to achieve redundancy and load balancing. Internet exchange points are major traffic exchanges with physical connections to multiple ISPs. Large organizations, such as academic institutions, large enterprises, and governments, may perform the same function as ISPs, engaging in peering and purchasing transit on behalf of their internal networks. Research networks tend to interconnect with large subnetworks such as GEANT, GLORIAD, Internet2, and the UK's national research and education network, JANET.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Common methods of Internet access by users include dial-up with a computer modem via telephone circuits, broadband over coaxial cable, fiber optics or copper wires, Wi-Fi, satellite, and cellular telephone technology (e.g. 3G, 4G). The Internet may often be accessed from computers in libraries and Internet cafés. Internet access points exist in many public places such as airport halls and coffee shops. Various terms are used, such as public Internet kiosk, public access terminal, and Web payphone. Many hotels also have public terminals that are usually fee-based. These terminals are widely accessed for various usages, such as ticket booking, bank deposit, or online payment. Wi-Fi provides wireless access to the Internet via local computer networks. Hotspots providing such access include Wi-Fi cafés, where users need to bring their own wireless devices, such as a laptop or PDA. These services may be free to all, free to customers only, or fee-based.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Grassroots efforts have led to wireless community networks. Commercial Wi-Fi services that cover large areas are available in many cities, such as New York, London, Vienna, Toronto, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and Pittsburgh, where the Internet can then be accessed from places such as a park bench. Experiments have also been conducted with proprietary mobile wireless networks like Ricochet, various high-speed data services over cellular networks, and fixed wireless services. Modern smartphones can also access the Internet through the cellular carrier network. For Web browsing, these devices provide applications such as Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and a wide variety of other Internet software may be installed from app stores. Internet usage by mobile and tablet devices exceeded desktop worldwide for the first time in October 2016.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimated that, by the end of 2017, 48% of individual users regularly connect to the Internet, up from 34% in 2012. Mobile Internet connectivity has played an important role in expanding access in recent years, especially in Asia and the Pacific and in Africa. The number of unique mobile cellular subscriptions increased from 3.9 billion in 2012 to 4.8 billion in 2016, two-thirds of the world's population, with more than half of subscriptions located in Asia and the Pacific. The number of subscriptions was predicted to rise to 5.7 billion users in 2020. As of 2018, 80% of the world's population were covered by a 4G network. The limits that users face on accessing information via mobile applications coincide with a broader process of fragmentation of the Internet. Fragmentation restricts access to media content and tends to affect the poorest users the most.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Zero-rating, the practice of Internet service providers allowing users free connectivity to access specific content or applications without cost, has offered opportunities to surmount economic hurdles but has also been accused by its critics as creating a two-tiered Internet. To address the issues with zero-rating, an alternative model has emerged in the concept of 'equal rating' and is being tested in experiments by Mozilla and Orange in Africa. Equal rating prevents prioritization of one type of content and zero-rates all content up to a specified data cap. In a study published by Chatham House, 15 out of 19 countries researched in Latin America had some kind of hybrid or zero-rated product offered. Some countries in the region had a handful of plans to choose from (across all mobile network operators) while others, such as Colombia, offered as many as 30 pre-paid and 34 post-paid plans.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "A study of eight countries in the Global South found that zero-rated data plans exist in every country, although there is a great range in the frequency with which they are offered and actually used in each. The study looked at the top three to five carriers by market share in Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru and Philippines. Across the 181 plans examined, 13 percent were offering zero-rated services. Another study, covering Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, found Facebook's Free Basics and Wikipedia Zero to be the most commonly zero-rated content.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Internet standards describe a framework known as the Internet protocol suite (also called TCP/IP, based on the first two components.) This is a suite of protocols that are ordered into a set of four conceptional layers by the scope of their operation, originally documented in RFC 1122 and RFC 1123. At the top is the application layer, where communication is described in terms of the objects or data structures most appropriate for each application. For example, a web browser operates in a client–server application model and exchanges information with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and an application-germane data structure, such as the HyperText Markup Language (HTML).",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Below this top layer, the transport layer connects applications on different hosts with a logical channel through the network. It provides this service with a variety of possible characteristics, such as ordered, reliable delivery (TCP), and an unreliable datagram service (UDP).",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Underlying these layers are the networking technologies that interconnect networks at their borders and exchange traffic across them. The Internet layer implements the Internet Protocol (IP) which enables computers to identify and locate each other by IP address and route their traffic via intermediate (transit) networks. The Internet Protocol layer code is independent of the type of network that it is physically running over.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "At the bottom of the architecture is the link layer, which connects nodes on the same physical link, and contains protocols that do not require routers for traversal to other links. The protocol suite does not explicitly specify hardware methods to transfer bits, or protocols to manage such hardware, but assumes that appropriate technology is available. Examples of that technology include Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and DSL.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The most prominent component of the Internet model is the Internet Protocol (IP). IP enables internetworking and, in essence, establishes the Internet itself. Two versions of the Internet Protocol exist, IPv4 and IPv6.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "For locating individual computers on the network, the Internet provides IP addresses. IP addresses are used by the Internet infrastructure to direct internet packets to their destinations. They consist of fixed-length numbers, which are found within the packet. IP addresses are generally assigned to equipment either automatically via DHCP, or are configured.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "However, the network also supports other addressing systems. Users generally enter domain names (e.g. \"en.wikipedia.org\") instead of IP addresses because they are easier to remember; they are converted by the Domain Name System (DNS) into IP addresses which are more efficient for routing purposes.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. IPv4 is the initial version used on the first generation of the Internet and is still in dominant use. It was designed to address up to ≈4.3 billion (10) hosts. However, the explosive growth of the Internet has led to IPv4 address exhaustion, which entered its final stage in 2011, when the global IPv4 address allocation pool was exhausted.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP IPv6, was developed in the mid-1990s, which provides vastly larger addressing capabilities and more efficient routing of Internet traffic. IPv6 uses 128 bits for the IP address and was standardized in 1998. IPv6 deployment has been ongoing since the mid-2000s and is currently in growing deployment around the world, since Internet address registries (RIRs) began to urge all resource managers to plan rapid adoption and conversion.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "IPv6 is not directly interoperable by design with IPv4. In essence, it establishes a parallel version of the Internet not directly accessible with IPv4 software. Thus, translation facilities must exist for internetworking or nodes must have duplicate networking software for both networks. Essentially all modern computer operating systems support both versions of the Internet Protocol. Network infrastructure, however, has been lagging in this development. Aside from the complex array of physical connections that make up its infrastructure, the Internet is facilitated by bi- or multi-lateral commercial contracts, e.g., peering agreements, and by technical specifications or protocols that describe the exchange of data over the network. Indeed, the Internet is defined by its interconnections and routing policies.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "A subnetwork or subnet is a logical subdivision of an IP network. The practice of dividing a network into two or more networks is called subnetting.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Computers that belong to a subnet are addressed with an identical most-significant bit-group in their IP addresses. This results in the logical division of an IP address into two fields, the network number or routing prefix and the rest field or host identifier. The rest field is an identifier for a specific host or network interface.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The routing prefix may be expressed in Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notation written as the first address of a network, followed by a slash character (/), and ending with the bit-length of the prefix. For example, 198.51.100.0/24 is the prefix of the Internet Protocol version 4 network starting at the given address, having 24 bits allocated for the network prefix, and the remaining 8 bits reserved for host addressing. Addresses in the range 198.51.100.0 to 198.51.100.255 belong to this network. The IPv6 address specification 2001:db8::/32 is a large address block with 2 addresses, having a 32-bit routing prefix.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "For IPv4, a network may also be characterized by its subnet mask or netmask, which is the bitmask that when applied by a bitwise AND operation to any IP address in the network, yields the routing prefix. Subnet masks are also expressed in dot-decimal notation like an address. For example, 255.255.255.0 is the subnet mask for the prefix 198.51.100.0/24.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Traffic is exchanged between subnetworks through routers when the routing prefixes of the source address and the destination address differ. A router serves as a logical or physical boundary between the subnets.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The benefits of subnetting an existing network vary with each deployment scenario. In the address allocation architecture of the Internet using CIDR and in large organizations, it is necessary to allocate address space efficiently. Subnetting may also enhance routing efficiency or have advantages in network management when subnetworks are administratively controlled by different entities in a larger organization. Subnets may be arranged logically in a hierarchical architecture, partitioning an organization's network address space into a tree-like routing structure.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Computers and routers use routing tables in their operating system to direct IP packets to reach a node on a different subnetwork. Routing tables are maintained by manual configuration or automatically by routing protocols. End-nodes typically use a default route that points toward an ISP providing transit, while ISP routers use the Border Gateway Protocol to establish the most efficient routing across the complex connections of the global Internet. The default gateway is the node that serves as the forwarding host (router) to other networks when no other route specification matches the destination IP address of a packet.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "While the hardware components in the Internet infrastructure can often be used to support other software systems, it is the design and the standardization process of the software that characterizes the Internet and provides the foundation for its scalability and success. The responsibility for the architectural design of the Internet software systems has been assumed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The IETF conducts standard-setting work groups, open to any individual, about the various aspects of Internet architecture. The resulting contributions and standards are published as Request for Comments (RFC) documents on the IETF web site. The principal methods of networking that enable the Internet are contained in specially designated RFCs that constitute the Internet Standards. Other less rigorous documents are simply informative, experimental, or historical, or document the best current practices (BCP) when implementing Internet technologies.",
"title": "Internet Protocol Suite"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Internet carries many applications and services, most prominently the World Wide Web, including social media, electronic mail, mobile applications, multiplayer online games, Internet telephony, file sharing, and streaming media services.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Most servers that provide these services are today hosted in data centers, and content is often accessed through high-performance content delivery networks.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The World Wide Web is a global collection of documents, images, multimedia, applications, and other resources, logically interrelated by hyperlinks and referenced with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), which provide a global system of named references. URIs symbolically identify services, web servers, databases, and the documents and resources that they can provide. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the main access protocol of the World Wide Web. Web services also use HTTP for communication between software systems for information transfer, sharing and exchanging business data and logistics and is one of many languages or protocols that can be used for communication on the Internet.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "World Wide Web browser software, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer/Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Apple's Safari, and Google Chrome, enable users to navigate from one web page to another via the hyperlinks embedded in the documents. These documents may also contain any combination of computer data, including graphics, sounds, text, video, multimedia and interactive content that runs while the user is interacting with the page. Client-side software can include animations, games, office applications and scientific demonstrations. Through keyword-driven Internet research using search engines like Yahoo!, Bing and Google, users worldwide have easy, instant access to a vast and diverse amount of online information. Compared to printed media, books, encyclopedias and traditional libraries, the World Wide Web has enabled the decentralization of information on a large scale.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Web has enabled individuals and organizations to publish ideas and information to a potentially large audience online at greatly reduced expense and time delay. Publishing a web page, a blog, or building a website involves little initial cost and many cost-free services are available. However, publishing and maintaining large, professional web sites with attractive, diverse and up-to-date information is still a difficult and expensive proposition. Many individuals and some companies and groups use web logs or blogs, which are largely used as easily updatable online diaries. Some commercial organizations encourage staff to communicate advice in their areas of specialization in the hope that visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free information and be attracted to the corporation as a result.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Advertising on popular web pages can be lucrative, and e-commerce, which is the sale of products and services directly via the Web, continues to grow. Online advertising is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers. It includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising (including web banner advertising), and mobile advertising. In 2011, Internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable television and nearly exceeded those of broadcast television. Many common online advertising practices are controversial and increasingly subject to regulation.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "When the Web developed in the 1990s, a typical web page was stored in completed form on a web server, formatted in HTML, ready for transmission to a web browser in response to a request. Over time, the process of creating and serving web pages has become dynamic, creating a flexible design, layout, and content. Websites are often created using content management software with, initially, very little content. Contributors to these systems, who may be paid staff, members of an organization or the public, fill underlying databases with content using editing pages designed for that purpose while casual visitors view and read this content in HTML form. There may or may not be editorial, approval and security systems built into the process of taking newly entered content and making it available to the target visitors.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Email is an important communications service available via the Internet. The concept of sending electronic text messages between parties, analogous to mailing letters or memos, predates the creation of the Internet. Pictures, documents, and other files are sent as email attachments. Email messages can be cc-ed to multiple email addresses.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Internet telephony is a common communications service realized with the Internet. The name of the principal internetworking protocol, the Internet Protocol, lends its name to voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The idea began in the early 1990s with walkie-talkie-like voice applications for personal computers. VoIP systems now dominate many markets and are as easy to use and as convenient as a traditional telephone. The benefit has been substantial cost savings over traditional telephone calls, especially over long distances. Cable, ADSL, and mobile data networks provide Internet access in customer premises and inexpensive VoIP network adapters provide the connection for traditional analog telephone sets. The voice quality of VoIP often exceeds that of traditional calls. Remaining problems for VoIP include the situation that emergency services may not be universally available and that devices rely on a local power supply, while older traditional phones are powered from the local loop, and typically operate during a power failure.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "File sharing is an example of transferring large amounts of data across the Internet. A computer file can be emailed to customers, colleagues and friends as an attachment. It can be uploaded to a website or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server for easy download by others. It can be put into a \"shared location\" or onto a file server for instant use by colleagues. The load of bulk downloads to many users can be eased by the use of \"mirror\" servers or peer-to-peer networks. In any of these cases, access to the file may be controlled by user authentication, the transit of the file over the Internet may be obscured by encryption, and money may change hands for access to the file. The price can be paid by the remote charging of funds from, for example, a credit card whose details are also passed—usually fully encrypted—across the Internet. The origin and authenticity of the file received may be checked by digital signatures or by MD5 or other message digests. These simple features of the Internet, over a worldwide basis, are changing the production, sale, and distribution of anything that can be reduced to a computer file for transmission. This includes all manner of print publications, software products, news, music, film, video, photography, graphics and the other arts. This in turn has caused seismic shifts in each of the existing industries that previously controlled the production and distribution of these products.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Streaming media is the real-time delivery of digital media for immediate consumption or enjoyment by end users. Many radio and television broadcasters provide Internet feeds of their live audio and video productions. They may also allow time-shift viewing or listening such as Preview, Classic Clips and Listen Again features. These providers have been joined by a range of pure Internet \"broadcasters\" who never had on-air licenses. This means that an Internet-connected device, such as a computer or something more specific, can be used to access online media in much the same way as was previously possible only with a television or radio receiver. The range of available types of content is much wider, from specialized technical webcasts to on-demand popular multimedia services. Podcasting is a variation on this theme, where—usually audio—material is downloaded and played back on a computer or shifted to a portable media player to be listened to on the move. These techniques using simple equipment allow anybody, with little censorship or licensing control, to broadcast audio-visual material worldwide.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Digital media streaming increases the demand for network bandwidth. For example, standard image quality needs 1 Mbit/s link speed for SD 480p, HD 720p quality requires 2.5 Mbit/s, and the top-of-the-line HDX quality needs 4.5 Mbit/s for 1080p.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Webcams are a low-cost extension of this phenomenon. While some webcams can give full-frame-rate video, the picture either is usually small or updates slowly. Internet users can watch animals around an African waterhole, ships in the Panama Canal, traffic at a local roundabout or monitor their own premises, live and in real time. Video chat rooms and video conferencing are also popular with many uses being found for personal webcams, with and without two-way sound. YouTube was founded on 15 February 2005 and is now the leading website for free streaming video with more than two billion users. It uses an HTML5 based web player by default to stream and show video files. Registered users may upload an unlimited amount of video and build their own personal profile. YouTube claims that its users watch hundreds of millions, and upload hundreds of thousands of videos daily.",
"title": "Applications and services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Internet has enabled new forms of social interaction, activities, and social associations. This phenomenon has given rise to the scholarly study of the sociology of the Internet.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The early Internet left an impact on some writers who used symbolism to write about it, such as describing the Internet as a \"means to connect individuals in a vast invisible net over all the earth.\"",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Between 2000-09, the number of Internet users globally rose from 390 million to 1.9 billion. By 2010, 22% of the world's population had access to computers with 1 billion Google searches every day, 300 million Internet users reading blogs, and 2 billion videos viewed daily on YouTube. In 2014 the world's Internet users surpassed 3 billion or 44 percent of world population, but two-thirds came from the richest countries, with 78 percent of Europeans using the Internet, followed by 57 percent of the Americas. However, by 2018, Asia alone accounted for 51% of all Internet users, with 2.2 billion out of the 4.3 billion Internet users in the world. China's Internet users surpassed a major milestone in 2018, when the country's Internet regulatory authority, China Internet Network Information Centre, announced that China had 802 million users. China was followed by India, with some 700 million users, with the United States third with 275 million users. However, in terms of penetration, in 2022 China had a 70% penetration rate compared to India's 28% and the United States's 90%. In 2022, 54% of the world's Internet users were based in Asia, 14% in Europe, 7% in North America, 10% in Latin America and the Caribbean, 11% in Africa, 4% in the Middle East and 1% in Oceania. In 2019, Kuwait, Qatar, the Falkland Islands, Bermuda and Iceland had the highest Internet penetration by the number of users, with 93% or more of the population with access. As of 2022, it was estimated that 5.4 billion people use the Internet, more than two-thirds of the world's population.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The prevalent language for communication via the Internet has always been English. This may be a result of the origin of the Internet, as well as the language's role as a lingua franca and as a world language. Early computer systems were limited to the characters in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), a subset of the Latin alphabet. After English (27%), the most requested languages on the World Wide Web are Chinese (25%), Spanish (8%), Japanese (5%), Portuguese and German (4% each), Arabic, French and Russian (3% each), and Korean (2%). The Internet's technologies have developed enough in recent years, especially in the use of Unicode, that good facilities are available for development and communication in the world's widely used languages. However, some glitches such as mojibake (incorrect display of some languages' characters) still remain.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In a US study in 2005, the percentage of men using the Internet was very slightly ahead of the percentage of women, although this difference reversed in those under 30. Men logged on more often, spent more time online, and were more likely to be broadband users, whereas women tended to make more use of opportunities to communicate (such as email). Men were more likely to use the Internet to pay bills, participate in auctions, and for recreation such as downloading music and videos. Men and women were equally likely to use the Internet for shopping and banking. In 2008, women significantly outnumbered men on most social networking services, such as Facebook and Myspace, although the ratios varied with age. Women watched more streaming content, whereas men downloaded more. Men were more likely to blog. Among those who blog, men were more likely to have a professional blog, whereas women were more likely to have a personal blog.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Several neologisms exist that refer to Internet users: Netizen (as in \"citizen of the net\") refers to those actively involved in improving online communities, the Internet in general or surrounding political affairs and rights such as free speech, Internaut refers to operators or technically highly capable users of the Internet, digital citizen refers to a person using the Internet in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The Internet allows greater flexibility in working hours and location, especially with the spread of unmetered high-speed connections. The Internet can be accessed almost anywhere by numerous means, including through mobile Internet devices. Mobile phones, datacards, handheld game consoles and cellular routers allow users to connect to the Internet wirelessly. Within the limitations imposed by small screens and other limited facilities of such pocket-sized devices, the services of the Internet, including email and the web, may be available. Service providers may restrict the services offered and mobile data charges may be significantly higher than other access methods.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Educational material at all levels from pre-school to post-doctoral is available from websites. Examples range from CBeebies, through school and high-school revision guides and virtual universities, to access to top-end scholarly literature through the likes of Google Scholar. For distance education, help with homework and other assignments, self-guided learning, whiling away spare time or just looking up more detail on an interesting fact, it has never been easier for people to access educational information at any level from anywhere. The Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular are important enablers of both formal and informal education. Further, the Internet allows researchers (especially those from the social and behavioral sciences) to conduct research remotely via virtual laboratories, with profound changes in reach and generalizability of findings as well as in communication between scientists and in the publication of results.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The low cost and nearly instantaneous sharing of ideas, knowledge, and skills have made collaborative work dramatically easier, with the help of collaborative software. Not only can a group cheaply communicate and share ideas but the wide reach of the Internet allows such groups more easily to form. An example of this is the free software movement, which has produced, among other things, Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and OpenOffice.org (later forked into LibreOffice). Internet chat, whether using an IRC chat room, an instant messaging system, or a social networking service, allows colleagues to stay in touch in a very convenient way while working at their computers during the day. Messages can be exchanged even more quickly and conveniently than via email. These systems may allow files to be exchanged, drawings and images to be shared, or voice and video contact between team members.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Content management systems allow collaborating teams to work on shared sets of documents simultaneously without accidentally destroying each other's work. Business and project teams can share calendars as well as documents and other information. Such collaboration occurs in a wide variety of areas including scientific research, software development, conference planning, political activism and creative writing. Social and political collaboration is also becoming more widespread as both Internet access and computer literacy spread.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The Internet allows computer users to remotely access other computers and information stores easily from any access point. Access may be with computer security, i.e. authentication and encryption technologies, depending on the requirements. This is encouraging new ways of remote work, collaboration and information sharing in many industries. An accountant sitting at home can audit the books of a company based in another country, on a server situated in a third country that is remotely maintained by IT specialists in a fourth. These accounts could have been created by home-working bookkeepers, in other remote locations, based on information emailed to them from offices all over the world. Some of these things were possible before the widespread use of the Internet, but the cost of private leased lines would have made many of them infeasible in practice. An office worker away from their desk, perhaps on the other side of the world on a business trip or a holiday, can access their emails, access their data using cloud computing, or open a remote desktop session into their office PC using a secure virtual private network (VPN) connection on the Internet. This can give the worker complete access to all of their normal files and data, including email and other applications, while away from the office. It has been referred to among system administrators as the Virtual Private Nightmare, because it extends the secure perimeter of a corporate network into remote locations and its employees' homes.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "By late 2010s Internet has been described as \"the main source of scientific information \"for the majority of the global North population\".",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Many people use the World Wide Web to access news, weather and sports reports, to plan and book vacations and to pursue their personal interests. People use chat, messaging and email to make and stay in touch with friends worldwide, sometimes in the same way as some previously had pen pals. Social networking services such as Facebook have created new ways to socialize and interact. Users of these sites are able to add a wide variety of information to pages, pursue common interests, and connect with others. It is also possible to find existing acquaintances, to allow communication among existing groups of people. Sites like LinkedIn foster commercial and business connections. YouTube and Flickr specialize in users' videos and photographs. Social networking services are also widely used by businesses and other organizations to promote their brands, to market to their customers and to encourage posts to \"go viral\". \"Black hat\" social media techniques are also employed by some organizations, such as spam accounts and astroturfing.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "A risk for both individuals and organizations writing posts (especially public posts) on social networking services, is that especially foolish or controversial posts occasionally lead to an unexpected and possibly large-scale backlash on social media from other Internet users. This is also a risk in relation to controversial offline behavior, if it is widely made known. The nature of this backlash can range widely from counter-arguments and public mockery, through insults and hate speech, to, in extreme cases, rape and death threats. The online disinhibition effect describes the tendency of many individuals to behave more stridently or offensively online than they would in person. A significant number of feminist women have been the target of various forms of harassment in response to posts they have made on social media, and Twitter in particular has been criticised in the past for not doing enough to aid victims of online abuse.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "For organizations, such a backlash can cause overall brand damage, especially if reported by the media. However, this is not always the case, as any brand damage in the eyes of people with an opposing opinion to that presented by the organization could sometimes be outweighed by strengthening the brand in the eyes of others. Furthermore, if an organization or individual gives in to demands that others perceive as wrong-headed, that can then provoke a counter-backlash.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Some websites, such as Reddit, have rules forbidding the posting of personal information of individuals (also known as doxxing), due to concerns about such postings leading to mobs of large numbers of Internet users directing harassment at the specific individuals thereby identified. In particular, the Reddit rule forbidding the posting of personal information is widely understood to imply that all identifying photos and names must be censored in Facebook screenshots posted to Reddit. However, the interpretation of this rule in relation to public Twitter posts is less clear, and in any case, like-minded people online have many other ways they can use to direct each other's attention to public social media posts they disagree with.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Children also face dangers online such as cyberbullying and approaches by sexual predators, who sometimes pose as children themselves. Children may also encounter material that they may find upsetting, or material that their parents consider to be not age-appropriate. Due to naivety, they may also post personal information about themselves online, which could put them or their families at risk unless warned not to do so. Many parents choose to enable Internet filtering or supervise their children's online activities in an attempt to protect their children from inappropriate material on the Internet. The most popular social networking services, such as Facebook and Twitter, commonly forbid users under the age of 13. However, these policies are typically trivial to circumvent by registering an account with a false birth date, and a significant number of children aged under 13 join such sites anyway. Social networking services for younger children, which claim to provide better levels of protection for children, also exist.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Internet has been a major outlet for leisure activity since its inception, with entertaining social experiments such as MUDs and MOOs being conducted on university servers, and humor-related Usenet groups receiving much traffic. Many Internet forums have sections devoted to games and funny videos. The Internet pornography and online gambling industries have taken advantage of the World Wide Web. Although many governments have attempted to restrict both industries' use of the Internet, in general, this has failed to stop their widespread popularity.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Another area of leisure activity on the Internet is multiplayer gaming. This form of recreation creates communities, where people of all ages and origins enjoy the fast-paced world of multiplayer games. These range from MMORPG to first-person shooters, from role-playing video games to online gambling. While online gaming has been around since the 1970s, modern modes of online gaming began with subscription services such as GameSpy and MPlayer. Non-subscribers were limited to certain types of game play or certain games. Many people use the Internet to access and download music, movies and other works for their enjoyment and relaxation. Free and fee-based services exist for all of these activities, using centralized servers and distributed peer-to-peer technologies. Some of these sources exercise more care with respect to the original artists' copyrights than others.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Internet usage has been correlated to users' loneliness. Lonely people tend to use the Internet as an outlet for their feelings and to share their stories with others, such as in the \"I am lonely will anyone speak to me\" thread.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "A 2017 book claimed that the Internet consolidates most aspects of human endeavor into singular arenas of which all of humanity are potential members and competitors, with fundamentally negative impacts on mental health as a result. While successes in each field of activity are pervasively visible and trumpeted, they are reserved for an extremely thin sliver of the world's most exceptional, leaving everyone else behind. Whereas, before the Internet, expectations of success in any field were supported by reasonable probabilities of achievement at the village, suburb, city or even state level, the same expectations in the Internet world are virtually certain to bring disappointment today: there is always someone else, somewhere on the planet, who can do better and take the now one-and-only top spot.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Cybersectarianism is a new organizational form that involves, \"highly dispersed small groups of practitioners that may remain largely anonymous within the larger social context and operate in relative secrecy, while still linked remotely to a larger network of believers who share a set of practices and texts, and often a common devotion to a particular leader. Overseas supporters provide funding and support; domestic practitioners distribute tracts, participate in acts of resistance, and share information on the internal situation with outsiders. Collectively, members and practitioners of such sects construct viable virtual communities of faith, exchanging personal testimonies and engaging in the collective study via email, online chat rooms, and web-based message boards.\" In particular, the British government has raised concerns about the prospect of young British Muslims being indoctrinated into Islamic extremism by material on the Internet, being persuaded to join terrorist groups such as the so-called \"Islamic State\", and then potentially committing acts of terrorism on returning to Britain after fighting in Syria or Iraq.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Cyberslacking can become a drain on corporate resources; the average UK employee spent 57 minutes a day surfing the Web while at work, according to a 2003 study by Peninsula Business Services. Internet addiction disorder is excessive computer use that interferes with daily life. Nicholas G. Carr believes that Internet use has other effects on individuals, for instance improving skills of scan-reading and interfering with the deep thinking that leads to true creativity.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Electronic business (e-business) encompasses business processes spanning the entire value chain: purchasing, supply chain management, marketing, sales, customer service, and business relationship. E-commerce seeks to add revenue streams using the Internet to build and enhance relationships with clients and partners. According to International Data Corporation, the size of worldwide e-commerce, when global business-to-business and -consumer transactions are combined, equate to $16 trillion for 2013. A report by Oxford Economics added those two together to estimate the total size of the digital economy at $20.4 trillion, equivalent to roughly 13.8% of global sales.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "While much has been written of the economic advantages of Internet-enabled commerce, there is also evidence that some aspects of the Internet such as maps and location-aware services may serve to reinforce economic inequality and the digital divide. Electronic commerce may be responsible for consolidation and the decline of mom-and-pop, brick and mortar businesses resulting in increases in income inequality.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Author Andrew Keen, a long-time critic of the social transformations caused by the Internet, has focused on the economic effects of consolidation from Internet businesses. Keen cites a 2013 Institute for Local Self-Reliance report saying brick-and-mortar retailers employ 47 people for every $10 million in sales while Amazon employs only 14. Similarly, the 700-employee room rental start-up Airbnb was valued at $10 billion in 2014, about half as much as Hilton Worldwide, which employs 152,000 people. At that time, Uber employed 1,000 full-time employees and was valued at $18.2 billion, about the same valuation as Avis Rent a Car and The Hertz Corporation combined, which together employed almost 60,000 people.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Remote work is facilitated by tools such as groupware, virtual private networks, conference calling, videotelephony, and VoIP so that work may be performed from any location, most conveniently the worker's home. It can be efficient and useful for companies as it allows workers to communicate over long distances, saving significant amounts of travel time and cost. More workers have adequate bandwidth at home to use these tools to link their home to their corporate intranet and internal communication networks.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Wikis have also been used in the academic community for sharing and dissemination of information across institutional and international boundaries. In those settings, they have been found useful for collaboration on grant writing, strategic planning, departmental documentation, and committee work. The United States Patent and Trademark Office uses a wiki to allow the public to collaborate on finding prior art relevant to examination of pending patent applications. Queens, New York has used a wiki to allow citizens to collaborate on the design and planning of a local park. The English Wikipedia has the largest user base among wikis on the World Wide Web and ranks in the top 10 among all sites in terms of traffic.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The Internet has achieved new relevance as a political tool. The presidential campaign of Howard Dean in 2004 in the United States was notable for its success in soliciting donation via the Internet. Many political groups use the Internet to achieve a new method of organizing for carrying out their mission, having given rise to Internet activism. The New York Times suggested that social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, helped people organize the political revolutions in Egypt, by helping activists organize protests, communicate grievances, and disseminate information.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Many have understood the Internet as an extension of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere, observing how network communication technologies provide something like a global civic forum. However, incidents of politically motivated Internet censorship have now been recorded in many countries, including western democracies.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "E-government is the use of technological communications devices, such as the Internet, to provide public services to citizens and other persons in a country or region. E-government offers opportunities for more direct and convenient citizen access to government and for government provision of services directly to citizens.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The spread of low-cost Internet access in developing countries has opened up new possibilities for peer-to-peer charities, which allow individuals to contribute small amounts to charitable projects for other individuals. Websites, such as DonorsChoose and GlobalGiving, allow small-scale donors to direct funds to individual projects of their choice. A popular twist on Internet-based philanthropy is the use of peer-to-peer lending for charitable purposes. Kiva pioneered this concept in 2005, offering the first web-based service to publish individual loan profiles for funding. Kiva raises funds for local intermediary microfinance organizations that post stories and updates on behalf of the borrowers. Lenders can contribute as little as $25 to loans of their choice and receive their money back as borrowers repay. Kiva falls short of being a pure peer-to-peer charity, in that loans are disbursed before being funded by lenders and borrowers do not communicate with lenders themselves.",
"title": "Social impact"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Internet resources, hardware, and software components are the target of criminal or malicious attempts to gain unauthorized control to cause interruptions, commit fraud, engage in blackmail or access private information.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Malware is malicious software used and distributed via the Internet. It includes computer viruses which are copied with the help of humans, computer worms which copy themselves automatically, software for denial of service attacks, ransomware, botnets, and spyware that reports on the activity and typing of users. Usually, these activities constitute cybercrime. Defense theorists have also speculated about the possibilities of hackers using cyber warfare using similar methods on a large scale.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Malware poses serious problems to individuals and businesses on the Internet. According to Symantec's 2018 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), malware variants number has increased to 669,947,865 in 2017, which is twice as many malware variants as in 2016. Cybercrime, which includes malware attacks as well as other crimes committed by computer, was predicted to cost the world economy $6 trillion USD in 2021, and is increasing at a rate of 15% per year. Since 2021, malware has been designed to target computer systems that run critical infrastructure such as the electricity distribution network. Malware can be designed to evade antivirus software detection algorithms.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The vast majority of computer surveillance involves the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet. In the United States for example, under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband Internet traffic (emails, web traffic, instant messaging, etc.) are required to be available for unimpeded real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement agencies. Packet capture is the monitoring of data traffic on a computer network. Computers communicate over the Internet by breaking up messages (emails, images, videos, web pages, files, etc.) into small chunks called \"packets\", which are routed through a network of computers, until they reach their destination, where they are assembled back into a complete \"message\" again. Packet Capture Appliance intercepts these packets as they are traveling through the network, in order to examine their contents using other programs. A packet capture is an information gathering tool, but not an analysis tool. That is it gathers \"messages\" but it does not analyze them and figure out what they mean. Other programs are needed to perform traffic analysis and sift through intercepted data looking for important/useful information. Under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act all U.S. telecommunications providers are required to install packet sniffing technology to allow Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to intercept all of their customers' broadband Internet and VoIP traffic.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "The large amount of data gathered from packet capturing requires surveillance software that filters and reports relevant information, such as the use of certain words or phrases, the access of certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with certain parties. Agencies, such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, GCHQ and the FBI, spend billions of dollars per year to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems for interception and analysis of data. Similar systems are operated by Iranian secret police to identify and suppress dissidents. The required hardware and software were allegedly installed by German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Some governments, such as those of Burma, Iran, North Korea, Mainland China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, restrict access to content on the Internet within their territories, especially to political and religious content, with domain name and keyword filters.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, major Internet service providers have voluntarily agreed to restrict access to sites listed by authorities. While this list of forbidden resources is supposed to contain only known child pornography sites, the content of the list is secret. Many countries, including the United States, have enacted laws against the possession or distribution of certain material, such as child pornography, via the Internet, but do not mandate filter software. Many free or commercially available software programs, called content-control software are available to users to block offensive websites on individual computers or networks, in order to limit access by children to pornographic material or depiction of violence.",
"title": "Security"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "As the Internet is a heterogeneous network, the physical characteristics, including for example the data transfer rates of connections, vary widely. It exhibits emergent phenomena that depend on its large-scale organization.",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The volume of Internet traffic is difficult to measure because no single point of measurement exists in the multi-tiered, non-hierarchical topology. Traffic data may be estimated from the aggregate volume through the peering points of the Tier 1 network providers, but traffic that stays local in large provider networks may not be accounted for.",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "An Internet blackout or outage can be caused by local signaling interruptions. Disruptions of submarine communications cables may cause blackouts or slowdowns to large areas, such as in the 2008 submarine cable disruption. Less-developed countries are more vulnerable due to a small number of high-capacity links. Land cables are also vulnerable, as in 2011 when a woman digging for scrap metal severed most connectivity for the nation of Armenia. Internet blackouts affecting almost entire countries can be achieved by governments as a form of Internet censorship, as in the blockage of the Internet in Egypt, whereby approximately 93% of networks were without access in 2011 in an attempt to stop mobilization for anti-government protests.",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Estimates of the Internet's electricity usage have been the subject of controversy, according to a 2014 peer-reviewed research paper that found claims differing by a factor of 20,000 published in the literature during the preceding decade, ranging from 0.0064 kilowatt hours per gigabyte transferred (kWh/GB) to 136 kWh/GB. The researchers attributed these discrepancies mainly to the year of reference (i.e. whether efficiency gains over time had been taken into account) and to whether \"end devices such as personal computers and servers are included\" in the analysis.",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "In 2011, academic researchers estimated the overall energy used by the Internet to be between 170 and 307 GW, less than two percent of the energy used by humanity. This estimate included the energy needed to build, operate, and periodically replace the estimated 750 million laptops, a billion smart phones and 100 million servers worldwide as well as the energy that routers, cell towers, optical switches, Wi-Fi transmitters and cloud storage devices use when transmitting Internet traffic. According to a non-peer reviewed study published in 2018 by The Shift Project (a French think tank funded by corporate sponsors), nearly 4% of global CO2 emissions could be attributed to global data transfer and the necessary infrastructure. The study also said that online video streaming alone accounted for 60% of this data transfer and therefore contributed to over 300 million tons of CO2 emission per year, and argued for new \"digital sobriety\" regulations restricting the use and size of video files.",
"title": "Performance"
}
]
| The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing. The origins of the Internet date back to research to enable time-sharing of computer resources and the development of packet switching in the 1960s. The set of rules to enable internetworking on the Internet arose from research and development commissioned in the 1970s by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense in collaboration with universities and researchers across the United States and in the United Kingdom and France. The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. The funding of the National Science Foundation Network as a new backbone in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial extensions, encouraged worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and the merger of many networks using DARPA's Internet protocol suite. The linking of commercial networks and enterprises by the early 1990s, as well as the advent of the World Wide Web, marked the beginning of the transition to the modern Internet, and generated a sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal, and mobile computers were connected to the network. Although the Internet was widely used by academia in the 1980s, subsequent commercialization is what incorporated its services and technologies into virtually every aspect of modern life. Most traditional communication media, including telephone, radio, television, paper mail, and newspapers, are reshaped, redefined, or even bypassed by the Internet, giving birth to new services such as email, Internet telephone, Internet television, online music, digital newspapers, and video streaming websites. Newspaper, book, and other print publishing have adapted to website technology or have been reshaped into blogging, web feeds, and online news aggregators. The Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interaction through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking services. Online shopping has grown exponentially for major retailers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs, as it enables firms to extend their "brick and mortar" presence to serve a larger market or even sell goods and services entirely online. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries. The Internet has no single centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. The overarching definitions of the two principal name spaces on the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System (DNS), are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise. In November 2006, the Internet was included on USA Today's list of the New Seven Wonders. | 2001-11-10T22:37:10Z | 2023-12-26T23:43:40Z | [
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14,540 | Indo-European (disambiguation) | Indo-European is a major language family of Europe, the Middle East and South Asia.
Indo-European may also refer to: | [
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"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Indo-European is a major language family of Europe, the Middle East and South Asia.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Indo-European may also refer to:",
"title": ""
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| Indo-European is a major language family of Europe, the Middle East and South Asia. Indo-European may also refer to: Proto-Indo-European language, the reconstructed common ancestor of all Indo-European languages
Proto-Indo-Europeans, a hypothetical prehistoric ethnolinguistic group of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European
Indo people, people of Dutch East Indies and European descent | 2023-07-23T20:27:32Z | [
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|
14,541 | Indo-Iranian languages | The Indo-Iranian languages (also known as Indo-Iranic languages or the Aryan languages) constitute the largest and southeasternmost extant branch of the Indo-European language family. They include over 300 languages, spoken by around 1.5 billion speakers, predominantly in South Asia, West Asia and parts of Central Asia and Europe, comprising the modern-day countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Maldives and the adjacent regions of neighbouring countries.
The common reconstructed ancestor of all of the languages in this family is called Proto-Indo-Iranian, also known as Common Aryan, which is hypothesized to have been spoken in approximately the late 3rd millennium BC in an area of the Eurasian steppe that borders the Ural River on the west, the Tian Shan on the east (where the Indo-Iranians took over the area occupied by the earlier Afanasevo culture), and Transoxiana and the Hindu Kush on the south. The three branches of the modern Indo-Iranian languages are Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and Nuristani. A fourth independent branch, Dardic, was previously posited, but recent scholarship in general places Dardic languages as archaic members of the Indo-Aryan branch.
The areas with Indo-Iranian languages stretch from Europe (Romani) and the Caucasus (Ossetian, Tat and Talysh), down to Mesopotamia (Kurdish languages, Zaza–Gorani and Kurmanji Dialect continuum) and Iran (Persian), eastward to Xinjiang (Sarikoli) and Assam (Assamese), and south to Sri Lanka (Sinhala) and the Maldives (Maldivian), with branches stretching as far out as Oceania and the Caribbean for Fiji Hindi and Caribbean Hindustani respectively. Furthermore, there are large diaspora communities of Indo-Iranian speakers in northwestern Europe (the United Kingdom), North America (United States, Canada), Australia, South Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region (United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia).
The number of distinct languages listed in Ethnologue are 312, while those recognised in Glottolog are 320. The Indo-Iranian language with the largest number of native speakers is Hindustani language (Hindi-Urdu).
The term Indo-Iranian languages refers to the spectrum of Indo-European languages spoken in the Southern Asian region of Eurasia, spanning from the Indian subcontinent (where the Indic branch of Aryan languages are spoken, hence called Indo-Aryan) till the Iranian plateau (where the Iranic branch of Aryan languages are spoken).
This branch is also known as Aryan languages, referring to the languages spoken by Aryan peoples, where the term Aryan is the ethnocultural self-designation of ancient Indo-Iranians. But in modern-day, Western scholars avoid the term Aryan since World War II, owing to the perceived negative connotation associated with Aryanism. | [
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"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "The common reconstructed ancestor of all of the languages in this family is called Proto-Indo-Iranian, also known as Common Aryan, which is hypothesized to have been spoken in approximately the late 3rd millennium BC in an area of the Eurasian steppe that borders the Ural River on the west, the Tian Shan on the east (where the Indo-Iranians took over the area occupied by the earlier Afanasevo culture), and Transoxiana and the Hindu Kush on the south. The three branches of the modern Indo-Iranian languages are Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and Nuristani. A fourth independent branch, Dardic, was previously posited, but recent scholarship in general places Dardic languages as archaic members of the Indo-Aryan branch.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The areas with Indo-Iranian languages stretch from Europe (Romani) and the Caucasus (Ossetian, Tat and Talysh), down to Mesopotamia (Kurdish languages, Zaza–Gorani and Kurmanji Dialect continuum) and Iran (Persian), eastward to Xinjiang (Sarikoli) and Assam (Assamese), and south to Sri Lanka (Sinhala) and the Maldives (Maldivian), with branches stretching as far out as Oceania and the Caribbean for Fiji Hindi and Caribbean Hindustani respectively. Furthermore, there are large diaspora communities of Indo-Iranian speakers in northwestern Europe (the United Kingdom), North America (United States, Canada), Australia, South Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region (United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The number of distinct languages listed in Ethnologue are 312, while those recognised in Glottolog are 320. The Indo-Iranian language with the largest number of native speakers is Hindustani language (Hindi-Urdu).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The term Indo-Iranian languages refers to the spectrum of Indo-European languages spoken in the Southern Asian region of Eurasia, spanning from the Indian subcontinent (where the Indic branch of Aryan languages are spoken, hence called Indo-Aryan) till the Iranian plateau (where the Iranic branch of Aryan languages are spoken).",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
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"text": "This branch is also known as Aryan languages, referring to the languages spoken by Aryan peoples, where the term Aryan is the ethnocultural self-designation of ancient Indo-Iranians. But in modern-day, Western scholars avoid the term Aryan since World War II, owing to the perceived negative connotation associated with Aryanism.",
"title": "Etymology"
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"title": "External links"
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| The Indo-Iranian languages constitute the largest and southeasternmost extant branch of the Indo-European language family. They include over 300 languages, spoken by around 1.5 billion speakers, predominantly in South Asia, West Asia and parts of Central Asia and Europe, comprising the modern-day countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Maldives and the adjacent regions of neighbouring countries. The common reconstructed ancestor of all of the languages in this family is called Proto-Indo-Iranian, also known as Common Aryan, which is hypothesized to have been spoken in approximately the late 3rd millennium BC in an area of the Eurasian steppe that borders the Ural River on the west, the Tian Shan on the east, and Transoxiana and the Hindu Kush on the south. The three branches of the modern Indo-Iranian languages are Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and Nuristani. A fourth independent branch, Dardic, was previously posited, but recent scholarship in general places Dardic languages as archaic members of the Indo-Aryan branch. The areas with Indo-Iranian languages stretch from Europe (Romani) and the Caucasus, down to Mesopotamia and Iran (Persian), eastward to Xinjiang (Sarikoli) and Assam (Assamese), and south to Sri Lanka (Sinhala) and the Maldives (Maldivian), with branches stretching as far out as Oceania and the Caribbean for Fiji Hindi and Caribbean Hindustani respectively. Furthermore, there are large diaspora communities of Indo-Iranian speakers in northwestern Europe, North America, Australia, South Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region. The number of distinct languages listed in Ethnologue are 312, while those recognised in Glottolog are 320. The Indo-Iranian language with the largest number of native speakers is Hindustani language (Hindi-Urdu). | 2001-10-04T18:24:59Z | 2023-12-31T06:00:49Z | [
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14,543 | Industry (economics) | In macroeconomics, an industry is a branch of an economy that produces a closely related set of raw materials, goods, or services. For example, one might refer to the wood industry or to the insurance industry.
When evaluating a single group or company, its dominant source of revenue is typically used by industry classifications to classify it within a specific industry. For example the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) – used directly or through derived classifications for the official statistics of most countries worldwide – classifies "statistical units" by the "economic activity in which they mainly engage". Industry is then defined as "set of statistical units that are classified into the same ISIC category". However, a single business need not belong just to one industry, such as when a large business (often referred to as a conglomerate) diversifies across separate industries.
Other industry classification systems include the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which was developed through partnerships with North American countries such as the United States, Canada, and Mexico, in order to standardize the comparison of business activities in North America. There is also the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), which is used to assign companies to specific economic sectors and industry groups.
There are many industry classifications in the modern economy, which can be grouped into larger categories called economic sectors. Sectors are broader than industry classifications. For example, the retail trade sector contains industries such as clothing stores, shoe stores, and health and personal care stores. Companies are not limited to one sector or industry. They can reside in multiple sectors and industries.
Industries, though associated with specific products, processes, and consumer markets, can evolve over time. One distinct industry (for example, barrelmaking) may become limited to a tiny niche market and get mostly re-classified into another industry using new techniques. At the same time, entirely new industries may branch off from older ones once a significant market becomes apparent (as the semiconductor industry became distinguished from the wider electronics industry).
Industry classification is valuable for economic analysis because it leads to largely distinct categories with simple relationships. Through these classifications, economists are able to compare companies within the same industry to evaluate the attractiveness of that industry. Companies within the same industry can also have similar stock price movements due to their similarity and macroeconomic factors that affect all members of an industry. However, more complex cases, such as otherwise different processes yielding similar products, require an element of standardization and prevent any one schema from fitting all possible uses. | [
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"text": "In macroeconomics, an industry is a branch of an economy that produces a closely related set of raw materials, goods, or services. For example, one might refer to the wood industry or to the insurance industry.",
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},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "When evaluating a single group or company, its dominant source of revenue is typically used by industry classifications to classify it within a specific industry. For example the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) – used directly or through derived classifications for the official statistics of most countries worldwide – classifies \"statistical units\" by the \"economic activity in which they mainly engage\". Industry is then defined as \"set of statistical units that are classified into the same ISIC category\". However, a single business need not belong just to one industry, such as when a large business (often referred to as a conglomerate) diversifies across separate industries.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "Other industry classification systems include the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which was developed through partnerships with North American countries such as the United States, Canada, and Mexico, in order to standardize the comparison of business activities in North America. There is also the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), which is used to assign companies to specific economic sectors and industry groups.",
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},
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"text": "There are many industry classifications in the modern economy, which can be grouped into larger categories called economic sectors. Sectors are broader than industry classifications. For example, the retail trade sector contains industries such as clothing stores, shoe stores, and health and personal care stores. Companies are not limited to one sector or industry. They can reside in multiple sectors and industries.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Industries, though associated with specific products, processes, and consumer markets, can evolve over time. One distinct industry (for example, barrelmaking) may become limited to a tiny niche market and get mostly re-classified into another industry using new techniques. At the same time, entirely new industries may branch off from older ones once a significant market becomes apparent (as the semiconductor industry became distinguished from the wider electronics industry).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Industry classification is valuable for economic analysis because it leads to largely distinct categories with simple relationships. Through these classifications, economists are able to compare companies within the same industry to evaluate the attractiveness of that industry. Companies within the same industry can also have similar stock price movements due to their similarity and macroeconomic factors that affect all members of an industry. However, more complex cases, such as otherwise different processes yielding similar products, require an element of standardization and prevent any one schema from fitting all possible uses.",
"title": ""
}
]
| In macroeconomics, an industry is a branch of an economy that produces a closely related set of raw materials, goods, or services. For example, one might refer to the wood industry or to the insurance industry. When evaluating a single group or company, its dominant source of revenue is typically used by industry classifications to classify it within a specific industry. For example the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC) – used directly or through derived classifications for the official statistics of most countries worldwide – classifies "statistical units" by the "economic activity in which they mainly engage". Industry is then defined as "set of statistical units that are classified into the same ISIC category". However, a single business need not belong just to one industry, such as when a large business diversifies across separate industries. Other industry classification systems include the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which was developed through partnerships with North American countries such as the United States, Canada, and Mexico, in order to standardize the comparison of business activities in North America. There is also the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), which is used to assign companies to specific economic sectors and industry groups. There are many industry classifications in the modern economy, which can be grouped into larger categories called economic sectors. Sectors are broader than industry classifications. For example, the retail trade sector contains industries such as clothing stores, shoe stores, and health and personal care stores. Companies are not limited to one sector or industry. They can reside in multiple sectors and industries. Industries, though associated with specific products, processes, and consumer markets, can evolve over time. One distinct industry may become limited to a tiny niche market and get mostly re-classified into another industry using new techniques. At the same time, entirely new industries may branch off from older ones once a significant market becomes apparent. Industry classification is valuable for economic analysis because it leads to largely distinct categories with simple relationships. Through these classifications, economists are able to compare companies within the same industry to evaluate the attractiveness of that industry. Companies within the same industry can also have similar stock price movements due to their similarity and macroeconomic factors that affect all members of an industry. However, more complex cases, such as otherwise different processes yielding similar products, require an element of standardization and prevent any one schema from fitting all possible uses. | 2001-03-07T23:05:22Z | 2023-12-07T20:59:10Z | [
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14,544 | Indriidae | The Indriidae (sometimes incorrectly spelled Indridae) are a family of strepsirrhine primates. They are medium- to large-sized lemurs, with only four teeth in the toothcomb instead of the usual six. Indriids, like all lemurs, live exclusively on the island of Madagascar.
The 19 living species in the family are divided into three genera.
Family Indriidae
The 19 extant Indriidae species vary considerably in size. Not counting the length of their tails, the avahis are only 30 cm (12 in) in length, while the indri is the largest extant strepsirrhine. The tail of the indri is only a stub, while avahi and the sifaka tails are as long as their bodies. Their fur is long and mostly from whitish over reddish up to grey. Their black faces, however, are always bald. The hind legs are longer than their fore limbs, their hands are long and thin, and their thumbs cannot be opposed to the other fingers correctly.
All species are arboreal, though they do come to the ground occasionally. When on the ground, they stand upright and move with short hops forward, with their arms held high. In the trees, though, they can make extraordinary leaps and are extremely agile, able to change direction from tree to tree. Like most leaf eaters, they adjust for the low nutrient content of their food by long rests. Often, they can be seen lying stretched on trees sunning themselves. Indriidae live together in family federations up to 15 animals, communicating with roars and facial expressions.
Indriidae are herbivores, eating mostly leaves, fruits, and flowers. Like some other herbivores, they have a large cecum, containing bacteria that ferment cellulose, allowing for more efficient digestion of plant matter. They have fewer premolar teeth than other lemurs, with the dental formula of: 2.1.2.32.1.2.3
Females and males usually mate monogamously for many years. Mostly at the end of the dry season, their four- to five-month gestation ends with the birth of a single offspring, which lives in the family for a while after its weaning (at the age of five to six months). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Indriidae (sometimes incorrectly spelled Indridae) are a family of strepsirrhine primates. They are medium- to large-sized lemurs, with only four teeth in the toothcomb instead of the usual six. Indriids, like all lemurs, live exclusively on the island of Madagascar.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "The 19 living species in the family are divided into three genera.",
"title": "Classification"
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"text": "Family Indriidae",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The 19 extant Indriidae species vary considerably in size. Not counting the length of their tails, the avahis are only 30 cm (12 in) in length, while the indri is the largest extant strepsirrhine. The tail of the indri is only a stub, while avahi and the sifaka tails are as long as their bodies. Their fur is long and mostly from whitish over reddish up to grey. Their black faces, however, are always bald. The hind legs are longer than their fore limbs, their hands are long and thin, and their thumbs cannot be opposed to the other fingers correctly.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
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"text": "All species are arboreal, though they do come to the ground occasionally. When on the ground, they stand upright and move with short hops forward, with their arms held high. In the trees, though, they can make extraordinary leaps and are extremely agile, able to change direction from tree to tree. Like most leaf eaters, they adjust for the low nutrient content of their food by long rests. Often, they can be seen lying stretched on trees sunning themselves. Indriidae live together in family federations up to 15 animals, communicating with roars and facial expressions.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Indriidae are herbivores, eating mostly leaves, fruits, and flowers. Like some other herbivores, they have a large cecum, containing bacteria that ferment cellulose, allowing for more efficient digestion of plant matter. They have fewer premolar teeth than other lemurs, with the dental formula of: 2.1.2.32.1.2.3",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Females and males usually mate monogamously for many years. Mostly at the end of the dry season, their four- to five-month gestation ends with the birth of a single offspring, which lives in the family for a while after its weaning (at the age of five to six months).",
"title": "Characteristics"
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| The Indriidae are a family of strepsirrhine primates. They are medium- to large-sized lemurs, with only four teeth in the toothcomb instead of the usual six. Indriids, like all lemurs, live exclusively on the island of Madagascar. | 2001-03-08T13:16:39Z | 2023-11-28T23:20:54Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indriidae |
14,545 | I, Robot | I, Robot is a fixup collection made up of science fiction short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950 and were then collected into a 1950 publication Gnome Press in 1950, in an initial edition of 5,000 copies.
The stories are woven together by a framing narrative in which the fictional Dr. Susan Calvin tells each story to a reporter (who serves as the narrator) in the 21st century. Although the stories can be read separately, they share a theme of the interaction of humans, robots, and morality, and when combined they tell a larger story of Asimov's fictional history of robotics.
Several of the stories feature the character of Dr. Calvin, chief robopsychologist at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., the major manufacturer of robots. Upon their publication in this collection, Asimov wrote a framing sequence presenting the stories as Calvin's reminiscences during an interview with her about her life's work, chiefly concerned with aberrant behaviour of robots and the use of "robopsychology" to sort out what is happening in their positronic brain. The book also contains the short story in which Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics first appear, which had large influence on later science fiction and had impact on thought on ethics of artificial intelligence as well. Other characters that appear in these short stories are Powell and Donovan, a field-testing team which locates flaws in USRMM's prototype models.
The collection shares a title with the then recent short story "I, Robot" (1939) by Eando Binder (pseudonym of Earl and Otto Binder), which greatly influenced Asimov. Asimov had wanted to call his collection Mind and Iron and objected when the publisher made the title the same as Binder's. In his introduction to the story in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories (1979), Asimov wrote:
It certainly caught my attention. Two months after I read it, I began "Robbie", about a sympathetic robot, and that was the start of my positronic robot series. Eleven years later, when nine of my robot stories were collected into a book, the publisher named the collection I, Robot over my objections. My book is now the more famous, but Otto's story was there first.
The New York Times described I, Robot as "an exciting science thriller [which] could be fun for those whose nerves are not already made raw by the potentialities of the atomic age".
Describing it as "continuously fascinating", Groff Conklin "unreservedly recommended" the book.
P. Schuyler Miller recommended the collection: "For puzzle situations, for humor, for warm character, [and] for most of the values of plain good writing."
At least three of the short stories from I, Robot have been adapted for television. The first was a 1962 episode of Out of this World hosted by Boris Karloff called "Little Lost Robot" with Maxine Audley as Susan Calvin. Two short stories from the collection were made into episodes of the British series Out of the Unknown. These are "The Prophet" (1967), based on "Reason"; and "Liar!" (1969). Both episodes were wiped by the BBC and are no longer thought to exist, although video clips, audio extracts and still photographs have survived. Repurposed robot costumes from the former appeared in the 1968 Doctor Who serial The Mind Robber. The 12th episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1987 and entitled Don't Joke with Robots, was based on works by Aleksandr Belyaev and Fredrik Kilander as well as Asimov's "Liar!" story.
Both the original and revival series of The Outer Limits include episodes named "I, Robot" but these are adaptations of an unrelated work by Earl and Otto Binder under their joint pseudonym "Eando Binder". The Binders' story introduced a recurring character, the robot named Adam Link.
In August 2023, David S. Goyer revealed that he had gotten permission from FOX head Lachlan Murdoch, a self-professed fan of Apple TV+'s Foundation, to adapt concepts from I, Robot to the series' 2023 second season, in "tying [Demerzel/Daneel] into the I, Robot laws [and] doing a spin-off mini-series that specifically delves into our version of "The Robot Wars".
During the late 1970s, Warner Bros. acquired the option to make a film based on the book, but no screenplay was ever accepted. The most notable attempt was one by Harlan Ellison, who collaborated with Asimov himself to create a version which captured the spirit of the original. Asimov is quoted as saying that this screenplay would lead to "the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction movie ever made." Ellison worked on the project from December 1977 to December 1978. Asimov himself advised Ellison as to the scientific validity of some elements of the script.
Ellison's script, taking inspiration from Citizen Kane, began with reporter Robert Bratenahl tracking down information about Susan Calvin's alleged former lover Stephen Byerly. This provided for a framing sequence to adaptations of Asimov's stories. These differ from the originals in that they more strongly center around Calvin as a character. Ellison placed Calvin into stories in which she had not appeared and amplified her role in ones in which she did.
Although well-regarded by critics, the screenplay is generally considered to have been unfilmable for practical reasons, given the technology and average film budgets of the time. Asimov also believed that the film may have been scrapped owing to a conflict between Ellison and the producers: when the producers suggested changes in the script, instead of being diplomatic as advised by Asimov, Ellison "reacted violently" and offended them.
The script was serialized in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in late 1987, and appeared in book form with illustrations by Mark Zug under the title I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay, in 1994 (reprinted 2004, ISBN 1-4165-0600-4). Both Ellison and Asimov received credits.
The film I, Robot, starring Will Smith, was released by Twentieth Century Fox on July 16, 2004 in the United States. Its plot uses elements of "Little Lost Robot", a few of Asimov's character names and the Three Laws. The plot of the movie is actually original, though, and based on the screenplay Hardwired by Jeff Vintar, a script not based on Asimov's stories and has been compared to Asimov's The Caves of Steel, which revolves around the murder of a roboticist (although the rest of the film's plot is not based on that novel or other works by Asimov). Unlike the works by Asimov, the movie featured hordes of killer robots.
BBC Radio 4 aired an audio drama adaptation of five of the I, Robot stories on their 15 Minute Drama in 2017, dramatized by Richard Kurti and starring Hermione Norris.
These also aired in a single program on BBC Radio 4 Extra as Isaac Asimov's 'I, Robot': Omnibus.
The Asimov estate asked Mickey Zucker Reichert (best known for the Norse fantasy Renshai series) to write three prequels for I, Robot, since she was a science fiction writer with a medical degree who had first met Asimov when she was 23, although she did not know him well. She was the first female writer to be authorized to write stories based on Asimov's novels.
The follow-ups to Asimov's Foundation series had been written by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin.
Berkley Books ordered the I, Robot prequels, which included:
In 2004, The Saturday Evening Post said that I, Robot's Three Laws "revolutionized the science fiction genre and made robots far more interesting than they ever had been before." I, Robot has influenced many aspects of modern popular culture, particularly with respect to science fiction and technology. One example of this is in the technology industry. The name of the real-life modem manufacturer named U.S. Robotics was directly inspired by I, Robot. The name is taken from the name of a robot manufacturer ("United States Robots and Mechanical Men") that appears throughout Asimov's robot short stories.
Many works in the field of science fiction have also paid homage to Asimov's collection.
An episode of the original Star Trek series, "I, Mudd" (1967), which depicts a planet of androids in need of humans, references I, Robot. Another reference appears in the title of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, "I, Borg" (1992), in which Geordi La Forge befriends a lost member of the Borg collective and teaches it a sense of individuality and free will.
A Doctor Who story, The Robots of Death (1977), references I, Robot with the "First Principle", stating: "It is forbidden for robots to harm humans."
In the film Aliens (1986), the synthetic person Bishop paraphrases Asimov's First Law in the line: "It is impossible for me to harm, or by omission of action allow to be harmed, a human being."
An episode of The Simpsons entitled "I D'oh Bot" (2004) has Professor Frink build a robot named "Smashius Clay" (also named "Killhammad Aieee") that follows all three of Asimov's laws of robotics.
The animated science fiction/comedy Futurama makes several references to I, Robot. The title of the episode "I, Roommate" (1999) is a spoof on I, Robot although the plot of the episode has little to do with the original stories. Additionally, the episode "The Cyber House Rules" included an optician named "Eye Robot" and the episode "Anthology of Interest II" included a segment called "I, Meatbag." Also in "Bender's Game" (2008) the psychiatrist is shown a logical fallacy and explodes when the assistant shouts "Liar!" a la "Liar!". Leela once told Bender to "cover his ears" so that he would not hear the robot-destroying paradox which she used to destroy Robot Santa (he punishes the bad, he kills people, killing is bad, therefore he must punish himself), causing a total breakdown; additionally, Bender has stated that he is Three Laws Safe.
The positronic brain, which Asimov named his robots' central processors, is what powers Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as other Soong type androids. Positronic brains have been referenced in a number of other television shows including Doctor Who, Once Upon a Time... Space, Perry Rhodan, The Number of the Beast, and others.
Author Cory Doctorow has written a story called "I, Robot" as homage to and critique of Asimov, as well as "I, Row-Boat", both released in the 2007 short story collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present. He has also said, "If I return to this theme, it will be with a story about uplifted cheese sandwiches, called 'I, Rarebit.'"
Other cultural references to the book are less directly related to science fiction and technology. The album I Robot (1977), by The Alan Parsons Project, was inspired by Asimov's I, Robot. In its original conception, the album was to follow the themes and concepts presented in the short story collection. The Alan Parsons Project were not able to obtain the rights in spite of Asimov's enthusiasm; he had already assigned the rights elsewhere. Thus, the album's concept was altered slightly although the name was kept (minus comma to avoid copyright infringement). An album, I, Human (2009), by Singaporean band Deus Ex Machina, draws heavily upon Asimov's principles on robotics and applies it to the concept of cloning.
The Indian science fiction film Endhiran (2010) refers to Asimov's three laws for artificial intelligence for the fictional character "Chitti: The Robot". When a scientist takes in the robot for evaluation, the panel inquires whether the robot was built using the Three Laws of Robotics.
The theme for Burning Man 2018 was "I, Robot".
In Episode 15 of the Netflix series Young Sheldon, Dolomite, Apple Slices and a Mystery Woman, Sheldon is seen reading I, Robot. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "I, Robot is a fixup collection made up of science fiction short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950 and were then collected into a 1950 publication Gnome Press in 1950, in an initial edition of 5,000 copies.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The stories are woven together by a framing narrative in which the fictional Dr. Susan Calvin tells each story to a reporter (who serves as the narrator) in the 21st century. Although the stories can be read separately, they share a theme of the interaction of humans, robots, and morality, and when combined they tell a larger story of Asimov's fictional history of robotics.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Several of the stories feature the character of Dr. Calvin, chief robopsychologist at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., the major manufacturer of robots. Upon their publication in this collection, Asimov wrote a framing sequence presenting the stories as Calvin's reminiscences during an interview with her about her life's work, chiefly concerned with aberrant behaviour of robots and the use of \"robopsychology\" to sort out what is happening in their positronic brain. The book also contains the short story in which Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics first appear, which had large influence on later science fiction and had impact on thought on ethics of artificial intelligence as well. Other characters that appear in these short stories are Powell and Donovan, a field-testing team which locates flaws in USRMM's prototype models.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The collection shares a title with the then recent short story \"I, Robot\" (1939) by Eando Binder (pseudonym of Earl and Otto Binder), which greatly influenced Asimov. Asimov had wanted to call his collection Mind and Iron and objected when the publisher made the title the same as Binder's. In his introduction to the story in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories (1979), Asimov wrote:",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "It certainly caught my attention. Two months after I read it, I began \"Robbie\", about a sympathetic robot, and that was the start of my positronic robot series. Eleven years later, when nine of my robot stories were collected into a book, the publisher named the collection I, Robot over my objections. My book is now the more famous, but Otto's story was there first.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The New York Times described I, Robot as \"an exciting science thriller [which] could be fun for those whose nerves are not already made raw by the potentialities of the atomic age\".",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Describing it as \"continuously fascinating\", Groff Conklin \"unreservedly recommended\" the book.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "P. Schuyler Miller recommended the collection: \"For puzzle situations, for humor, for warm character, [and] for most of the values of plain good writing.\"",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "At least three of the short stories from I, Robot have been adapted for television. The first was a 1962 episode of Out of this World hosted by Boris Karloff called \"Little Lost Robot\" with Maxine Audley as Susan Calvin. Two short stories from the collection were made into episodes of the British series Out of the Unknown. These are \"The Prophet\" (1967), based on \"Reason\"; and \"Liar!\" (1969). Both episodes were wiped by the BBC and are no longer thought to exist, although video clips, audio extracts and still photographs have survived. Repurposed robot costumes from the former appeared in the 1968 Doctor Who serial The Mind Robber. The 12th episode of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World, filmed in 1987 and entitled Don't Joke with Robots, was based on works by Aleksandr Belyaev and Fredrik Kilander as well as Asimov's \"Liar!\" story.",
"title": "Dramatic adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Both the original and revival series of The Outer Limits include episodes named \"I, Robot\" but these are adaptations of an unrelated work by Earl and Otto Binder under their joint pseudonym \"Eando Binder\". The Binders' story introduced a recurring character, the robot named Adam Link.",
"title": "Dramatic adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In August 2023, David S. Goyer revealed that he had gotten permission from FOX head Lachlan Murdoch, a self-professed fan of Apple TV+'s Foundation, to adapt concepts from I, Robot to the series' 2023 second season, in \"tying [Demerzel/Daneel] into the I, Robot laws [and] doing a spin-off mini-series that specifically delves into our version of \"The Robot Wars\".",
"title": "Dramatic adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "During the late 1970s, Warner Bros. acquired the option to make a film based on the book, but no screenplay was ever accepted. The most notable attempt was one by Harlan Ellison, who collaborated with Asimov himself to create a version which captured the spirit of the original. Asimov is quoted as saying that this screenplay would lead to \"the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction movie ever made.\" Ellison worked on the project from December 1977 to December 1978. Asimov himself advised Ellison as to the scientific validity of some elements of the script.",
"title": "Dramatic adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Ellison's script, taking inspiration from Citizen Kane, began with reporter Robert Bratenahl tracking down information about Susan Calvin's alleged former lover Stephen Byerly. This provided for a framing sequence to adaptations of Asimov's stories. These differ from the originals in that they more strongly center around Calvin as a character. Ellison placed Calvin into stories in which she had not appeared and amplified her role in ones in which she did.",
"title": "Dramatic adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Although well-regarded by critics, the screenplay is generally considered to have been unfilmable for practical reasons, given the technology and average film budgets of the time. Asimov also believed that the film may have been scrapped owing to a conflict between Ellison and the producers: when the producers suggested changes in the script, instead of being diplomatic as advised by Asimov, Ellison \"reacted violently\" and offended them.",
"title": "Dramatic adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The script was serialized in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in late 1987, and appeared in book form with illustrations by Mark Zug under the title I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay, in 1994 (reprinted 2004, ISBN 1-4165-0600-4). Both Ellison and Asimov received credits.",
"title": "Dramatic adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The film I, Robot, starring Will Smith, was released by Twentieth Century Fox on July 16, 2004 in the United States. Its plot uses elements of \"Little Lost Robot\", a few of Asimov's character names and the Three Laws. The plot of the movie is actually original, though, and based on the screenplay Hardwired by Jeff Vintar, a script not based on Asimov's stories and has been compared to Asimov's The Caves of Steel, which revolves around the murder of a roboticist (although the rest of the film's plot is not based on that novel or other works by Asimov). Unlike the works by Asimov, the movie featured hordes of killer robots.",
"title": "Dramatic adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "BBC Radio 4 aired an audio drama adaptation of five of the I, Robot stories on their 15 Minute Drama in 2017, dramatized by Richard Kurti and starring Hermione Norris.",
"title": "Dramatic adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "These also aired in a single program on BBC Radio 4 Extra as Isaac Asimov's 'I, Robot': Omnibus.",
"title": "Dramatic adaptations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Asimov estate asked Mickey Zucker Reichert (best known for the Norse fantasy Renshai series) to write three prequels for I, Robot, since she was a science fiction writer with a medical degree who had first met Asimov when she was 23, although she did not know him well. She was the first female writer to be authorized to write stories based on Asimov's novels.",
"title": "Prequels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The follow-ups to Asimov's Foundation series had been written by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin.",
"title": "Prequels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Berkley Books ordered the I, Robot prequels, which included:",
"title": "Prequels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2004, The Saturday Evening Post said that I, Robot's Three Laws \"revolutionized the science fiction genre and made robots far more interesting than they ever had been before.\" I, Robot has influenced many aspects of modern popular culture, particularly with respect to science fiction and technology. One example of this is in the technology industry. The name of the real-life modem manufacturer named U.S. Robotics was directly inspired by I, Robot. The name is taken from the name of a robot manufacturer (\"United States Robots and Mechanical Men\") that appears throughout Asimov's robot short stories.",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Many works in the field of science fiction have also paid homage to Asimov's collection.",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "An episode of the original Star Trek series, \"I, Mudd\" (1967), which depicts a planet of androids in need of humans, references I, Robot. Another reference appears in the title of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, \"I, Borg\" (1992), in which Geordi La Forge befriends a lost member of the Borg collective and teaches it a sense of individuality and free will.",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "A Doctor Who story, The Robots of Death (1977), references I, Robot with the \"First Principle\", stating: \"It is forbidden for robots to harm humans.\"",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In the film Aliens (1986), the synthetic person Bishop paraphrases Asimov's First Law in the line: \"It is impossible for me to harm, or by omission of action allow to be harmed, a human being.\"",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "An episode of The Simpsons entitled \"I D'oh Bot\" (2004) has Professor Frink build a robot named \"Smashius Clay\" (also named \"Killhammad Aieee\") that follows all three of Asimov's laws of robotics.",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The animated science fiction/comedy Futurama makes several references to I, Robot. The title of the episode \"I, Roommate\" (1999) is a spoof on I, Robot although the plot of the episode has little to do with the original stories. Additionally, the episode \"The Cyber House Rules\" included an optician named \"Eye Robot\" and the episode \"Anthology of Interest II\" included a segment called \"I, Meatbag.\" Also in \"Bender's Game\" (2008) the psychiatrist is shown a logical fallacy and explodes when the assistant shouts \"Liar!\" a la \"Liar!\". Leela once told Bender to \"cover his ears\" so that he would not hear the robot-destroying paradox which she used to destroy Robot Santa (he punishes the bad, he kills people, killing is bad, therefore he must punish himself), causing a total breakdown; additionally, Bender has stated that he is Three Laws Safe.",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The positronic brain, which Asimov named his robots' central processors, is what powers Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as other Soong type androids. Positronic brains have been referenced in a number of other television shows including Doctor Who, Once Upon a Time... Space, Perry Rhodan, The Number of the Beast, and others.",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Author Cory Doctorow has written a story called \"I, Robot\" as homage to and critique of Asimov, as well as \"I, Row-Boat\", both released in the 2007 short story collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present. He has also said, \"If I return to this theme, it will be with a story about uplifted cheese sandwiches, called 'I, Rarebit.'\"",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Other cultural references to the book are less directly related to science fiction and technology. The album I Robot (1977), by The Alan Parsons Project, was inspired by Asimov's I, Robot. In its original conception, the album was to follow the themes and concepts presented in the short story collection. The Alan Parsons Project were not able to obtain the rights in spite of Asimov's enthusiasm; he had already assigned the rights elsewhere. Thus, the album's concept was altered slightly although the name was kept (minus comma to avoid copyright infringement). An album, I, Human (2009), by Singaporean band Deus Ex Machina, draws heavily upon Asimov's principles on robotics and applies it to the concept of cloning.",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Indian science fiction film Endhiran (2010) refers to Asimov's three laws for artificial intelligence for the fictional character \"Chitti: The Robot\". When a scientist takes in the robot for evaluation, the panel inquires whether the robot was built using the Three Laws of Robotics.",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The theme for Burning Man 2018 was \"I, Robot\".",
"title": "Popular culture references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In Episode 15 of the Netflix series Young Sheldon, Dolomite, Apple Slices and a Mystery Woman, Sheldon is seen reading I, Robot.",
"title": "Popular culture references"
}
]
| I, Robot is a fixup collection made up of science fiction short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950 and were then collected into a 1950 publication Gnome Press in 1950, in an initial edition of 5,000 copies. | 2001-07-30T20:53:30Z | 2023-11-03T04:07:35Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot |
14,546 | Invictus | "Invictus" is a short poem by the Victorian era British poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903). It was written in 1875 and published in 1888 in his first volume of poems, Book of Verses, in the section Life and Death (Echoes).
When Henley was 16 years old, his left leg required amputation owing to complications arising from tuberculosis. In the early 1870s, after seeking treatment for problems with his other leg at Margate, he was told that it would require a similar procedure.
He instead chose to travel to Edinburgh in August 1873 to enlist the services of the distinguished English surgeon Joseph Lister, who was able to save Henley's remaining leg after multiple surgical interventions on the foot. While recovering in the infirmary, he was moved to write the verses that became the poem "Invictus". A memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism—the "stiff upper lip" of self-discipline and fortitude in adversity, which popular culture rendered into a British character trait—"Invictus" remains a cultural touchstone.
INVICTUS
Out of the night that covers me Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul.
Latin for "unconquered", the poem "Invictus" is a deeply descriptive and motivational work filled with vivid imagery. With four stanzas and sixteen lines, each containing eight syllables, the poem has a rather uncomplicated structure. The poem is most known for its themes of willpower and strength in the face of adversity, much of which is drawn from the horrible fate assigned to many amputees of the day—gangrene and death.
Each stanza takes considerable note of William Ernest Henley's perseverance and fearlessness throughout his early life and over twenty months under Lister's care. In the second stanza, Henley refers to the strength that helped him through a childhood defined by his struggles with tuberculosis when he says "I have not winced nor cried aloud." In the fourth stanza, Henley alludes to the fact that each individual's destiny is under the jurisdiction of themselves, not at the mercy of the obstacles they face, nor other worldly powers.
Those who have taken time to analyze "Invictus" have also taken notice of religious themes, or the lack thereof, that exist in this piece. There is agreement that much of the dark descriptions in the opening lines make reference to Hell. Later, the fourth stanza of the poem alludes to a phrase from the King James Bible, which says, at Matthew 7:14, "Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."
Despite Henley's evocative tellings of perseverance and determination, worry was on his mind; in a letter to a close companion, William Ernest Henley later confided, "I am afeard my marching days are over" when asked about the condition of his leg.
The second edition of Henley's Book of Verses added a dedication "To R. T. H. B."—a reference to Robert Thomas Hamilton Bruce, a successful Scottish flour merchant, baker, and literary patron. The 1900 edition of Henley's Poems, published after Bruce's death, altered the dedication to "I. M. R. T. Hamilton Bruce (1846–1899)," whereby I. M. stands for "in memoriam."
The poem was published in 1888 in his first volume of poems, Book of Verses, with no title, but would later be reprinted in 19th-century newspapers under various titles, including:
The established title "Invictus" was added by editor Arthur Quiller-Couch when the poem was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse (1900). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "\"Invictus\" is a short poem by the Victorian era British poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903). It was written in 1875 and published in 1888 in his first volume of poems, Book of Verses, in the section Life and Death (Echoes).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "When Henley was 16 years old, his left leg required amputation owing to complications arising from tuberculosis. In the early 1870s, after seeking treatment for problems with his other leg at Margate, he was told that it would require a similar procedure.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "He instead chose to travel to Edinburgh in August 1873 to enlist the services of the distinguished English surgeon Joseph Lister, who was able to save Henley's remaining leg after multiple surgical interventions on the foot. While recovering in the infirmary, he was moved to write the verses that became the poem \"Invictus\". A memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism—the \"stiff upper lip\" of self-discipline and fortitude in adversity, which popular culture rendered into a British character trait—\"Invictus\" remains a cultural touchstone.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "INVICTUS",
"title": "Poem"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Out of the night that covers me Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul.",
"title": "Poem"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Latin for \"unconquered\", the poem \"Invictus\" is a deeply descriptive and motivational work filled with vivid imagery. With four stanzas and sixteen lines, each containing eight syllables, the poem has a rather uncomplicated structure. The poem is most known for its themes of willpower and strength in the face of adversity, much of which is drawn from the horrible fate assigned to many amputees of the day—gangrene and death.",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Each stanza takes considerable note of William Ernest Henley's perseverance and fearlessness throughout his early life and over twenty months under Lister's care. In the second stanza, Henley refers to the strength that helped him through a childhood defined by his struggles with tuberculosis when he says \"I have not winced nor cried aloud.\" In the fourth stanza, Henley alludes to the fact that each individual's destiny is under the jurisdiction of themselves, not at the mercy of the obstacles they face, nor other worldly powers.",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Those who have taken time to analyze \"Invictus\" have also taken notice of religious themes, or the lack thereof, that exist in this piece. There is agreement that much of the dark descriptions in the opening lines make reference to Hell. Later, the fourth stanza of the poem alludes to a phrase from the King James Bible, which says, at Matthew 7:14, \"Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.\"",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Despite Henley's evocative tellings of perseverance and determination, worry was on his mind; in a letter to a close companion, William Ernest Henley later confided, \"I am afeard my marching days are over\" when asked about the condition of his leg.",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The second edition of Henley's Book of Verses added a dedication \"To R. T. H. B.\"—a reference to Robert Thomas Hamilton Bruce, a successful Scottish flour merchant, baker, and literary patron. The 1900 edition of Henley's Poems, published after Bruce's death, altered the dedication to \"I. M. R. T. Hamilton Bruce (1846–1899),\" whereby I. M. stands for \"in memoriam.\"",
"title": "Publication history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The poem was published in 1888 in his first volume of poems, Book of Verses, with no title, but would later be reprinted in 19th-century newspapers under various titles, including:",
"title": "Publication history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The established title \"Invictus\" was added by editor Arthur Quiller-Couch when the poem was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse (1900).",
"title": "Publication history"
}
]
| "Invictus" is a short poem by the Victorian era British poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903). It was written in 1875 and published in 1888 in his first volume of poems, Book of Verses, in the section Life and Death (Echoes). | 2001-08-23T19:34:46Z | 2023-12-19T11:21:42Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invictus |
14,551 | Tertiary sector of the economy | The tertiary sector of the economy, generally known as the service sector, is the third of the three economic sectors in the three-sector model (also known as the economic cycle). The others are the primary sector (raw materials) and the secondary sector (manufacturing).
The tertiary sector consists of the provision of services instead of end products. Services (also known as "intangible goods") include attention, advice, access, experience and affective labour.
The tertiary sector involves the provision of services to other businesses as well as to final consumers. Services may involve the transport, distribution and sale of goods from a producer to a consumer, as may happen in wholesaling and retailing, pest control or entertainment. The goods may be transformed in the process of providing the service, as happens in the restaurant industry. However, the focus is on people by interacting with them and serving the customers rather than transforming the physical goods. The production of information has been long regarded as a service, but some economists now attribute it to a fourth sector, called the quaternary sector.
It is sometimes hard to determine whether a given company is part of the secondary or the tertiary sector. It is not only companies that have been classified as part of a sector in some schemes, since governments and their services (such as the police or military), as well as nonprofit organizations (such as charities or research associations), can also be seen as part of that sector.
To classify a business as a service, one can use classification systems such as the United Nations' International Standard Industrial Classification standard, the United States' Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code system and its new replacement, the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS), the Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community (NACE) in the EU and similar systems elsewhere. These governmental classification systems have a first-level of hierarchy that reflects whether the economic goods are tangible or intangible.
For purposes of finance and market research, market-based classification systems such as the Global Industry Classification Standard and the Industry Classification Benchmark are used to classify businesses that participate in the service sector. Unlike governmental classification systems, the first level of market-based classification systems divides the economy into functionally related markets or industries. The second or third level of these hierarchies then reflects whether goods or services are produced.
For the last 100 years, there has been a substantial shift from the primary and secondary sectors to the tertiary sector in industrialized countries. This shift is called tertiarisation. The tertiary sector is now the largest sector of the economy in the Western world, and is also the fastest-growing sector. In examining the growth of the service sector in the early nineties, the globalist Kenichi Ohmae noted that:
In the United States, 70 per cent of the workforce works in the service sector; in Japan, 60 per cent, and in Taiwan, 50 per cent. These are not necessarily busboys and live-in maids. Numerous of them are in the skilled category. They are earning as much as manufacturing employees, and often more.
Economies tend to follow a developmental progression that takes them from heavy reliance on agriculture and mining, toward the development of manufacturing (e.g. automobiles, textiles, shipbuilding, steel) and finally toward a more service-based structure. The first economy to follow this path in the modern world was the United Kingdom. The speed at which other economies have made the transition to service-based (or "post-industrial") economies has increased over time.
Historically, manufacturing tended to be more open to international trade and competition than services. However, with dramatic cost reduction and speed and reliability improvements in the transportation of people and the communication of information, the service sector now includes some of the most intensive international competition, despite residual protectionism.
Service providers face obstacles selling services that goods-sellers rarely face. Services are intangible, making it difficult for potential customers to understand what they will receive and what value it will hold for them. Indeed, some, such as consultants and providers of investment services, offer no guarantees of the value for the price paid.
Since the quality of most services depends largely on the quality of the individuals providing the services, "people costs" are usually a high fraction of service costs. Whereas a manufacturer may use technology, simplification, and other techniques to lower the cost of goods sold, the service provider often faces an unrelenting pattern of increasing costs.
Product differentiation is often difficult. For example, how does one choose one investment adviser over another, since they are often seen to provide identical services? Charging a premium for services is usually an option only for the most established firms, who charge extra based upon brand recognition.
Examples of tertiary industries may include:
Below is a list of countries by service output at market exchange rates in 2016: | [
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"title": ""
},
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"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The tertiary sector involves the provision of services to other businesses as well as to final consumers. Services may involve the transport, distribution and sale of goods from a producer to a consumer, as may happen in wholesaling and retailing, pest control or entertainment. The goods may be transformed in the process of providing the service, as happens in the restaurant industry. However, the focus is on people by interacting with them and serving the customers rather than transforming the physical goods. The production of information has been long regarded as a service, but some economists now attribute it to a fourth sector, called the quaternary sector.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "It is sometimes hard to determine whether a given company is part of the secondary or the tertiary sector. It is not only companies that have been classified as part of a sector in some schemes, since governments and their services (such as the police or military), as well as nonprofit organizations (such as charities or research associations), can also be seen as part of that sector.",
"title": "Difficulty of definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "To classify a business as a service, one can use classification systems such as the United Nations' International Standard Industrial Classification standard, the United States' Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code system and its new replacement, the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS), the Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community (NACE) in the EU and similar systems elsewhere. These governmental classification systems have a first-level of hierarchy that reflects whether the economic goods are tangible or intangible.",
"title": "Difficulty of definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "For purposes of finance and market research, market-based classification systems such as the Global Industry Classification Standard and the Industry Classification Benchmark are used to classify businesses that participate in the service sector. Unlike governmental classification systems, the first level of market-based classification systems divides the economy into functionally related markets or industries. The second or third level of these hierarchies then reflects whether goods or services are produced.",
"title": "Difficulty of definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "For the last 100 years, there has been a substantial shift from the primary and secondary sectors to the tertiary sector in industrialized countries. This shift is called tertiarisation. The tertiary sector is now the largest sector of the economy in the Western world, and is also the fastest-growing sector. In examining the growth of the service sector in the early nineties, the globalist Kenichi Ohmae noted that:",
"title": "Theory of progression"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the United States, 70 per cent of the workforce works in the service sector; in Japan, 60 per cent, and in Taiwan, 50 per cent. These are not necessarily busboys and live-in maids. Numerous of them are in the skilled category. They are earning as much as manufacturing employees, and often more.",
"title": "Theory of progression"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Economies tend to follow a developmental progression that takes them from heavy reliance on agriculture and mining, toward the development of manufacturing (e.g. automobiles, textiles, shipbuilding, steel) and finally toward a more service-based structure. The first economy to follow this path in the modern world was the United Kingdom. The speed at which other economies have made the transition to service-based (or \"post-industrial\") economies has increased over time.",
"title": "Theory of progression"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Historically, manufacturing tended to be more open to international trade and competition than services. However, with dramatic cost reduction and speed and reliability improvements in the transportation of people and the communication of information, the service sector now includes some of the most intensive international competition, despite residual protectionism.",
"title": "Theory of progression"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Service providers face obstacles selling services that goods-sellers rarely face. Services are intangible, making it difficult for potential customers to understand what they will receive and what value it will hold for them. Indeed, some, such as consultants and providers of investment services, offer no guarantees of the value for the price paid.",
"title": "Issues for service providers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Since the quality of most services depends largely on the quality of the individuals providing the services, \"people costs\" are usually a high fraction of service costs. Whereas a manufacturer may use technology, simplification, and other techniques to lower the cost of goods sold, the service provider often faces an unrelenting pattern of increasing costs.",
"title": "Issues for service providers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Product differentiation is often difficult. For example, how does one choose one investment adviser over another, since they are often seen to provide identical services? Charging a premium for services is usually an option only for the most established firms, who charge extra based upon brand recognition.",
"title": "Issues for service providers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Examples of tertiary industries may include:",
"title": "Examples of tertiary sector industries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Below is a list of countries by service output at market exchange rates in 2016:",
"title": "List of countries by tertiary output"
}
]
| The tertiary sector of the economy, generally known as the service sector, is the third of the three economic sectors in the three-sector model. The others are the primary sector and the secondary sector (manufacturing). The tertiary sector consists of the provision of services instead of end products. Services include attention, advice, access, experience and affective labour. The tertiary sector involves the provision of services to other businesses as well as to final consumers. Services may involve the transport, distribution and sale of goods from a producer to a consumer, as may happen in wholesaling and retailing, pest control or entertainment. The goods may be transformed in the process of providing the service, as happens in the restaurant industry. However, the focus is on people by interacting with them and serving the customers rather than transforming the physical goods. The production of information has been long regarded as a service, but some economists now attribute it to a fourth sector, called the quaternary sector. | 2001-03-19T17:38:41Z | 2023-12-06T08:04:08Z | [
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14,552 | Primary sector of the economy | The primary sector of the economy includes any industry involved in the extraction and production of raw materials, such as farming, logging, fishing, forestry and mining.
The primary sector tends to make up a larger portion of the economy in developing countries than it does in developed countries. For example, in 2018, agriculture, forestry, and fishing comprised more than 15% of GDP in sub-Saharan Africa but less than 1% of GDP in North America.
In developed countries the primary sector has become more technologically advanced, enabling for example the mechanization of farming, as compared with lower-tech methods in poorer countries. More developed economies may invest additional capital in primary means of production: for example, in the United States corn belt, combine harvesters pick the corn, and sprayers spray large amounts of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, producing a higher yield than is possible using less capital-intensive techniques. These technological advances and investment allow the primary sector to employ a smaller workforce, so developed countries tend to have a smaller percentage of their workforce involved in primary activities, instead having a higher percentage involved in the secondary and tertiary sectors. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The primary sector of the economy includes any industry involved in the extraction and production of raw materials, such as farming, logging, fishing, forestry and mining.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The primary sector tends to make up a larger portion of the economy in developing countries than it does in developed countries. For example, in 2018, agriculture, forestry, and fishing comprised more than 15% of GDP in sub-Saharan Africa but less than 1% of GDP in North America.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In developed countries the primary sector has become more technologically advanced, enabling for example the mechanization of farming, as compared with lower-tech methods in poorer countries. More developed economies may invest additional capital in primary means of production: for example, in the United States corn belt, combine harvesters pick the corn, and sprayers spray large amounts of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, producing a higher yield than is possible using less capital-intensive techniques. These technological advances and investment allow the primary sector to employ a smaller workforce, so developed countries tend to have a smaller percentage of their workforce involved in primary activities, instead having a higher percentage involved in the secondary and tertiary sectors.",
"title": ""
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| The primary sector of the economy includes any industry involved in the extraction and production of raw materials, such as farming, logging, fishing, forestry and mining. The primary sector tends to make up a larger portion of the economy in developing countries than it does in developed countries. For example, in 2018, agriculture, forestry, and fishing comprised more than 15% of GDP in sub-Saharan Africa but less than 1% of GDP in North America. In developed countries the primary sector has become more technologically advanced, enabling for example the mechanization of farming, as compared with lower-tech methods in poorer countries. More developed economies may invest additional capital in primary means of production: for example, in the United States corn belt, combine harvesters pick the corn, and sprayers spray large amounts of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, producing a higher yield than is possible using less capital-intensive techniques. These technological advances and investment allow the primary sector to employ a smaller workforce, so developed countries tend to have a smaller percentage of their workforce involved in primary activities, instead having a higher percentage involved in the secondary and tertiary sectors. | 2001-08-02T15:49:35Z | 2023-12-05T13:33:21Z | [
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14,553 | Secondary sector of the economy | In macroeconomics, the secondary sector of the economy is an economic sector in the three-sector theory that describes the role of manufacturing. It encompasses industries that produce a finished, usable product or are involved in construction.
This sector generally takes the output of the primary sector (i.e. raw materials) and creates finished goods suitable for sale to domestic businesses or consumers and for export (via distribution through the tertiary sector). Many of these industries consume large quantities of energy, require factories and use machinery; they are often classified as light or heavy based on such quantities. This also produces waste materials and waste heat that may cause environmental problems or pollution (see negative externalities). Examples include textile production, car manufacturing, and handicraft.
Manufacturing is an important activity in promoting economic growth and development. Nations that export manufactured products tend to generate higher marginal GDP growth, which supports higher incomes and therefore marginal tax revenue needed to fund such government expenditures as health care and infrastructure. Among developed countries, it is an important source of well-paying jobs for the middle class (e.g., engineering) to facilitate greater social mobility for successive generations on the economy. Currently, an estimated 20% of the labor force in the United States is involved in the secondary industry.
The secondary sector depends on the primary sector for the raw materials necessary for production. Countries that primarily produce agricultural and other raw materials (i.e., primary sector) tend to grow slowly and remain either under-developed or developing economies. The value added through the transformation of raw materials into finished goods reliably generates greater profitability, which underlies the faster growth of developed economies. | [
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"text": "In macroeconomics, the secondary sector of the economy is an economic sector in the three-sector theory that describes the role of manufacturing. It encompasses industries that produce a finished, usable product or are involved in construction.",
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},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "This sector generally takes the output of the primary sector (i.e. raw materials) and creates finished goods suitable for sale to domestic businesses or consumers and for export (via distribution through the tertiary sector). Many of these industries consume large quantities of energy, require factories and use machinery; they are often classified as light or heavy based on such quantities. This also produces waste materials and waste heat that may cause environmental problems or pollution (see negative externalities). Examples include textile production, car manufacturing, and handicraft.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "Manufacturing is an important activity in promoting economic growth and development. Nations that export manufactured products tend to generate higher marginal GDP growth, which supports higher incomes and therefore marginal tax revenue needed to fund such government expenditures as health care and infrastructure. Among developed countries, it is an important source of well-paying jobs for the middle class (e.g., engineering) to facilitate greater social mobility for successive generations on the economy. Currently, an estimated 20% of the labor force in the United States is involved in the secondary industry.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The secondary sector depends on the primary sector for the raw materials necessary for production. Countries that primarily produce agricultural and other raw materials (i.e., primary sector) tend to grow slowly and remain either under-developed or developing economies. The value added through the transformation of raw materials into finished goods reliably generates greater profitability, which underlies the faster growth of developed economies.",
"title": ""
}
]
| In macroeconomics, the secondary sector of the economy is an economic sector in the three-sector theory that describes the role of manufacturing. It encompasses industries that produce a finished, usable product or are involved in construction. This sector generally takes the output of the primary sector and creates finished goods suitable for sale to domestic businesses or consumers and for export. Many of these industries consume large quantities of energy, require factories and use machinery; they are often classified as light or heavy based on such quantities. This also produces waste materials and waste heat that may cause environmental problems or pollution. Examples include textile production, car manufacturing, and handicraft. Manufacturing is an important activity in promoting economic growth and development. Nations that export manufactured products tend to generate higher marginal GDP growth, which supports higher incomes and therefore marginal tax revenue needed to fund such government expenditures as health care and infrastructure. Among developed countries, it is an important source of well-paying jobs for the middle class to facilitate greater social mobility for successive generations on the economy. Currently, an estimated 20% of the labor force in the United States is involved in the secondary industry. The secondary sector depends on the primary sector for the raw materials necessary for production. Countries that primarily produce agricultural and other raw materials tend to grow slowly and remain either under-developed or developing economies. The value added through the transformation of raw materials into finished goods reliably generates greater profitability, which underlies the faster growth of developed economies. | 2001-05-04T01:55:14Z | 2023-12-05T13:29:03Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sector_of_the_economy |
14,554 | Imaginary number | An imaginary number is a real number multiplied by the imaginary unit i, which is defined by its property i = −1. The square of an imaginary number bi is −b. For example, 5i is an imaginary number, and its square is −25. The number zero is considered to be both real and imaginary.
Originally coined in the 17th century by René Descartes as a derogatory term and regarded as fictitious or useless, the concept gained wide acceptance following the work of Leonhard Euler (in the 18th century) and Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Carl Friedrich Gauss (in the early 19th century).
An imaginary number bi can be added to a real number a to form a complex number of the form a + bi, where the real numbers a and b are called, respectively, the real part and the imaginary part of the complex number.
Although the Greek mathematician and engineer Heron of Alexandria is noted as the first to present a calculation involving the square root of a negative number, it was Rafael Bombelli who first set down the rules for multiplication of complex numbers in 1572. The concept had appeared in print earlier, such as in work by Gerolamo Cardano. At the time, imaginary numbers and negative numbers were poorly understood and were regarded by some as fictitious or useless, much as zero once was. Many other mathematicians were slow to adopt the use of imaginary numbers, including René Descartes, who wrote about them in his La Géométrie in which he coined the term imaginary and meant it to be derogatory. The use of imaginary numbers was not widely accepted until the work of Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). The geometric significance of complex numbers as points in a plane was first described by Caspar Wessel (1745–1818).
In 1843, William Rowan Hamilton extended the idea of an axis of imaginary numbers in the plane to a four-dimensional space of quaternion imaginaries in which three of the dimensions are analogous to the imaginary numbers in the complex field.
Geometrically, imaginary numbers are found on the vertical axis of the complex number plane, which allows them to be presented perpendicular to the real axis. One way of viewing imaginary numbers is to consider a standard number line positively increasing in magnitude to the right and negatively increasing in magnitude to the left. At 0 on the x-axis, a y-axis can be drawn with "positive" direction going up; "positive" imaginary numbers then increase in magnitude upwards, and "negative" imaginary numbers increase in magnitude downwards. This vertical axis is often called the "imaginary axis" and is denoted i R , {\displaystyle i\mathbb {R} ,} I , {\displaystyle \mathbb {I} ,} or ℑ.
In this representation, multiplication by i corresponds to a counterclockwise rotation of 90 degrees about the origin, which is a quarter of a circle. Multiplication by −i corresponds to a clockwise rotation of 90 degrees about the origin. Similarly, multiplying by a purely imaginary number bi, with b a real number, both causes a counterclockwise rotation about the origin by 90 degrees and scales the answer by a factor of b. When b < 0, this can instead be described as a clockwise rotation by 90 degrees and a scaling by |b|.
Care must be used when working with imaginary numbers that are expressed as the principal values of the square roots of negative numbers. For x and y both positive real numbers: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "An imaginary number is a real number multiplied by the imaginary unit i, which is defined by its property i = −1. The square of an imaginary number bi is −b. For example, 5i is an imaginary number, and its square is −25. The number zero is considered to be both real and imaginary.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Originally coined in the 17th century by René Descartes as a derogatory term and regarded as fictitious or useless, the concept gained wide acceptance following the work of Leonhard Euler (in the 18th century) and Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Carl Friedrich Gauss (in the early 19th century).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "An imaginary number bi can be added to a real number a to form a complex number of the form a + bi, where the real numbers a and b are called, respectively, the real part and the imaginary part of the complex number.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Although the Greek mathematician and engineer Heron of Alexandria is noted as the first to present a calculation involving the square root of a negative number, it was Rafael Bombelli who first set down the rules for multiplication of complex numbers in 1572. The concept had appeared in print earlier, such as in work by Gerolamo Cardano. At the time, imaginary numbers and negative numbers were poorly understood and were regarded by some as fictitious or useless, much as zero once was. Many other mathematicians were slow to adopt the use of imaginary numbers, including René Descartes, who wrote about them in his La Géométrie in which he coined the term imaginary and meant it to be derogatory. The use of imaginary numbers was not widely accepted until the work of Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). The geometric significance of complex numbers as points in a plane was first described by Caspar Wessel (1745–1818).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1843, William Rowan Hamilton extended the idea of an axis of imaginary numbers in the plane to a four-dimensional space of quaternion imaginaries in which three of the dimensions are analogous to the imaginary numbers in the complex field.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Geometrically, imaginary numbers are found on the vertical axis of the complex number plane, which allows them to be presented perpendicular to the real axis. One way of viewing imaginary numbers is to consider a standard number line positively increasing in magnitude to the right and negatively increasing in magnitude to the left. At 0 on the x-axis, a y-axis can be drawn with \"positive\" direction going up; \"positive\" imaginary numbers then increase in magnitude upwards, and \"negative\" imaginary numbers increase in magnitude downwards. This vertical axis is often called the \"imaginary axis\" and is denoted i R , {\\displaystyle i\\mathbb {R} ,} I , {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {I} ,} or ℑ.",
"title": "Geometric interpretation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In this representation, multiplication by i corresponds to a counterclockwise rotation of 90 degrees about the origin, which is a quarter of a circle. Multiplication by −i corresponds to a clockwise rotation of 90 degrees about the origin. Similarly, multiplying by a purely imaginary number bi, with b a real number, both causes a counterclockwise rotation about the origin by 90 degrees and scales the answer by a factor of b. When b < 0, this can instead be described as a clockwise rotation by 90 degrees and a scaling by |b|.",
"title": "Geometric interpretation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Care must be used when working with imaginary numbers that are expressed as the principal values of the square roots of negative numbers. For x and y both positive real numbers:",
"title": "Square roots of negative numbers"
}
]
| An imaginary number is a real number multiplied by the imaginary unit i, which is defined by its property i2 = −1. The square of an imaginary number bi is −b2. For example, 5i is an imaginary number, and its square is −25. The number zero is considered to be both real and imaginary. Originally coined in the 17th century by René Descartes as a derogatory term and regarded as fictitious or useless, the concept gained wide acceptance following the work of Leonhard Euler and Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Carl Friedrich Gauss. An imaginary number bi can be added to a real number a to form a complex number of the form a + bi, where the real numbers a and b are called, respectively, the real part and the imaginary part of the complex number. | 2001-11-14T18:58:38Z | 2023-12-25T13:56:48Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_number |
14,559 | Indictment | An indictment (/ɪnˈdaɪtmənt/ in-DYTE-mənt) is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. In jurisdictions that use the concept of felonies, the most serious criminal offense is a felony; jurisdictions that do not use that concept often use that of an indictable offense, an offense that requires an indictment.
Section 80 of the Constitution of Australia provides that "the trial on indictment of any offence against any law of the Commonwealth shall be by jury". The High Court of Australia has consistently used a narrow interpretation of this clause, allowing the Parliament of Australia to define which offences proceed on indictment rather than conferring a universal right to a jury trial. Section 4G of the Crimes Act 1914 provides that "offences against a law of the Commonwealth punishable by imprisonment for a period exceeding 12 months are indictable offences, unless the contrary intention appears".
A direct indictment is one in which the case is sent directly to trial before a preliminary inquiry is completed or when the accused has been discharged by a preliminary inquiry. It is meant to be an extraordinary, rarely used power to ensure that those who should be brought to trial are in a timely manner or where an error of judgment is seen to have been made in the preliminary inquiry. In the aftermath of the 2016 Jordan decision, in which the Supreme Court of Canada imposed time limits on the Crown to bring criminal cases to trial, the Crown has started to use the procedure more frequently.
In England and Wales (except in private prosecutions by individuals) an indictment is issued by the public prosecutor (in most cases this will be the Crown Prosecution Service) on behalf of the Crown, which is the nominal plaintiff in all public prosecutions under English law. This is why a public prosecution of a person whose surname is Smith would be referred to in writing as "R v Smith" (or alternatively as "Regina v Smith" or "Rex v Smith" depending on the sex of the Sovereign, Regina and Rex being Latin for "Queen" and "King" and in either case may informally be pronounced as such) and when cited orally in court would be pronounced "the Crown against Smith".
All proceedings on indictment must be brought before the Crown Court. By virtue of practice directions issued under section 75(1) of the Senior Courts Act 1981, an indictment must be tried by a High Court judge, a circuit judge or a recorder (which of these depends on the offence).
As to the form of an indictment, see the Indictments Act 1915 and the Indictment Rules 1971 made thereunder.
The Indictment Rules 1971 were revoked by the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Rules 2007 (on the whole) incorporated into the Criminal Procedure Rules 2010. The form and content and the service of an indictment are governed by Rule 14 of the CPR 2012. Additional guidance is contained in the Consolidated Criminal Practice Direction Part IV.34.
As to the preferring of a bill of indictment and the signing of an indictment, see section 2 of the Administration of Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1933 and the Indictments (Procedure) Rules 1971 (S.I. 1971/2084) made thereunder, as amended and modified by the Indictments (Procedure) (Amendment) Rules 1983 (S.I. 1983/284), the Indictments (Procedure) (Amendment) Rules 1988 (S.I. 1988/1783), the Indictments (Procedure) (Amendment) Rules 1992 (S.I. 1992/284), the Indictments (Procedure) (Amendment) Rules 1997 (S.I. 1997/711), the Indictments (Procedure) (Modification) Rules 1998 (S.I. 1998/3045) and the Indictments (Procedure) (Amendment) Rules 2000 (S.I. 2000/3360).
See the Indictments Act (Northern Ireland) 1945.
In Scotland, all of these cases brought in the High Court of Justiciary are brought in the name of the Lord Advocate and will be tried on indictment. In a sheriff court where trials proceed using the solemn proceedings they will also be tried on indictment and are brought in the name of the Lord Advocate. All solemn indictments are designed in the manner Her (or His) Majesty’s Advocate v Smith, or, more frequently HMA v Smith.
The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution states in part: "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia when in actual service in time of War or public danger." The requirement of an indictment has not been incorporated against the states; therefore, even though the federal government uses grand juries and indictments, not all states do. As of 2019, all states besides Pennsylvania and Connecticut still use grand juries to indict suspects for some offenses.
In many jurisdictions that use grand juries, prosecutors often have a choice between seeking an indictment from a grand jury and filing a charging document directly with the court. Such a document is usually called an information, accusation, or complaint, to distinguish it from a grand-jury indictment. To protect the suspect's due process rights in felony cases (where the suspect's interest in liberty is at stake), there is usually a preliminary hearing, at which a judge determines whether there was probable cause to arrest the suspect who is in custody. If the judge finds such probable cause, they bind, or hold over, the suspect for trial.
The substance of an indictment or other charging instrument is usually the same, regardless of the jurisdiction: it consists of a short and plain statement of where, when, and how the defendant allegedly committed the offense. Each offense is usually set out in a separate count. Indictments for complex crimes, particularly those involving conspiracy or numerous counts, may run to hundreds of pages. In other cases, however, an indictment for a crime as serious as murder may consist of a single sheet of paper.
Indictable offenses are tried by jury, unless the accused waives the right to a jury trial. Even though the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution mandates the right to a jury trial in any criminal prosecution, the vast majority of criminal cases in the US are resolved by the plea-bargaining process.
A sealed indictment stays non-public, for various reasons, until it is unsealed (for example, once the indicted is arrested or notified by police). A superseding indictment takes the place of the previously active one. A speaking indictment goes beyond the legally required statement of the elements of the charged crime(s) and also includes a narrative of the alleged underlying acts in more detail. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "An indictment (/ɪnˈdaɪtmənt/ in-DYTE-mənt) is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. In jurisdictions that use the concept of felonies, the most serious criminal offense is a felony; jurisdictions that do not use that concept often use that of an indictable offense, an offense that requires an indictment.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Section 80 of the Constitution of Australia provides that \"the trial on indictment of any offence against any law of the Commonwealth shall be by jury\". The High Court of Australia has consistently used a narrow interpretation of this clause, allowing the Parliament of Australia to define which offences proceed on indictment rather than conferring a universal right to a jury trial. Section 4G of the Crimes Act 1914 provides that \"offences against a law of the Commonwealth punishable by imprisonment for a period exceeding 12 months are indictable offences, unless the contrary intention appears\".",
"title": "Australia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "A direct indictment is one in which the case is sent directly to trial before a preliminary inquiry is completed or when the accused has been discharged by a preliminary inquiry. It is meant to be an extraordinary, rarely used power to ensure that those who should be brought to trial are in a timely manner or where an error of judgment is seen to have been made in the preliminary inquiry. In the aftermath of the 2016 Jordan decision, in which the Supreme Court of Canada imposed time limits on the Crown to bring criminal cases to trial, the Crown has started to use the procedure more frequently.",
"title": "Canada"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In England and Wales (except in private prosecutions by individuals) an indictment is issued by the public prosecutor (in most cases this will be the Crown Prosecution Service) on behalf of the Crown, which is the nominal plaintiff in all public prosecutions under English law. This is why a public prosecution of a person whose surname is Smith would be referred to in writing as \"R v Smith\" (or alternatively as \"Regina v Smith\" or \"Rex v Smith\" depending on the sex of the Sovereign, Regina and Rex being Latin for \"Queen\" and \"King\" and in either case may informally be pronounced as such) and when cited orally in court would be pronounced \"the Crown against Smith\".",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "All proceedings on indictment must be brought before the Crown Court. By virtue of practice directions issued under section 75(1) of the Senior Courts Act 1981, an indictment must be tried by a High Court judge, a circuit judge or a recorder (which of these depends on the offence).",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "As to the form of an indictment, see the Indictments Act 1915 and the Indictment Rules 1971 made thereunder.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Indictment Rules 1971 were revoked by the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Rules 2007 (on the whole) incorporated into the Criminal Procedure Rules 2010. The form and content and the service of an indictment are governed by Rule 14 of the CPR 2012. Additional guidance is contained in the Consolidated Criminal Practice Direction Part IV.34.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "As to the preferring of a bill of indictment and the signing of an indictment, see section 2 of the Administration of Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1933 and the Indictments (Procedure) Rules 1971 (S.I. 1971/2084) made thereunder, as amended and modified by the Indictments (Procedure) (Amendment) Rules 1983 (S.I. 1983/284), the Indictments (Procedure) (Amendment) Rules 1988 (S.I. 1988/1783), the Indictments (Procedure) (Amendment) Rules 1992 (S.I. 1992/284), the Indictments (Procedure) (Amendment) Rules 1997 (S.I. 1997/711), the Indictments (Procedure) (Modification) Rules 1998 (S.I. 1998/3045) and the Indictments (Procedure) (Amendment) Rules 2000 (S.I. 2000/3360).",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "See the Indictments Act (Northern Ireland) 1945.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In Scotland, all of these cases brought in the High Court of Justiciary are brought in the name of the Lord Advocate and will be tried on indictment. In a sheriff court where trials proceed using the solemn proceedings they will also be tried on indictment and are brought in the name of the Lord Advocate. All solemn indictments are designed in the manner Her (or His) Majesty’s Advocate v Smith, or, more frequently HMA v Smith.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution states in part: \"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia when in actual service in time of War or public danger.\" The requirement of an indictment has not been incorporated against the states; therefore, even though the federal government uses grand juries and indictments, not all states do. As of 2019, all states besides Pennsylvania and Connecticut still use grand juries to indict suspects for some offenses.",
"title": "United States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In many jurisdictions that use grand juries, prosecutors often have a choice between seeking an indictment from a grand jury and filing a charging document directly with the court. Such a document is usually called an information, accusation, or complaint, to distinguish it from a grand-jury indictment. To protect the suspect's due process rights in felony cases (where the suspect's interest in liberty is at stake), there is usually a preliminary hearing, at which a judge determines whether there was probable cause to arrest the suspect who is in custody. If the judge finds such probable cause, they bind, or hold over, the suspect for trial.",
"title": "United States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The substance of an indictment or other charging instrument is usually the same, regardless of the jurisdiction: it consists of a short and plain statement of where, when, and how the defendant allegedly committed the offense. Each offense is usually set out in a separate count. Indictments for complex crimes, particularly those involving conspiracy or numerous counts, may run to hundreds of pages. In other cases, however, an indictment for a crime as serious as murder may consist of a single sheet of paper.",
"title": "United States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Indictable offenses are tried by jury, unless the accused waives the right to a jury trial. Even though the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution mandates the right to a jury trial in any criminal prosecution, the vast majority of criminal cases in the US are resolved by the plea-bargaining process.",
"title": "United States"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "A sealed indictment stays non-public, for various reasons, until it is unsealed (for example, once the indicted is arrested or notified by police). A superseding indictment takes the place of the previously active one. A speaking indictment goes beyond the legally required statement of the elements of the charged crime(s) and also includes a narrative of the alleged underlying acts in more detail.",
"title": "Types"
}
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| An indictment is a formal accusation that a person has committed a crime. In jurisdictions that use the concept of felonies, the most serious criminal offense is a felony; jurisdictions that do not use that concept often use that of an indictable offense, an offense that requires an indictment. | 2001-10-04T17:24:58Z | 2023-11-19T07:57:20Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment |
14,560 | Republic of Ireland | Ireland (Irish: Éire [ˈeːɾʲə] ), also known as the Republic of Ireland (Poblacht na hÉireann), is a country in north-western Europe consisting of 26 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, on the eastern side of the island. Around 2.1 million of the country's population of 5.15 million people reside in the Greater Dublin Area. The sovereign state shares its only land border with Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. It is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the Celtic Sea to the south, St George's Channel to the south-east, and the Irish Sea to the east. It is a unitary, parliamentary republic. The legislature, the Oireachtas, consists of a lower house, Dáil Éireann; an upper house, Seanad Éireann; and an elected President (Uachtarán) who serves as the largely ceremonial head of state, but with some important powers and duties. The head of government is the Taoiseach (Prime Minister, literally "Chief"), who is elected by the Dáil and appointed by the President; the Taoiseach in turn appoints other government ministers.
The Irish Free State was created with Dominion status in 1922, following the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In 1937, a new constitution was adopted, in which the state was named "Ireland" and effectively became a republic, with an elected non-executive president. It was officially declared a republic in 1949, following the Republic of Ireland Act 1948. Ireland became a member of the United Nations in 1955. It joined the European Communities (EC), the predecessor of the European Union (EU), in 1973. The state had no formal relations with Northern Ireland for most of the 20th century, but the 1980s and 1990s saw the British and Irish governments working with Northern Irish parties to resolve the conflict that had become known as the Troubles. Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the Irish government and Northern Irish government have co-operated on a number of policy areas under the North/South Ministerial Council created by the Agreement.
Ireland is a developed country with a quality of life that ranks amongst the highest in the world; after adjustments for inequality, the 2021 Human Development Index listing ranked it the sixth-highest in the world. It also ranks highly in healthcare, economic freedom, and freedom of the press. It is a member of the EU and a founding member of the Council of Europe and the OECD. The Irish government has followed a policy of military neutrality through non-alignment since before World War II, and the country is consequently not a member of NATO, although it is a member of Partnership for Peace and certain aspects of PESCO. Ireland's economy is advanced, with one of Europe's major financial hubs being centred around Dublin. It ranks among the top 10 wealthiest countries in the world in terms of both GDP and GNI per capita. After joining the EC, the country's government enacted a series of liberal economic policies that helped to boost economic growth between 1995 and 2007, a time now often referred to as the Celtic Tiger period. A recession and reversal in growth then followed during the Great Recession, which was exacerbated by the bursting of the Irish property bubble.
The Irish name for Ireland is Éire, deriving from Ériu, a goddess in Irish mythology. The state created in 1922, comprising 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland, was "styled and known as the Irish Free State" (Saorstát Éireann). The Constitution of Ireland, adopted in 1937, says that "the name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland". Section 2 of the Republic of Ireland Act 1948 states, "It is hereby declared that the description of the State shall be the Republic of Ireland." The 1948 Act does not name the state "Republic of Ireland", because to have done so would have put it in conflict with the Constitution.
The government of the United Kingdom used the name "Eire" (without the diacritic) and, from 1949, "Republic of Ireland", for the state. It was not until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, when the state dropped its claim to Northern Ireland, that it began calling the state "Ireland".
The state is also informally called "the Republic", "Southern Ireland" or "the South"; especially when distinguishing the state from the island or when discussing Northern Ireland ("the North"). Irish republicans reserve the name "Ireland" for the whole island and often refer to the state as "the Free State", "the 26 Counties", or "the South of Ireland". This is a "response to the partitionist view [...] that Ireland stops at the border".
From the Act of Union on 1 January 1801, until 6 December 1922, the island of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. During the Great Famine, from 1845 to 1849, the island's population of over 8 million fell by 30%. One million Irish died of starvation and disease and another 1.5 million emigrated, mostly to the United States. This set the pattern of emigration for the century to come, resulting in constant population decline up to the 1960s.
From 1874, and particularly under Charles Stewart Parnell from 1880, the Irish Parliamentary Party gained prominence. This was firstly through widespread agrarian agitation via the Irish Land League, which won land reforms for tenants in the form of the Irish Land Acts, and secondly through its attempts to achieve Home Rule, via two unsuccessful bills which would have granted Ireland limited national autonomy. These led to "grass-roots" control of national affairs, under the Local Government Act 1898, that had been in the hands of landlord-dominated grand juries of the Protestant Ascendancy.
Home Rule seemed certain when the Parliament Act 1911 abolished the veto of the House of Lords, and John Redmond secured the Third Home Rule Act in 1914. However, the Unionist movement had been growing since 1886 among Irish Protestants after the introduction of the first home rule bill, fearing discrimination and loss of economic and social privileges if Irish Catholics achieved real political power. In the late 19th and early 20th-century unionism was particularly strong in parts of Ulster, where industrialisation was more common in contrast to the more agrarian rest of the island, and where the Protestant population was more prominent, with a majority in four counties. Under the leadership of the Dublin-born Sir Edward Carson of the Irish Unionist Party and the Ulsterman Sir James Craig of the Ulster Unionist Party, unionists became strongly militant, forming Ulster Volunteers in order to oppose "the Coercion of Ulster". After the Home Rule Bill passed parliament in May 1914, to avoid rebellion with Ulster, the British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith introduced an Amending Bill reluctantly conceded to by the Irish Party leadership. This provided for the temporary exclusion of Ulster from the workings of the bill for a trial period of six years, with an as yet undecided new set of measures to be introduced for the area to be temporarily excluded.
Though it received the Royal Assent and was placed on the statute books in 1914, the implementation of the Third Home Rule Act was suspended until after the First World War which defused the threat of civil war in Ireland. With the hope of ensuring the implementation of the Act at the end of the war through Ireland's engagement in the war, Redmond and the Irish National Volunteers supported the UK and its Allies. 175,000 men joined Irish regiments of the 10th (Irish) and 16th (Irish) divisions of the New British Army, while Unionists joined the 36th (Ulster) divisions.
The remainder of the Irish Volunteers, who refused Redmond and opposed any support of the UK, launched an armed insurrection against British rule in the 1916 Easter Rising, together with the Irish Citizen Army. This commenced on 24 April 1916 with the declaration of independence. After a week of heavy fighting, primarily in Dublin, the surviving rebels were forced to surrender their positions. The majority were imprisoned, with fifteen of the prisoners (including most of the leaders) were executed as traitors to the UK. This included Patrick Pearse, the spokesman for the rising and who provided the signal to the volunteers to start the rising, as well as James Connolly, socialist and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World union and both the Irish and Scottish Labour movements. These events, together with the Conscription Crisis of 1918, had a profound effect on changing public opinion in Ireland against the British Government.
In January 1919, after the December 1918 general election, 73 of Ireland's 105 Members of Parliament (MPs) elected were Sinn Féin members who were elected on a platform of abstentionism from the British House of Commons. In January 1919, they set up an Irish parliament called Dáil Éireann. This first Dáil issued a declaration of independence and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The declaration was mainly a restatement of the 1916 Proclamation with the additional provision that Ireland was no longer a part of the United Kingdom. The Irish Republic's Ministry of Dáil Éireann sent a delegation under Ceann Comhairle (Head of Council, or Speaker, of the Daíl) Seán T. O'Kelly to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, but it was not admitted.
After the War of Independence and truce called in July 1921, representatives of the British government and the five Irish treaty delegates, led by Arthur Griffith, Robert Barton and Michael Collins, negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London from 11 October to 6 December 1921. The Irish delegates set up headquarters at Hans Place in Knightsbridge, and it was here in private discussions that the decision was taken on 5 December to recommend the treaty to Dáil Éireann. On 7 January 1922, the Second Dáil ratified the Treaty by 64 votes to 57.
In accordance with the treaty, on 6 December 1922 the entire island of Ireland became a self-governing Dominion called the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann). Under the Constitution of the Irish Free State, the Parliament of Northern Ireland had the option to leave the Irish Free State one month later and return to the United Kingdom. During the intervening period, the powers of the Parliament of the Irish Free State and Executive Council of the Irish Free State did not extend to Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland exercised its right under the treaty to leave the new Dominion and rejoined the United Kingdom on 8 December 1922. It did so by making an address to the King requesting, "that the powers of the Parliament and Government of the Irish Free State shall no longer extend to Northern Ireland." The Irish Free State was a constitutional monarchy sharing a monarch with the United Kingdom and other Dominions of the British Commonwealth. The country had a governor-general (representing the monarch), a bicameral parliament, a cabinet called the "Executive Council", and a prime minister called the President of the Executive Council.
The Irish Civil War (June 1922 – May 1923) was the consequence of the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the creation of the Irish Free State. Anti-treaty forces, led by Éamon de Valera, objected to the fact that acceptance of the treaty abolished the Irish Republic of 1919 to which they had sworn loyalty, arguing in the face of public support for the settlement that the "people have no right to do wrong". They objected most to the fact that the state would remain part of the British Empire and that members of the Free State Parliament would have to swear what the anti-treaty side saw as an oath of fidelity to the British king. Pro-treaty forces, led by Michael Collins, argued that the treaty gave "not the ultimate freedom that all nations aspire to and develop, but the freedom to achieve it".
At the start of the war, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) split into two opposing camps: a pro-treaty IRA and an anti-treaty IRA. The pro-treaty IRA disbanded and joined the new National Army. However, because the anti-treaty IRA lacked an effective command structure and because of the pro-treaty forces' defensive tactics throughout the war, Michael Collins and his pro-treaty forces were able to build up an army with many tens of thousands of World War I veterans from the 1922 disbanded Irish regiments of the British Army, capable of overwhelming the anti-treatyists. British supplies of artillery, aircraft, machine-guns and ammunition boosted pro-treaty forces, and the threat of a return of Crown forces to the Free State removed any doubts about the necessity of enforcing the treaty. Lack of public support for the anti-treaty forces (often called the Irregulars) and the determination of the government to overcome the Irregulars contributed significantly to their defeat.
Following a national plebiscite in July 1937, the new Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht na hÉireann) came into force on 29 December 1937. This replaced the Constitution of the Irish Free State and declared that the name of the state is Éire, or "Ireland" in the English language. While Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution defined the national territory to be the whole island, they also confined the state's jurisdiction to the area that had been the Irish Free State. The former Irish Free State government had abolished the Office of Governor-General in December 1936. Although the constitution established the office of President of Ireland, the question over whether Ireland was a republic remained open. Diplomats were accredited to the king, but the president exercised all internal functions of a head of state. For instance, the President gave assent to new laws with his own authority, without reference to King George VI who was only an "organ", that was provided for by statute law.
Ireland remained neutral during World War II, a period it described as The Emergency. Ireland's Dominion status was terminated with the passage of The Republic of Ireland Act 1948, which came into force on 18 April 1949 and declared that the state was a republic. At the time, a declaration of a republic terminated Commonwealth membership. This rule was changed 10 days after Ireland declared itself a republic, with the London Declaration of 28 April 1949. Ireland did not reapply when the rules were altered to permit republics to join. Later, the Crown of Ireland Act 1542 was repealed in Ireland by the Statute Law Revision (Pre-Union Irish Statutes) Act 1962.
Ireland became a member of the United Nations in December 1955, after having been denied membership because of its neutral stance during the Second World War and not supporting the Allied cause. At the time, joining the UN involved a commitment to using force to deter aggression by one state against another if the UN thought it was necessary.
Interest towards membership of the European Communities (EC) developed in Ireland during the 1950s, with consideration also given to membership of the European Free Trade Area. As the United Kingdom intended on EC membership, Ireland applied for membership in July 1961 due to the substantial economic linkages with the United Kingdom. The founding EC members remained sceptical regarding Ireland's economic capacity, neutrality, and unattractive protectionist policy. Many Irish economists and politicians realised that economic policy reform was necessary. The prospect of EC membership became doubtful in 1963 when French President General Charles de Gaulle stated that France opposed Britain's accession, which ceased negotiations with all other candidate countries. In 1969 his successor, Georges Pompidou, was not opposed to British and Irish membership. Negotiations began and in 1972 the Treaty of Accession was signed. A referendum was held later that year which confirmed Ireland's entry into the bloc, and it finally joined the EC as a member state on 1 January 1973.
The economic crisis of the late 1970s was fuelled by the Fianna Fáil government's budget, the abolition of the car tax, excessive borrowing, and global economic instability including the 1979 oil crisis. There were significant policy changes from 1989 onwards, with economic reform, tax cuts, welfare reform, an increase in competition, and a ban on borrowing to fund current spending. This policy began in 1989–1992 by the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrats government, and continued by the subsequent Fianna Fáil/Labour government and Fine Gael/Labour/Democratic Left government. Ireland became one of the world's fastest growing economies by the late 1990s in what was known as the Celtic Tiger period, which lasted until the Great Recession. Since 2014, Ireland has experienced increased economic activity.
In the Northern Ireland question, the British and Irish governments started to seek a peaceful resolution to the violent conflict involving many paramilitaries and the British Army in Northern Ireland known as "The Troubles". A peace settlement for Northern Ireland, known as the Good Friday Agreement, was approved in 1998 in referendums north and south of the border. As part of the peace settlement, the territorial claim to Northern Ireland in Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland was removed by referendum. In its white paper on Brexit the United Kingdom government reiterated its commitment to the Good Friday Agreement. With regard to Northern Ireland's status, it said that the UK Government's "clearly-stated preference is to retain Northern Ireland's current constitutional position: as part of the UK, but with strong links to Ireland".
The state extends over an area of about five-sixths (70,273 km or 27,133 sq mi) of the island of Ireland (84,421 km or 32,595 sq mi), with Northern Ireland constituting the remainder. The island is bounded to the north and west by the Atlantic Ocean and to the northeast by the North Channel. To the east, the Irish Sea connects to the Atlantic Ocean via St George's Channel and the Celtic Sea to the southwest.
The western landscape mostly consists of rugged cliffs, hills and mountains. The central lowlands are extensively covered with glacial deposits of clay and sand, as well as significant areas of bogland and several lakes. The highest point is Carrauntoohil (1,038.6 m or 3,407 ft), located in the MacGillycuddy's Reeks mountain range in the southwest. River Shannon, which traverses the central lowlands, is the longest river in Ireland at 386 kilometres or 240 miles in length. The west coast is more rugged than the east, with numerous islands, peninsulas, headlands and bays.
Ireland is one of the least forested countries in Europe. Until the end of the Middle Ages, the land was heavily forested. Native species include deciduous trees such as oak, ash, hazel, birch, alder, willow, aspen, elm, rowan and hawthorn, as well as evergreen trees such Scots pine, yew, holly and strawberry trees. The growth of blanket bog and the extensive clearing of woodland for farming are believed to be the main causes of deforestation. Today, only about 10% of Ireland is woodland, most of which is non-native conifer plantations, and only 2% of which is native woodland. The average woodland cover in European countries is over 33%. According to Coillte, a state-owned forestry business, the country's climate gives Ireland one of the fastest growth rates for forests in Europe. Hedgerows, which are traditionally used to define land boundaries, are an important substitute for woodland habitat, providing refuge for native wild flora and a wide range of insect, bird and mammal species. It is home to two terrestrial ecoregions: Celtic broadleaf forests and North Atlantic moist mixed forests.
Agriculture accounts for about 64% of the total land area. This has resulted in limited land to preserve natural habitats, in particular for larger wild mammals with greater territorial requirements. The long history of agricultural production coupled with modern agricultural methods, such as pesticide and fertiliser use, has placed pressure on biodiversity.
The Atlantic Ocean and the warming influence of the Gulf Stream affect weather patterns in Ireland. Temperatures differ regionally, with central and eastern areas tending to be more extreme. However, due to a temperate oceanic climate, temperatures are seldom lower than −5 °C (23 °F) in winter or higher than 26 °C (79 °F) in summer. The highest temperature recorded in Ireland was 33.3 °C (91.9 °F) on 26 June 1887 at Kilkenny Castle in Kilkenny, while the lowest temperature recorded was −19.1 °C (−2.4 °F) at Markree Castle in Sligo. Rainfall is more prevalent during winter months and less so during the early months of summer. Southwestern areas experience the most rainfall as a result of south westerly winds, while Dublin receives the least. Sunshine duration is highest in the southeast of the country. The far north and west are two of the windiest regions in Europe, with great potential for wind energy generation.
Ireland normally gets between 1100 and 1600 hours of sunshine each year, most areas averaging between 3.25 and 3.75 hours a day. The sunniest months are May and June, which average between 5 and 6.5 hours per day over most of the country. The extreme southeast gets most sunshine, averaging over 7 hours a day in early summer. December is the dullest month, with an average daily sunshine ranging from about 1 hour in the north to almost 2 hours in the extreme southeast. The sunniest summer in the 100 years from 1881 to 1980 was 1887, according to measurements made at the Phoenix Park in Dublin; 1980 was the dullest.
Ireland is a constitutional republic with a parliamentary system of government. The Oireachtas is the bicameral national parliament composed of the President of Ireland and the two Houses of the Oireachtas: Dáil Éireann (House of Representatives) and Seanad Éireann (Senate). Áras an Uachtaráin is the official residence of the President of Ireland, while the houses of the Oireachtas meet at Leinster House in Dublin.
The President serves as head of state, is elected for a seven-year term, and may be re-elected once. The President is primarily a figurehead, but is entrusted with certain constitutional powers with the advice of the Council of State. The office has absolute discretion in some areas, such as referring a bill to the Supreme Court for a judgment on its constitutionality. Michael D. Higgins became the ninth President of Ireland on 11 November 2011.
The Taoiseach (Prime Minister) serves as the head of government and is appointed by the President upon the nomination of the Dáil. Most Taoisigh have served as the leader of the political party that gains the most seats in national elections. It has become customary for coalitions to form a government, as there has not been a single-party government since 1989.
The Dáil has 160 members (Teachtaí Dála) elected to represent multi-seat constituencies under the system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote. The Seanad is composed of sixty members, with eleven nominated by the Taoiseach, six elected by two university constituencies, and 43 elected by public representatives from panels of candidates established on a vocational basis.
The government is constitutionally limited to fifteen members. No more than two members can be selected from the Seanad, and the Taoiseach, Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and Minister for Finance must be members of the Dáil. The Dáil must be dissolved within five years of its first meeting following the previous election, and a general election for members of the Dáil must take place no later than thirty days after the dissolution. In accordance with the Constitution of Ireland, parliamentary elections must be held at least every seven years, though a lower limit may be set by statute law. The current government is a coalition of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party with Leo Varadkar of Fine Gael as Taoiseach and Micheál Martin of Fianna Fáil as Tánaiste. Opposition parties in the current Dáil are Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, People Before Profit–Solidarity, Social Democrats, Aontú, as well as a number of independents.
Ireland has been a member state of the European Union since 1973. Citizens of the United Kingdom can freely enter the country without a passport due to the Common Travel Area, which is a passport-free zone comprising the islands of Ireland, Great Britain, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. However, some identification is required at airports and seaports.
The Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 was the founding statute of the present system of local government, while the Twentieth Amendment to the constitution of 1999 provided for its constitutional recognition. The twenty-six traditional counties of Ireland are the basis of the local government areas, with the traditional counties of Cork, Dublin and Galway containing two or more local government areas. The Local Government Act 2001, as amended by the Local Government Reform Act 2014, provides for a system of thirty-one local authorities – twenty-six county councils, two city and county councils, and three city councils. Counties (with the exception of the three counties in Dublin) are divided into municipal districts. A second local government tier of town councils was abolished in 2014.
Local authorities are responsible for matters such as planning, local roads, sanitation, and libraries. The breaching of county boundaries should be avoided as far as practicable in drawing Dáil constituencies. Counties with greater populations have multiple constituencies, some of more than one county, but generally do not cross county boundaries. The counties are grouped into three regions, each with a Regional Assembly composed of members delegated by the various county and city councils in the region. The regions do not have any direct administrative role as such, but they serve for planning, coordination and statistical purposes.
Ireland has a common law legal system with a written constitution that provides for a parliamentary democracy. The court system consists of the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the High Court, the Circuit Court and the District Court, all of which apply the Irish law and hear both civil and criminal matters. Trials for serious offences must usually be held before a jury. The High Court, Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court have authority, by means of judicial review, to determine the compatibility of laws and activities of other institutions of the state with the constitution and the law. Except in exceptional circumstances, court hearings must occur in public.
The Garda Síochána (lit. Guardians of the Peace), more commonly referred to as the Gardaí, is the state's civilian police force. The force is responsible for all aspects of civil policing, both in terms of territory and infrastructure. It is headed by the Garda Commissioner, who is appointed by the Government. Most uniformed members do not routinely carry firearms. Standard policing is traditionally carried out by uniformed officers equipped only with a baton and pepper spray.
The Military Police is the corps of the Irish Army responsible for the provision of policing service personnel and providing a military police presence to forces while on exercise and deployment. In wartime, additional tasks include the provision of a traffic control organisation to allow rapid movement of military formations to their mission areas. Other wartime roles include control of prisoners of war and refugees.
Ireland's citizenship laws relate to "the island of Ireland", including islands and seas, thereby extending them to Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. Therefore, anyone born in Northern Ireland who meets the requirements for being an Irish citizen, such as birth on the island of Ireland to an Irish or British citizen parent or a parent who is entitled to live in Northern Ireland or the Republic without restriction on their residency, may exercise an entitlement to Irish citizenship, such as an Irish passport.
Foreign relations are substantially influenced by membership of the European Union, although bilateral relations with the United Kingdom and United States are also important. It held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union on six occasions, most recently from January to June 2013.
Ireland tends towards independence in foreign policy; thus the country is not a member of NATO and has a longstanding policy of military neutrality. This policy has led to the Irish Defence Forces contributing to peace-keeping missions with the United Nations since 1960, including during the Congo Crisis and subsequently in Cyprus, Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Despite Irish neutrality during World War II, Ireland had more than 50,000 participants in the war through enlistment in the British armed forces. During the Cold War, Irish military policy, while ostensibly neutral, was biased towards NATO. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Seán Lemass authorised the search of Cuban and Czechoslovak aircraft passing through Shannon and passed the information to the CIA. Ireland's air facilities were used by the United States military for the delivery of military personnel involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq through Shannon Airport. The airport had previously been used for the United States invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, as well as the First Gulf War.
Since 1999, Ireland has been a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) program and NATO's Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), which is aimed at creating trust between NATO and other states in Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Ireland is a neutral country, and has "triple-lock" rules governing the participation of Irish troops in conflict zones, whereby approval must be given by the UN, the Dáil and Government. Accordingly, its military role is limited to national self-defence and participation in United Nations peacekeeping.
The Irish Defence Forces (Óglaigh na hÉireann) are made up of the Army, Naval Service, Air Corps and Reserve Defence Force. It is small but well equipped, with almost 10,000 full-time military personnel and over 2,000 in reserve. Daily deployments of the Defence Forces cover aid to civil power operations, protection and patrol of Irish territorial waters and EEZ by the Irish Naval Service, and UN, EU and PfP peace-keeping missions. By 1996, over 40,000 Irish service personnel had served in international UN peacekeeping missions.
The Irish Air Corps is the air component of the Defence Forces and operates sixteen fixed wing aircraft and eight helicopters. The Irish Naval Service is Ireland's navy, and operates six patrol ships, and smaller numbers of inflatable boats and training vessels, and has armed boarding parties capable of seizing a ship and a special unit of frogmen. The military includes the Reserve Defence Forces (Army Reserve and Naval Service Reserve) for part-time reservists. Ireland's special forces include the Army Ranger Wing, which trains and operates with international special operations units. The President is the formal Supreme Commander of the Defence Forces, but in practice these Forces answer to the Government via the Minister for Defence.
In 2017, Ireland signed the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Ireland is an open economy and ranks first for "high-value" foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Ireland ranks 5th of 187 (IMF) and 6th of 175 (World Bank) in GDP per capita as well as ranking in the top ten for GNI per capita. An alternative metric, known as modified Gross National Income (GNI), was created by the Central Statistics Office and is used by the Irish government to give a view of activity in the domestic economy after stripping out large multinational export movements which can often relate to intangible assets. This is particularly relevant in Ireland's economy, as GDP disproportionately includes income from non-Irish owned companies, which often flows out of Ireland. Foreign multinationals are the main driver of Ireland's economy, employing a quarter of the private sector workforce, and paying 80% of Irish corporate taxes. 14 of Ireland's top 20 firms (by 2017 turnover) are US-based multinationals and 80% of foreign multinationals in Ireland are from the US.
Ireland adopted the euro currency in 2002 along with eleven other EU member states. As of January 2023 there are 20 EU member states using the euro currency with Croatia the most recent member to join on 1 January 2023.
Following the Great Recession and the bursting of the Irish property bubble, the country officially exited recession in 2010, driven by a growth in exports from US multinationals in Ireland. However, due to a rise in the cost of public borrowing due to government guarantees of private banking debt, the Irish government accepted an €85 billion programme of assistance from the EU, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and bilateral loans from the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark. Following three years of contraction, the economy grew by 0.7% in 2011 and 0.9% in 2012. The unemployment rate was 14.7% in 2012, including 18.5% among recent immigrants. In March 2016 the unemployment rate was reported by the CSO to be 8.6%, down from a peak unemployment rate of 15.1% in February 2012. In addition to unemployment, net emigration from Ireland between 2008 and 2013 totalled 120,100, or some 2.6% of the total population according to the Census of Ireland 2011. One-third of the emigrants were aged between 15 and 24. As of November 2022, unemployment had fallen back to 4.4%.
Ireland exited its EU-IMF bailout programme on 15 December 2013. Having implemented budget cuts, reforms and sold assets, Ireland was again able to access debt markets. Since then, Ireland has been able to sell long term bonds at record rates. However, the stabilisation of the Irish credit bubble required a large transfer of debt from the private sector balance sheet (highest OECD leverage), to the public sector balance sheet (almost unleveraged, pre-crisis), via Irish bank bailouts and public deficit spending. The transfer of this debt means that Ireland, in 2017, still has one of the highest levels of both public sector indebtedness, and private sector indebtedness, in the EU-28/OECD.
Ireland became one of the main destinations for US pharmaceutical corporate tax inversions from 2009 to 2016. The country has also became the largest foreign location for large US technology multinationals (i.e. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook), which delivered a GDP growth rate of 26.3% (and GNP growth rate of 18.7%) in 2015. This growth was subsequently shown to be due to Apple restructuring its "double Irish" subsidiary (Apple Sales International, currently under threat of a €13bn EU "illegal state aid" fine for preferential tax treatment).
The transformation of Ireland's tax policy started with the creation of a 10% low-tax "special economic zone", called the International Financial Services Centre (or "IFSC"), in 1987. In 1999, the entire country was effectively "turned into an IFSC" with the reduction of Irish corporation tax from 32% to 12.5%. This accelerated the later stages of Ireland's transition from a predominantly agricultural economy into a knowledge and service economy initially focused on property and construction and later focused on attracting mainly US multinationals from high-tech, life sciences, and financial services industries seeking to avail of Ireland's low corporation tax rates and favourable corporate tax system.
The multinational tax schemes foreign firms use in Ireland materially distort Irish economic statistics. This reached a climax with the "leprechaun economics" GDP/GNP growth rates of 2015 (as Apple restructured its Irish subsidiaries in 2015). The Central Bank of Ireland introduced a new statistic, Modified gross national income, to remove these distortions. GNI* is 30% below GDP (or, GDP is 143% of GNI).
From the creation of the IFSC, the country experienced strong and sustained economic growth which fuelled a dramatic rise in Irish consumer borrowing and spending, and Irish construction and investment, which became known as the Celtic Tiger period. By 2007, Ireland had the highest private sector debt in the OECD with a household debt-to-disposable income ratio of 190%. Global capital markets, who had financed Ireland's build-up of debt in the Celtic Tiger period by enabling Irish banks to borrow in excess of the domestic deposit base (to over 180% at peak), withdrew support in the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Their withdrawal from the over-borrowed Irish credit system would precipitate a deep Irish property correction which then led to the Post-2008 Irish banking crisis.
Ireland's successful "low-tax" economy opens it to accusations of being a "corporate tax haven", and led to it being "blacklisted" by Brazil. A 2017 study ranks Ireland as the 5th largest global Conduit OFC, which legally route funds to tax havens. A serious challenge is the passing of the US Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (whose FDII and GILTI regimes target Ireland's multinational tax schemes). The EU's 2018 Digital Sales Tax (DST) (and desire for a CCCTB) is also seen as an attempt to restrict Irish "multinational tax schemes" by US technology firms.
Although multinational corporations dominate Ireland's export sector, exports from other sources also contribute significantly to the national income. The activities of multinational companies based in Ireland have made it one of the largest exporters of pharmaceutical agents, medical devices and software-related goods and services in the world. Ireland's exports also relate to the activities of large Irish companies (such as Ryanair, Kerry Group and Smurfit Kappa) and exports of mineral resources including zinc and lead concentrates. The country also has significant deposits of gypsum and smaller quantities of copper, silver, gold, barite, and dolomite. Tourism in Ireland contributes about 4% of GDP and is a significant source of employment.
Other goods exports include agri-food, cattle, beef, dairy products, and aluminum. Ireland's major imports include data processing equipment, chemicals, petroleum and petroleum products, textiles, and clothing. Financial services provided by multinational corporations based at the Irish Financial Services Centre also contribute to Irish exports. The difference between exports (€89.4 billion) and imports (€45.5 billion) resulted an annual trade surplus of €43.9 billion in 2010, which is the highest trade surplus relative to GDP achieved by any EU member state.
The EU is by far the country's largest trading partner, accounting for 57.9% of exports and 60.7% of imports. Prior to Brexit, the United Kingdom was the most important trading partner within the EU, accounting for 15.4% of exports and 32.1% of imports. Outside the EU, the United States accounted for 23.2% of exports and 14.1% of imports in 2010.
ESB, Bord Gáis Energy and Airtricity are the three main electricity and gas suppliers in Ireland. There are 19.82 billion cubic metres of proven reserves of gas. Natural gas extraction previously occurred at the Kinsale Head until its exhaustion. The Corrib gas field was due to come on stream in 2013/14. In 2012, the Barryroe field was confirmed to have up to 1.6 billion barrels of oil in reserve, with between 160 and 600 million recoverable. That could provide for Ireland's entire energy needs for up to 13 years, when it is developed in 2015/16.
There have been significant efforts to increase the use of renewable and sustainable forms of energy in Ireland, particularly in wind power, with 3,000 MegaWatts of wind farms being constructed, some for the purpose of export. The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) has estimated that 6.5% of Ireland's 2011 energy requirements were produced by renewable sources. The SEAI has also reported an increase in energy efficiency in Ireland with a 28% reduction in carbon emissions per house from 2005 to 2013.
As of 2021, Ireland was the 24th largest wind energy producer in the world and the 3rd ranked in 2020 on a per capita basis.
The country's three main international airports at Dublin, Shannon and Cork serve many European and intercontinental routes with scheduled and chartered flights. The London to Dublin air route is the ninth busiest international air route in the world, and also the busiest international air route in Europe, with 14,500 flights between the two in 2017. In 2015, 4.5 million people took the route, at that time, the world's second-busiest. Aer Lingus is the flag carrier of Ireland, although Ryanair is the country's largest airline. Ryanair is Europe's largest low-cost carrier, the second largest in terms of passenger numbers, and the world's largest in terms of international passenger numbers.
Railway services are provided by Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail), which operates all internal intercity, commuter and freight railway services in the country. Dublin is the centre of the network with two main stations, Heuston station and Connolly station, linking to the country's cities and main towns. The Enterprise service, which runs jointly with Northern Ireland Railways, connects Dublin and Belfast. The whole of Ireland's mainline network operates on track with a gauge of 5 ft 3 in (1,600 mm), which is unique in Europe and has resulted in distinct rolling stock designs. Dublin's public transport network includes the DART, Luas, Dublin Bus, and dublinbikes.
Motorways, national primary roads and national secondary roads are managed by Transport Infrastructure Ireland, while regional roads and local roads are managed by the local authorities in each of their respective areas. The road network is primarily focused on the capital, but motorways connect it to other major Irish cities including Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway.
Dublin is served by major infrastructure such as the East-Link and West-Link toll-bridges, as well as the Dublin Port Tunnel. The Jack Lynch Tunnel, under the River Lee in Cork, and the Limerick Tunnel, under the River Shannon, were two major projects outside Dublin.
Genetic research suggests that the earliest settlers migrated from Iberia following the most recent ice age. After the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age, migrants introduced a Celtic language and culture. Migrants from the two latter eras still represent the genetic heritage of most Irish people. Gaelic tradition expanded and became the dominant form over time. Irish people are a combination of Gaelic, Norse, Anglo-Norman, French, and British ancestry.
The population of Ireland stood at 5,149,139 in 2022, an increase of 8% since 2016. As of 2011, Ireland had the highest birth rate in the European Union (16 births per 1,000 of population). In 2014, 36.3% of births were to unmarried women. Annual population growth rates exceeded 2% during the 2002–2006 intercensal period, which was attributed to high rates of natural increase and immigration. This rate declined somewhat during the subsequent 2006–2011 intercensal period, with an average annual percentage change of 1.6%. The total fertility rate (TFR) in 2017 was estimated at 1.80 children born per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1, it remains considerably below the high of 4.2 children born per woman in 1850. In 2018 the median age of the Irish population was 37.1 years.
At the time of the 2022 census, the number of non-Irish nationals was recorded at 631,785. This represents an 8% increase from the 2016 census figure of 535,475. The five largest sources of non-Irish nationals were Poland (93,680), the UK (83,347), India (45,449), Romania (43,323), Lithuania (31,177), and Latvia (27,338) respectively. The non-Irish nationalities which saw the largest increase from 2016 were India (+33,984), Romania (+14,137), Brazil (+13,698), Ukraine (+10,006). The non-Irish nationalities which saw the largest decrease from 2016 were Poland (-28,835), UK (-19,766), Lithuania (-5,375), Latvia (-1,633), and Slovakia (-1,117).
The Irish Constitution describes Irish as the "national language" and the "first official language", but English (the "second official language") is the dominant language. In the 2016 census, about 1.75 million people (40% of the population) said they were able to speak Irish but, of those, under 74,000 spoke it on a daily basis. Irish is spoken as a community language only in a small number of rural areas mostly in the west and south of the country, collectively known as the Gaeltacht. Except in Gaeltacht regions, road signs are usually bilingual. Most public notices and print media are in English only. While the state is officially bilingual, citizens can often struggle to access state services in Irish and most government publications are not available in both languages, even though citizens have the right to deal with the state in Irish. Irish language media include the TV channel TG4, the radio station RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta and online newspaper Tuairisc.ie. In the Irish Defence Forces, all foot and arms drill commands are given in the Irish language.
As a result of immigration, Polish is the most widely spoken language in Ireland after English, with Irish as the third most spoken. Several other Central European languages (namely Czech, Hungarian and Slovak), as well as Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian) are also spoken on a day-to-day basis. Other languages spoken in Ireland include Shelta, spoken by Irish Travellers, and a dialect of Scots is spoken by some Ulster Scots people in Donegal. Most secondary school students choose to learn one or two foreign languages. Languages available for the Junior Certificate and the Leaving Certificate include French, German, Italian and Spanish; Leaving Certificate students can also study Arabic, Japanese and Russian. Some secondary schools also offer Ancient Greek, Hebrew and Latin. The study of Irish is generally compulsory for Leaving Certificate students, but some may qualify for an exemption in some circumstances, such as learning difficulties or entering the country after age 11.
Healthcare in Ireland is provided by both public and private healthcare providers. The Minister for Health has responsibility for setting overall health service policy. Every resident of Ireland is entitled to receive health care through the public health care system, which is managed by the Health Service Executive and funded by general taxation. A person may be required to pay a subsidised fee for certain health care received; this depends on income, age, illness or disability. All maternity services are provided free of charge and children up to the age of 6 months. Emergency care is provided to patients who present to a hospital emergency department. However, visitors to emergency departments in non-emergency situations who are not referred by their GP may incur a fee of €100. In some circumstances this fee is not payable or may be waived.
Anyone holding a European Health Insurance Card is entitled to free maintenance and treatment in public beds in Health Service Executive and voluntary hospitals. Outpatient services are also provided for free. However, the majority of patients on median incomes or above are required to pay subsidised hospital charges. Private health insurance is available to the population for those who want to avail of it.
The average life expectancy in Ireland in 2016 was 81.8 years (OECD 2016 list), with 79.9 years for men and 83.6 years for women. It has the highest birth rate in the EU (16.8 births per 1,000 inhabitants, compared to an EU average of 10.7) and a very low infant mortality rate (3.5 per 1,000 live births). The Irish healthcare system ranked 13th out of 34 European countries in 2012 according to the European Health Consumer Index produced by Health Consumer Powerhouse. The same report ranked the Irish healthcare system as having the 8th best health outcomes but only the 21st most accessible system in Europe.
Ireland has three levels of education: primary, secondary and higher education. The education systems are largely under the direction of the Government via the Minister for Education. Recognised primary and secondary schools must adhere to the curriculum established by the relevant authorities. Education is compulsory between the ages of six and fifteen years, and all children up to the age of eighteen must complete the first three years of secondary, including one sitting of the Junior Certificate examination.
There are approximately 3,300 primary schools in Ireland. The vast majority (92%) are under the patronage of the Catholic Church. Schools run by religious organisations, but receiving public money and recognition, cannot discriminate against pupils based upon religion or lack thereof. A sanctioned system of preference does exist, where students of a particular religion may be accepted before those who do not share the ethos of the school, in a case where a school's quota has already been reached.
The Leaving Certificate, which is taken after two years of study, is the final examination in the secondary school system. Those intending to pursue higher education normally take this examination, with access to third-level courses generally depending on results obtained from the best six subjects taken, on a competitive basis. Third-level education awards are conferred by at least 38 Higher Education Institutions – this includes the constituent or linked colleges of seven universities, plus other designated institutions of the Higher Education and Training Awards Council. According to the 2022 US News rankings, Ireland is among the top twenty best countries for education.
The Programme for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks Ireland as having the fourth highest reading score, ninth highest science score and thirteenth highest mathematics score, among OECD countries, in its 2012 assessment. In 2012, Irish students aged 15 years had the second highest levels of reading literacy in the EU. Ireland also has 0.747 of the World's top 500 Universities per capita, which ranks the country in 8th place in the world. Primary, secondary and higher (university/college) level education are all free in Ireland for all EU citizens. There are charges to cover student services and examinations.
In addition, 37 percent of Ireland's population has a university or college degree, which is among the highest percentages in the world.
Religious freedom is constitutionally provided for in Ireland, and the country's constitution has been secular since 1973. Christianity is the predominant religion, and while Ireland remains a predominantly Catholic country, the percentage of the population who identified as Catholic on the census has fallen sharply from 84.2 percent in the 2011 census to 78.3 percent in the most recent 2016 census. Other results from the 2016 census are: 4.2% Protestant, 1.3% Orthodox, 1.3% as Muslim, and 9.8% as having no religion. According to a Georgetown University study, before 2000 the country had one of the highest rates of regular mass attendance in the Western world. While daily attendance was 13% in 2006, there was a reduction in weekly attendance from 81% in 1990 to 48% in 2006, although the decline was reported as stabilising. In 2011, it was reported that weekly Mass attendance in Dublin was just 18%, and was even lower among younger generations.
The Church of Ireland, at 2.7% of the population, is the second largest Christian denomination. Membership declined throughout the twentieth century, but experienced an increase early in the 21st century, as have other small Christian denominations. Other significant Protestant denominations are the Presbyterian Church and Methodist Church. Immigration has contributed to a growth in Hindu and Muslim populations. In percentage terms, Orthodox Christianity and Islam were the fastest growing religions, with increases of 100% and 70% respectively.
Ireland's patron saints are Saint Patrick, Saint Bridget and Saint Columba, with Saint Patrick commonly recognised as the patron saint. Saint Patrick's Day is celebrated on 17 March in Ireland and abroad as the Irish national day, with parades and other celebrations.
As with other predominantly Catholic European states, Ireland underwent a period of legal secularisation in the late twentieth century. In 1972, the article of the Constitution naming specific religious groups was deleted by the Fifth Amendment in a referendum. Article 44 remains in the Constitution: "The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion." The article also establishes freedom of religion, prohibits endowment of any religion, prohibits the state from religious discrimination, and requires the state to treat religious and non-religious schools in a non-prejudicial manner.
Religious studies was introduced as an optional Junior Certificate subject in 2001. Although most schools are run by religious organisations, a secularist trend is occurring among younger generations.
Ireland's culture was for centuries predominantly Gaelic, and it remains one of the six principal Celtic nations. Following the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 12th century, and gradual British conquest and colonisation beginning in the 16th century, Ireland became influenced by English and Scottish culture. Subsequently, Irish culture, though distinct in many aspects, shares characteristics with the rest of the Anglosphere, Catholic Europe, and other Celtic regions. The Irish diaspora, one of the world's largest and most dispersed, has contributed to the globalisation of Irish culture, producing many prominent figures in art, music, and science.
Ireland has made a significant contribution to world literature in both the English and Irish languages. Modern Irish fiction began with the publishing of the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Other writers of importance during the 18th century and their most notable works include Laurence Sterne with the publication of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. Numerous Irish novelists emerged during the 19th century, including Maria Edgeworth, John Banim, Gerald Griffin, Charles Kickham, William Carleton, George Moore, and Somerville and Ross. Bram Stoker is best known as the author of the 1897 novel Dracula.
James Joyce (1882–1941) published his most famous work Ulysses in 1922, which is an interpretation of the Odyssey set in Dublin. Edith Somerville continued writing after the death of her partner Martin Ross in 1915. Dublin's Annie M. P. Smithson was one of several authors catering for fans of romantic fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Second World War, popular novels were published by, among others, Brian O'Nolan, who published as Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kate O'Brien. During the final decades of the 20th century, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, Maeve Binchy, Joseph O'Connor, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, and John Banville came to the fore as novelists.
Patricia Lynch was a prolific children's author in the 20th century, while Eoin Colfer's works were NYT Best Sellers in this genre in the early 21st century. In the genre of the short story, which is a form favoured by many Irish writers, the most prominent figures include Seán Ó Faoláin, Frank O'Connor and William Trevor. Well known Irish poets include Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas McCarthy, Dermot Bolger, and Nobel Prize in Literature laureates William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney (born in Northern Ireland but resided in Dublin). Prominent writers in the Irish language are Pádraic Ó Conaire, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Séamus Ó Grianna, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.
The history of Irish theatre begins with the expansion of the English administration in Dublin during the early 17th century, and since then, Ireland has significantly contributed to English drama. In its early history, theatrical productions in Ireland tended to serve political purposes, but as more theatres opened and the popular audience grew, a more diverse range of entertainments were staged. Many Dublin-based theatres developed links with their London equivalents, and British productions frequently found their way to the Irish stage. However, most Irish playwrights went abroad to establish themselves. In the 18th century, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan were two of the most successful playwrights on the London stage at that time. At the beginning of the 20th century, theatre companies dedicated to the staging of Irish plays and the development of writers, directors and performers began to emerge, which allowed many Irish playwrights to learn their trade and establish their reputations in Ireland rather than in Britain or the United States. Following in the tradition of acclaimed practitioners, principally Oscar Wilde, Literature Nobel Prize laureates George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Samuel Beckett (1969), playwrights such as Seán O'Casey, Brian Friel, Sebastian Barry, Brendan Behan, Conor McPherson and Billy Roche have gained popular success. Other Irish playwrights of the 20th century include Denis Johnston, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard, Frank McGuinness, and John B. Keane.
Irish traditional music has remained vibrant, despite globalising cultural forces, and retains many traditional aspects. It has influenced various music genres, such as American country and roots music, and to some extent modern rock. It has occasionally been blended with styles such as rock and roll and punk rock. Ireland has also produced many internationally known artists in other genres, such as rock, pop, jazz, and blues. Ireland's best selling musical act is the rock band U2, who have sold 170 million copies of their albums worldwide since their formation in 1976.
There are a number of classical music ensembles around the country, such as the RTÉ Performing Groups. Ireland also has two opera organisations: Irish National Opera in Dublin, and the annual Wexford Opera Festival, which promotes lesser-known operas, takes place during October and November.
Ireland has participated in the Eurovision Song Contest since 1965. Its first win was in 1970, when Dana won with All Kinds of Everything. It has subsequently won the competition six more times, the highest number of wins by any competing country. The phenomenon Riverdance originated as an interval performance during the 1994 contest.
Irish dance can broadly be divided into social dance and performance dance. Irish social dance can be divided into céilí and set dancing. Irish set dances are quadrilles, danced by 4 couples arranged in a square, while céilí dances are danced by varied formations of couples of 2 to 16 people. There are also many stylistic differences between these two forms. Irish social dance is a living tradition, and variations in particular dances are found across the country. In some places dances are deliberately modified and new dances are choreographed. Performance dance is traditionally referred to as stepdance. Irish stepdance, popularised by the show Riverdance, is notable for its rapid leg movements, with the body and arms being kept largely stationary. The solo stepdance is generally characterised by a controlled but not rigid upper body, straight arms, and quick, precise movements of the feet. The solo dances can either be in "soft shoe" or "hard shoe".
Ireland has a wealth of structures, surviving in various states of preservation, from the Neolithic period, such as Brú na Bóinne, Poulnabrone dolmen, Castlestrange stone, Turoe stone, and Drombeg stone circle. As Ireland was never a part of the Roman Empire, ancient architecture in Greco-Roman style is extremely rare, in contrast to most of Western Europe. The country instead had an extended period of Iron Age architecture. The Irish round tower originated during the Early Medieval period.
Christianity introduced simple monastic houses, such as Clonmacnoise, Skellig Michael and Scattery Island. A stylistic similarity has been remarked between these double monasteries and those of the Copts of Egypt. Gaelic kings and aristocrats occupied ringforts or crannógs. Church reforms during the 12th century via the Cistercians stimulated continental influence, with the Romanesque styled Mellifont, Boyle and Tintern abbeys. Gaelic settlement had been limited to the Monastic proto-towns, such as Kells, where the current street pattern preserves the original circular settlement outline to some extent. Significant urban settlements only developed following the period of Viking invasions. The major Hiberno-Norse Longphorts were located on the coast, but with minor inland fluvial settlements, such as the eponymous Longford.
Castles were built by the Anglo-Normans during the late 12th century, such as Dublin Castle and Kilkenny Castle, and the concept of the planned walled trading town was introduced, which gained legal status and several rights by grant of a Charter under Feudalism. These charters specifically governed the design of these towns. Two significant waves of planned town formation followed, the first being the 16th- and 17th-century plantation towns, which were used as a mechanism for the Tudor English kings to suppress local insurgency, followed by 18th-century landlord towns. Surviving Norman founded planned towns include Drogheda and Youghal; plantation towns include Portlaoise and Portarlington; well-preserved 18th-century planned towns include Westport and Ballinasloe. These episodes of planned settlement account for the majority of present-day towns throughout the country.
Gothic cathedrals, such as St Patrick's, were also introduced by the Normans. Franciscans were dominant in directing the abbeys by the Late Middle Ages, while elegant tower houses, such as Bunratty Castle, were built by the Gaelic and Norman aristocracy. Many religious buildings were ruined with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Following the Restoration, palladianism and rococo, particularly country houses, swept through Ireland under the initiative of Edward Lovett Pearce, with the Houses of Parliament being the most significant.
With the erection of buildings such as The Custom House, Four Courts, General Post Office and King's Inns, the neoclassical and Georgian styles flourished, especially in Dublin. Georgian townhouses produced streets of singular distinction, particularly in Dublin, Limerick and Cork. Following Catholic Emancipation, cathedrals and churches influenced by the French Gothic Revival emerged, such as St Colman's and St Finbarre's. Ireland has long been associated with thatched roof cottages, though these are nowadays considered quaint.
Beginning with the American designed art deco church at Turner's Cross, Cork in 1927, Irish architecture followed the international trend towards modern and sleek building styles since the 20th century. Other developments include the regeneration of Ballymun and an urban extension of Dublin at Adamstown. Since the establishment of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority in 1997, the Dublin Docklands area underwent large-scale redevelopment, which included the construction of the Convention Centre Dublin and Grand Canal Theatre. Completed in 2018, Capital Dock in Dublin is the tallest building in the Republic of Ireland achieving 79 metres (259 feet) in height (the Obel Tower in Belfast, Northern Ireland being the tallest in Ireland). The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland regulates the practice of architecture in the state.
Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) is Ireland's public service broadcaster, funded by a television licence fee and advertising. RTÉ operates two national television channels, RTÉ One and RTÉ Two. The other independent national television channels are Virgin Media One, Virgin Media Two, Virgin Media Three and TG4, the latter of which is a public service broadcaster for speakers of the Irish language. All these channels are available on Saorview, the national free-to-air digital terrestrial television service. Additional channels included in the service are RTÉ News Now, RTÉjr, and RTÉ One +1. Subscription-based television providers operating in Ireland include Virgin Media and Sky.
The BBC's Northern Irish division is widely available in Ireland. BBC One Northern Ireland and BBC Two Northern Ireland are available in pay television providers including Virgin and Sky as well as via signal overspill by Freeview in border counties.
Supported by the Irish Film Board, the Irish film industry grew significantly since the 1990s, with the promotion of indigenous films as well as the attraction of international productions like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan.
A large number of regional and local radio stations are available countrywide. A survey showed that a consistent 85% of adults listen to a mixture of national, regional and local stations on a daily basis. RTÉ Radio operates four national stations, Radio 1, 2fm, Lyric fm, and RnaG. It also operates four national DAB radio stations. There are two independent national stations: Today FM and Newstalk.
Ireland has a traditionally competitive print media, which is divided into daily national newspapers and weekly regional newspapers, as well as national Sunday editions. The strength of the British press is a unique feature of the Irish print media scene, with the availability of a wide selection of British published newspapers and magazines.
Eurostat reported that 82% of Irish households had Internet access in 2013 compared to the EU average of 79% but only 67% had broadband access.
Irish cuisine was traditionally based on meat and dairy products, supplemented with vegetables and seafood. Examples of popular Irish cuisine include boxty, colcannon, coddle, stew, and bacon and cabbage. Ireland is known for the full Irish breakfast, which involves a fried or grilled meal generally consisting of rashers, egg, sausage, white and black pudding, and fried tomato. Apart from the influence by European and international dishes, there has been an emergence of a new Irish cuisine based on traditional ingredients handled in new ways. This cuisine is based on fresh vegetables, fish, oysters, mussels and other shellfish, and the wide range of hand-made cheeses that are now being produced across the country. Shellfish have increased in popularity, especially due to the high quality shellfish available from the country's coastline. The most popular fish include salmon and cod. Traditional breads include soda bread and wheaten bread. Barmbrack is a yeasted bread with added sultanas and raisins, traditionally eaten on Halloween.
Popular everyday beverages among the Irish include tea and coffee. Alcoholic drinks associated with Ireland include Poitín and the world-famous Guinness, which is a dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate in Dublin. Irish whiskey is also popular throughout the country and comes in various forms, including single malt, single grain, and blended whiskey.
Gaelic football and hurling are the traditional sports of Ireland as well as popular spectator sports. They are administered by the Gaelic Athletics Association on an all-Ireland basis. Other Gaelic games organised by the association include Gaelic handball and rounders.
Association football (soccer) is the third most popular spectator sport and has the highest level of participation. Although the League of Ireland is the national league, the English Premier League is the most popular among the public. The Republic of Ireland national football team plays at international level and is administered by the Football Association of Ireland.
The Irish Rugby Football Union is the governing body of rugby union, which is played at local and international levels on an all-Ireland basis, and has produced players such as Brian O'Driscoll and Ronan O'Gara, who were on the team that won the Grand Slam in 2009.
The success of the Irish Cricket Team in the 2007 Cricket World Cup has led to an increase in the popularity of cricket, which is also administered on an all-Ireland basis by Cricket Ireland. Ireland are one of the twelve Test playing members of the International Cricket Council, having been granted Test status in 2017. Professional domestic matches are played between the major cricket unions of Leinster, Munster, Northern, and North West.
Netball is represented by the Ireland national netball team.
Golf is another popular sport in Ireland, with over 300 courses countrywide. The country has produced several internationally successful golfers, such as Pádraig Harrington, Shane Lowry and Paul McGinley.
Horse racing has a large presence, with influential breeding and racing operations in the country. Racing takes place at courses at The Curragh Racecourse in County Kildare, Leopardstown Racecourse just outside Dublin, and Galway. Ireland has produced champion horses such as Galileo, Montjeu, and Sea the Stars.
Boxing is Ireland's most successful sport at an Olympic level. Administered by the Irish Athletic Boxing Association on an all-Ireland basis, it has gained in popularity as a result of the international success of boxers such as Bernard Dunne, Andy Lee and Katie Taylor.
Some of Ireland's highest performers in athletics have competed at the Olympic Games, such as Eamonn Coghlan and Sonia O'Sullivan. The annual Dublin Marathon and Dublin Women's Mini Marathon are two of the most popular athletics events in the country.
Rugby league is represented by the Ireland national rugby league team and administered by Rugby League Ireland (who are full member of the Rugby League European Federation) on an all-Ireland basis. The team compete in the European Cup (rugby league) and the Rugby League World Cup. Ireland reached the quarter-finals of the 2000 Rugby League World Cup as well as reaching the semi-finals in the 2008 Rugby League World Cup. The Irish Elite League is a domestic competition for rugby league teams in Ireland.
While Australian rules football in Ireland has a limited following, a series of International rules football games (constituting a hybrid of the Australian and Gaelic football codes) takes place annually between teams representing Ireland and Australia. Baseball and basketball are also emerging sports in Ireland, both of which have an international team representing the island of Ireland. Other sports which retain a following in Ireland include cycling, greyhound racing, horse riding, and motorsport.
Ireland ranks fifth in the world in terms of gender equality. In 2011, Ireland was ranked the most charitable country in Europe, and second most charitable in the world. Contraception was controlled in Ireland until 1979, however, the receding influence of the Catholic Church has led to an increasingly secularised society. A constitutional ban on divorce was lifted following a referendum in 1995. Divorce rates in Ireland are very low compared to European Union averages (0.7 divorced people per 1,000 population in 2011) while the marriage rate in Ireland is slightly above the European Union average (4.6 marriages per 1,000 population per year in 2012). Abortion had been banned throughout the period of the Irish state, first through provisions of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and later by the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013. The right to life of the unborn was protected in the constitution by the Eighth Amendment in 1983; this provision was removed following a referendum, and replaced it with a provision allowing legislation to regulate the termination of pregnancy. The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 passed later that year provided for abortion generally during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and in specified circumstances after that date.
Capital punishment is constitutionally banned in Ireland, while discrimination based on age, gender, sexual orientation, marital or familial status, religion, race or membership of the travelling community is illegal. The legislation which outlawed homosexual acts was repealed in 1993. The Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act 2010 permitted civil partnerships between same-sex couples. The Children and Family Relationships Act 2015 allowed for adoption rights for couples other than married couples, including civil partners and cohabitants, and provided for donor-assisted human reproduction; however, significant sections of the Act have yet to be commenced. Following a referendum held on 23 May 2015, Ireland became the eighteenth country to provide in law for same-sex marriage, and the first to do so by popular vote.
Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce an environmental levy for plastic shopping bags in 2002 and a public smoking ban in 2004. Recycling in Ireland is carried out extensively, and Ireland has the second highest rate of packaging recycling in the European Union. It was the first country in Europe to ban incandescent lightbulbs in 2008 and the first EU country to ban in-store tobacco advertising and product display in 2009. In 2015, Ireland became the second country in the world to introduce plain cigarette packaging. Despite the above measures to discourage tobacco use, smoking rates in Ireland remain at approximately 15.4% as of 2020.
The state shares many symbols with the island of Ireland. These include the colours green and blue, animals such as the Irish wolfhound and stags, structures such as round towers and celtic crosses, and designs such as Celtic knots and spirals. The shamrock, a type of clover, has been a national symbol of Ireland since the 17th century when it became customary to wear it as a symbol on St. Patrick's Day. These symbols are used by state institutions as well as private bodies in the Republic of Ireland.
The flag of Ireland is a tricolour of green, white and orange. The flag originates with the Young Ireland movement of the mid-19th century but was not popularised until its use during the Easter Rising of 1916. The colours represent the Gaelic tradition (green) and the followers of William of Orange in Ireland (orange), with white representing the aspiration for peace between them. It was adopted as the flag of the Irish Free State in 1922 and continues to be used as the sole flag and ensign of the state. A naval jack, a green flag with a yellow harp, is set out in Defence Forces Regulations and flown from the bows of warships in addition to the national flag in limited circumstances (e.g. when a ship is not underway). It is based on the unofficial green ensign of Ireland used in the 18th and 19th centuries and the traditional green flag of Ireland dating from the 16th century.
Like the national flag, the national anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann (English: A Soldier's Song), has its roots in the Easter Rising, when the song was sung by the rebels. Although originally published in English in 1912, the song was translated into Irish in 1923 and the Irish-language version is more commonly sung today. The song was officially adopted as the anthem of the Irish Free State in 1926 and continues as the national anthem of the state. The first four bars of the chorus followed by the last five comprise the presidential salute.
The arms of Ireland originate as the arms of the monarchs of Ireland and was recorded as the arms of the King of Ireland in the 12th century. From the union of the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1603, they have appeared quartered on the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. Today, they are the personal arms of the president of Ireland whilst he or she is in office and are flown as the presidential standard. The harp symbol is used extensively by the state to mark official documents, Irish coinage and on the seal of the president of Ireland. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Ireland (Irish: Éire [ˈeːɾʲə] ), also known as the Republic of Ireland (Poblacht na hÉireann), is a country in north-western Europe consisting of 26 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, on the eastern side of the island. Around 2.1 million of the country's population of 5.15 million people reside in the Greater Dublin Area. The sovereign state shares its only land border with Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. It is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the Celtic Sea to the south, St George's Channel to the south-east, and the Irish Sea to the east. It is a unitary, parliamentary republic. The legislature, the Oireachtas, consists of a lower house, Dáil Éireann; an upper house, Seanad Éireann; and an elected President (Uachtarán) who serves as the largely ceremonial head of state, but with some important powers and duties. The head of government is the Taoiseach (Prime Minister, literally \"Chief\"), who is elected by the Dáil and appointed by the President; the Taoiseach in turn appoints other government ministers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The Irish Free State was created with Dominion status in 1922, following the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In 1937, a new constitution was adopted, in which the state was named \"Ireland\" and effectively became a republic, with an elected non-executive president. It was officially declared a republic in 1949, following the Republic of Ireland Act 1948. Ireland became a member of the United Nations in 1955. It joined the European Communities (EC), the predecessor of the European Union (EU), in 1973. The state had no formal relations with Northern Ireland for most of the 20th century, but the 1980s and 1990s saw the British and Irish governments working with Northern Irish parties to resolve the conflict that had become known as the Troubles. Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the Irish government and Northern Irish government have co-operated on a number of policy areas under the North/South Ministerial Council created by the Agreement.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Ireland is a developed country with a quality of life that ranks amongst the highest in the world; after adjustments for inequality, the 2021 Human Development Index listing ranked it the sixth-highest in the world. It also ranks highly in healthcare, economic freedom, and freedom of the press. It is a member of the EU and a founding member of the Council of Europe and the OECD. The Irish government has followed a policy of military neutrality through non-alignment since before World War II, and the country is consequently not a member of NATO, although it is a member of Partnership for Peace and certain aspects of PESCO. Ireland's economy is advanced, with one of Europe's major financial hubs being centred around Dublin. It ranks among the top 10 wealthiest countries in the world in terms of both GDP and GNI per capita. After joining the EC, the country's government enacted a series of liberal economic policies that helped to boost economic growth between 1995 and 2007, a time now often referred to as the Celtic Tiger period. A recession and reversal in growth then followed during the Great Recession, which was exacerbated by the bursting of the Irish property bubble.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Irish name for Ireland is Éire, deriving from Ériu, a goddess in Irish mythology. The state created in 1922, comprising 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland, was \"styled and known as the Irish Free State\" (Saorstát Éireann). The Constitution of Ireland, adopted in 1937, says that \"the name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland\". Section 2 of the Republic of Ireland Act 1948 states, \"It is hereby declared that the description of the State shall be the Republic of Ireland.\" The 1948 Act does not name the state \"Republic of Ireland\", because to have done so would have put it in conflict with the Constitution.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The government of the United Kingdom used the name \"Eire\" (without the diacritic) and, from 1949, \"Republic of Ireland\", for the state. It was not until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, when the state dropped its claim to Northern Ireland, that it began calling the state \"Ireland\".",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The state is also informally called \"the Republic\", \"Southern Ireland\" or \"the South\"; especially when distinguishing the state from the island or when discussing Northern Ireland (\"the North\"). Irish republicans reserve the name \"Ireland\" for the whole island and often refer to the state as \"the Free State\", \"the 26 Counties\", or \"the South of Ireland\". This is a \"response to the partitionist view [...] that Ireland stops at the border\".",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "From the Act of Union on 1 January 1801, until 6 December 1922, the island of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. During the Great Famine, from 1845 to 1849, the island's population of over 8 million fell by 30%. One million Irish died of starvation and disease and another 1.5 million emigrated, mostly to the United States. This set the pattern of emigration for the century to come, resulting in constant population decline up to the 1960s.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "From 1874, and particularly under Charles Stewart Parnell from 1880, the Irish Parliamentary Party gained prominence. This was firstly through widespread agrarian agitation via the Irish Land League, which won land reforms for tenants in the form of the Irish Land Acts, and secondly through its attempts to achieve Home Rule, via two unsuccessful bills which would have granted Ireland limited national autonomy. These led to \"grass-roots\" control of national affairs, under the Local Government Act 1898, that had been in the hands of landlord-dominated grand juries of the Protestant Ascendancy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Home Rule seemed certain when the Parliament Act 1911 abolished the veto of the House of Lords, and John Redmond secured the Third Home Rule Act in 1914. However, the Unionist movement had been growing since 1886 among Irish Protestants after the introduction of the first home rule bill, fearing discrimination and loss of economic and social privileges if Irish Catholics achieved real political power. In the late 19th and early 20th-century unionism was particularly strong in parts of Ulster, where industrialisation was more common in contrast to the more agrarian rest of the island, and where the Protestant population was more prominent, with a majority in four counties. Under the leadership of the Dublin-born Sir Edward Carson of the Irish Unionist Party and the Ulsterman Sir James Craig of the Ulster Unionist Party, unionists became strongly militant, forming Ulster Volunteers in order to oppose \"the Coercion of Ulster\". After the Home Rule Bill passed parliament in May 1914, to avoid rebellion with Ulster, the British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith introduced an Amending Bill reluctantly conceded to by the Irish Party leadership. This provided for the temporary exclusion of Ulster from the workings of the bill for a trial period of six years, with an as yet undecided new set of measures to be introduced for the area to be temporarily excluded.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Though it received the Royal Assent and was placed on the statute books in 1914, the implementation of the Third Home Rule Act was suspended until after the First World War which defused the threat of civil war in Ireland. With the hope of ensuring the implementation of the Act at the end of the war through Ireland's engagement in the war, Redmond and the Irish National Volunteers supported the UK and its Allies. 175,000 men joined Irish regiments of the 10th (Irish) and 16th (Irish) divisions of the New British Army, while Unionists joined the 36th (Ulster) divisions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The remainder of the Irish Volunteers, who refused Redmond and opposed any support of the UK, launched an armed insurrection against British rule in the 1916 Easter Rising, together with the Irish Citizen Army. This commenced on 24 April 1916 with the declaration of independence. After a week of heavy fighting, primarily in Dublin, the surviving rebels were forced to surrender their positions. The majority were imprisoned, with fifteen of the prisoners (including most of the leaders) were executed as traitors to the UK. This included Patrick Pearse, the spokesman for the rising and who provided the signal to the volunteers to start the rising, as well as James Connolly, socialist and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World union and both the Irish and Scottish Labour movements. These events, together with the Conscription Crisis of 1918, had a profound effect on changing public opinion in Ireland against the British Government.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In January 1919, after the December 1918 general election, 73 of Ireland's 105 Members of Parliament (MPs) elected were Sinn Féin members who were elected on a platform of abstentionism from the British House of Commons. In January 1919, they set up an Irish parliament called Dáil Éireann. This first Dáil issued a declaration of independence and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The declaration was mainly a restatement of the 1916 Proclamation with the additional provision that Ireland was no longer a part of the United Kingdom. The Irish Republic's Ministry of Dáil Éireann sent a delegation under Ceann Comhairle (Head of Council, or Speaker, of the Daíl) Seán T. O'Kelly to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, but it was not admitted.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "After the War of Independence and truce called in July 1921, representatives of the British government and the five Irish treaty delegates, led by Arthur Griffith, Robert Barton and Michael Collins, negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty in London from 11 October to 6 December 1921. The Irish delegates set up headquarters at Hans Place in Knightsbridge, and it was here in private discussions that the decision was taken on 5 December to recommend the treaty to Dáil Éireann. On 7 January 1922, the Second Dáil ratified the Treaty by 64 votes to 57.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In accordance with the treaty, on 6 December 1922 the entire island of Ireland became a self-governing Dominion called the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann). Under the Constitution of the Irish Free State, the Parliament of Northern Ireland had the option to leave the Irish Free State one month later and return to the United Kingdom. During the intervening period, the powers of the Parliament of the Irish Free State and Executive Council of the Irish Free State did not extend to Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland exercised its right under the treaty to leave the new Dominion and rejoined the United Kingdom on 8 December 1922. It did so by making an address to the King requesting, \"that the powers of the Parliament and Government of the Irish Free State shall no longer extend to Northern Ireland.\" The Irish Free State was a constitutional monarchy sharing a monarch with the United Kingdom and other Dominions of the British Commonwealth. The country had a governor-general (representing the monarch), a bicameral parliament, a cabinet called the \"Executive Council\", and a prime minister called the President of the Executive Council.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Irish Civil War (June 1922 – May 1923) was the consequence of the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the creation of the Irish Free State. Anti-treaty forces, led by Éamon de Valera, objected to the fact that acceptance of the treaty abolished the Irish Republic of 1919 to which they had sworn loyalty, arguing in the face of public support for the settlement that the \"people have no right to do wrong\". They objected most to the fact that the state would remain part of the British Empire and that members of the Free State Parliament would have to swear what the anti-treaty side saw as an oath of fidelity to the British king. Pro-treaty forces, led by Michael Collins, argued that the treaty gave \"not the ultimate freedom that all nations aspire to and develop, but the freedom to achieve it\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "At the start of the war, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) split into two opposing camps: a pro-treaty IRA and an anti-treaty IRA. The pro-treaty IRA disbanded and joined the new National Army. However, because the anti-treaty IRA lacked an effective command structure and because of the pro-treaty forces' defensive tactics throughout the war, Michael Collins and his pro-treaty forces were able to build up an army with many tens of thousands of World War I veterans from the 1922 disbanded Irish regiments of the British Army, capable of overwhelming the anti-treatyists. British supplies of artillery, aircraft, machine-guns and ammunition boosted pro-treaty forces, and the threat of a return of Crown forces to the Free State removed any doubts about the necessity of enforcing the treaty. Lack of public support for the anti-treaty forces (often called the Irregulars) and the determination of the government to overcome the Irregulars contributed significantly to their defeat.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Following a national plebiscite in July 1937, the new Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht na hÉireann) came into force on 29 December 1937. This replaced the Constitution of the Irish Free State and declared that the name of the state is Éire, or \"Ireland\" in the English language. While Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution defined the national territory to be the whole island, they also confined the state's jurisdiction to the area that had been the Irish Free State. The former Irish Free State government had abolished the Office of Governor-General in December 1936. Although the constitution established the office of President of Ireland, the question over whether Ireland was a republic remained open. Diplomats were accredited to the king, but the president exercised all internal functions of a head of state. For instance, the President gave assent to new laws with his own authority, without reference to King George VI who was only an \"organ\", that was provided for by statute law.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Ireland remained neutral during World War II, a period it described as The Emergency. Ireland's Dominion status was terminated with the passage of The Republic of Ireland Act 1948, which came into force on 18 April 1949 and declared that the state was a republic. At the time, a declaration of a republic terminated Commonwealth membership. This rule was changed 10 days after Ireland declared itself a republic, with the London Declaration of 28 April 1949. Ireland did not reapply when the rules were altered to permit republics to join. Later, the Crown of Ireland Act 1542 was repealed in Ireland by the Statute Law Revision (Pre-Union Irish Statutes) Act 1962.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Ireland became a member of the United Nations in December 1955, after having been denied membership because of its neutral stance during the Second World War and not supporting the Allied cause. At the time, joining the UN involved a commitment to using force to deter aggression by one state against another if the UN thought it was necessary.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Interest towards membership of the European Communities (EC) developed in Ireland during the 1950s, with consideration also given to membership of the European Free Trade Area. As the United Kingdom intended on EC membership, Ireland applied for membership in July 1961 due to the substantial economic linkages with the United Kingdom. The founding EC members remained sceptical regarding Ireland's economic capacity, neutrality, and unattractive protectionist policy. Many Irish economists and politicians realised that economic policy reform was necessary. The prospect of EC membership became doubtful in 1963 when French President General Charles de Gaulle stated that France opposed Britain's accession, which ceased negotiations with all other candidate countries. In 1969 his successor, Georges Pompidou, was not opposed to British and Irish membership. Negotiations began and in 1972 the Treaty of Accession was signed. A referendum was held later that year which confirmed Ireland's entry into the bloc, and it finally joined the EC as a member state on 1 January 1973.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The economic crisis of the late 1970s was fuelled by the Fianna Fáil government's budget, the abolition of the car tax, excessive borrowing, and global economic instability including the 1979 oil crisis. There were significant policy changes from 1989 onwards, with economic reform, tax cuts, welfare reform, an increase in competition, and a ban on borrowing to fund current spending. This policy began in 1989–1992 by the Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrats government, and continued by the subsequent Fianna Fáil/Labour government and Fine Gael/Labour/Democratic Left government. Ireland became one of the world's fastest growing economies by the late 1990s in what was known as the Celtic Tiger period, which lasted until the Great Recession. Since 2014, Ireland has experienced increased economic activity.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the Northern Ireland question, the British and Irish governments started to seek a peaceful resolution to the violent conflict involving many paramilitaries and the British Army in Northern Ireland known as \"The Troubles\". A peace settlement for Northern Ireland, known as the Good Friday Agreement, was approved in 1998 in referendums north and south of the border. As part of the peace settlement, the territorial claim to Northern Ireland in Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland was removed by referendum. In its white paper on Brexit the United Kingdom government reiterated its commitment to the Good Friday Agreement. With regard to Northern Ireland's status, it said that the UK Government's \"clearly-stated preference is to retain Northern Ireland's current constitutional position: as part of the UK, but with strong links to Ireland\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The state extends over an area of about five-sixths (70,273 km or 27,133 sq mi) of the island of Ireland (84,421 km or 32,595 sq mi), with Northern Ireland constituting the remainder. The island is bounded to the north and west by the Atlantic Ocean and to the northeast by the North Channel. To the east, the Irish Sea connects to the Atlantic Ocean via St George's Channel and the Celtic Sea to the southwest.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The western landscape mostly consists of rugged cliffs, hills and mountains. The central lowlands are extensively covered with glacial deposits of clay and sand, as well as significant areas of bogland and several lakes. The highest point is Carrauntoohil (1,038.6 m or 3,407 ft), located in the MacGillycuddy's Reeks mountain range in the southwest. River Shannon, which traverses the central lowlands, is the longest river in Ireland at 386 kilometres or 240 miles in length. The west coast is more rugged than the east, with numerous islands, peninsulas, headlands and bays.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Ireland is one of the least forested countries in Europe. Until the end of the Middle Ages, the land was heavily forested. Native species include deciduous trees such as oak, ash, hazel, birch, alder, willow, aspen, elm, rowan and hawthorn, as well as evergreen trees such Scots pine, yew, holly and strawberry trees. The growth of blanket bog and the extensive clearing of woodland for farming are believed to be the main causes of deforestation. Today, only about 10% of Ireland is woodland, most of which is non-native conifer plantations, and only 2% of which is native woodland. The average woodland cover in European countries is over 33%. According to Coillte, a state-owned forestry business, the country's climate gives Ireland one of the fastest growth rates for forests in Europe. Hedgerows, which are traditionally used to define land boundaries, are an important substitute for woodland habitat, providing refuge for native wild flora and a wide range of insect, bird and mammal species. It is home to two terrestrial ecoregions: Celtic broadleaf forests and North Atlantic moist mixed forests.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Agriculture accounts for about 64% of the total land area. This has resulted in limited land to preserve natural habitats, in particular for larger wild mammals with greater territorial requirements. The long history of agricultural production coupled with modern agricultural methods, such as pesticide and fertiliser use, has placed pressure on biodiversity.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Atlantic Ocean and the warming influence of the Gulf Stream affect weather patterns in Ireland. Temperatures differ regionally, with central and eastern areas tending to be more extreme. However, due to a temperate oceanic climate, temperatures are seldom lower than −5 °C (23 °F) in winter or higher than 26 °C (79 °F) in summer. The highest temperature recorded in Ireland was 33.3 °C (91.9 °F) on 26 June 1887 at Kilkenny Castle in Kilkenny, while the lowest temperature recorded was −19.1 °C (−2.4 °F) at Markree Castle in Sligo. Rainfall is more prevalent during winter months and less so during the early months of summer. Southwestern areas experience the most rainfall as a result of south westerly winds, while Dublin receives the least. Sunshine duration is highest in the southeast of the country. The far north and west are two of the windiest regions in Europe, with great potential for wind energy generation.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Ireland normally gets between 1100 and 1600 hours of sunshine each year, most areas averaging between 3.25 and 3.75 hours a day. The sunniest months are May and June, which average between 5 and 6.5 hours per day over most of the country. The extreme southeast gets most sunshine, averaging over 7 hours a day in early summer. December is the dullest month, with an average daily sunshine ranging from about 1 hour in the north to almost 2 hours in the extreme southeast. The sunniest summer in the 100 years from 1881 to 1980 was 1887, according to measurements made at the Phoenix Park in Dublin; 1980 was the dullest.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Ireland is a constitutional republic with a parliamentary system of government. The Oireachtas is the bicameral national parliament composed of the President of Ireland and the two Houses of the Oireachtas: Dáil Éireann (House of Representatives) and Seanad Éireann (Senate). Áras an Uachtaráin is the official residence of the President of Ireland, while the houses of the Oireachtas meet at Leinster House in Dublin.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The President serves as head of state, is elected for a seven-year term, and may be re-elected once. The President is primarily a figurehead, but is entrusted with certain constitutional powers with the advice of the Council of State. The office has absolute discretion in some areas, such as referring a bill to the Supreme Court for a judgment on its constitutionality. Michael D. Higgins became the ninth President of Ireland on 11 November 2011.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Taoiseach (Prime Minister) serves as the head of government and is appointed by the President upon the nomination of the Dáil. Most Taoisigh have served as the leader of the political party that gains the most seats in national elections. It has become customary for coalitions to form a government, as there has not been a single-party government since 1989.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Dáil has 160 members (Teachtaí Dála) elected to represent multi-seat constituencies under the system of proportional representation by means of the single transferable vote. The Seanad is composed of sixty members, with eleven nominated by the Taoiseach, six elected by two university constituencies, and 43 elected by public representatives from panels of candidates established on a vocational basis.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The government is constitutionally limited to fifteen members. No more than two members can be selected from the Seanad, and the Taoiseach, Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and Minister for Finance must be members of the Dáil. The Dáil must be dissolved within five years of its first meeting following the previous election, and a general election for members of the Dáil must take place no later than thirty days after the dissolution. In accordance with the Constitution of Ireland, parliamentary elections must be held at least every seven years, though a lower limit may be set by statute law. The current government is a coalition of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party with Leo Varadkar of Fine Gael as Taoiseach and Micheál Martin of Fianna Fáil as Tánaiste. Opposition parties in the current Dáil are Sinn Féin, the Labour Party, People Before Profit–Solidarity, Social Democrats, Aontú, as well as a number of independents.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Ireland has been a member state of the European Union since 1973. Citizens of the United Kingdom can freely enter the country without a passport due to the Common Travel Area, which is a passport-free zone comprising the islands of Ireland, Great Britain, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. However, some identification is required at airports and seaports.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 was the founding statute of the present system of local government, while the Twentieth Amendment to the constitution of 1999 provided for its constitutional recognition. The twenty-six traditional counties of Ireland are the basis of the local government areas, with the traditional counties of Cork, Dublin and Galway containing two or more local government areas. The Local Government Act 2001, as amended by the Local Government Reform Act 2014, provides for a system of thirty-one local authorities – twenty-six county councils, two city and county councils, and three city councils. Counties (with the exception of the three counties in Dublin) are divided into municipal districts. A second local government tier of town councils was abolished in 2014.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Local authorities are responsible for matters such as planning, local roads, sanitation, and libraries. The breaching of county boundaries should be avoided as far as practicable in drawing Dáil constituencies. Counties with greater populations have multiple constituencies, some of more than one county, but generally do not cross county boundaries. The counties are grouped into three regions, each with a Regional Assembly composed of members delegated by the various county and city councils in the region. The regions do not have any direct administrative role as such, but they serve for planning, coordination and statistical purposes.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Ireland has a common law legal system with a written constitution that provides for a parliamentary democracy. The court system consists of the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the High Court, the Circuit Court and the District Court, all of which apply the Irish law and hear both civil and criminal matters. Trials for serious offences must usually be held before a jury. The High Court, Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court have authority, by means of judicial review, to determine the compatibility of laws and activities of other institutions of the state with the constitution and the law. Except in exceptional circumstances, court hearings must occur in public.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The Garda Síochána (lit. Guardians of the Peace), more commonly referred to as the Gardaí, is the state's civilian police force. The force is responsible for all aspects of civil policing, both in terms of territory and infrastructure. It is headed by the Garda Commissioner, who is appointed by the Government. Most uniformed members do not routinely carry firearms. Standard policing is traditionally carried out by uniformed officers equipped only with a baton and pepper spray.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The Military Police is the corps of the Irish Army responsible for the provision of policing service personnel and providing a military police presence to forces while on exercise and deployment. In wartime, additional tasks include the provision of a traffic control organisation to allow rapid movement of military formations to their mission areas. Other wartime roles include control of prisoners of war and refugees.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Ireland's citizenship laws relate to \"the island of Ireland\", including islands and seas, thereby extending them to Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. Therefore, anyone born in Northern Ireland who meets the requirements for being an Irish citizen, such as birth on the island of Ireland to an Irish or British citizen parent or a parent who is entitled to live in Northern Ireland or the Republic without restriction on their residency, may exercise an entitlement to Irish citizenship, such as an Irish passport.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Foreign relations are substantially influenced by membership of the European Union, although bilateral relations with the United Kingdom and United States are also important. It held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union on six occasions, most recently from January to June 2013.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Ireland tends towards independence in foreign policy; thus the country is not a member of NATO and has a longstanding policy of military neutrality. This policy has led to the Irish Defence Forces contributing to peace-keeping missions with the United Nations since 1960, including during the Congo Crisis and subsequently in Cyprus, Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Despite Irish neutrality during World War II, Ireland had more than 50,000 participants in the war through enlistment in the British armed forces. During the Cold War, Irish military policy, while ostensibly neutral, was biased towards NATO. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Seán Lemass authorised the search of Cuban and Czechoslovak aircraft passing through Shannon and passed the information to the CIA. Ireland's air facilities were used by the United States military for the delivery of military personnel involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq through Shannon Airport. The airport had previously been used for the United States invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, as well as the First Gulf War.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Since 1999, Ireland has been a member of NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) program and NATO's Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), which is aimed at creating trust between NATO and other states in Europe and the former Soviet Union.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Ireland is a neutral country, and has \"triple-lock\" rules governing the participation of Irish troops in conflict zones, whereby approval must be given by the UN, the Dáil and Government. Accordingly, its military role is limited to national self-defence and participation in United Nations peacekeeping.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Irish Defence Forces (Óglaigh na hÉireann) are made up of the Army, Naval Service, Air Corps and Reserve Defence Force. It is small but well equipped, with almost 10,000 full-time military personnel and over 2,000 in reserve. Daily deployments of the Defence Forces cover aid to civil power operations, protection and patrol of Irish territorial waters and EEZ by the Irish Naval Service, and UN, EU and PfP peace-keeping missions. By 1996, over 40,000 Irish service personnel had served in international UN peacekeeping missions.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Irish Air Corps is the air component of the Defence Forces and operates sixteen fixed wing aircraft and eight helicopters. The Irish Naval Service is Ireland's navy, and operates six patrol ships, and smaller numbers of inflatable boats and training vessels, and has armed boarding parties capable of seizing a ship and a special unit of frogmen. The military includes the Reserve Defence Forces (Army Reserve and Naval Service Reserve) for part-time reservists. Ireland's special forces include the Army Ranger Wing, which trains and operates with international special operations units. The President is the formal Supreme Commander of the Defence Forces, but in practice these Forces answer to the Government via the Minister for Defence.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In 2017, Ireland signed the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Ireland is an open economy and ranks first for \"high-value\" foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Ireland ranks 5th of 187 (IMF) and 6th of 175 (World Bank) in GDP per capita as well as ranking in the top ten for GNI per capita. An alternative metric, known as modified Gross National Income (GNI), was created by the Central Statistics Office and is used by the Irish government to give a view of activity in the domestic economy after stripping out large multinational export movements which can often relate to intangible assets. This is particularly relevant in Ireland's economy, as GDP disproportionately includes income from non-Irish owned companies, which often flows out of Ireland. Foreign multinationals are the main driver of Ireland's economy, employing a quarter of the private sector workforce, and paying 80% of Irish corporate taxes. 14 of Ireland's top 20 firms (by 2017 turnover) are US-based multinationals and 80% of foreign multinationals in Ireland are from the US.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Ireland adopted the euro currency in 2002 along with eleven other EU member states. As of January 2023 there are 20 EU member states using the euro currency with Croatia the most recent member to join on 1 January 2023.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Following the Great Recession and the bursting of the Irish property bubble, the country officially exited recession in 2010, driven by a growth in exports from US multinationals in Ireland. However, due to a rise in the cost of public borrowing due to government guarantees of private banking debt, the Irish government accepted an €85 billion programme of assistance from the EU, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and bilateral loans from the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark. Following three years of contraction, the economy grew by 0.7% in 2011 and 0.9% in 2012. The unemployment rate was 14.7% in 2012, including 18.5% among recent immigrants. In March 2016 the unemployment rate was reported by the CSO to be 8.6%, down from a peak unemployment rate of 15.1% in February 2012. In addition to unemployment, net emigration from Ireland between 2008 and 2013 totalled 120,100, or some 2.6% of the total population according to the Census of Ireland 2011. One-third of the emigrants were aged between 15 and 24. As of November 2022, unemployment had fallen back to 4.4%.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Ireland exited its EU-IMF bailout programme on 15 December 2013. Having implemented budget cuts, reforms and sold assets, Ireland was again able to access debt markets. Since then, Ireland has been able to sell long term bonds at record rates. However, the stabilisation of the Irish credit bubble required a large transfer of debt from the private sector balance sheet (highest OECD leverage), to the public sector balance sheet (almost unleveraged, pre-crisis), via Irish bank bailouts and public deficit spending. The transfer of this debt means that Ireland, in 2017, still has one of the highest levels of both public sector indebtedness, and private sector indebtedness, in the EU-28/OECD.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Ireland became one of the main destinations for US pharmaceutical corporate tax inversions from 2009 to 2016. The country has also became the largest foreign location for large US technology multinationals (i.e. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook), which delivered a GDP growth rate of 26.3% (and GNP growth rate of 18.7%) in 2015. This growth was subsequently shown to be due to Apple restructuring its \"double Irish\" subsidiary (Apple Sales International, currently under threat of a €13bn EU \"illegal state aid\" fine for preferential tax treatment).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The transformation of Ireland's tax policy started with the creation of a 10% low-tax \"special economic zone\", called the International Financial Services Centre (or \"IFSC\"), in 1987. In 1999, the entire country was effectively \"turned into an IFSC\" with the reduction of Irish corporation tax from 32% to 12.5%. This accelerated the later stages of Ireland's transition from a predominantly agricultural economy into a knowledge and service economy initially focused on property and construction and later focused on attracting mainly US multinationals from high-tech, life sciences, and financial services industries seeking to avail of Ireland's low corporation tax rates and favourable corporate tax system.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The multinational tax schemes foreign firms use in Ireland materially distort Irish economic statistics. This reached a climax with the \"leprechaun economics\" GDP/GNP growth rates of 2015 (as Apple restructured its Irish subsidiaries in 2015). The Central Bank of Ireland introduced a new statistic, Modified gross national income, to remove these distortions. GNI* is 30% below GDP (or, GDP is 143% of GNI).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "From the creation of the IFSC, the country experienced strong and sustained economic growth which fuelled a dramatic rise in Irish consumer borrowing and spending, and Irish construction and investment, which became known as the Celtic Tiger period. By 2007, Ireland had the highest private sector debt in the OECD with a household debt-to-disposable income ratio of 190%. Global capital markets, who had financed Ireland's build-up of debt in the Celtic Tiger period by enabling Irish banks to borrow in excess of the domestic deposit base (to over 180% at peak), withdrew support in the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Their withdrawal from the over-borrowed Irish credit system would precipitate a deep Irish property correction which then led to the Post-2008 Irish banking crisis.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Ireland's successful \"low-tax\" economy opens it to accusations of being a \"corporate tax haven\", and led to it being \"blacklisted\" by Brazil. A 2017 study ranks Ireland as the 5th largest global Conduit OFC, which legally route funds to tax havens. A serious challenge is the passing of the US Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (whose FDII and GILTI regimes target Ireland's multinational tax schemes). The EU's 2018 Digital Sales Tax (DST) (and desire for a CCCTB) is also seen as an attempt to restrict Irish \"multinational tax schemes\" by US technology firms.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Although multinational corporations dominate Ireland's export sector, exports from other sources also contribute significantly to the national income. The activities of multinational companies based in Ireland have made it one of the largest exporters of pharmaceutical agents, medical devices and software-related goods and services in the world. Ireland's exports also relate to the activities of large Irish companies (such as Ryanair, Kerry Group and Smurfit Kappa) and exports of mineral resources including zinc and lead concentrates. The country also has significant deposits of gypsum and smaller quantities of copper, silver, gold, barite, and dolomite. Tourism in Ireland contributes about 4% of GDP and is a significant source of employment.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Other goods exports include agri-food, cattle, beef, dairy products, and aluminum. Ireland's major imports include data processing equipment, chemicals, petroleum and petroleum products, textiles, and clothing. Financial services provided by multinational corporations based at the Irish Financial Services Centre also contribute to Irish exports. The difference between exports (€89.4 billion) and imports (€45.5 billion) resulted an annual trade surplus of €43.9 billion in 2010, which is the highest trade surplus relative to GDP achieved by any EU member state.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The EU is by far the country's largest trading partner, accounting for 57.9% of exports and 60.7% of imports. Prior to Brexit, the United Kingdom was the most important trading partner within the EU, accounting for 15.4% of exports and 32.1% of imports. Outside the EU, the United States accounted for 23.2% of exports and 14.1% of imports in 2010.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "ESB, Bord Gáis Energy and Airtricity are the three main electricity and gas suppliers in Ireland. There are 19.82 billion cubic metres of proven reserves of gas. Natural gas extraction previously occurred at the Kinsale Head until its exhaustion. The Corrib gas field was due to come on stream in 2013/14. In 2012, the Barryroe field was confirmed to have up to 1.6 billion barrels of oil in reserve, with between 160 and 600 million recoverable. That could provide for Ireland's entire energy needs for up to 13 years, when it is developed in 2015/16.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "There have been significant efforts to increase the use of renewable and sustainable forms of energy in Ireland, particularly in wind power, with 3,000 MegaWatts of wind farms being constructed, some for the purpose of export. The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) has estimated that 6.5% of Ireland's 2011 energy requirements were produced by renewable sources. The SEAI has also reported an increase in energy efficiency in Ireland with a 28% reduction in carbon emissions per house from 2005 to 2013.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "As of 2021, Ireland was the 24th largest wind energy producer in the world and the 3rd ranked in 2020 on a per capita basis.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The country's three main international airports at Dublin, Shannon and Cork serve many European and intercontinental routes with scheduled and chartered flights. The London to Dublin air route is the ninth busiest international air route in the world, and also the busiest international air route in Europe, with 14,500 flights between the two in 2017. In 2015, 4.5 million people took the route, at that time, the world's second-busiest. Aer Lingus is the flag carrier of Ireland, although Ryanair is the country's largest airline. Ryanair is Europe's largest low-cost carrier, the second largest in terms of passenger numbers, and the world's largest in terms of international passenger numbers.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Railway services are provided by Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail), which operates all internal intercity, commuter and freight railway services in the country. Dublin is the centre of the network with two main stations, Heuston station and Connolly station, linking to the country's cities and main towns. The Enterprise service, which runs jointly with Northern Ireland Railways, connects Dublin and Belfast. The whole of Ireland's mainline network operates on track with a gauge of 5 ft 3 in (1,600 mm), which is unique in Europe and has resulted in distinct rolling stock designs. Dublin's public transport network includes the DART, Luas, Dublin Bus, and dublinbikes.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Motorways, national primary roads and national secondary roads are managed by Transport Infrastructure Ireland, while regional roads and local roads are managed by the local authorities in each of their respective areas. The road network is primarily focused on the capital, but motorways connect it to other major Irish cities including Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Dublin is served by major infrastructure such as the East-Link and West-Link toll-bridges, as well as the Dublin Port Tunnel. The Jack Lynch Tunnel, under the River Lee in Cork, and the Limerick Tunnel, under the River Shannon, were two major projects outside Dublin.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Genetic research suggests that the earliest settlers migrated from Iberia following the most recent ice age. After the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age, migrants introduced a Celtic language and culture. Migrants from the two latter eras still represent the genetic heritage of most Irish people. Gaelic tradition expanded and became the dominant form over time. Irish people are a combination of Gaelic, Norse, Anglo-Norman, French, and British ancestry.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The population of Ireland stood at 5,149,139 in 2022, an increase of 8% since 2016. As of 2011, Ireland had the highest birth rate in the European Union (16 births per 1,000 of population). In 2014, 36.3% of births were to unmarried women. Annual population growth rates exceeded 2% during the 2002–2006 intercensal period, which was attributed to high rates of natural increase and immigration. This rate declined somewhat during the subsequent 2006–2011 intercensal period, with an average annual percentage change of 1.6%. The total fertility rate (TFR) in 2017 was estimated at 1.80 children born per woman, below the replacement rate of 2.1, it remains considerably below the high of 4.2 children born per woman in 1850. In 2018 the median age of the Irish population was 37.1 years.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "At the time of the 2022 census, the number of non-Irish nationals was recorded at 631,785. This represents an 8% increase from the 2016 census figure of 535,475. The five largest sources of non-Irish nationals were Poland (93,680), the UK (83,347), India (45,449), Romania (43,323), Lithuania (31,177), and Latvia (27,338) respectively. The non-Irish nationalities which saw the largest increase from 2016 were India (+33,984), Romania (+14,137), Brazil (+13,698), Ukraine (+10,006). The non-Irish nationalities which saw the largest decrease from 2016 were Poland (-28,835), UK (-19,766), Lithuania (-5,375), Latvia (-1,633), and Slovakia (-1,117).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Irish Constitution describes Irish as the \"national language\" and the \"first official language\", but English (the \"second official language\") is the dominant language. In the 2016 census, about 1.75 million people (40% of the population) said they were able to speak Irish but, of those, under 74,000 spoke it on a daily basis. Irish is spoken as a community language only in a small number of rural areas mostly in the west and south of the country, collectively known as the Gaeltacht. Except in Gaeltacht regions, road signs are usually bilingual. Most public notices and print media are in English only. While the state is officially bilingual, citizens can often struggle to access state services in Irish and most government publications are not available in both languages, even though citizens have the right to deal with the state in Irish. Irish language media include the TV channel TG4, the radio station RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta and online newspaper Tuairisc.ie. In the Irish Defence Forces, all foot and arms drill commands are given in the Irish language.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "As a result of immigration, Polish is the most widely spoken language in Ireland after English, with Irish as the third most spoken. Several other Central European languages (namely Czech, Hungarian and Slovak), as well as Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian) are also spoken on a day-to-day basis. Other languages spoken in Ireland include Shelta, spoken by Irish Travellers, and a dialect of Scots is spoken by some Ulster Scots people in Donegal. Most secondary school students choose to learn one or two foreign languages. Languages available for the Junior Certificate and the Leaving Certificate include French, German, Italian and Spanish; Leaving Certificate students can also study Arabic, Japanese and Russian. Some secondary schools also offer Ancient Greek, Hebrew and Latin. The study of Irish is generally compulsory for Leaving Certificate students, but some may qualify for an exemption in some circumstances, such as learning difficulties or entering the country after age 11.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Healthcare in Ireland is provided by both public and private healthcare providers. The Minister for Health has responsibility for setting overall health service policy. Every resident of Ireland is entitled to receive health care through the public health care system, which is managed by the Health Service Executive and funded by general taxation. A person may be required to pay a subsidised fee for certain health care received; this depends on income, age, illness or disability. All maternity services are provided free of charge and children up to the age of 6 months. Emergency care is provided to patients who present to a hospital emergency department. However, visitors to emergency departments in non-emergency situations who are not referred by their GP may incur a fee of €100. In some circumstances this fee is not payable or may be waived.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Anyone holding a European Health Insurance Card is entitled to free maintenance and treatment in public beds in Health Service Executive and voluntary hospitals. Outpatient services are also provided for free. However, the majority of patients on median incomes or above are required to pay subsidised hospital charges. Private health insurance is available to the population for those who want to avail of it.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The average life expectancy in Ireland in 2016 was 81.8 years (OECD 2016 list), with 79.9 years for men and 83.6 years for women. It has the highest birth rate in the EU (16.8 births per 1,000 inhabitants, compared to an EU average of 10.7) and a very low infant mortality rate (3.5 per 1,000 live births). The Irish healthcare system ranked 13th out of 34 European countries in 2012 according to the European Health Consumer Index produced by Health Consumer Powerhouse. The same report ranked the Irish healthcare system as having the 8th best health outcomes but only the 21st most accessible system in Europe.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Ireland has three levels of education: primary, secondary and higher education. The education systems are largely under the direction of the Government via the Minister for Education. Recognised primary and secondary schools must adhere to the curriculum established by the relevant authorities. Education is compulsory between the ages of six and fifteen years, and all children up to the age of eighteen must complete the first three years of secondary, including one sitting of the Junior Certificate examination.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "There are approximately 3,300 primary schools in Ireland. The vast majority (92%) are under the patronage of the Catholic Church. Schools run by religious organisations, but receiving public money and recognition, cannot discriminate against pupils based upon religion or lack thereof. A sanctioned system of preference does exist, where students of a particular religion may be accepted before those who do not share the ethos of the school, in a case where a school's quota has already been reached.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The Leaving Certificate, which is taken after two years of study, is the final examination in the secondary school system. Those intending to pursue higher education normally take this examination, with access to third-level courses generally depending on results obtained from the best six subjects taken, on a competitive basis. Third-level education awards are conferred by at least 38 Higher Education Institutions – this includes the constituent or linked colleges of seven universities, plus other designated institutions of the Higher Education and Training Awards Council. According to the 2022 US News rankings, Ireland is among the top twenty best countries for education.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The Programme for International Student Assessment, coordinated by the OECD, currently ranks Ireland as having the fourth highest reading score, ninth highest science score and thirteenth highest mathematics score, among OECD countries, in its 2012 assessment. In 2012, Irish students aged 15 years had the second highest levels of reading literacy in the EU. Ireland also has 0.747 of the World's top 500 Universities per capita, which ranks the country in 8th place in the world. Primary, secondary and higher (university/college) level education are all free in Ireland for all EU citizens. There are charges to cover student services and examinations.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In addition, 37 percent of Ireland's population has a university or college degree, which is among the highest percentages in the world.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Religious freedom is constitutionally provided for in Ireland, and the country's constitution has been secular since 1973. Christianity is the predominant religion, and while Ireland remains a predominantly Catholic country, the percentage of the population who identified as Catholic on the census has fallen sharply from 84.2 percent in the 2011 census to 78.3 percent in the most recent 2016 census. Other results from the 2016 census are: 4.2% Protestant, 1.3% Orthodox, 1.3% as Muslim, and 9.8% as having no religion. According to a Georgetown University study, before 2000 the country had one of the highest rates of regular mass attendance in the Western world. While daily attendance was 13% in 2006, there was a reduction in weekly attendance from 81% in 1990 to 48% in 2006, although the decline was reported as stabilising. In 2011, it was reported that weekly Mass attendance in Dublin was just 18%, and was even lower among younger generations.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The Church of Ireland, at 2.7% of the population, is the second largest Christian denomination. Membership declined throughout the twentieth century, but experienced an increase early in the 21st century, as have other small Christian denominations. Other significant Protestant denominations are the Presbyterian Church and Methodist Church. Immigration has contributed to a growth in Hindu and Muslim populations. In percentage terms, Orthodox Christianity and Islam were the fastest growing religions, with increases of 100% and 70% respectively.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Ireland's patron saints are Saint Patrick, Saint Bridget and Saint Columba, with Saint Patrick commonly recognised as the patron saint. Saint Patrick's Day is celebrated on 17 March in Ireland and abroad as the Irish national day, with parades and other celebrations.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "As with other predominantly Catholic European states, Ireland underwent a period of legal secularisation in the late twentieth century. In 1972, the article of the Constitution naming specific religious groups was deleted by the Fifth Amendment in a referendum. Article 44 remains in the Constitution: \"The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.\" The article also establishes freedom of religion, prohibits endowment of any religion, prohibits the state from religious discrimination, and requires the state to treat religious and non-religious schools in a non-prejudicial manner.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Religious studies was introduced as an optional Junior Certificate subject in 2001. Although most schools are run by religious organisations, a secularist trend is occurring among younger generations.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Ireland's culture was for centuries predominantly Gaelic, and it remains one of the six principal Celtic nations. Following the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 12th century, and gradual British conquest and colonisation beginning in the 16th century, Ireland became influenced by English and Scottish culture. Subsequently, Irish culture, though distinct in many aspects, shares characteristics with the rest of the Anglosphere, Catholic Europe, and other Celtic regions. The Irish diaspora, one of the world's largest and most dispersed, has contributed to the globalisation of Irish culture, producing many prominent figures in art, music, and science.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Ireland has made a significant contribution to world literature in both the English and Irish languages. Modern Irish fiction began with the publishing of the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Other writers of importance during the 18th century and their most notable works include Laurence Sterne with the publication of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. Numerous Irish novelists emerged during the 19th century, including Maria Edgeworth, John Banim, Gerald Griffin, Charles Kickham, William Carleton, George Moore, and Somerville and Ross. Bram Stoker is best known as the author of the 1897 novel Dracula.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "James Joyce (1882–1941) published his most famous work Ulysses in 1922, which is an interpretation of the Odyssey set in Dublin. Edith Somerville continued writing after the death of her partner Martin Ross in 1915. Dublin's Annie M. P. Smithson was one of several authors catering for fans of romantic fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Second World War, popular novels were published by, among others, Brian O'Nolan, who published as Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kate O'Brien. During the final decades of the 20th century, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, Maeve Binchy, Joseph O'Connor, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, and John Banville came to the fore as novelists.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Patricia Lynch was a prolific children's author in the 20th century, while Eoin Colfer's works were NYT Best Sellers in this genre in the early 21st century. In the genre of the short story, which is a form favoured by many Irish writers, the most prominent figures include Seán Ó Faoláin, Frank O'Connor and William Trevor. Well known Irish poets include Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas McCarthy, Dermot Bolger, and Nobel Prize in Literature laureates William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney (born in Northern Ireland but resided in Dublin). Prominent writers in the Irish language are Pádraic Ó Conaire, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Séamus Ó Grianna, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The history of Irish theatre begins with the expansion of the English administration in Dublin during the early 17th century, and since then, Ireland has significantly contributed to English drama. In its early history, theatrical productions in Ireland tended to serve political purposes, but as more theatres opened and the popular audience grew, a more diverse range of entertainments were staged. Many Dublin-based theatres developed links with their London equivalents, and British productions frequently found their way to the Irish stage. However, most Irish playwrights went abroad to establish themselves. In the 18th century, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan were two of the most successful playwrights on the London stage at that time. At the beginning of the 20th century, theatre companies dedicated to the staging of Irish plays and the development of writers, directors and performers began to emerge, which allowed many Irish playwrights to learn their trade and establish their reputations in Ireland rather than in Britain or the United States. Following in the tradition of acclaimed practitioners, principally Oscar Wilde, Literature Nobel Prize laureates George Bernard Shaw (1925) and Samuel Beckett (1969), playwrights such as Seán O'Casey, Brian Friel, Sebastian Barry, Brendan Behan, Conor McPherson and Billy Roche have gained popular success. Other Irish playwrights of the 20th century include Denis Johnston, Thomas Kilroy, Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard, Frank McGuinness, and John B. Keane.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Irish traditional music has remained vibrant, despite globalising cultural forces, and retains many traditional aspects. It has influenced various music genres, such as American country and roots music, and to some extent modern rock. It has occasionally been blended with styles such as rock and roll and punk rock. Ireland has also produced many internationally known artists in other genres, such as rock, pop, jazz, and blues. Ireland's best selling musical act is the rock band U2, who have sold 170 million copies of their albums worldwide since their formation in 1976.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "There are a number of classical music ensembles around the country, such as the RTÉ Performing Groups. Ireland also has two opera organisations: Irish National Opera in Dublin, and the annual Wexford Opera Festival, which promotes lesser-known operas, takes place during October and November.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Ireland has participated in the Eurovision Song Contest since 1965. Its first win was in 1970, when Dana won with All Kinds of Everything. It has subsequently won the competition six more times, the highest number of wins by any competing country. The phenomenon Riverdance originated as an interval performance during the 1994 contest.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Irish dance can broadly be divided into social dance and performance dance. Irish social dance can be divided into céilí and set dancing. Irish set dances are quadrilles, danced by 4 couples arranged in a square, while céilí dances are danced by varied formations of couples of 2 to 16 people. There are also many stylistic differences between these two forms. Irish social dance is a living tradition, and variations in particular dances are found across the country. In some places dances are deliberately modified and new dances are choreographed. Performance dance is traditionally referred to as stepdance. Irish stepdance, popularised by the show Riverdance, is notable for its rapid leg movements, with the body and arms being kept largely stationary. The solo stepdance is generally characterised by a controlled but not rigid upper body, straight arms, and quick, precise movements of the feet. The solo dances can either be in \"soft shoe\" or \"hard shoe\".",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Ireland has a wealth of structures, surviving in various states of preservation, from the Neolithic period, such as Brú na Bóinne, Poulnabrone dolmen, Castlestrange stone, Turoe stone, and Drombeg stone circle. As Ireland was never a part of the Roman Empire, ancient architecture in Greco-Roman style is extremely rare, in contrast to most of Western Europe. The country instead had an extended period of Iron Age architecture. The Irish round tower originated during the Early Medieval period.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Christianity introduced simple monastic houses, such as Clonmacnoise, Skellig Michael and Scattery Island. A stylistic similarity has been remarked between these double monasteries and those of the Copts of Egypt. Gaelic kings and aristocrats occupied ringforts or crannógs. Church reforms during the 12th century via the Cistercians stimulated continental influence, with the Romanesque styled Mellifont, Boyle and Tintern abbeys. Gaelic settlement had been limited to the Monastic proto-towns, such as Kells, where the current street pattern preserves the original circular settlement outline to some extent. Significant urban settlements only developed following the period of Viking invasions. The major Hiberno-Norse Longphorts were located on the coast, but with minor inland fluvial settlements, such as the eponymous Longford.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Castles were built by the Anglo-Normans during the late 12th century, such as Dublin Castle and Kilkenny Castle, and the concept of the planned walled trading town was introduced, which gained legal status and several rights by grant of a Charter under Feudalism. These charters specifically governed the design of these towns. Two significant waves of planned town formation followed, the first being the 16th- and 17th-century plantation towns, which were used as a mechanism for the Tudor English kings to suppress local insurgency, followed by 18th-century landlord towns. Surviving Norman founded planned towns include Drogheda and Youghal; plantation towns include Portlaoise and Portarlington; well-preserved 18th-century planned towns include Westport and Ballinasloe. These episodes of planned settlement account for the majority of present-day towns throughout the country.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Gothic cathedrals, such as St Patrick's, were also introduced by the Normans. Franciscans were dominant in directing the abbeys by the Late Middle Ages, while elegant tower houses, such as Bunratty Castle, were built by the Gaelic and Norman aristocracy. Many religious buildings were ruined with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Following the Restoration, palladianism and rococo, particularly country houses, swept through Ireland under the initiative of Edward Lovett Pearce, with the Houses of Parliament being the most significant.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "With the erection of buildings such as The Custom House, Four Courts, General Post Office and King's Inns, the neoclassical and Georgian styles flourished, especially in Dublin. Georgian townhouses produced streets of singular distinction, particularly in Dublin, Limerick and Cork. Following Catholic Emancipation, cathedrals and churches influenced by the French Gothic Revival emerged, such as St Colman's and St Finbarre's. Ireland has long been associated with thatched roof cottages, though these are nowadays considered quaint.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Beginning with the American designed art deco church at Turner's Cross, Cork in 1927, Irish architecture followed the international trend towards modern and sleek building styles since the 20th century. Other developments include the regeneration of Ballymun and an urban extension of Dublin at Adamstown. Since the establishment of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority in 1997, the Dublin Docklands area underwent large-scale redevelopment, which included the construction of the Convention Centre Dublin and Grand Canal Theatre. Completed in 2018, Capital Dock in Dublin is the tallest building in the Republic of Ireland achieving 79 metres (259 feet) in height (the Obel Tower in Belfast, Northern Ireland being the tallest in Ireland). The Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland regulates the practice of architecture in the state.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) is Ireland's public service broadcaster, funded by a television licence fee and advertising. RTÉ operates two national television channels, RTÉ One and RTÉ Two. The other independent national television channels are Virgin Media One, Virgin Media Two, Virgin Media Three and TG4, the latter of which is a public service broadcaster for speakers of the Irish language. All these channels are available on Saorview, the national free-to-air digital terrestrial television service. Additional channels included in the service are RTÉ News Now, RTÉjr, and RTÉ One +1. Subscription-based television providers operating in Ireland include Virgin Media and Sky.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The BBC's Northern Irish division is widely available in Ireland. BBC One Northern Ireland and BBC Two Northern Ireland are available in pay television providers including Virgin and Sky as well as via signal overspill by Freeview in border counties.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Supported by the Irish Film Board, the Irish film industry grew significantly since the 1990s, with the promotion of indigenous films as well as the attraction of international productions like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "A large number of regional and local radio stations are available countrywide. A survey showed that a consistent 85% of adults listen to a mixture of national, regional and local stations on a daily basis. RTÉ Radio operates four national stations, Radio 1, 2fm, Lyric fm, and RnaG. It also operates four national DAB radio stations. There are two independent national stations: Today FM and Newstalk.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Ireland has a traditionally competitive print media, which is divided into daily national newspapers and weekly regional newspapers, as well as national Sunday editions. The strength of the British press is a unique feature of the Irish print media scene, with the availability of a wide selection of British published newspapers and magazines.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Eurostat reported that 82% of Irish households had Internet access in 2013 compared to the EU average of 79% but only 67% had broadband access.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Irish cuisine was traditionally based on meat and dairy products, supplemented with vegetables and seafood. Examples of popular Irish cuisine include boxty, colcannon, coddle, stew, and bacon and cabbage. Ireland is known for the full Irish breakfast, which involves a fried or grilled meal generally consisting of rashers, egg, sausage, white and black pudding, and fried tomato. Apart from the influence by European and international dishes, there has been an emergence of a new Irish cuisine based on traditional ingredients handled in new ways. This cuisine is based on fresh vegetables, fish, oysters, mussels and other shellfish, and the wide range of hand-made cheeses that are now being produced across the country. Shellfish have increased in popularity, especially due to the high quality shellfish available from the country's coastline. The most popular fish include salmon and cod. Traditional breads include soda bread and wheaten bread. Barmbrack is a yeasted bread with added sultanas and raisins, traditionally eaten on Halloween.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Popular everyday beverages among the Irish include tea and coffee. Alcoholic drinks associated with Ireland include Poitín and the world-famous Guinness, which is a dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate in Dublin. Irish whiskey is also popular throughout the country and comes in various forms, including single malt, single grain, and blended whiskey.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Gaelic football and hurling are the traditional sports of Ireland as well as popular spectator sports. They are administered by the Gaelic Athletics Association on an all-Ireland basis. Other Gaelic games organised by the association include Gaelic handball and rounders.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Association football (soccer) is the third most popular spectator sport and has the highest level of participation. Although the League of Ireland is the national league, the English Premier League is the most popular among the public. The Republic of Ireland national football team plays at international level and is administered by the Football Association of Ireland.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "The Irish Rugby Football Union is the governing body of rugby union, which is played at local and international levels on an all-Ireland basis, and has produced players such as Brian O'Driscoll and Ronan O'Gara, who were on the team that won the Grand Slam in 2009.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "The success of the Irish Cricket Team in the 2007 Cricket World Cup has led to an increase in the popularity of cricket, which is also administered on an all-Ireland basis by Cricket Ireland. Ireland are one of the twelve Test playing members of the International Cricket Council, having been granted Test status in 2017. Professional domestic matches are played between the major cricket unions of Leinster, Munster, Northern, and North West.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Netball is represented by the Ireland national netball team.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Golf is another popular sport in Ireland, with over 300 courses countrywide. The country has produced several internationally successful golfers, such as Pádraig Harrington, Shane Lowry and Paul McGinley.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Horse racing has a large presence, with influential breeding and racing operations in the country. Racing takes place at courses at The Curragh Racecourse in County Kildare, Leopardstown Racecourse just outside Dublin, and Galway. Ireland has produced champion horses such as Galileo, Montjeu, and Sea the Stars.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Boxing is Ireland's most successful sport at an Olympic level. Administered by the Irish Athletic Boxing Association on an all-Ireland basis, it has gained in popularity as a result of the international success of boxers such as Bernard Dunne, Andy Lee and Katie Taylor.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Some of Ireland's highest performers in athletics have competed at the Olympic Games, such as Eamonn Coghlan and Sonia O'Sullivan. The annual Dublin Marathon and Dublin Women's Mini Marathon are two of the most popular athletics events in the country.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Rugby league is represented by the Ireland national rugby league team and administered by Rugby League Ireland (who are full member of the Rugby League European Federation) on an all-Ireland basis. The team compete in the European Cup (rugby league) and the Rugby League World Cup. Ireland reached the quarter-finals of the 2000 Rugby League World Cup as well as reaching the semi-finals in the 2008 Rugby League World Cup. The Irish Elite League is a domestic competition for rugby league teams in Ireland.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "While Australian rules football in Ireland has a limited following, a series of International rules football games (constituting a hybrid of the Australian and Gaelic football codes) takes place annually between teams representing Ireland and Australia. Baseball and basketball are also emerging sports in Ireland, both of which have an international team representing the island of Ireland. Other sports which retain a following in Ireland include cycling, greyhound racing, horse riding, and motorsport.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Ireland ranks fifth in the world in terms of gender equality. In 2011, Ireland was ranked the most charitable country in Europe, and second most charitable in the world. Contraception was controlled in Ireland until 1979, however, the receding influence of the Catholic Church has led to an increasingly secularised society. A constitutional ban on divorce was lifted following a referendum in 1995. Divorce rates in Ireland are very low compared to European Union averages (0.7 divorced people per 1,000 population in 2011) while the marriage rate in Ireland is slightly above the European Union average (4.6 marriages per 1,000 population per year in 2012). Abortion had been banned throughout the period of the Irish state, first through provisions of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and later by the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013. The right to life of the unborn was protected in the constitution by the Eighth Amendment in 1983; this provision was removed following a referendum, and replaced it with a provision allowing legislation to regulate the termination of pregnancy. The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 passed later that year provided for abortion generally during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and in specified circumstances after that date.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Capital punishment is constitutionally banned in Ireland, while discrimination based on age, gender, sexual orientation, marital or familial status, religion, race or membership of the travelling community is illegal. The legislation which outlawed homosexual acts was repealed in 1993. The Civil Partnership and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act 2010 permitted civil partnerships between same-sex couples. The Children and Family Relationships Act 2015 allowed for adoption rights for couples other than married couples, including civil partners and cohabitants, and provided for donor-assisted human reproduction; however, significant sections of the Act have yet to be commenced. Following a referendum held on 23 May 2015, Ireland became the eighteenth country to provide in law for same-sex marriage, and the first to do so by popular vote.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce an environmental levy for plastic shopping bags in 2002 and a public smoking ban in 2004. Recycling in Ireland is carried out extensively, and Ireland has the second highest rate of packaging recycling in the European Union. It was the first country in Europe to ban incandescent lightbulbs in 2008 and the first EU country to ban in-store tobacco advertising and product display in 2009. In 2015, Ireland became the second country in the world to introduce plain cigarette packaging. Despite the above measures to discourage tobacco use, smoking rates in Ireland remain at approximately 15.4% as of 2020.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "The state shares many symbols with the island of Ireland. These include the colours green and blue, animals such as the Irish wolfhound and stags, structures such as round towers and celtic crosses, and designs such as Celtic knots and spirals. The shamrock, a type of clover, has been a national symbol of Ireland since the 17th century when it became customary to wear it as a symbol on St. Patrick's Day. These symbols are used by state institutions as well as private bodies in the Republic of Ireland.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "The flag of Ireland is a tricolour of green, white and orange. The flag originates with the Young Ireland movement of the mid-19th century but was not popularised until its use during the Easter Rising of 1916. The colours represent the Gaelic tradition (green) and the followers of William of Orange in Ireland (orange), with white representing the aspiration for peace between them. It was adopted as the flag of the Irish Free State in 1922 and continues to be used as the sole flag and ensign of the state. A naval jack, a green flag with a yellow harp, is set out in Defence Forces Regulations and flown from the bows of warships in addition to the national flag in limited circumstances (e.g. when a ship is not underway). It is based on the unofficial green ensign of Ireland used in the 18th and 19th centuries and the traditional green flag of Ireland dating from the 16th century.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "Like the national flag, the national anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann (English: A Soldier's Song), has its roots in the Easter Rising, when the song was sung by the rebels. Although originally published in English in 1912, the song was translated into Irish in 1923 and the Irish-language version is more commonly sung today. The song was officially adopted as the anthem of the Irish Free State in 1926 and continues as the national anthem of the state. The first four bars of the chorus followed by the last five comprise the presidential salute.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "The arms of Ireland originate as the arms of the monarchs of Ireland and was recorded as the arms of the King of Ireland in the 12th century. From the union of the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1603, they have appeared quartered on the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. Today, they are the personal arms of the president of Ireland whilst he or she is in office and are flown as the presidential standard. The harp symbol is used extensively by the state to mark official documents, Irish coinage and on the seal of the president of Ireland.",
"title": "Culture"
}
]
| Ireland, also known as the Republic of Ireland, is a country in north-western Europe consisting of 26 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, on the eastern side of the island. Around 2.1 million of the country's population of 5.15 million people reside in the Greater Dublin Area. The sovereign state shares its only land border with Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. It is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the Celtic Sea to the south, St George's Channel to the south-east, and the Irish Sea to the east. It is a unitary, parliamentary republic. The legislature, the Oireachtas, consists of a lower house, Dáil Éireann; an upper house, Seanad Éireann; and an elected President (Uachtarán) who serves as the largely ceremonial head of state, but with some important powers and duties. The head of government is the Taoiseach, who is elected by the Dáil and appointed by the President; the Taoiseach in turn appoints other government ministers. The Irish Free State was created with Dominion status in 1922, following the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In 1937, a new constitution was adopted, in which the state was named "Ireland" and effectively became a republic, with an elected non-executive president. It was officially declared a republic in 1949, following the Republic of Ireland Act 1948. Ireland became a member of the United Nations in 1955. It joined the European Communities (EC), the predecessor of the European Union (EU), in 1973. The state had no formal relations with Northern Ireland for most of the 20th century, but the 1980s and 1990s saw the British and Irish governments working with Northern Irish parties to resolve the conflict that had become known as the Troubles. Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the Irish government and Northern Irish government have co-operated on a number of policy areas under the North/South Ministerial Council created by the Agreement. Ireland is a developed country with a quality of life that ranks amongst the highest in the world; after adjustments for inequality, the 2021 Human Development Index listing ranked it the sixth-highest in the world. It also ranks highly in healthcare, economic freedom, and freedom of the press. It is a member of the EU and a founding member of the Council of Europe and the OECD. The Irish government has followed a policy of military neutrality through non-alignment since before World War II, and the country is consequently not a member of NATO, although it is a member of Partnership for Peace and certain aspects of PESCO. Ireland's economy is advanced, with one of Europe's major financial hubs being centred around Dublin. It ranks among the top 10 wealthiest countries in the world in terms of both GDP and GNI per capita. After joining the EC, the country's government enacted a series of liberal economic policies that helped to boost economic growth between 1995 and 2007, a time now often referred to as the Celtic Tiger period. A recession and reversal in growth then followed during the Great Recession, which was exacerbated by the bursting of the Irish property bubble. | 2001-10-14T14:07:53Z | 2023-12-18T07:49:52Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ireland |
14,561 | Irish diaspora | The Irish diaspora (Irish: Diaspóra na nGael) refers to ethnic Irish people and their descendants who live outside the island of Ireland.
The phenomenon of migration from Ireland is recorded since the Early Middle Ages, but it can be quantified only from around 1700. Since then, between 9 and 10 million people born in Ireland have emigrated. That is more than the population of Ireland itself, which at its historical peak was 8.5 million on the eve of the Great Famine. The poorest of them went to Great Britain, especially Liverpool. Those who could afford it went further, including almost 5 million to the United States.
After 1765, emigration from Ireland became a short, relentless and efficiently managed national enterprise. In 1890, 40% of Irish-born people were living abroad. By the 21st century, an estimated 80 million people worldwide claimed some Irish descent, which includes more than 36 million Americans claiming Irish as their primary ethnicity.
As recently as the second half of the 19th century, most Irish emigrants spoke Irish as their first language. That had social and cultural consequences for the cultivation of the language abroad, including innovations in journalism. The language continues to be cultivated abroad by a small minority as a literary and social medium. The Irish diaspora are largely assimilated in most countries outside Ireland after World War I. Seán Fleming is the Republic of Ireland's Minister of State for the Diaspora.
The term Irish diaspora is open to many interpretations. The diaspora, broadly interpreted, contains all those known to have Irish ancestors, i.e., over 100 million people, which is more than fifteen times the population of the island of Ireland, which was about 6.4 million in 2011. It has been argued the idea of an Irish diaspora, as distinct from the old identification of Irishness with Ireland itself, was influenced by the perceived advent of global mobility and modernity. Irishness could now be identified with dispersed individuals and groups of Irish descent. But many of those individuals were the product of complex ethnic intermarriage in America and elsewhere, complicating the idea of a single line of descent. "Irishness" might then rely primarily on individual identification with an Irish diaspora.
The Government of Ireland defines the Irish diaspora as all persons of Irish nationality who habitually reside outside of the island of Ireland. This includes Irish citizens who have emigrated abroad and their children, who are Irish citizens by descent under Irish law. It also includes their grandchildren in cases where they were registered as Irish citizens in the Foreign Births Register held in every Irish diplomatic mission. Under this legal definition, the Irish diaspora is considerably smaller—some 3 million persons, of whom 1.47 million are Irish-born emigrants. Given the island of Ireland's estimated population of 6.8 million in 2018, this is still a large ratio.
However, the usage of Irish diaspora is generally not limited by citizenship status, thus leading to an estimated (and fluctuating) membership of up to 80 million persons—the second and more emotive definition. The Irish Government acknowledged this interpretation—although it did not acknowledge any legal obligations to persons in this larger diaspora—when Article 2 of the Constitution of Ireland was amended in 1998 to read "[f]urthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage."
There are people of Irish descent abroad (including Irish speakers) who reject inclusion in an Irish "diaspora" and who designate their identity in other ways. They may see the diasporic label as something used by the Irish government for its own purposes.
The Irish, who were called by the Romans Scotti but called themselves Gaels, had raided and settled along the West Coast of Roman Britain, and numbers of them were allowed to settle within the province, where the Roman Army recruited many Irish into auxiliary units that were dispatched to the German frontier. The Attacotti, who were similarly recruited into the Roman army, may also have been Irish settlers in Britain. The movement between Ireland and the classical Britain may have been two-way as similarities between the medieval accounts of Túathal Teachtmar and archaeological evidence indicate that the Romans may have supported the invasion and conquest of Ireland by Irish exiles from Britain with the hope of establishing a friendly ruler who could halt the raiding of Britain by the Irish, and some historians have also suggested that the Cruthin of the north of Ireland may have been Picts. After the departure of the Roman army, the Irish began increasing their footholds in Britain, with part of the north-West of the island annexed within the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata. In time, the Irish colonies became independent, merged with the Pictish kingdom and formed the basis of modern Scotland.
The traditionally Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland (the Highlands and Hebrides) are still referred to in the Gaelic language as a' Ghàidhealtachd ("the Gaeldom"). Irish monks and the Celtic Church engineered a wave of Irish emigration to Great Britain and Continental Europe and were possibly the first inhabitants of the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Throughout the Early Middle Ages, Great Britain and Continental Europe experienced Irish immigration of varying intensity, mostly from clerics and scholars who are collectively known as peregrini. Irish emigration to Western Europe, especially to Great Britain, has continued at a greater or lesser pace since then. Today, the ethnic Irish are the single largest minority group in both England and Scotland, most of whom eventually made it back to Ireland.
The dispersal of the Irish has been mainly to Britain or to countries colonised by Britain. England's political connection with Ireland began in 1155, when Pope Adrian IV issued a papal bull (known as Laudabiliter), which gave Henry II permission to invade Ireland as a means of strengthening the papacy's control over the Irish Church. That was followed in 1169 by the Norman invasion of Ireland, which was led by the general Richard de Clare, or Strongbow.
The English Crown did not attempt to assert full control of the island until after Henry VIII's repudiation of papal authority over the Church in England, and the subsequent rebellion of the Earl of Kildare in Ireland in 1534 threatened English hegemony there. Until the break with Rome, it was widely believed that Ireland was a papal possession, which was granted as a mere fiefdom to the English king and so in 1541, Henry VIII asserted England's claim to Ireland free from the papal overlordship by proclaiming himself King of Ireland.
After the Nine Years' War (1594 to 1603), political power rested in the hands of a Protestant Ascendancy minority and was marked by a Crown policy of plantation, which involved the arrival of thousands of English and Scottish Protestant settlers.and the consequent displacement of the pre-plantation Roman Catholic landholders. As the military and political defeat of Gaelic Ireland became more pronounced in the early 17th century, sectarian conflict became a recurrent theme in Irish history.
Roman Catholics and members of dissenting Protestant denominations suffered severe political and economic privations from Penal Laws. The Irish Parliament was abolished in 1801 in the wake of the republican United Irishmen Rebellion, and Ireland became an integral part of a new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the Act of Union.
The Great Famine, during the 1840s saw a significant number of people flee from the island to all over the world. Between 1841 and 1851, as a result of death and mass emigration, mainly to Great Britain and North America, Ireland's population fell by over 2 million. In Connacht alone, the population fell by almost 30%.
Robert E. Kennedy explains, however, that the common argument that the mass emigration from Ireland was a "flight from famine" is not entirely correct. Firstly, the Irish had been coming to Great Britain to build canals there since the 18th century, and as soon as conditions in Ireland improved, their emigration did not slow down. After the famine ended, the four years that followed it were marked by more emigration than the four years of the blight. Kennedy argues that the famine was considered the final straw because it convinced more people to move even though several other factors influenced their decision.
By 1900, the population of Ireland was about half of its 1840 peak, and it continued to fall during the 20th century.
In the decades that followed independence in the 1920s, emigration accelerated for economic and social reasons, and with the preferred destination switching from the United States to Great Britain, over 500,000 emigrated in the 1950s and 450,000 in the 1980s, and over 3 million Irish citizens resided outside of Ireland in 2017.
Irish people who still lived in Ireland were subjected to discrimination by Great Britain based on their religion. Evictions increased after the repeal of the British Corn Laws in 1846, the passage of the Encumbered Estates' Court in 1849 and the removal of existing civil rights and class norms. Any remaining hope for change was squashed by the 1847 death of Daniel O'Connell, the political leader who championed liberal and reform causes and emancipation for Ireland's Catholics, and the failed rising of the Young Irelanders in 1848. More was to be gained by immigrating to America from Ireland, and the 1848 discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada lured away more.
People of the Irish diaspora who were not born in Ireland but who identify as Irish are sometimes referred to disparagingly as Plastic Paddies.
Mary J. Hickman writes that "plastic Paddy" was a term used to "deny and denigrate the second-generation Irish in Britain" in the 1980s, and was "frequently articulated by the new middle class Irish immigrants in Britain, for whom it was a means of distancing themselves from established Irish communities." According to Bronwen Walter, professor of Irish diaspora studies at Anglia Ruskin University, "the adoption of a hyphenated identity has been much more problematic for the second generation Irish in Britain. The Irish-born have frequently denied the authenticity of their Irish identity."
The term has also been used to taunt non-Irish-born players who choose to play for the Republic of Ireland national football team, fans of Irish teams, who are members of supporters clubs outside Ireland, and other Irish individuals living in Great Britain. A study by the University of Strathclyde and Nil by Mouth found the term was used abusively on Celtic F.C. and Rangers F.C. supporters' internet forums in reference to Celtic supporters and the wider Roman Catholic community in Scotland. In August 2009, a Rangers F.C supporter, himself a British Asian man from Birmingham, England, received a suspended sentence after making derogatory comments to a police officer, who was of Irish origin. The prosecutor said the man had made racist remarks about the officer, including accusations that the officer was a "Plastic Paddy".
Scottish journalist Alex Massie wrote in National Review:
When I was a student in Dublin we scoffed at the American celebration of St. Patrick, finding something preposterous in the green beer, the search for any connection, no matter how tenuous, to Ireland, the misty sentiment of it all that seemed so at odds with the Ireland we knew and actually lived in. Who were these people dressed as Leprechauns and why were they dressed that way? This Hibernian Brigadoon was a sham, a mockery, a Shamrockery of real Ireland and a remarkable exhibition of plastic paddyness. But at least it was confined to the Irish abroad and those foreigners desperate to find some trace of green in their blood.
In Spiked, Brendan O'Neill, himself of Irish descent, uses the term to describe "second-generation wannabe" Irishmen and writes that some of those guilty of "Plastic Paddyism" (or, in his words, "Dermot-itis") are Bill Clinton, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Shane MacGowan. Scottish-Australian songwriter Eric Bogle wrote and recorded a song titled "Plastic Paddy". British Mixed martial arts fighter Dan Hardy has called American fighter Marcus Davis a "Plastic Paddy" due to Marcus' enthusiasm for his Irish ancestry and identity. In the book Why I Am Still a Catholic: Essays in Faith and Perseverance by Peter Stanford, the television presenter Dermot O'Leary describes his upbringing as "classic plastic paddy", where he would be "bullied in a nice way" by his own cousins in Wexford for being English "until anyone else there called me English and then they would stick up for me."
Irish migration to Great Britain has occurred since the early medieval period. The largest waves of Irish migration occurred in the 19th century, when a devastating famine broke out in Ireland, resulting in thousands of Irish immigrants settling down in Britain, primarily in the port cities of Liverpool and Glasgow. Other waves of Irish migration occurred during the 20th century, as Irish immigrants escaping poor economic conditions in Ireland following the establishment of the Irish Free State, came to Britain in response to labour shortages. These waves of migration have resulted in millions of British citizens being of Irish descent.
An article for The Guardian estimated that as many as six million people living in the United Kingdom have an Irish-born grandparent (around 10% of the British population).
The 2001 UK census states that 869,093 people born in Ireland are living in Great Britain. More than 10% of those born in the United Kingdom have at least one grandparent born in Ireland. The article "More Britons applying for Irish passports" states that 6 million Britons have either an Irish grandfather or grandmother and are thus able to apply for Irish citizenship. Almost a quarter claimed some Irish ancestry in one survey.
The Irish have traditionally been involved in the building trade and transport particularly as dockers, following an influx of Irish workers, or navvies, to build the British canal, road and rail networks in the 19th century. This is largely due to the flow of emigrants from Ireland during the Great Famine of 1845–1849. Many Irish servicemen, particularly sailors, settled in Britain: During the first half of the 19th century a third of the Army and Royal Navy were Irish. The Irish still represent a large contingent of foreign volunteers to the British military. Since the 1950s and 1960s in particular, the Irish have become assimilated into the British population. Emigration continued into the next century; over half a million Irish went to Britain in World War II to work in industry and serve in the British armed forces. In the post-war reconstruction era, the numbers of immigrants began to increase, many settling in the larger cities and towns of Britain. According to the 2001 census, around 850,000 people in Britain were born in Ireland.
The largest Irish communities in Britain are located predominantly in the cities and towns: in London, in particular Kilburn (which has one of the largest Irish-born communities outside Ireland) out to the west and north west of the city, in the large port cities such as Liverpool (which elected the first Irish nationalist members of parliament), Glasgow, Bristol, Sunderland and Portsmouth. Big industrial cities such as Salford, Manchester, Luton, Coventry, Birmingham, Sheffield, Wolverhampton, Cardiff and parts of Newcastle and Nottingham also have large diaspora populations due to the Industrial Revolution and, in the case of the first three, the strength of the motor industry in the 1960s and 1970s. The towns of Hebburn, Jarrow and Coatbridge have all earned the nickname 'Little Ireland' due to their high Irish populations.
Central to the Irish community in Britain was the community's relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, with which it maintained a strong sense of identity. The Church remains a crucial focus of communal life among some of the immigrant population and their descendants. The largest ethnic group among the Roman Catholic priesthood of Britain remains Irish (in the United States, the upper ranks of the Church's hierarchy are of predominantly Irish descent). The former head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland is Cardinal Keith O'Brien.
Scotland experienced a significant amount of Irish immigration, particularly in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Coatbridge. This led to the formation of Celtic Football Club in 1888 by Marist Brother Walfrid, to raise money to help the community. In Edinburgh Hibernian were founded in 1875 and in 1909 another club with Irish links, Dundee United, was formed. Likewise the Irish community in London formed the London Irish rugby union club. The 2001 UK census states in Scotland 50,000 people identified as having Irish heritage.
The Irish have maintained a strong political presence in the UK (mostly in Scotland), in local government and at the national level. Former prime ministers David Cameron, Tony Blair, John Major and James Callaghan have been amongst the many in Britain of part-Irish ancestry; Blair's mother, Hazel Elizabeth Rosaleen Corscaden, was born on 12 June 1923 in Ballyshannon, County Donegal. Former Chancellor George Osborne is a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and heir to the baronetcies of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon.
Moreover, the UK holds official public St. Patrick's Day celebrations. While many such celebrations were suspended in the 1970s because of The Troubles, the holiday is now widely celebrated by the UK public.
Irish links with the continent go back many centuries. During the early Middle Ages, 700–900 AD, many Irish religious figures went abroad to preach and found monasteries in what is known as the Hiberno-Scottish mission. Saint Brieuc founded the city that bears his name in Brittany, Saint Colmán founded the great monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy and one of his monks was Saint Gall for whom the Swiss town of St Gallen and canton of St Gallen are named.
During the Counter-Reformation, Irish religious and political links with Europe became stronger. An important centre of learning and training for Irish priests developed in Leuven (Lúbhan in Irish) in the Duchy of Brabant, now in Flanders (northern Belgium). The Flight of the Earls, in 1607, led much of the Gaelic nobility to flee the country, and after the wars of the 17th century many others fled to Spain, France, Austria, and other Roman Catholic lands. The lords and their retainers and supporters joined the armies of these countries, and were known as the Wild Geese. Some of the lords and their descendants rose to high ranks in their adoptive countries, such as the Spanish general and politician Leopoldo O'Donnell, 1st Duke of Tetuan, who became the president of the Government of Spain or the French general and politician Patrice de Mac-Mahon, Duke of Magenta, who became the president of the French Republic. The French Cognac brandy maker, Hennessy, was founded by Richard Hennessy, an Irish officer in the Clare Regiment of the Irish Brigade of the French Army. In Spain and its territories, many Irish descendants can be found with the name Obregón (O'Brien, Irish, Ó Briain), including Madrid-born actress Ana Victoria García Obregón.
During the 20th century, certain Irish intellectuals made their homes in continental Europe, particularly James Joyce, and later Samuel Beckett (who became a courier for the French Resistance). Eoin O'Duffy led a brigade of 700 Irish volunteers to fight for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and Frank Ryan led the Connolly column who fought on the opposite side, with the Republican International Brigades. William Joyce became an English-language propagandist for Nazi Germany, known colloquially as Lord Haw-Haw.
Some of the first Irish people to travel to the New World did so as members of the Spanish garrison in Florida during the 1560s, and small numbers of Irish colonists were involved in efforts to establish colonies in the Amazon region, in Newfoundland, and in Virginia between 1604 and the 1630s. According to historian Donald Akenson, there were "few if any" Irish being forcibly transported to the New World during this period.
The Plantation of Ulster, by the Stuart monarchy of the early 17th century, primarily in the lands gained by the Flight of the Earls, with an equal number of loyal Lowland Scots and redundant English Border reivers, caused resentment, as did their transferring of all property owned by the Roman Catholic Church to the Church of Ireland, resulting in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Following the rebellion's failure the Commonwealth regime began to pacify Ireland, through the sentencing and transporting Irish rebels (known as “tories”), Catholic priests, friars and schoolmasters, to indentured servitude in the Crown's New World colonies. This increased following the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland (1649–1653), of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1653). Cromwell took Irish land both to repay investors who had financed the invasion and as payment for his soldiers, many of whom settled down in Ireland. As a result, Irish in Leinster, and Munster, with property worth more than £10, were ordered to move to Connaught, to land valued at no more than 1/3 the value of their current holding, or be banished on pain of death. In the 17th century 50,000 Irish people are estimated to have migrated to the New World colonies, 165,000 by 1775.
The population of Ireland fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000, between 1641 and 1652, over 550,000 attributed to famine and other war-related causes.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, over 38,000 Irish immigrated to Argentina. Very distinct Irish communities and schools existed until the Perón era in the 1950s.
Today there are an estimated 500,000 people of Irish ancestry in Argentina, approximately 15.5% of the Republic of Ireland's current population; however, these numbers may be far higher, given that many Irish newcomers declared themselves to be British, as Ireland at the time was still part of the United Kingdom and today their descendants integrated into Argentine society with mixed bloodlines.
The modern Irish-Argentine community is composed of some of their descendants, and the total number is estimated at between 500,000 and 1,000,000.
Argentina is the home of the fifth largest Irish community in the world, the largest in a non-English speaking nation and the greatest in Latin America.
Despite the fact that Argentina was never the main destination for Irish emigrants it does form part of the Irish diaspora. The Irish-Argentine William Bulfin remarked as he travelled around Westmeath in the early 20th century that he came across many locals who had been to Buenos Aires. Several families from Bere island, County Cork were encouraged to send emigrants to Argentina by an islander who had been successful there in the 1880s.
Considered by some to be a national hero, William Brown is the most famous Irish citizen in Argentina. Creator of the Argentine Navy (Armada de la República Argentina, ARA) and leader of the Argentine Armed Forces in the wars against Brazil and Spain, he was born in Foxford, County Mayo on 22 June 1777 and died in Buenos Aires in 1857. The Almirante Brown-class destroyer is named after him, as well as the Almirante Brown partido, part of the Gran Buenos Aires urban area, with a population of over 500.000 inhabitants.
The first entirely Roman Catholic English language publication published in Buenos Aires, The Southern Cross is an Argentine newspaper founded on 16 January 1875 by Dean Patricio Dillon, an Irish immigrant, a deputy for Buenos Aires Province and president of the Presidential Affairs Commission amongst other positions. The newspaper continues in print to this day and publishes a beginner's guide to the Irish language, helping Irish Argentines keep in touch with their cultural heritage. Previously to The Southern Cross Dublin-born brothers Edward and Michael Mulhall successfully published The Standard, allegedly the first English-language daily paper in South America.
Between 1943 and 1946, the de facto President of Argentina was Edelmiro Farrell, whose paternal ancestry was Irish.
Bermudiana (Sisyrinchium bermudiana), the indigenous flower that is ubiquitous in Bermuda in the Spring, has now been realised to be found in one other location, Ireland, where it is restricted to sites around Lough Erne and Lough Melvin in County Fermanagh, and is known as Feilistrín gorm, or Blue-eyed grass. Early in its history, Bermuda had unusual connections with Ireland. It has been suggested that St. Brendan discovered it during his legendary voyage; a local psychiatric hospital (since renamed) was named after him. In 1616, an incident occurred in which five white settlers arrived in Ireland, having crossed the Atlantic (a distance of around 5,000 kilometres (3,100 mi)) in a two-ton boat. By the following year, one of Bermuda's main islands was named after Ireland. By the mid-17th century, Irish prisoners of war and civilian captives were involuntarily shipped to Bermuda, condemned to indentured servitude. These people had become indentured as a result of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. The Cromwellian conquest led to Irish captives, from both military and civilian backgrounds, to be sent as indentured servants to the West Indies. The Puritan Commonwealth government saw sending indentured servants from Ireland to the Caribbean as both assisting in their conquest of the island (by removing the strongest resistance against their rule) and saving the souls of the Roman Catholic Irish servants by settling them in Protestant-dominated colonies where they would supposedly inevitably convert to the "true faith".
These rapid demographic changes quickly began to alarm the dominant Anglo-Bermudian population, in particular the Irish indentured servants, most of whom were presumed to be secretly practising Catholicism (recusancy had been outlawed by the colonial government). Relationships between the Anglo-Bermudian community and Irish indentured servants consistently remained hostile, resulting in the Irish responding to ostracism by ultimately merging with the Scottish, African and Native American communities in Bermuda to form a new demographic: the coloureds, which in Bermuda meant anyone not entirely of European descent. In modern-day Bermuda, the term has been replaced by 'Black', in which wholly sub-Saharan African ancestry is erroneously implicit. The Irish quickly proved hostile to their new conditions in Bermuda, and colonial legislation soon stipulated:
that those that hath the Irish servants should take care that they straggle not night nor daie as is too common with them. If any masters or dames be remiss hereafter in watching over them, they shall be fyned according to the discretion of the Governor and counsell, and that it shall not be lawfull for any inhabitant in these Islands to buy or purchase any more of the Irish nation upon any pretence whatsoever".
In September, 1658, three Irishmen – John Chehen (Shehan, Sheehan, Sheene, or Sheen), David Laragen and Edmund Malony – were lashed for breaking curfew and being suspected of stealing a boat. Jeames Benninge (a Scottish indentured servant), black Franke (a servant to Mr John Devitt), and Tomakin, Clemento, and black Dick (servants of Mrs Anne Trimingham) were also punished.
In September 1660, Paget Parish constable John Hutchins complained that he had been abused and jostled by three Irishmen, who were sentenced to stand in church during the forenoon's exercise with signs on their chests detailing their crimes, and then held in the stocks till the evening's exercise began. The following year, in 1661, the colonial government alleged that a plot was being hatched by an alliance of Blacks and Irish, one which involved cutting the throats of all Bermudians of English descent. The governor of Bermuda, William Sayle (who had returned to Bermuda after the Bermudian colonial government acknowledged the authority of Parliament) countered the alleged plot with three edicts: The first was that a nightly watch be raised throughout the colony; second, that slaves and the Irish be disarmed of militia weapons; and third, that any gathering of two or more Irish or slaves be dispersed by whipping. There were no arrests, trials or executions connected to the plot, though an Irish woman named Margaret was found to be romantically involved with a Native American; she was voted to be stigmatised and he was whipped.
During the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries, the colony's various demographic groups boiled down to free whites and mostly enslaved "coloured" Bermudians with a homogeneous Anglo-Bermudian culture. Little survived of the Irish culture brought by indentured servants from Ireland. Catholicism was outlawed in Bermuda by the colonial authorities, and all islanders were required by law to attend services of the established Anglican church. Some surnames that were common in Bermuda at this period, however, give lingering evidence of the Irish presence. For example, the area to the east of Bailey's Bay, in Hamilton Parish, is named Callan Glen for a Scottish-born shipwright, Claude MacCallan, who settled in Bermuda after the vessel in which he was a passenger was wrecked off the North Shore in 1787. MacCallan swam to a rock from which he was rescued by a Bailey's Bay fisherman named Daniel Seon (Sheehan). A later Daniel Seon was appointed Clerk of the House of Assembly and Prothonotary of the Court of General Assize in 1889 (he was also the Registrar of the Supreme Court, and died in 1909).
In 1803, Irish poet Thomas Moore arrived in Bermuda, having been appointed registrar to the Admiralty there. Robert Kennedy, born in Cultra, County Down, was the Government of Bermuda's Colonial Secretary, and was the acting Governor of Bermuda on three occasions (1829, 1830 and 1835–1836). Irish prisoners were again sent to Bermuda in the 19th century, including participants in the ill-fated Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, nationalist journalist and politician John Mitchel, and painter and convicted murderer William Burke Kirwan. Alongside English convicts, they were used to build the Royal Naval Dockyard on Ireland Island. Conditions for the convicts were harsh, and discipline was draconian. In April, 1830, convict James Ryan was shot and killed during rioting of convicts on Ireland Island. Another five convicts were given death sentences for their parts in the riots, with those of the youngest three being commuted to transportation (to Australia) for life. In June 1849 convict James Cronin, on the hulk Medway at Ireland Island, was placed in solitary confinement from the 25th to the 29th for fighting. On release, and being returned to work, he refused to be cross-ironed. He ran onto the breakwater, brandishing a poker threateningly. For this, he was ordered to receive punishment (presumably flogging) on Tuesday, 3 July 1849, with the other convicts aboard the hulk assembled behind a rail to witness. When ordered to strip, he hesitated. Thomas Cronin, his older brother, addressed him and, while brandishing a knife, rushed forward to the separating rail. He called out to the other prisoners in Irish and many joined him in attempting to free the prisoner and attack the officers. The officers opened fire. Two men were killed and twelve wounded. Punishment of James Cronin was then carried out. Three hundred men of the 42nd Regiment of Foot, in barracks on Ireland Island, responded to the scene under arms.
Although the Roman Catholic Church (which had been banned in Bermuda, as in the rest of England, since settlement) began to operate openly in Bermuda in the 19th century, its priests were not permitted to conduct baptisms, weddings or funerals. As the most important British naval and military base in the Western Hemisphere following US independence, large numbers of Irish Roman Catholic soldiers served in the British Army's Bermuda Garrison (the Royal Navy had also benefitted from a shipload of Irish emigres wrecked on Bermuda, with most being recruited into the navy there). The first Roman Catholic services in Bermuda were conducted by British Army chaplains early in the 19th century. Mount Saint Agnes Academy, a private school operated by the Roman Catholic Church of Bermuda, opened in 1890 at the behest of officers of the 86th (Royal County Down) Regiment of Foot (which was posted to Bermuda from 1880 to 1883), who had requested from the Archbishop of Halifax, Nova Scotia, a school for the children of Irish Roman Catholic soldiers.
Not all Irish soldiers in Bermuda had happy lives there. Private Joseph McDaniel of the 30th Regiment of Foot (who was born in the East Indies to an Irish father and a Malay mother) was convicted of the murder of Mary Swears in June, 1837, after he had been found with a self-inflicted wound and her lifeless body. Although he maintained his innocence throughout the trial, after his conviction he confessed that they had made a pact to die together. Although he had succeeded in killing her, he had failed to kill himself. He was put to death on Wednesday, 29 November 1837. Private Patrick Shea of the 20th Regiment of Foot was sentenced to death in June 1846, for discharging his weapon at Sergeant John Evans. His sentence was commuted to transportation (to Australia) for life. In October, 1841, County Carlow-born Peter Doyle had also been transported to Australia for fourteen years for shooting at a picket. At his court martial he had explained that he had been drunk at the time.
Other Irish soldiers, taking discharge, made a home in Bermuda, remaining there for the rest of their lives. Dublin-born Sapper Cornelius Farrell was discharged in Bermuda from the Royal Engineers. His three Bermudian-born sons followed him into the army, fighting on the Western Front during the First World War in the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps.
Although there is little surviving evidence of Irish culture, some elderly islanders can remember when the term "cilig" (or killick) was used to describe a common method of fishing for sea turtles by tricking them into swimming into prearranged nets (this was done by splashing a stone on a line—the cilig—into the water on the turtle's opposite side). The word cilig appears to be meaningless in English, but in some dialects of Gaelic is used as an adjective meaning "easily deceived". In Irish there is a word cílí meaning sly. It is used in the expression Is é an cílí ceart é (pronounced Shayeh kilic airtay) and means What a sly-boots. Alternatively, the word may be derived from an Irish word for a stone and wood anchor. Characteristics of older Bermudian accents, such as the pronunciation of the letter 'd' as 'dj', as in Bermudjin (Bermudian), may indicate an Irish origin. Later Irish immigrants have continued to contribute to Bermuda's makeup, with names like Crockwell (Ó Creachmhaoil) and O'Connor (Ó Conchobhair) now being thought of locally as Bermudian names. The strongest remaining Irish influence can be seen in the presence of bagpipes in the music of Bermuda, which stemmed from the presence of Scottish and Irish soldiers from the 18th through 20th centuries. Several prominent businesses in Bermuda have a clear Irish influence, such as the Irish Linen Shop, Tom Moore's Tavern and Flanagan's Irish Pub and Restaurant.
A succession of Irish Masonic lodges have existed in Bermuda, beginning with Military Lodge #192, established by soldiers of the 47th Regiment of Foot, and operating in Bermuda from 1793 to 1801. This was an ambulatory or travelling lodge, as with other military lodges, moving with its members. Irish Lodges #220 (also a military travelling lodge) was active in Bermuda from 1856 to 1861, and Irish Lodge #209 was established in Bermuda in 1881. Minder Lodge #63 of the Irish Constitution was in Bermuda with the 20th Regiment of Foot from 1841 to 1847. The Hannibal Lodge #224 of the Irish Constitution was warranted in 1867, and still exists, meeting in the Masonic Hall on Old Maid's Lane, St. George's. Another Hannibal Chapter, #123 of the Irish Constitution, was chartered in 1877, but lasted only until 1911.
The first known Irish settler in Brazil was a missionary, Thomas Field, who arrived to Brazil in late 1577 and spent three years in Piratininga (present-day São Paulo). In 1612, the Irish brothers Philip and James Purcell established a colony in Tauregue, at the mouth of the Amazon river, where English, Dutch, and French settlements were also established. Many of the colonists traded in tobacco, dyes, and hardwoods. A second group of Irish settlers led by Bernardo O'Brien of County Clare arrived in 1620. The first recorded Saint Patrick's Day celebration was on 17 March 1770.
During the Cisplatine War, Brazil sent recruiters to Ireland to recruit men as soldiers for the war against Argentina. Any Irish that signed up for the Brazilian army were promised that if they enlisted they would be given a grant of land after five years of service. Approximately 2,400 men were recruited and when they arrived in Brazil (many with their families), they were completely neglected by the government. The Irish mutinied together with a German regiment, and for a few days there was open warfare on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. While most were ultimately sent home or re-emigrated to Canada or Argentina, some did stay and were sent to form a colony in the province of Bahia.
Several attempts were made by Brazil to bring in more Irish immigrants to settle in the country, however, much of the land given to the settlers was porous or in extremely remote locations. Many of the Irish settlers died or re-emigrated to other countries. At the same time, several prominent Irish figures served in diplomatic posts in Brazil for the United Kingdom (as Ireland was part of the British Empire). Irish nationalist and British diplomat Roger Casement, served as British Consul in Santos, Belém, and in Rio de Janeiro.
The 2006 census by Statcan, Canada's Official Statistical office revealed that the Irish were the 4th largest ethnic group with 4,354,155 Canadians with full or partial Irish descent or 14% of the nation's total population. During the 2016 census by Statistics Canada, the Irish ethnicity retained its spot as the 4th largest ethnic group with 4,627,000 Canadians with full or partial Irish descent.
After the permanent settlement in Newfoundland by Irish in the late 18th and early 19th century, overwhelmingly from County Waterford, increased immigration of the Irish elsewhere in Canada began in the decades following the War of 1812 and formed a significant part of The Great Migration of Canada. Between 1825 and 1845, 60% of all immigrants to Canada were Irish; in 1831 alone, some 34,000 arrived in Montreal.
Between 1830 and 1850, 624,000 Irish arrived; in contextual terms, at the end of this period, the population of the provinces of Canada was 2.4 million. Besides Upper Canada (Ontario), Lower Canada (Quebec), the Maritime colonies of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, especially Saint John, were arrival points. Not all remained; many out-migrated to the United States or to Western Canada in the decades that followed. Few returned to Ireland.
Many Newfoundlanders are of Irish descent. It is estimated that about 80% of Newfoundlanders have Irish ancestry on at least one side of their family tree. The family names, the predominant Roman Catholic religion, the prevalence of Irish music – even the accents of the people – are so reminiscent of rural Ireland that Irish author Tim Pat Coogan has described Newfoundland as "the most Irish place in the world outside Ireland". Newfoundland Irish, the dialect of the Irish language specific to the island was widely spoken until the mid-20th century. It is very similar to the language heard in the southeast of Ireland centuries ago, due to mass emigration from the counties Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, County Kerry and Cork.
Saint John, New Brunswick, claims the distinction of being Canada's most Irish city, according to census records. There have been Irish settlers in New Brunswick since at least the late 18th century, but during the peak of the Great Irish Famine (1845–1847), thousands of Irish emigrated through Partridge Island in the port of Saint John. Most of these Irish were Roman Catholic, who changed the complexion of the Loyalist city. A large, vibrant Irish community can also be found in the Miramichi region of New Brunswick.
Guysborough County, Nova Scotia has many rural Irish villages. Erinville (which means Irishville), Salmon River, Ogden, Bantry (named after Bantry Bay, County Cork, Ireland but now abandoned and grown up in trees) among others, where Irish last names are prevalent and the accent is reminiscent of the Irish as well as the music, traditions, religion (Roman Catholic), and the love of Ireland itself. Some of the Irish counties from which these people arrived were County Kerry (Dingle Peninsula), County Cork, and County Roscommon, along with others.
Quebec is also home to a large Irish community, especially in Montreal, where the Irish shamrock is featured on the municipal flag. Notably, thousands of Irish emigrants during the Famine passed through Grosse Isle near Québec City, where many succumbed to typhus. Most of the Irish who settled near Québec City are now French speakers.
Irish Catholic settlers also opened up new agricultural areas in the recently surveyed Eastern Townships, the Ottawa valley, and Gatineau and Pontiac counties. Irish from Quebec would also settle in communities such as Frampton, Saint Sylvestre, and Saint Patrick in the Beauce region of southeastern Quebec.
Ontario has over 2 million people of Irish descent, who in greater numbers arrived in the 1820s and the decades that followed to work on colonial infrastructure and to settle land tracts in Upper Canada, the result today is a countryside speckled with the place names of Ireland. Ontario received a large number of those who landed in Quebec during the Famine years, many thousands died in Ontario's ports. Irish-born became the majority in Toronto by 1851.
From the 1620s, many of the Irish Roman Catholic merchant class in this period migrated voluntarily to the West Indies to avail of the business opportunities there occasioned by the trade in sugar, tobacco and cotton. They were followed by landless Irish indentured labourers, who were recruited to serve a landowner for a specified time before receiving freedom and land. The descendants of some Irish immigrants are known today in the West Indies as redlegs. Most descendants of these Irishmen moved off the islands as African slavery was implemented and blacks began to replace whites. Many Barbadian-born Irishmen helped establish the Carolina colony in the United States.
After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland Irish prisoners were forcibly transferred to English colonies in the Americas and sold into indentured servitude, a practice that came to be known as being Barbadosed, though Barbados was not the only colony to receive Irish prisoners, with those sent to Montserrat being the best known. To this day, Montserrat is the only country or territory in the world, apart from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the Canadian province of Newfoundland to observe a public holiday on St Patrick's Day. The population is predominantly of mixed Irish and African descent.
Irish immigrants played an instrumental role in Puerto Rico's economy. One of the most important industries of the island was the sugar industry. Among the successful businessmen in this industry were Miguel Conway, who owned a plantation in the town of Hatillo and Juan Nagle whose plantation was located in Río Piedras. General Alexander O'Reilly, "Father of the Puerto Rican Militia", named Tomas O'Daly chief engineer of modernising the defences of San Juan, this included the fortress of San Cristóbal. Tomas O'Daly and Miguel Kirwan were partners in the "Hacienda San Patricio", which they named after the patron saint of Ireland, Saint Patrick. A relative of O'Daly, Demetrio O'Daly, succeeded Captain Ramon Power y Giralt as the island's delegate to the Spanish Courts. The plantation no longer exists; however, the land in which the plantation was located is now a San Patricio suburb with a shopping mall by the same name. The Quinlan family established two plantations, one in the town of Toa Baja and the other in Loíza. Puerto Ricans of Irish descent were also instrumental in the development of the island's tobacco industry. Among them Miguel Conboy who was a founder of the tobacco trade in Puerto Rico.
Other notable places in the Caribbean include:
The presence and impact of the Irish in Colombia dates back to the time of Spanish rule, when in different historical periods they migrated to the Iberian Peninsula and from there to the American continent, enlisted in the colonization, trade, army and administration companies. One episode in which this group had a special impact was the colonization of the Darien (Gulf of Urabá) in 1788. In this place 64 families and 50 single individuals from North America were established, to which were added families from the interior. Of these families, 28 were of Irish origin, which shows their numerical importance and valuation as an emerging social group within the Hispanic world.
There is no doubt that the greatest concentration and contributions to the country occurred during the emancipation campaigns. It is enough to look at the list drawn up by researcher Matthew Brown to understand their importance and impact, for out of some 6,808 Europeans, the Irish represented 48%; we are talking about more than 3,000 Irish who fought to give freedom to Colombia. These would have come enlisted in the Irish Legion, where they were famous officers like: Casey, Devereux, Egan, Ferguson, Foley, Lanagan, Rooke, Larkin, McCarthy, Murphy, O'Leary, O'Connell, O'Connor and Sanders.
Once the wars of Independence were over, a good portion of them would have remained to form part of the Colombian army. Others, on the other hand, would have abandoned military life to integrate into society as businessmen, merchants, musicians, doctors, poets, miners and settlers. The economic sector in which the Irish participated the most was mining: they formed small mining colonies in the north and south of Antioquia. In the middle of the century, the English miner Tyrell Moore, presented to the Sovereign State of Antioquia a project to colonize with 200 Irish families in the north and lower Cauca, an intention that apparently met with local disapproval and added to other logistical problems made its materialization impossible. But the largest mining colony was established in the south (currently Caldas department), in towns such as Marmato and Supía. Among the hundreds of British, French, German and Swedish miners who moved there were some Irishmen such as Eduardo MacAllister, Joseph Raphson, Nicolas Fitzgerald, Juan O'Byrne, David Davis and the Nicholls.
In addition, this immigration has been highlighted in dozens of literary and academic works, the most important of which are: Irish Blood in Antioquia (Sangre irlandesa en Antioquia), by Aquiles Echeverri, Irish descendant; The Mysters of the Mines (Los místeres de las minas), by Alvaro Gartner and The Sanctuary: Global History of a Battle (El Santuario: Historia global de una batalla), by Matthew Brown. For all of the above, it is evident that Irish immigration has not been alien to us and its presence, traces and impact also constitute an important part of our past and historical and cultural heritage.
Many of the Wild Geese, expatriate Irish soldiers who had gone to Spain, or their descendants, continued on to its colonies in South America. Many of them rose to prominent positions in the Spanish governments there. In the 1820s, some of them helped liberate the continent. Bernardo O'Higgins was the first Supreme director of Chile. When Chilean troops occupied Lima during the War of the Pacific in 1881, they put in charge certain Patricio Lynch, whose grandfather came from Ireland to Argentina and then moved to Chile. Other Latin American countries that have Irish settlement include Puerto Rico and Colombia.
The County Wexford born William Lamport, better known to most Mexicans as Guillén de Lampart, was a precursor of the Independence movement and author of the first proclamation of independence in the New World. His statue stands today in the Crypt of Heroes beneath the Column of Independence in Mexico City. Juan de O'Donojú y O'Ryan, of Irish descent, was the last Viceroy of New Spain (Mexico), died and is buried in Mexico City.
Among the most famous Irishmen in Mexican history are "Los Patricios" of Saint Patrick's Battalion. Many communities existed in Mexican Texas until the revolution there, when they sided with Roman Catholic Mexico against Protestant pro-US elements. The Batallón de San Patricio, a battalion of US troops who deserted and fought alongside the Mexican Army against the United States in the Mexican–American War of 1846–1848, is well known in Mexican history. The most well known of these was Major John Riley.
Mexico also has a large number of people of Irish ancestry, among them the actor Anthony Quinn. There are monuments in Mexico City paying tribute to those Irish who fought for Mexico in the 19th century. There is a monument to Los Patricios in the fort of Churubusco. During the Great Famine, thousands of Irish immigrants entered the country. Other Mexicans of Irish descent are: Romulo O'Farril, Juan O'Gorman, Edmundo O'Gorman and Alejo Bay (Governor of the state of Sonora).
The first Irish came to modern day America during the 1600s mostly to Virginia and mostly indentured servants. The diaspora to the United States was immortalised in the words of many songs including the Irish ballad, "The Green Fields of America":
So pack up your sea-stores, consider no longer, Ten dollars a week is not very bad pay, With no taxes or tithes to devour up your wages, When you're on the green fields of Americay.
The experience of Irish immigrants in the United States has not always been harmonious. The US did not have a good relationship with most of the incoming Irish because of their Roman Catholic faith, as the majority of the population was Protestant and had been originally formed by offshoots of the Protestant faith, many of whom were from the north of Ireland (Ulster). So it came as no surprise that the federal government issued new immigration acts, adding to previous ones which limited Eastern European immigration, ones which limited the immigration of the Irish.
Those who were successful in coming over from Ireland were for the most part already good farmers and other hard labour workers, so the jobs they were taking were plentiful in the beginning. However, as time went on and the land needed less cultivation, the jobs the new Irish immigrants were taking were those that Americans wanted as well. In most cases, Irish newcomers were sometimes uneducated and often found themselves competing with Americans for manual labour jobs or, in the 1860s, being recruited from the docks by the US Army to serve in the American Civil War and afterward to build the Union Pacific Railroad. This view of the Irish-American experience is depicted by another traditional song, "Paddy's Lamentation."
Hear me boys, now take my advice, To America I'll have ye's not be going, There is nothing here but war, where the murderin' cannons roar, And I wish I was at home in dear old Ireland.
The classic image of an Irish immigrant is led to a certain extent by racist and anti-Catholic stereotypes. In modern times, in the United States, the Irish are largely perceived as hard workers. Most notably they are associated with the positions of police officer, firefighter, Roman Catholic Church leaders and politicians in the larger Eastern Seaboard metropolitan areas. Irish Americans number over 35 million, making them the second largest reported ethnic group in the country, after German Americans. Historically, large Irish American communities have been found in Philadelphia; Chicago; Boston; New York City; New York; Detroit; New England; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Pittsburgh; Cleveland; St. Paul, Minnesota; Buffalo; Broome County; Butte; Dubuque; Quincy; Dublin; Hartford; New Haven; Waterbury; Providence; Kansas City; New Orleans; Braintree; Weymouth; Norfolk; Nashville; Scranton; Wilkes-Barre; O'Fallon; Tampa; Hazleton; Worcester; Lowell; Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Bay Area. Many cities across the country have annual St Patrick's Day parades; The nation's largest is in New York City—one of the world's largest parades. The parade in Boston is closely associated with Evacuation Day, when the British left Boston in 1776 during the American War of Independence.
Before the Great Hunger, in which over a million died and more emigrated, there had been the Penal Laws which had already resulted in significant emigration from Ireland.
According to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, in 1790 there were 400,000 Americans of Irish birth or ancestry out of a total white population of 3,100,000. Half of these Irish Americans were descended from Ulster people, and half were descended from the people of Connacht, Leinster and Munster.
According to US census figures from 2000, 41,000,000 Americans claim to be wholly or partly of Irish ancestry, a group that represents more than one in five white Americans. Many African Americans are part of the Irish diaspora, as they are descended from Irish or Scots-Irish slave owners and overseers who arrived in America during the colonial era. The US Census Bureau's data from 2016 reveals that Irish ancestry is one of the most common reported ancestries reported (in the top 3 most common ancestries reported). Even though Irish immigration is extremely small relative to the scope of current migration, Irish ancestry is one of the most common ancestries in the United States because of the events that took place over a century ago.
The enduring nature of Irish-American identity is exemplified by the widespread celebration of St.Patrick's Day, the national day of Ireland, across the United States. The traditional St. Patrick's Day parade having developed, in its modern form, in the United States itself. The largest such parade in the world is the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade which features in the region of 150,000 participants and 2,000,000 spectators annually, with thousands of parades of all sizes across the United States.
Irishmen have been known in India right from the days of the East India Company, which was founded in 1600. While most of the early Irish came as traders, some also came as soldiers. However, the majority of these traders and soldiers were from the Protestant Ascendancy. Prominent among them were the generals Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) who became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1834 and his brother Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley (1760–1842), who was Governor-General of India (1798–1805). Later in the Victorian period, many thinkers, philosophers and Irish nationalists from the Roman Catholic majority too made it to India, prominent among the nationalists being the theosophist Annie Besant.
It is widely believed that there existed a secret alliance between the Irish and Indian independence movements. Some Indian intellectuals like Jawaharlal Nehru and V. V. Giri were certainly inspired by Irish nationalists when they studied in the United Kingdom. The Indian revolutionary group known as the Bengal Volunteers took this name in emulation of the Irish Volunteers.
2,087,800 Australians, 10.4% of the population, self-reported some Irish ancestry in the 2011 census, second only to English and Australian. The Australian government estimates the total figure may be around 7 million (30%).
In the 2006 census 50,255 Australian residents declared they were born in the Republic of Ireland and a further 21,291 declared to have been born in Northern Ireland. This gives Australia the third largest Irish-born population outside of Ireland (after Britain and America).
Between the 1790s and 1920s, approximately 400,000 Irish settlers – both voluntary and forced – are thought to have arrived in Australia. They first came over in large numbers as convicts, with around 50,000 transported between 1791 and 1867. Even larger numbers of free settlers came during the 19th century due to famine, the Donegal Relief Fund, the discovery of gold in Victoria and New South Wales, and the increasing "pull" of a pre-existing Irish community. By 1871, Irish immigrants accounted for one quarter of Australia's overseas-born population.
Irish Catholic immigrants – who made up about 75% of the total Irish population – were largely responsible for the establishment of a separate Catholic school system. About 20% of Australian children attend Catholic schools as of 2017.
It has also been argued that the Irish language was the source of a significant number of words in Australian English.
Irish communities can be found in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, and Johannesburg, with smaller communities in Pretoria, Barberton, Durban and East London. A third of the Cape's governors were Irish, as were many of the judges and politicians. Both the Cape Colony and the Colony of Natal had Irish prime ministers: Sir Thomas Upington, "The Afrikaner from Cork"; and Sir Albert Hime, from Kilcoole in County Wicklow. Irish Cape Governors included Lord Macartney, Lord Caledon and Sir John Francis Cradock. Henry Nourse, a shipowner at the Cape, brought out a small party of Irish settlers in 1818. Many Irish were with the 1820 British settlers in the Eastern Cape frontier with the Xhosa. In 1823, John Ingram brought out 146 Irish from Cork. Single Irish women were sent to the Cape on a few occasions. Twenty arrived in November 1849 and 46 arrived in March 1851. The majority arrived in November 1857 aboard Lady Kennaway. A large contingent of Irish troops fought in the Anglo-Boer War on both sides and a few of them stayed in South Africa after the war. Others returned home but later came out to settle in South Africa with their families. Between 1902 and 1905, there were about 5,000 Irish immigrants. Places in South Africa named after Irish people include Upington, Porterville, Caledon, Cradock, Sir Lowry's Pass, the Biggarsberg Mountains, Donnybrook, Himeville and Belfast.
James Rorke was of Irish parentage and was the founder of Rorkes's drift.
The diaspora population of Ireland also got a fresh start on the islands of New Zealand during the 19th century. The possibility of striking it rich in the gold mines caused many Irish people to flock to the docks; risking their lives on the long voyage to potential freedom and more importantly self-sufficiency, many Irish also came with the British army during the New Zealand wars. Several places, including Gabriel's Gully and Otago, were mining sites which, with the funding of large companies, allowed for the creation of wages and the appearance of mining towns. Women found jobs as housemaids cleaning the shacks of the single men at work thereby providing a second income to the Irish family household. The subsequent money accumulated with regards to this would allow for chain migration for the rest of the family left behind.
The transition to New Zealand was made easier due to the overexposure that the Irish had previously had with colonialism. They ventured upwards to the British ports, settling temporarily to accumulate the necessary finances before moving onwards towards the banks of the far away island. In doing so, they not only exposed themselves to the form of British form of government but likewise to capitalism. This aided to further the simplicity of the transition for the dispersed population.
The government aided through the use of both promissory notes and land grants. By promising to pay for the passage of a family the government ensured that the island would be populated and a British colony would be formed. Free passage was installed for women first between the ages of 15 and 35, while males between the ages of 18 and 40 years of age would be promised a certain number of acres of land upon arrival in the New World. This was attributed to the installment of the New Zealand Land act. To further aid with the financial burden, free passage to any immigrant was granted after 1874.
The Irish diaspora population in New Zealand also resulted in a diminished amount of prejudice against Roman Catholicism compared to that in other British colonies. The lack of embedded hierarchy and social structure allowed for previous sectarian tensions to be dissolved. This can also be attributed to the sheer amount of distance between the respective religions due to the sparseness of the unpopulated area and the sheer size of the islands.
Paul Cardinal Cullen set out to spread Irish dominance over the English-speaking Roman Catholic Church in the 19th century. The establishment of an 'Irish Episcopal Empire' involved three transnational entities – the British Empire, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Irish diaspora. Irish clergy, notably Cullen, made particular use of the reach of the British Empire to spread their influence. From the 1830s until his death in 1878, Cullen held several key positions near the top of the Irish hierarchy and influenced Rome's appointment of Irish bishops on four continents.
Walker (2007) compares Irish immigrant communities in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Great Britain respecting issues of identity and 'Irishness.' Religion remained the major cause of differentiation in all Irish diaspora communities and had the greatest impact on identity, followed by the nature and difficulty of socio-economic conditions faced in each new country and the strength of continued social and political links of Irish immigrants and their descendants with Ireland.
In the United States specifically, Irish immigrants were persecuted because of their religion. The Know Nothing Movement sprung up during the time of the Irish's arrival. The Know Nothing Party was formed by Protestants and was the first political party in American history to push against Catholic immigration to the United States, particularly targeting Irish and German immigrants. The Know Nothings fought to limit immigration from traditional Catholic countries, prohibit non-English language speaking on US territory, and create a policy where you must spend 21 years in the US before gaining citizenship. The party faded out of existence relatively quickly, but they are a reminder of the persecution Irish immigrants faced. During the third and fourth waves of immigration, new arrivals faced similar discrimination and the now settled Irish would take part in this persecution of other groups.
From the late 20th century onward, Irish identity abroad became increasingly cultural, non-denominational, and non-political, although many emigrants from Northern Ireland stood apart from this trend. However, Ireland as religious reference point is now increasingly significant in neopagan contexts.
This listing is for politicians of Irish nationality or origin, who were or are engaged in the politics of a foreign country. The term Irish diaspora is open to many interpretations. One, preferred by the government of Ireland, is defined in legal terms: the Irish diaspora are those of Irish nationality, mostly but not exclusively Roman Catholic, residing outside of the island of Ireland. This includes Irish citizens who have emigrated abroad and their children, who were Irish citizens by descent under Irish law. It also includes their grandchildren in cases. See also Irish military diaspora. (See also Notable Americans of Scotch-Irish descent). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Irish diaspora (Irish: Diaspóra na nGael) refers to ethnic Irish people and their descendants who live outside the island of Ireland.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The phenomenon of migration from Ireland is recorded since the Early Middle Ages, but it can be quantified only from around 1700. Since then, between 9 and 10 million people born in Ireland have emigrated. That is more than the population of Ireland itself, which at its historical peak was 8.5 million on the eve of the Great Famine. The poorest of them went to Great Britain, especially Liverpool. Those who could afford it went further, including almost 5 million to the United States.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "After 1765, emigration from Ireland became a short, relentless and efficiently managed national enterprise. In 1890, 40% of Irish-born people were living abroad. By the 21st century, an estimated 80 million people worldwide claimed some Irish descent, which includes more than 36 million Americans claiming Irish as their primary ethnicity.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As recently as the second half of the 19th century, most Irish emigrants spoke Irish as their first language. That had social and cultural consequences for the cultivation of the language abroad, including innovations in journalism. The language continues to be cultivated abroad by a small minority as a literary and social medium. The Irish diaspora are largely assimilated in most countries outside Ireland after World War I. Seán Fleming is the Republic of Ireland's Minister of State for the Diaspora.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The term Irish diaspora is open to many interpretations. The diaspora, broadly interpreted, contains all those known to have Irish ancestors, i.e., over 100 million people, which is more than fifteen times the population of the island of Ireland, which was about 6.4 million in 2011. It has been argued the idea of an Irish diaspora, as distinct from the old identification of Irishness with Ireland itself, was influenced by the perceived advent of global mobility and modernity. Irishness could now be identified with dispersed individuals and groups of Irish descent. But many of those individuals were the product of complex ethnic intermarriage in America and elsewhere, complicating the idea of a single line of descent. \"Irishness\" might then rely primarily on individual identification with an Irish diaspora.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Government of Ireland defines the Irish diaspora as all persons of Irish nationality who habitually reside outside of the island of Ireland. This includes Irish citizens who have emigrated abroad and their children, who are Irish citizens by descent under Irish law. It also includes their grandchildren in cases where they were registered as Irish citizens in the Foreign Births Register held in every Irish diplomatic mission. Under this legal definition, the Irish diaspora is considerably smaller—some 3 million persons, of whom 1.47 million are Irish-born emigrants. Given the island of Ireland's estimated population of 6.8 million in 2018, this is still a large ratio.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "However, the usage of Irish diaspora is generally not limited by citizenship status, thus leading to an estimated (and fluctuating) membership of up to 80 million persons—the second and more emotive definition. The Irish Government acknowledged this interpretation—although it did not acknowledge any legal obligations to persons in this larger diaspora—when Article 2 of the Constitution of Ireland was amended in 1998 to read \"[f]urthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage.\"",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "There are people of Irish descent abroad (including Irish speakers) who reject inclusion in an Irish \"diaspora\" and who designate their identity in other ways. They may see the diasporic label as something used by the Irish government for its own purposes.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Irish, who were called by the Romans Scotti but called themselves Gaels, had raided and settled along the West Coast of Roman Britain, and numbers of them were allowed to settle within the province, where the Roman Army recruited many Irish into auxiliary units that were dispatched to the German frontier. The Attacotti, who were similarly recruited into the Roman army, may also have been Irish settlers in Britain. The movement between Ireland and the classical Britain may have been two-way as similarities between the medieval accounts of Túathal Teachtmar and archaeological evidence indicate that the Romans may have supported the invasion and conquest of Ireland by Irish exiles from Britain with the hope of establishing a friendly ruler who could halt the raiding of Britain by the Irish, and some historians have also suggested that the Cruthin of the north of Ireland may have been Picts. After the departure of the Roman army, the Irish began increasing their footholds in Britain, with part of the north-West of the island annexed within the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata. In time, the Irish colonies became independent, merged with the Pictish kingdom and formed the basis of modern Scotland.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The traditionally Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland (the Highlands and Hebrides) are still referred to in the Gaelic language as a' Ghàidhealtachd (\"the Gaeldom\"). Irish monks and the Celtic Church engineered a wave of Irish emigration to Great Britain and Continental Europe and were possibly the first inhabitants of the Faroe Islands and Iceland. Throughout the Early Middle Ages, Great Britain and Continental Europe experienced Irish immigration of varying intensity, mostly from clerics and scholars who are collectively known as peregrini. Irish emigration to Western Europe, especially to Great Britain, has continued at a greater or lesser pace since then. Today, the ethnic Irish are the single largest minority group in both England and Scotland, most of whom eventually made it back to Ireland.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The dispersal of the Irish has been mainly to Britain or to countries colonised by Britain. England's political connection with Ireland began in 1155, when Pope Adrian IV issued a papal bull (known as Laudabiliter), which gave Henry II permission to invade Ireland as a means of strengthening the papacy's control over the Irish Church. That was followed in 1169 by the Norman invasion of Ireland, which was led by the general Richard de Clare, or Strongbow.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The English Crown did not attempt to assert full control of the island until after Henry VIII's repudiation of papal authority over the Church in England, and the subsequent rebellion of the Earl of Kildare in Ireland in 1534 threatened English hegemony there. Until the break with Rome, it was widely believed that Ireland was a papal possession, which was granted as a mere fiefdom to the English king and so in 1541, Henry VIII asserted England's claim to Ireland free from the papal overlordship by proclaiming himself King of Ireland.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "After the Nine Years' War (1594 to 1603), political power rested in the hands of a Protestant Ascendancy minority and was marked by a Crown policy of plantation, which involved the arrival of thousands of English and Scottish Protestant settlers.and the consequent displacement of the pre-plantation Roman Catholic landholders. As the military and political defeat of Gaelic Ireland became more pronounced in the early 17th century, sectarian conflict became a recurrent theme in Irish history.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Roman Catholics and members of dissenting Protestant denominations suffered severe political and economic privations from Penal Laws. The Irish Parliament was abolished in 1801 in the wake of the republican United Irishmen Rebellion, and Ireland became an integral part of a new United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the Act of Union.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Great Famine, during the 1840s saw a significant number of people flee from the island to all over the world. Between 1841 and 1851, as a result of death and mass emigration, mainly to Great Britain and North America, Ireland's population fell by over 2 million. In Connacht alone, the population fell by almost 30%.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Robert E. Kennedy explains, however, that the common argument that the mass emigration from Ireland was a \"flight from famine\" is not entirely correct. Firstly, the Irish had been coming to Great Britain to build canals there since the 18th century, and as soon as conditions in Ireland improved, their emigration did not slow down. After the famine ended, the four years that followed it were marked by more emigration than the four years of the blight. Kennedy argues that the famine was considered the final straw because it convinced more people to move even though several other factors influenced their decision.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "By 1900, the population of Ireland was about half of its 1840 peak, and it continued to fall during the 20th century.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In the decades that followed independence in the 1920s, emigration accelerated for economic and social reasons, and with the preferred destination switching from the United States to Great Britain, over 500,000 emigrated in the 1950s and 450,000 in the 1980s, and over 3 million Irish citizens resided outside of Ireland in 2017.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Irish people who still lived in Ireland were subjected to discrimination by Great Britain based on their religion. Evictions increased after the repeal of the British Corn Laws in 1846, the passage of the Encumbered Estates' Court in 1849 and the removal of existing civil rights and class norms. Any remaining hope for change was squashed by the 1847 death of Daniel O'Connell, the political leader who championed liberal and reform causes and emancipation for Ireland's Catholics, and the failed rising of the Young Irelanders in 1848. More was to be gained by immigrating to America from Ireland, and the 1848 discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada lured away more.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "People of the Irish diaspora who were not born in Ireland but who identify as Irish are sometimes referred to disparagingly as Plastic Paddies.",
"title": "Genealogy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Mary J. Hickman writes that \"plastic Paddy\" was a term used to \"deny and denigrate the second-generation Irish in Britain\" in the 1980s, and was \"frequently articulated by the new middle class Irish immigrants in Britain, for whom it was a means of distancing themselves from established Irish communities.\" According to Bronwen Walter, professor of Irish diaspora studies at Anglia Ruskin University, \"the adoption of a hyphenated identity has been much more problematic for the second generation Irish in Britain. The Irish-born have frequently denied the authenticity of their Irish identity.\"",
"title": "Genealogy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The term has also been used to taunt non-Irish-born players who choose to play for the Republic of Ireland national football team, fans of Irish teams, who are members of supporters clubs outside Ireland, and other Irish individuals living in Great Britain. A study by the University of Strathclyde and Nil by Mouth found the term was used abusively on Celtic F.C. and Rangers F.C. supporters' internet forums in reference to Celtic supporters and the wider Roman Catholic community in Scotland. In August 2009, a Rangers F.C supporter, himself a British Asian man from Birmingham, England, received a suspended sentence after making derogatory comments to a police officer, who was of Irish origin. The prosecutor said the man had made racist remarks about the officer, including accusations that the officer was a \"Plastic Paddy\".",
"title": "Genealogy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Scottish journalist Alex Massie wrote in National Review:",
"title": "Genealogy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "When I was a student in Dublin we scoffed at the American celebration of St. Patrick, finding something preposterous in the green beer, the search for any connection, no matter how tenuous, to Ireland, the misty sentiment of it all that seemed so at odds with the Ireland we knew and actually lived in. Who were these people dressed as Leprechauns and why were they dressed that way? This Hibernian Brigadoon was a sham, a mockery, a Shamrockery of real Ireland and a remarkable exhibition of plastic paddyness. But at least it was confined to the Irish abroad and those foreigners desperate to find some trace of green in their blood.",
"title": "Genealogy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In Spiked, Brendan O'Neill, himself of Irish descent, uses the term to describe \"second-generation wannabe\" Irishmen and writes that some of those guilty of \"Plastic Paddyism\" (or, in his words, \"Dermot-itis\") are Bill Clinton, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Shane MacGowan. Scottish-Australian songwriter Eric Bogle wrote and recorded a song titled \"Plastic Paddy\". British Mixed martial arts fighter Dan Hardy has called American fighter Marcus Davis a \"Plastic Paddy\" due to Marcus' enthusiasm for his Irish ancestry and identity. In the book Why I Am Still a Catholic: Essays in Faith and Perseverance by Peter Stanford, the television presenter Dermot O'Leary describes his upbringing as \"classic plastic paddy\", where he would be \"bullied in a nice way\" by his own cousins in Wexford for being English \"until anyone else there called me English and then they would stick up for me.\"",
"title": "Genealogy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Irish migration to Great Britain has occurred since the early medieval period. The largest waves of Irish migration occurred in the 19th century, when a devastating famine broke out in Ireland, resulting in thousands of Irish immigrants settling down in Britain, primarily in the port cities of Liverpool and Glasgow. Other waves of Irish migration occurred during the 20th century, as Irish immigrants escaping poor economic conditions in Ireland following the establishment of the Irish Free State, came to Britain in response to labour shortages. These waves of migration have resulted in millions of British citizens being of Irish descent.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "An article for The Guardian estimated that as many as six million people living in the United Kingdom have an Irish-born grandparent (around 10% of the British population).",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The 2001 UK census states that 869,093 people born in Ireland are living in Great Britain. More than 10% of those born in the United Kingdom have at least one grandparent born in Ireland. The article \"More Britons applying for Irish passports\" states that 6 million Britons have either an Irish grandfather or grandmother and are thus able to apply for Irish citizenship. Almost a quarter claimed some Irish ancestry in one survey.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Irish have traditionally been involved in the building trade and transport particularly as dockers, following an influx of Irish workers, or navvies, to build the British canal, road and rail networks in the 19th century. This is largely due to the flow of emigrants from Ireland during the Great Famine of 1845–1849. Many Irish servicemen, particularly sailors, settled in Britain: During the first half of the 19th century a third of the Army and Royal Navy were Irish. The Irish still represent a large contingent of foreign volunteers to the British military. Since the 1950s and 1960s in particular, the Irish have become assimilated into the British population. Emigration continued into the next century; over half a million Irish went to Britain in World War II to work in industry and serve in the British armed forces. In the post-war reconstruction era, the numbers of immigrants began to increase, many settling in the larger cities and towns of Britain. According to the 2001 census, around 850,000 people in Britain were born in Ireland.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The largest Irish communities in Britain are located predominantly in the cities and towns: in London, in particular Kilburn (which has one of the largest Irish-born communities outside Ireland) out to the west and north west of the city, in the large port cities such as Liverpool (which elected the first Irish nationalist members of parliament), Glasgow, Bristol, Sunderland and Portsmouth. Big industrial cities such as Salford, Manchester, Luton, Coventry, Birmingham, Sheffield, Wolverhampton, Cardiff and parts of Newcastle and Nottingham also have large diaspora populations due to the Industrial Revolution and, in the case of the first three, the strength of the motor industry in the 1960s and 1970s. The towns of Hebburn, Jarrow and Coatbridge have all earned the nickname 'Little Ireland' due to their high Irish populations.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Central to the Irish community in Britain was the community's relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, with which it maintained a strong sense of identity. The Church remains a crucial focus of communal life among some of the immigrant population and their descendants. The largest ethnic group among the Roman Catholic priesthood of Britain remains Irish (in the United States, the upper ranks of the Church's hierarchy are of predominantly Irish descent). The former head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland is Cardinal Keith O'Brien.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Scotland experienced a significant amount of Irish immigration, particularly in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Coatbridge. This led to the formation of Celtic Football Club in 1888 by Marist Brother Walfrid, to raise money to help the community. In Edinburgh Hibernian were founded in 1875 and in 1909 another club with Irish links, Dundee United, was formed. Likewise the Irish community in London formed the London Irish rugby union club. The 2001 UK census states in Scotland 50,000 people identified as having Irish heritage.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The Irish have maintained a strong political presence in the UK (mostly in Scotland), in local government and at the national level. Former prime ministers David Cameron, Tony Blair, John Major and James Callaghan have been amongst the many in Britain of part-Irish ancestry; Blair's mother, Hazel Elizabeth Rosaleen Corscaden, was born on 12 June 1923 in Ballyshannon, County Donegal. Former Chancellor George Osborne is a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and heir to the baronetcies of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Moreover, the UK holds official public St. Patrick's Day celebrations. While many such celebrations were suspended in the 1970s because of The Troubles, the holiday is now widely celebrated by the UK public.",
"title": "United Kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Irish links with the continent go back many centuries. During the early Middle Ages, 700–900 AD, many Irish religious figures went abroad to preach and found monasteries in what is known as the Hiberno-Scottish mission. Saint Brieuc founded the city that bears his name in Brittany, Saint Colmán founded the great monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy and one of his monks was Saint Gall for whom the Swiss town of St Gallen and canton of St Gallen are named.",
"title": "The rest of Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "During the Counter-Reformation, Irish religious and political links with Europe became stronger. An important centre of learning and training for Irish priests developed in Leuven (Lúbhan in Irish) in the Duchy of Brabant, now in Flanders (northern Belgium). The Flight of the Earls, in 1607, led much of the Gaelic nobility to flee the country, and after the wars of the 17th century many others fled to Spain, France, Austria, and other Roman Catholic lands. The lords and their retainers and supporters joined the armies of these countries, and were known as the Wild Geese. Some of the lords and their descendants rose to high ranks in their adoptive countries, such as the Spanish general and politician Leopoldo O'Donnell, 1st Duke of Tetuan, who became the president of the Government of Spain or the French general and politician Patrice de Mac-Mahon, Duke of Magenta, who became the president of the French Republic. The French Cognac brandy maker, Hennessy, was founded by Richard Hennessy, an Irish officer in the Clare Regiment of the Irish Brigade of the French Army. In Spain and its territories, many Irish descendants can be found with the name Obregón (O'Brien, Irish, Ó Briain), including Madrid-born actress Ana Victoria García Obregón.",
"title": "The rest of Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "During the 20th century, certain Irish intellectuals made their homes in continental Europe, particularly James Joyce, and later Samuel Beckett (who became a courier for the French Resistance). Eoin O'Duffy led a brigade of 700 Irish volunteers to fight for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and Frank Ryan led the Connolly column who fought on the opposite side, with the Republican International Brigades. William Joyce became an English-language propagandist for Nazi Germany, known colloquially as Lord Haw-Haw.",
"title": "The rest of Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Some of the first Irish people to travel to the New World did so as members of the Spanish garrison in Florida during the 1560s, and small numbers of Irish colonists were involved in efforts to establish colonies in the Amazon region, in Newfoundland, and in Virginia between 1604 and the 1630s. According to historian Donald Akenson, there were \"few if any\" Irish being forcibly transported to the New World during this period.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The Plantation of Ulster, by the Stuart monarchy of the early 17th century, primarily in the lands gained by the Flight of the Earls, with an equal number of loyal Lowland Scots and redundant English Border reivers, caused resentment, as did their transferring of all property owned by the Roman Catholic Church to the Church of Ireland, resulting in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Following the rebellion's failure the Commonwealth regime began to pacify Ireland, through the sentencing and transporting Irish rebels (known as “tories”), Catholic priests, friars and schoolmasters, to indentured servitude in the Crown's New World colonies. This increased following the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland (1649–1653), of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1653). Cromwell took Irish land both to repay investors who had financed the invasion and as payment for his soldiers, many of whom settled down in Ireland. As a result, Irish in Leinster, and Munster, with property worth more than £10, were ordered to move to Connaught, to land valued at no more than 1/3 the value of their current holding, or be banished on pain of death. In the 17th century 50,000 Irish people are estimated to have migrated to the New World colonies, 165,000 by 1775.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The population of Ireland fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000, between 1641 and 1652, over 550,000 attributed to famine and other war-related causes.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In the 19th and early 20th centuries, over 38,000 Irish immigrated to Argentina. Very distinct Irish communities and schools existed until the Perón era in the 1950s.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Today there are an estimated 500,000 people of Irish ancestry in Argentina, approximately 15.5% of the Republic of Ireland's current population; however, these numbers may be far higher, given that many Irish newcomers declared themselves to be British, as Ireland at the time was still part of the United Kingdom and today their descendants integrated into Argentine society with mixed bloodlines.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The modern Irish-Argentine community is composed of some of their descendants, and the total number is estimated at between 500,000 and 1,000,000.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Argentina is the home of the fifth largest Irish community in the world, the largest in a non-English speaking nation and the greatest in Latin America.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Despite the fact that Argentina was never the main destination for Irish emigrants it does form part of the Irish diaspora. The Irish-Argentine William Bulfin remarked as he travelled around Westmeath in the early 20th century that he came across many locals who had been to Buenos Aires. Several families from Bere island, County Cork were encouraged to send emigrants to Argentina by an islander who had been successful there in the 1880s.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Considered by some to be a national hero, William Brown is the most famous Irish citizen in Argentina. Creator of the Argentine Navy (Armada de la República Argentina, ARA) and leader of the Argentine Armed Forces in the wars against Brazil and Spain, he was born in Foxford, County Mayo on 22 June 1777 and died in Buenos Aires in 1857. The Almirante Brown-class destroyer is named after him, as well as the Almirante Brown partido, part of the Gran Buenos Aires urban area, with a population of over 500.000 inhabitants.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The first entirely Roman Catholic English language publication published in Buenos Aires, The Southern Cross is an Argentine newspaper founded on 16 January 1875 by Dean Patricio Dillon, an Irish immigrant, a deputy for Buenos Aires Province and president of the Presidential Affairs Commission amongst other positions. The newspaper continues in print to this day and publishes a beginner's guide to the Irish language, helping Irish Argentines keep in touch with their cultural heritage. Previously to The Southern Cross Dublin-born brothers Edward and Michael Mulhall successfully published The Standard, allegedly the first English-language daily paper in South America.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Between 1943 and 1946, the de facto President of Argentina was Edelmiro Farrell, whose paternal ancestry was Irish.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Bermudiana (Sisyrinchium bermudiana), the indigenous flower that is ubiquitous in Bermuda in the Spring, has now been realised to be found in one other location, Ireland, where it is restricted to sites around Lough Erne and Lough Melvin in County Fermanagh, and is known as Feilistrín gorm, or Blue-eyed grass. Early in its history, Bermuda had unusual connections with Ireland. It has been suggested that St. Brendan discovered it during his legendary voyage; a local psychiatric hospital (since renamed) was named after him. In 1616, an incident occurred in which five white settlers arrived in Ireland, having crossed the Atlantic (a distance of around 5,000 kilometres (3,100 mi)) in a two-ton boat. By the following year, one of Bermuda's main islands was named after Ireland. By the mid-17th century, Irish prisoners of war and civilian captives were involuntarily shipped to Bermuda, condemned to indentured servitude. These people had become indentured as a result of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. The Cromwellian conquest led to Irish captives, from both military and civilian backgrounds, to be sent as indentured servants to the West Indies. The Puritan Commonwealth government saw sending indentured servants from Ireland to the Caribbean as both assisting in their conquest of the island (by removing the strongest resistance against their rule) and saving the souls of the Roman Catholic Irish servants by settling them in Protestant-dominated colonies where they would supposedly inevitably convert to the \"true faith\".",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "These rapid demographic changes quickly began to alarm the dominant Anglo-Bermudian population, in particular the Irish indentured servants, most of whom were presumed to be secretly practising Catholicism (recusancy had been outlawed by the colonial government). Relationships between the Anglo-Bermudian community and Irish indentured servants consistently remained hostile, resulting in the Irish responding to ostracism by ultimately merging with the Scottish, African and Native American communities in Bermuda to form a new demographic: the coloureds, which in Bermuda meant anyone not entirely of European descent. In modern-day Bermuda, the term has been replaced by 'Black', in which wholly sub-Saharan African ancestry is erroneously implicit. The Irish quickly proved hostile to their new conditions in Bermuda, and colonial legislation soon stipulated:",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "that those that hath the Irish servants should take care that they straggle not night nor daie as is too common with them. If any masters or dames be remiss hereafter in watching over them, they shall be fyned according to the discretion of the Governor and counsell, and that it shall not be lawfull for any inhabitant in these Islands to buy or purchase any more of the Irish nation upon any pretence whatsoever\".",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In September, 1658, three Irishmen – John Chehen (Shehan, Sheehan, Sheene, or Sheen), David Laragen and Edmund Malony – were lashed for breaking curfew and being suspected of stealing a boat. Jeames Benninge (a Scottish indentured servant), black Franke (a servant to Mr John Devitt), and Tomakin, Clemento, and black Dick (servants of Mrs Anne Trimingham) were also punished.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In September 1660, Paget Parish constable John Hutchins complained that he had been abused and jostled by three Irishmen, who were sentenced to stand in church during the forenoon's exercise with signs on their chests detailing their crimes, and then held in the stocks till the evening's exercise began. The following year, in 1661, the colonial government alleged that a plot was being hatched by an alliance of Blacks and Irish, one which involved cutting the throats of all Bermudians of English descent. The governor of Bermuda, William Sayle (who had returned to Bermuda after the Bermudian colonial government acknowledged the authority of Parliament) countered the alleged plot with three edicts: The first was that a nightly watch be raised throughout the colony; second, that slaves and the Irish be disarmed of militia weapons; and third, that any gathering of two or more Irish or slaves be dispersed by whipping. There were no arrests, trials or executions connected to the plot, though an Irish woman named Margaret was found to be romantically involved with a Native American; she was voted to be stigmatised and he was whipped.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "During the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries, the colony's various demographic groups boiled down to free whites and mostly enslaved \"coloured\" Bermudians with a homogeneous Anglo-Bermudian culture. Little survived of the Irish culture brought by indentured servants from Ireland. Catholicism was outlawed in Bermuda by the colonial authorities, and all islanders were required by law to attend services of the established Anglican church. Some surnames that were common in Bermuda at this period, however, give lingering evidence of the Irish presence. For example, the area to the east of Bailey's Bay, in Hamilton Parish, is named Callan Glen for a Scottish-born shipwright, Claude MacCallan, who settled in Bermuda after the vessel in which he was a passenger was wrecked off the North Shore in 1787. MacCallan swam to a rock from which he was rescued by a Bailey's Bay fisherman named Daniel Seon (Sheehan). A later Daniel Seon was appointed Clerk of the House of Assembly and Prothonotary of the Court of General Assize in 1889 (he was also the Registrar of the Supreme Court, and died in 1909).",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In 1803, Irish poet Thomas Moore arrived in Bermuda, having been appointed registrar to the Admiralty there. Robert Kennedy, born in Cultra, County Down, was the Government of Bermuda's Colonial Secretary, and was the acting Governor of Bermuda on three occasions (1829, 1830 and 1835–1836). Irish prisoners were again sent to Bermuda in the 19th century, including participants in the ill-fated Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, nationalist journalist and politician John Mitchel, and painter and convicted murderer William Burke Kirwan. Alongside English convicts, they were used to build the Royal Naval Dockyard on Ireland Island. Conditions for the convicts were harsh, and discipline was draconian. In April, 1830, convict James Ryan was shot and killed during rioting of convicts on Ireland Island. Another five convicts were given death sentences for their parts in the riots, with those of the youngest three being commuted to transportation (to Australia) for life. In June 1849 convict James Cronin, on the hulk Medway at Ireland Island, was placed in solitary confinement from the 25th to the 29th for fighting. On release, and being returned to work, he refused to be cross-ironed. He ran onto the breakwater, brandishing a poker threateningly. For this, he was ordered to receive punishment (presumably flogging) on Tuesday, 3 July 1849, with the other convicts aboard the hulk assembled behind a rail to witness. When ordered to strip, he hesitated. Thomas Cronin, his older brother, addressed him and, while brandishing a knife, rushed forward to the separating rail. He called out to the other prisoners in Irish and many joined him in attempting to free the prisoner and attack the officers. The officers opened fire. Two men were killed and twelve wounded. Punishment of James Cronin was then carried out. Three hundred men of the 42nd Regiment of Foot, in barracks on Ireland Island, responded to the scene under arms.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Although the Roman Catholic Church (which had been banned in Bermuda, as in the rest of England, since settlement) began to operate openly in Bermuda in the 19th century, its priests were not permitted to conduct baptisms, weddings or funerals. As the most important British naval and military base in the Western Hemisphere following US independence, large numbers of Irish Roman Catholic soldiers served in the British Army's Bermuda Garrison (the Royal Navy had also benefitted from a shipload of Irish emigres wrecked on Bermuda, with most being recruited into the navy there). The first Roman Catholic services in Bermuda were conducted by British Army chaplains early in the 19th century. Mount Saint Agnes Academy, a private school operated by the Roman Catholic Church of Bermuda, opened in 1890 at the behest of officers of the 86th (Royal County Down) Regiment of Foot (which was posted to Bermuda from 1880 to 1883), who had requested from the Archbishop of Halifax, Nova Scotia, a school for the children of Irish Roman Catholic soldiers.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Not all Irish soldiers in Bermuda had happy lives there. Private Joseph McDaniel of the 30th Regiment of Foot (who was born in the East Indies to an Irish father and a Malay mother) was convicted of the murder of Mary Swears in June, 1837, after he had been found with a self-inflicted wound and her lifeless body. Although he maintained his innocence throughout the trial, after his conviction he confessed that they had made a pact to die together. Although he had succeeded in killing her, he had failed to kill himself. He was put to death on Wednesday, 29 November 1837. Private Patrick Shea of the 20th Regiment of Foot was sentenced to death in June 1846, for discharging his weapon at Sergeant John Evans. His sentence was commuted to transportation (to Australia) for life. In October, 1841, County Carlow-born Peter Doyle had also been transported to Australia for fourteen years for shooting at a picket. At his court martial he had explained that he had been drunk at the time.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Other Irish soldiers, taking discharge, made a home in Bermuda, remaining there for the rest of their lives. Dublin-born Sapper Cornelius Farrell was discharged in Bermuda from the Royal Engineers. His three Bermudian-born sons followed him into the army, fighting on the Western Front during the First World War in the Bermuda Volunteer Rifle Corps.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Although there is little surviving evidence of Irish culture, some elderly islanders can remember when the term \"cilig\" (or killick) was used to describe a common method of fishing for sea turtles by tricking them into swimming into prearranged nets (this was done by splashing a stone on a line—the cilig—into the water on the turtle's opposite side). The word cilig appears to be meaningless in English, but in some dialects of Gaelic is used as an adjective meaning \"easily deceived\". In Irish there is a word cílí meaning sly. It is used in the expression Is é an cílí ceart é (pronounced Shayeh kilic airtay) and means What a sly-boots. Alternatively, the word may be derived from an Irish word for a stone and wood anchor. Characteristics of older Bermudian accents, such as the pronunciation of the letter 'd' as 'dj', as in Bermudjin (Bermudian), may indicate an Irish origin. Later Irish immigrants have continued to contribute to Bermuda's makeup, with names like Crockwell (Ó Creachmhaoil) and O'Connor (Ó Conchobhair) now being thought of locally as Bermudian names. The strongest remaining Irish influence can be seen in the presence of bagpipes in the music of Bermuda, which stemmed from the presence of Scottish and Irish soldiers from the 18th through 20th centuries. Several prominent businesses in Bermuda have a clear Irish influence, such as the Irish Linen Shop, Tom Moore's Tavern and Flanagan's Irish Pub and Restaurant.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "A succession of Irish Masonic lodges have existed in Bermuda, beginning with Military Lodge #192, established by soldiers of the 47th Regiment of Foot, and operating in Bermuda from 1793 to 1801. This was an ambulatory or travelling lodge, as with other military lodges, moving with its members. Irish Lodges #220 (also a military travelling lodge) was active in Bermuda from 1856 to 1861, and Irish Lodge #209 was established in Bermuda in 1881. Minder Lodge #63 of the Irish Constitution was in Bermuda with the 20th Regiment of Foot from 1841 to 1847. The Hannibal Lodge #224 of the Irish Constitution was warranted in 1867, and still exists, meeting in the Masonic Hall on Old Maid's Lane, St. George's. Another Hannibal Chapter, #123 of the Irish Constitution, was chartered in 1877, but lasted only until 1911.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The first known Irish settler in Brazil was a missionary, Thomas Field, who arrived to Brazil in late 1577 and spent three years in Piratininga (present-day São Paulo). In 1612, the Irish brothers Philip and James Purcell established a colony in Tauregue, at the mouth of the Amazon river, where English, Dutch, and French settlements were also established. Many of the colonists traded in tobacco, dyes, and hardwoods. A second group of Irish settlers led by Bernardo O'Brien of County Clare arrived in 1620. The first recorded Saint Patrick's Day celebration was on 17 March 1770.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "During the Cisplatine War, Brazil sent recruiters to Ireland to recruit men as soldiers for the war against Argentina. Any Irish that signed up for the Brazilian army were promised that if they enlisted they would be given a grant of land after five years of service. Approximately 2,400 men were recruited and when they arrived in Brazil (many with their families), they were completely neglected by the government. The Irish mutinied together with a German regiment, and for a few days there was open warfare on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. While most were ultimately sent home or re-emigrated to Canada or Argentina, some did stay and were sent to form a colony in the province of Bahia.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Several attempts were made by Brazil to bring in more Irish immigrants to settle in the country, however, much of the land given to the settlers was porous or in extremely remote locations. Many of the Irish settlers died or re-emigrated to other countries. At the same time, several prominent Irish figures served in diplomatic posts in Brazil for the United Kingdom (as Ireland was part of the British Empire). Irish nationalist and British diplomat Roger Casement, served as British Consul in Santos, Belém, and in Rio de Janeiro.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The 2006 census by Statcan, Canada's Official Statistical office revealed that the Irish were the 4th largest ethnic group with 4,354,155 Canadians with full or partial Irish descent or 14% of the nation's total population. During the 2016 census by Statistics Canada, the Irish ethnicity retained its spot as the 4th largest ethnic group with 4,627,000 Canadians with full or partial Irish descent.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "After the permanent settlement in Newfoundland by Irish in the late 18th and early 19th century, overwhelmingly from County Waterford, increased immigration of the Irish elsewhere in Canada began in the decades following the War of 1812 and formed a significant part of The Great Migration of Canada. Between 1825 and 1845, 60% of all immigrants to Canada were Irish; in 1831 alone, some 34,000 arrived in Montreal.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Between 1830 and 1850, 624,000 Irish arrived; in contextual terms, at the end of this period, the population of the provinces of Canada was 2.4 million. Besides Upper Canada (Ontario), Lower Canada (Quebec), the Maritime colonies of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, especially Saint John, were arrival points. Not all remained; many out-migrated to the United States or to Western Canada in the decades that followed. Few returned to Ireland.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Many Newfoundlanders are of Irish descent. It is estimated that about 80% of Newfoundlanders have Irish ancestry on at least one side of their family tree. The family names, the predominant Roman Catholic religion, the prevalence of Irish music – even the accents of the people – are so reminiscent of rural Ireland that Irish author Tim Pat Coogan has described Newfoundland as \"the most Irish place in the world outside Ireland\". Newfoundland Irish, the dialect of the Irish language specific to the island was widely spoken until the mid-20th century. It is very similar to the language heard in the southeast of Ireland centuries ago, due to mass emigration from the counties Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford, County Kerry and Cork.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Saint John, New Brunswick, claims the distinction of being Canada's most Irish city, according to census records. There have been Irish settlers in New Brunswick since at least the late 18th century, but during the peak of the Great Irish Famine (1845–1847), thousands of Irish emigrated through Partridge Island in the port of Saint John. Most of these Irish were Roman Catholic, who changed the complexion of the Loyalist city. A large, vibrant Irish community can also be found in the Miramichi region of New Brunswick.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Guysborough County, Nova Scotia has many rural Irish villages. Erinville (which means Irishville), Salmon River, Ogden, Bantry (named after Bantry Bay, County Cork, Ireland but now abandoned and grown up in trees) among others, where Irish last names are prevalent and the accent is reminiscent of the Irish as well as the music, traditions, religion (Roman Catholic), and the love of Ireland itself. Some of the Irish counties from which these people arrived were County Kerry (Dingle Peninsula), County Cork, and County Roscommon, along with others.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Quebec is also home to a large Irish community, especially in Montreal, where the Irish shamrock is featured on the municipal flag. Notably, thousands of Irish emigrants during the Famine passed through Grosse Isle near Québec City, where many succumbed to typhus. Most of the Irish who settled near Québec City are now French speakers.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Irish Catholic settlers also opened up new agricultural areas in the recently surveyed Eastern Townships, the Ottawa valley, and Gatineau and Pontiac counties. Irish from Quebec would also settle in communities such as Frampton, Saint Sylvestre, and Saint Patrick in the Beauce region of southeastern Quebec.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Ontario has over 2 million people of Irish descent, who in greater numbers arrived in the 1820s and the decades that followed to work on colonial infrastructure and to settle land tracts in Upper Canada, the result today is a countryside speckled with the place names of Ireland. Ontario received a large number of those who landed in Quebec during the Famine years, many thousands died in Ontario's ports. Irish-born became the majority in Toronto by 1851.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "From the 1620s, many of the Irish Roman Catholic merchant class in this period migrated voluntarily to the West Indies to avail of the business opportunities there occasioned by the trade in sugar, tobacco and cotton. They were followed by landless Irish indentured labourers, who were recruited to serve a landowner for a specified time before receiving freedom and land. The descendants of some Irish immigrants are known today in the West Indies as redlegs. Most descendants of these Irishmen moved off the islands as African slavery was implemented and blacks began to replace whites. Many Barbadian-born Irishmen helped establish the Carolina colony in the United States.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland Irish prisoners were forcibly transferred to English colonies in the Americas and sold into indentured servitude, a practice that came to be known as being Barbadosed, though Barbados was not the only colony to receive Irish prisoners, with those sent to Montserrat being the best known. To this day, Montserrat is the only country or territory in the world, apart from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the Canadian province of Newfoundland to observe a public holiday on St Patrick's Day. The population is predominantly of mixed Irish and African descent.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Irish immigrants played an instrumental role in Puerto Rico's economy. One of the most important industries of the island was the sugar industry. Among the successful businessmen in this industry were Miguel Conway, who owned a plantation in the town of Hatillo and Juan Nagle whose plantation was located in Río Piedras. General Alexander O'Reilly, \"Father of the Puerto Rican Militia\", named Tomas O'Daly chief engineer of modernising the defences of San Juan, this included the fortress of San Cristóbal. Tomas O'Daly and Miguel Kirwan were partners in the \"Hacienda San Patricio\", which they named after the patron saint of Ireland, Saint Patrick. A relative of O'Daly, Demetrio O'Daly, succeeded Captain Ramon Power y Giralt as the island's delegate to the Spanish Courts. The plantation no longer exists; however, the land in which the plantation was located is now a San Patricio suburb with a shopping mall by the same name. The Quinlan family established two plantations, one in the town of Toa Baja and the other in Loíza. Puerto Ricans of Irish descent were also instrumental in the development of the island's tobacco industry. Among them Miguel Conboy who was a founder of the tobacco trade in Puerto Rico.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Other notable places in the Caribbean include:",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The presence and impact of the Irish in Colombia dates back to the time of Spanish rule, when in different historical periods they migrated to the Iberian Peninsula and from there to the American continent, enlisted in the colonization, trade, army and administration companies. One episode in which this group had a special impact was the colonization of the Darien (Gulf of Urabá) in 1788. In this place 64 families and 50 single individuals from North America were established, to which were added families from the interior. Of these families, 28 were of Irish origin, which shows their numerical importance and valuation as an emerging social group within the Hispanic world.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "There is no doubt that the greatest concentration and contributions to the country occurred during the emancipation campaigns. It is enough to look at the list drawn up by researcher Matthew Brown to understand their importance and impact, for out of some 6,808 Europeans, the Irish represented 48%; we are talking about more than 3,000 Irish who fought to give freedom to Colombia. These would have come enlisted in the Irish Legion, where they were famous officers like: Casey, Devereux, Egan, Ferguson, Foley, Lanagan, Rooke, Larkin, McCarthy, Murphy, O'Leary, O'Connell, O'Connor and Sanders.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Once the wars of Independence were over, a good portion of them would have remained to form part of the Colombian army. Others, on the other hand, would have abandoned military life to integrate into society as businessmen, merchants, musicians, doctors, poets, miners and settlers. The economic sector in which the Irish participated the most was mining: they formed small mining colonies in the north and south of Antioquia. In the middle of the century, the English miner Tyrell Moore, presented to the Sovereign State of Antioquia a project to colonize with 200 Irish families in the north and lower Cauca, an intention that apparently met with local disapproval and added to other logistical problems made its materialization impossible. But the largest mining colony was established in the south (currently Caldas department), in towns such as Marmato and Supía. Among the hundreds of British, French, German and Swedish miners who moved there were some Irishmen such as Eduardo MacAllister, Joseph Raphson, Nicolas Fitzgerald, Juan O'Byrne, David Davis and the Nicholls.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In addition, this immigration has been highlighted in dozens of literary and academic works, the most important of which are: Irish Blood in Antioquia (Sangre irlandesa en Antioquia), by Aquiles Echeverri, Irish descendant; The Mysters of the Mines (Los místeres de las minas), by Alvaro Gartner and The Sanctuary: Global History of a Battle (El Santuario: Historia global de una batalla), by Matthew Brown. For all of the above, it is evident that Irish immigration has not been alien to us and its presence, traces and impact also constitute an important part of our past and historical and cultural heritage.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Many of the Wild Geese, expatriate Irish soldiers who had gone to Spain, or their descendants, continued on to its colonies in South America. Many of them rose to prominent positions in the Spanish governments there. In the 1820s, some of them helped liberate the continent. Bernardo O'Higgins was the first Supreme director of Chile. When Chilean troops occupied Lima during the War of the Pacific in 1881, they put in charge certain Patricio Lynch, whose grandfather came from Ireland to Argentina and then moved to Chile. Other Latin American countries that have Irish settlement include Puerto Rico and Colombia.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The County Wexford born William Lamport, better known to most Mexicans as Guillén de Lampart, was a precursor of the Independence movement and author of the first proclamation of independence in the New World. His statue stands today in the Crypt of Heroes beneath the Column of Independence in Mexico City. Juan de O'Donojú y O'Ryan, of Irish descent, was the last Viceroy of New Spain (Mexico), died and is buried in Mexico City.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Among the most famous Irishmen in Mexican history are \"Los Patricios\" of Saint Patrick's Battalion. Many communities existed in Mexican Texas until the revolution there, when they sided with Roman Catholic Mexico against Protestant pro-US elements. The Batallón de San Patricio, a battalion of US troops who deserted and fought alongside the Mexican Army against the United States in the Mexican–American War of 1846–1848, is well known in Mexican history. The most well known of these was Major John Riley.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Mexico also has a large number of people of Irish ancestry, among them the actor Anthony Quinn. There are monuments in Mexico City paying tribute to those Irish who fought for Mexico in the 19th century. There is a monument to Los Patricios in the fort of Churubusco. During the Great Famine, thousands of Irish immigrants entered the country. Other Mexicans of Irish descent are: Romulo O'Farril, Juan O'Gorman, Edmundo O'Gorman and Alejo Bay (Governor of the state of Sonora).",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "The first Irish came to modern day America during the 1600s mostly to Virginia and mostly indentured servants. The diaspora to the United States was immortalised in the words of many songs including the Irish ballad, \"The Green Fields of America\":",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "So pack up your sea-stores, consider no longer, Ten dollars a week is not very bad pay, With no taxes or tithes to devour up your wages, When you're on the green fields of Americay.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The experience of Irish immigrants in the United States has not always been harmonious. The US did not have a good relationship with most of the incoming Irish because of their Roman Catholic faith, as the majority of the population was Protestant and had been originally formed by offshoots of the Protestant faith, many of whom were from the north of Ireland (Ulster). So it came as no surprise that the federal government issued new immigration acts, adding to previous ones which limited Eastern European immigration, ones which limited the immigration of the Irish.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Those who were successful in coming over from Ireland were for the most part already good farmers and other hard labour workers, so the jobs they were taking were plentiful in the beginning. However, as time went on and the land needed less cultivation, the jobs the new Irish immigrants were taking were those that Americans wanted as well. In most cases, Irish newcomers were sometimes uneducated and often found themselves competing with Americans for manual labour jobs or, in the 1860s, being recruited from the docks by the US Army to serve in the American Civil War and afterward to build the Union Pacific Railroad. This view of the Irish-American experience is depicted by another traditional song, \"Paddy's Lamentation.\"",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Hear me boys, now take my advice, To America I'll have ye's not be going, There is nothing here but war, where the murderin' cannons roar, And I wish I was at home in dear old Ireland.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The classic image of an Irish immigrant is led to a certain extent by racist and anti-Catholic stereotypes. In modern times, in the United States, the Irish are largely perceived as hard workers. Most notably they are associated with the positions of police officer, firefighter, Roman Catholic Church leaders and politicians in the larger Eastern Seaboard metropolitan areas. Irish Americans number over 35 million, making them the second largest reported ethnic group in the country, after German Americans. Historically, large Irish American communities have been found in Philadelphia; Chicago; Boston; New York City; New York; Detroit; New England; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Pittsburgh; Cleveland; St. Paul, Minnesota; Buffalo; Broome County; Butte; Dubuque; Quincy; Dublin; Hartford; New Haven; Waterbury; Providence; Kansas City; New Orleans; Braintree; Weymouth; Norfolk; Nashville; Scranton; Wilkes-Barre; O'Fallon; Tampa; Hazleton; Worcester; Lowell; Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Bay Area. Many cities across the country have annual St Patrick's Day parades; The nation's largest is in New York City—one of the world's largest parades. The parade in Boston is closely associated with Evacuation Day, when the British left Boston in 1776 during the American War of Independence.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Before the Great Hunger, in which over a million died and more emigrated, there had been the Penal Laws which had already resulted in significant emigration from Ireland.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "According to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, in 1790 there were 400,000 Americans of Irish birth or ancestry out of a total white population of 3,100,000. Half of these Irish Americans were descended from Ulster people, and half were descended from the people of Connacht, Leinster and Munster.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "According to US census figures from 2000, 41,000,000 Americans claim to be wholly or partly of Irish ancestry, a group that represents more than one in five white Americans. Many African Americans are part of the Irish diaspora, as they are descended from Irish or Scots-Irish slave owners and overseers who arrived in America during the colonial era. The US Census Bureau's data from 2016 reveals that Irish ancestry is one of the most common reported ancestries reported (in the top 3 most common ancestries reported). Even though Irish immigration is extremely small relative to the scope of current migration, Irish ancestry is one of the most common ancestries in the United States because of the events that took place over a century ago.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The enduring nature of Irish-American identity is exemplified by the widespread celebration of St.Patrick's Day, the national day of Ireland, across the United States. The traditional St. Patrick's Day parade having developed, in its modern form, in the United States itself. The largest such parade in the world is the New York City St. Patrick's Day Parade which features in the region of 150,000 participants and 2,000,000 spectators annually, with thousands of parades of all sizes across the United States.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Irishmen have been known in India right from the days of the East India Company, which was founded in 1600. While most of the early Irish came as traders, some also came as soldiers. However, the majority of these traders and soldiers were from the Protestant Ascendancy. Prominent among them were the generals Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) who became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1834 and his brother Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley (1760–1842), who was Governor-General of India (1798–1805). Later in the Victorian period, many thinkers, philosophers and Irish nationalists from the Roman Catholic majority too made it to India, prominent among the nationalists being the theosophist Annie Besant.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "It is widely believed that there existed a secret alliance between the Irish and Indian independence movements. Some Indian intellectuals like Jawaharlal Nehru and V. V. Giri were certainly inspired by Irish nationalists when they studied in the United Kingdom. The Indian revolutionary group known as the Bengal Volunteers took this name in emulation of the Irish Volunteers.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "2,087,800 Australians, 10.4% of the population, self-reported some Irish ancestry in the 2011 census, second only to English and Australian. The Australian government estimates the total figure may be around 7 million (30%).",
"title": "Australia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "In the 2006 census 50,255 Australian residents declared they were born in the Republic of Ireland and a further 21,291 declared to have been born in Northern Ireland. This gives Australia the third largest Irish-born population outside of Ireland (after Britain and America).",
"title": "Australia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Between the 1790s and 1920s, approximately 400,000 Irish settlers – both voluntary and forced – are thought to have arrived in Australia. They first came over in large numbers as convicts, with around 50,000 transported between 1791 and 1867. Even larger numbers of free settlers came during the 19th century due to famine, the Donegal Relief Fund, the discovery of gold in Victoria and New South Wales, and the increasing \"pull\" of a pre-existing Irish community. By 1871, Irish immigrants accounted for one quarter of Australia's overseas-born population.",
"title": "Australia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Irish Catholic immigrants – who made up about 75% of the total Irish population – were largely responsible for the establishment of a separate Catholic school system. About 20% of Australian children attend Catholic schools as of 2017.",
"title": "Australia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "It has also been argued that the Irish language was the source of a significant number of words in Australian English.",
"title": "Australia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Irish communities can be found in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, and Johannesburg, with smaller communities in Pretoria, Barberton, Durban and East London. A third of the Cape's governors were Irish, as were many of the judges and politicians. Both the Cape Colony and the Colony of Natal had Irish prime ministers: Sir Thomas Upington, \"The Afrikaner from Cork\"; and Sir Albert Hime, from Kilcoole in County Wicklow. Irish Cape Governors included Lord Macartney, Lord Caledon and Sir John Francis Cradock. Henry Nourse, a shipowner at the Cape, brought out a small party of Irish settlers in 1818. Many Irish were with the 1820 British settlers in the Eastern Cape frontier with the Xhosa. In 1823, John Ingram brought out 146 Irish from Cork. Single Irish women were sent to the Cape on a few occasions. Twenty arrived in November 1849 and 46 arrived in March 1851. The majority arrived in November 1857 aboard Lady Kennaway. A large contingent of Irish troops fought in the Anglo-Boer War on both sides and a few of them stayed in South Africa after the war. Others returned home but later came out to settle in South Africa with their families. Between 1902 and 1905, there were about 5,000 Irish immigrants. Places in South Africa named after Irish people include Upington, Porterville, Caledon, Cradock, Sir Lowry's Pass, the Biggarsberg Mountains, Donnybrook, Himeville and Belfast.",
"title": "South Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "James Rorke was of Irish parentage and was the founder of Rorkes's drift.",
"title": "South Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "The diaspora population of Ireland also got a fresh start on the islands of New Zealand during the 19th century. The possibility of striking it rich in the gold mines caused many Irish people to flock to the docks; risking their lives on the long voyage to potential freedom and more importantly self-sufficiency, many Irish also came with the British army during the New Zealand wars. Several places, including Gabriel's Gully and Otago, were mining sites which, with the funding of large companies, allowed for the creation of wages and the appearance of mining towns. Women found jobs as housemaids cleaning the shacks of the single men at work thereby providing a second income to the Irish family household. The subsequent money accumulated with regards to this would allow for chain migration for the rest of the family left behind.",
"title": "New Zealand"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "The transition to New Zealand was made easier due to the overexposure that the Irish had previously had with colonialism. They ventured upwards to the British ports, settling temporarily to accumulate the necessary finances before moving onwards towards the banks of the far away island. In doing so, they not only exposed themselves to the form of British form of government but likewise to capitalism. This aided to further the simplicity of the transition for the dispersed population.",
"title": "New Zealand"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "The government aided through the use of both promissory notes and land grants. By promising to pay for the passage of a family the government ensured that the island would be populated and a British colony would be formed. Free passage was installed for women first between the ages of 15 and 35, while males between the ages of 18 and 40 years of age would be promised a certain number of acres of land upon arrival in the New World. This was attributed to the installment of the New Zealand Land act. To further aid with the financial burden, free passage to any immigrant was granted after 1874.",
"title": "New Zealand"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "The Irish diaspora population in New Zealand also resulted in a diminished amount of prejudice against Roman Catholicism compared to that in other British colonies. The lack of embedded hierarchy and social structure allowed for previous sectarian tensions to be dissolved. This can also be attributed to the sheer amount of distance between the respective religions due to the sparseness of the unpopulated area and the sheer size of the islands.",
"title": "New Zealand"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Paul Cardinal Cullen set out to spread Irish dominance over the English-speaking Roman Catholic Church in the 19th century. The establishment of an 'Irish Episcopal Empire' involved three transnational entities – the British Empire, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Irish diaspora. Irish clergy, notably Cullen, made particular use of the reach of the British Empire to spread their influence. From the 1830s until his death in 1878, Cullen held several key positions near the top of the Irish hierarchy and influenced Rome's appointment of Irish bishops on four continents.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Walker (2007) compares Irish immigrant communities in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Great Britain respecting issues of identity and 'Irishness.' Religion remained the major cause of differentiation in all Irish diaspora communities and had the greatest impact on identity, followed by the nature and difficulty of socio-economic conditions faced in each new country and the strength of continued social and political links of Irish immigrants and their descendants with Ireland.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "In the United States specifically, Irish immigrants were persecuted because of their religion. The Know Nothing Movement sprung up during the time of the Irish's arrival. The Know Nothing Party was formed by Protestants and was the first political party in American history to push against Catholic immigration to the United States, particularly targeting Irish and German immigrants. The Know Nothings fought to limit immigration from traditional Catholic countries, prohibit non-English language speaking on US territory, and create a policy where you must spend 21 years in the US before gaining citizenship. The party faded out of existence relatively quickly, but they are a reminder of the persecution Irish immigrants faced. During the third and fourth waves of immigration, new arrivals faced similar discrimination and the now settled Irish would take part in this persecution of other groups.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "From the late 20th century onward, Irish identity abroad became increasingly cultural, non-denominational, and non-political, although many emigrants from Northern Ireland stood apart from this trend. However, Ireland as religious reference point is now increasingly significant in neopagan contexts.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "This listing is for politicians of Irish nationality or origin, who were or are engaged in the politics of a foreign country. The term Irish diaspora is open to many interpretations. One, preferred by the government of Ireland, is defined in legal terms: the Irish diaspora are those of Irish nationality, mostly but not exclusively Roman Catholic, residing outside of the island of Ireland. This includes Irish citizens who have emigrated abroad and their children, who were Irish citizens by descent under Irish law. It also includes their grandchildren in cases. See also Irish military diaspora. (See also Notable Americans of Scotch-Irish descent).",
"title": "Famous members of the diaspora"
}
]
| The Irish diaspora refers to ethnic Irish people and their descendants who live outside the island of Ireland. The phenomenon of migration from Ireland is recorded since the Early Middle Ages, but it can be quantified only from around 1700. Since then, between 9 and 10 million people born in Ireland have emigrated. That is more than the population of Ireland itself, which at its historical peak was 8.5 million on the eve of the Great Famine. The poorest of them went to Great Britain, especially Liverpool. Those who could afford it went further, including almost 5 million to the United States. After 1765, emigration from Ireland became a short, relentless and efficiently managed national enterprise. In 1890, 40% of Irish-born people were living abroad. By the 21st century, an estimated 80 million people worldwide claimed some Irish descent, which includes more than 36 million Americans claiming Irish as their primary ethnicity. As recently as the second half of the 19th century, most Irish emigrants spoke Irish as their first language. That had social and cultural consequences for the cultivation of the language abroad, including innovations in journalism. The language continues to be cultivated abroad by a small minority as a literary and social medium. The Irish diaspora are largely assimilated in most countries outside Ireland after World War I. Seán Fleming is the Republic of Ireland's Minister of State for the Diaspora. | 2001-03-14T22:58:20Z | 2023-12-14T02:07:00Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_diaspora |
14,563 | Integer | An integer is the number zero (0), a positive natural number (1, 2, 3, etc.) or a negative integer with a minus sign (−1, −2, −3, etc.). The negative numbers are the additive inverses of the corresponding positive numbers. In the language of mathematics, the set of integers is often denoted by the boldface Z or blackboard bold Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } .
The set of natural numbers N {\displaystyle \mathbb {N} } is a subset of Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } , which in turn is a subset of the set of all rational numbers Q {\displaystyle \mathbb {Q} } , itself a subset of the real numbers R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } . Like the natural numbers, Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is countably infinite. An integer may be regarded as a real number that can be written without a fractional component. For example, 21, 4, 0, and −2048 are integers, while 9.75, 5+1/2, and √2 are not.
The integers form the smallest group and the smallest ring containing the natural numbers. In algebraic number theory, the integers are sometimes qualified as rational integers to distinguish them from the more general algebraic integers. In fact, (rational) integers are algebraic integers that are also rational numbers.
The word integer comes from the Latin integer meaning "whole" or (literally) "untouched", from in ("not") plus tangere ("to touch"). "Entire" derives from the same origin via the French word entier, which means both entire and integer. Historically the term was used for a number that was a multiple of 1, or to the whole part of a mixed number. Only positive integers were considered, making the term synonymous with the natural numbers. The definition of integer expanded over time to include negative numbers as their usefulness was recognized. For example Leonhard Euler in his 1765 Elements of Algebra defined integers to include both positive and negative numbers. However, European mathematicians, for the most part, resisted the concept of negative numbers until the middle of the 19th century.
The use of the letter Z to denote the set of integers comes from the German word Zahlen ("numbers") and has been attributed to David Hilbert. The earliest known use of the notation in a textbook occurs in Algébre written by the collective Nicolas Bourbaki, dating to 1947. The notation was not adopted immediately, for example another textbook used the letter J and a 1960 paper used Z to denote the non-negative integers. But by 1961, Z was generally used by modern algebra texts to denote the positive and negative integers.
The symbol Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is often annotated to denote various sets, with varying usage amongst different authors: Z + {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{+}} , Z + {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} _{+}} or Z > {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{>}} for the positive integers, Z 0 + {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{0+}} or Z ≥ {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{\geq }} for non-negative integers, and Z ≠ {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{\neq }} for non-zero integers. Some authors use Z ∗ {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} ^{*}} for non-zero integers, while others use it for non-negative integers, or for {–1, 1} (the group of units of Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } ). Additionally, Z p {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} _{p}} is used to denote either the set of integers modulo p (i.e., the set of congruence classes of integers), or the set of p-adic integers.
The whole numbers were synonymous with the integers up until the early 1950s. In the late 1950s, as part of the New Math movement, American elementary school teachers began teaching that "whole numbers" referred to the natural numbers, excluding negative numbers, while "integer" included the negative numbers. "Whole number" remains ambiguous to the present day.
Like the natural numbers, Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is closed under the operations of addition and multiplication, that is, the sum and product of any two integers is an integer. However, with the inclusion of the negative natural numbers (and importantly, 0), Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } , unlike the natural numbers, is also closed under subtraction.
The integers form a unital ring which is the most basic one, in the following sense: for any unital ring, there is a unique ring homomorphism from the integers into this ring. This universal property, namely to be an initial object in the category of rings, characterizes the ring Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } .
Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is not closed under division, since the quotient of two integers (e.g., 1 divided by 2) need not be an integer. Although the natural numbers are closed under exponentiation, the integers are not (since the result can be a fraction when the exponent is negative).
The following table lists some of the basic properties of addition and multiplication for any integers a, b and c:
The first five properties listed above for addition say that Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } , under addition, is an abelian group. It is also a cyclic group, since every non-zero integer can be written as a finite sum 1 + 1 + ... + 1 or (−1) + (−1) + ... + (−1). In fact, Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } under addition is the only infinite cyclic group—in the sense that any infinite cyclic group is isomorphic to Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } .
The first four properties listed above for multiplication say that Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } under multiplication is a commutative monoid. However, not every integer has a multiplicative inverse (as is the case of the number 2), which means that Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } under multiplication is not a group.
All the rules from the above property table (except for the last), when taken together, say that Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } together with addition and multiplication is a commutative ring with unity. It is the prototype of all objects of such algebraic structure. Only those equalities of expressions are true in Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } for all values of variables, which are true in any unital commutative ring. Certain non-zero integers map to zero in certain rings.
The lack of zero divisors in the integers (last property in the table) means that the commutative ring Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is an integral domain.
The lack of multiplicative inverses, which is equivalent to the fact that Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is not closed under division, means that Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is not a field. The smallest field containing the integers as a subring is the field of rational numbers. The process of constructing the rationals from the integers can be mimicked to form the field of fractions of any integral domain. And back, starting from an algebraic number field (an extension of rational numbers), its ring of integers can be extracted, which includes Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } as its subring.
Although ordinary division is not defined on Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } , the division "with remainder" is defined on them. It is called Euclidean division, and possesses the following important property: given two integers a and b with b ≠ 0, there exist unique integers q and r such that a = q × b + r and 0 ≤ r < |b|, where |b| denotes the absolute value of b. The integer q is called the quotient and r is called the remainder of the division of a by b. The Euclidean algorithm for computing greatest common divisors works by a sequence of Euclidean divisions.
The above says that Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is a Euclidean domain. This implies that Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is a principal ideal domain, and any positive integer can be written as the products of primes in an essentially unique way. This is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic.
Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is a totally ordered set without upper or lower bound. The ordering of Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } is given by: :... −3 < −2 < −1 < 0 < 1 < 2 < 3 < ... An integer is positive if it is greater than zero, and negative if it is less than zero. Zero is defined as neither negative nor positive.
The ordering of integers is compatible with the algebraic operations in the following way:
Thus it follows that Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } together with the above ordering is an ordered ring.
The integers are the only nontrivial totally ordered abelian group whose positive elements are well-ordered. This is equivalent to the statement that any Noetherian valuation ring is either a field—or a discrete valuation ring.
In elementary school teaching, integers are often intuitively defined as the union of the (positive) natural numbers, zero, and the negations of the natural numbers. This can be formalized as follows. First construct the set of natural numbers according to the Peano axioms, call this P {\displaystyle P} . Then construct a set P − {\displaystyle P^{-}} which is disjoint from P {\displaystyle P} and in one-to-one correspondence with P {\displaystyle P} via a function ψ {\displaystyle \psi } . For example, take P − {\displaystyle P^{-}} to be the ordered pairs ( 1 , n ) {\displaystyle (1,n)} with the mapping ψ = n ↦ ( 1 , n ) {\displaystyle \psi =n\mapsto (1,n)} . Finally let 0 be some object not in P {\displaystyle P} or P − {\displaystyle P^{-}} , for example the ordered pair ( 0 , 0 ) {\displaystyle (0,0)} . Then the integers are defined to be the union P ∪ P − ∪ { 0 } {\displaystyle P\cup P^{-}\cup \{0\}} .
The traditional arithmetic operations can then be defined on the integers in a piecewise fashion, for each of positive numbers, negative numbers, and zero. For example negation is defined as follows:
The traditional style of definition leads to many different cases (each arithmetic operation needs to be defined on each combination of types of integer) and makes it tedious to prove that integers obey the various laws of arithmetic.
In modern set-theoretic mathematics, a more abstract construction allowing one to define arithmetical operations without any case distinction is often used instead. The integers can thus be formally constructed as the equivalence classes of ordered pairs of natural numbers (a,b).
The intuition is that (a,b) stands for the result of subtracting b from a. To confirm our expectation that 1 − 2 and 4 − 5 denote the same number, we define an equivalence relation ~ on these pairs with the following rule:
precisely when
Addition and multiplication of integers can be defined in terms of the equivalent operations on the natural numbers; by using [(a,b)] to denote the equivalence class having (a,b) as a member, one has:
The negation (or additive inverse) of an integer is obtained by reversing the order of the pair:
Hence subtraction can be defined as the addition of the additive inverse:
The standard ordering on the integers is given by:
It is easily verified that these definitions are independent of the choice of representatives of the equivalence classes.
Every equivalence class has a unique member that is of the form (n,0) or (0,n) (or both at once). The natural number n is identified with the class [(n,0)] (i.e., the natural numbers are embedded into the integers by map sending n to [(n,0)]), and the class [(0,n)] is denoted −n (this covers all remaining classes, and gives the class [(0,0)] a second time since −0 = 0.
Thus, [(a,b)] is denoted by
If the natural numbers are identified with the corresponding integers (using the embedding mentioned above), this convention creates no ambiguity.
This notation recovers the familiar representation of the integers as {..., −2, −1, 0, 1, 2, ...} .
Some examples are:
In theoretical computer science, other approaches for the construction of integers are used by automated theorem provers and term rewrite engines. Integers are represented as algebraic terms built using a few basic operations (e.g., zero, succ, pred) and, possibly, using natural numbers, which are assumed to be already constructed (using, say, the Peano approach).
There exist at least ten such constructions of signed integers. These constructions differ in several ways: the number of basic operations used for the construction, the number (usually, between 0 and 2) and the types of arguments accepted by these operations; the presence or absence of natural numbers as arguments of some of these operations, and the fact that these operations are free constructors or not, i.e., that the same integer can be represented using only one or many algebraic terms.
The technique for the construction of integers presented in the previous section corresponds to the particular case where there is a single basic operation pair ( x , y ) {\displaystyle (x,y)} that takes as arguments two natural numbers x {\displaystyle x} and y {\displaystyle y} , and returns an integer (equal to x − y {\displaystyle x-y} ). This operation is not free since the integer 0 can be written pair(0,0), or pair(1,1), or pair(2,2), etc. This technique of construction is used by the proof assistant Isabelle; however, many other tools use alternative construction techniques, notable those based upon free constructors, which are simpler and can be implemented more efficiently in computers.
An integer is often a primitive data type in computer languages. However, integer data types can only represent a subset of all integers, since practical computers are of finite capacity. Also, in the common two's complement representation, the inherent definition of sign distinguishes between "negative" and "non-negative" rather than "negative, positive, and 0". (It is, however, certainly possible for a computer to determine whether an integer value is truly positive.) Fixed length integer approximation data types (or subsets) are denoted int or Integer in several programming languages (such as Algol68, C, Java, Delphi, etc.).
Variable-length representations of integers, such as bignums, can store any integer that fits in the computer's memory. Other integer data types are implemented with a fixed size, usually a number of bits which is a power of 2 (4, 8, 16, etc.) or a memorable number of decimal digits (e.g., 9 or 10).
The cardinality of the set of integers is equal to ℵ0 (aleph-null). This is readily demonstrated by the construction of a bijection, that is, a function that is injective and surjective from Z {\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} } to N = { 0 , 1 , 2 , . . . } . {\displaystyle \mathbb {N} =\{0,1,2,...\}.} Such a function may be defined as
with graph (set of the pairs ( x , f ( x ) ) {\displaystyle (x,f(x))} is
Its inverse function is defined by
with graph
This article incorporates material from Integer on PlanetMath, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "An integer is the number zero (0), a positive natural number (1, 2, 3, etc.) or a negative integer with a minus sign (−1, −2, −3, etc.). The negative numbers are the additive inverses of the corresponding positive numbers. In the language of mathematics, the set of integers is often denoted by the boldface Z or blackboard bold Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } .",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The set of natural numbers N {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {N} } is a subset of Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } , which in turn is a subset of the set of all rational numbers Q {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Q} } , itself a subset of the real numbers R {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} } . Like the natural numbers, Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is countably infinite. An integer may be regarded as a real number that can be written without a fractional component. For example, 21, 4, 0, and −2048 are integers, while 9.75, 5+1/2, and √2 are not.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The integers form the smallest group and the smallest ring containing the natural numbers. In algebraic number theory, the integers are sometimes qualified as rational integers to distinguish them from the more general algebraic integers. In fact, (rational) integers are algebraic integers that are also rational numbers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The word integer comes from the Latin integer meaning \"whole\" or (literally) \"untouched\", from in (\"not\") plus tangere (\"to touch\"). \"Entire\" derives from the same origin via the French word entier, which means both entire and integer. Historically the term was used for a number that was a multiple of 1, or to the whole part of a mixed number. Only positive integers were considered, making the term synonymous with the natural numbers. The definition of integer expanded over time to include negative numbers as their usefulness was recognized. For example Leonhard Euler in his 1765 Elements of Algebra defined integers to include both positive and negative numbers. However, European mathematicians, for the most part, resisted the concept of negative numbers until the middle of the 19th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The use of the letter Z to denote the set of integers comes from the German word Zahlen (\"numbers\") and has been attributed to David Hilbert. The earliest known use of the notation in a textbook occurs in Algébre written by the collective Nicolas Bourbaki, dating to 1947. The notation was not adopted immediately, for example another textbook used the letter J and a 1960 paper used Z to denote the non-negative integers. But by 1961, Z was generally used by modern algebra texts to denote the positive and negative integers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The symbol Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is often annotated to denote various sets, with varying usage amongst different authors: Z + {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} ^{+}} , Z + {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} _{+}} or Z > {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} ^{>}} for the positive integers, Z 0 + {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} ^{0+}} or Z ≥ {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} ^{\\geq }} for non-negative integers, and Z ≠ {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} ^{\\neq }} for non-zero integers. Some authors use Z ∗ {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} ^{*}} for non-zero integers, while others use it for non-negative integers, or for {–1, 1} (the group of units of Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } ). Additionally, Z p {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} _{p}} is used to denote either the set of integers modulo p (i.e., the set of congruence classes of integers), or the set of p-adic integers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The whole numbers were synonymous with the integers up until the early 1950s. In the late 1950s, as part of the New Math movement, American elementary school teachers began teaching that \"whole numbers\" referred to the natural numbers, excluding negative numbers, while \"integer\" included the negative numbers. \"Whole number\" remains ambiguous to the present day.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Like the natural numbers, Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is closed under the operations of addition and multiplication, that is, the sum and product of any two integers is an integer. However, with the inclusion of the negative natural numbers (and importantly, 0), Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } , unlike the natural numbers, is also closed under subtraction.",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The integers form a unital ring which is the most basic one, in the following sense: for any unital ring, there is a unique ring homomorphism from the integers into this ring. This universal property, namely to be an initial object in the category of rings, characterizes the ring Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } .",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is not closed under division, since the quotient of two integers (e.g., 1 divided by 2) need not be an integer. Although the natural numbers are closed under exponentiation, the integers are not (since the result can be a fraction when the exponent is negative).",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The following table lists some of the basic properties of addition and multiplication for any integers a, b and c:",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The first five properties listed above for addition say that Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } , under addition, is an abelian group. It is also a cyclic group, since every non-zero integer can be written as a finite sum 1 + 1 + ... + 1 or (−1) + (−1) + ... + (−1). In fact, Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } under addition is the only infinite cyclic group—in the sense that any infinite cyclic group is isomorphic to Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } .",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The first four properties listed above for multiplication say that Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } under multiplication is a commutative monoid. However, not every integer has a multiplicative inverse (as is the case of the number 2), which means that Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } under multiplication is not a group.",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "All the rules from the above property table (except for the last), when taken together, say that Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } together with addition and multiplication is a commutative ring with unity. It is the prototype of all objects of such algebraic structure. Only those equalities of expressions are true in Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } for all values of variables, which are true in any unital commutative ring. Certain non-zero integers map to zero in certain rings.",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The lack of zero divisors in the integers (last property in the table) means that the commutative ring Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is an integral domain.",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The lack of multiplicative inverses, which is equivalent to the fact that Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is not closed under division, means that Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is not a field. The smallest field containing the integers as a subring is the field of rational numbers. The process of constructing the rationals from the integers can be mimicked to form the field of fractions of any integral domain. And back, starting from an algebraic number field (an extension of rational numbers), its ring of integers can be extracted, which includes Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } as its subring.",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Although ordinary division is not defined on Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } , the division \"with remainder\" is defined on them. It is called Euclidean division, and possesses the following important property: given two integers a and b with b ≠ 0, there exist unique integers q and r such that a = q × b + r and 0 ≤ r < |b|, where |b| denotes the absolute value of b. The integer q is called the quotient and r is called the remainder of the division of a by b. The Euclidean algorithm for computing greatest common divisors works by a sequence of Euclidean divisions.",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The above says that Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is a Euclidean domain. This implies that Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is a principal ideal domain, and any positive integer can be written as the products of primes in an essentially unique way. This is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic.",
"title": "Algebraic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is a totally ordered set without upper or lower bound. The ordering of Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } is given by: :... −3 < −2 < −1 < 0 < 1 < 2 < 3 < ... An integer is positive if it is greater than zero, and negative if it is less than zero. Zero is defined as neither negative nor positive.",
"title": "Order-theoretic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The ordering of integers is compatible with the algebraic operations in the following way:",
"title": "Order-theoretic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Thus it follows that Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } together with the above ordering is an ordered ring.",
"title": "Order-theoretic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The integers are the only nontrivial totally ordered abelian group whose positive elements are well-ordered. This is equivalent to the statement that any Noetherian valuation ring is either a field—or a discrete valuation ring.",
"title": "Order-theoretic properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In elementary school teaching, integers are often intuitively defined as the union of the (positive) natural numbers, zero, and the negations of the natural numbers. This can be formalized as follows. First construct the set of natural numbers according to the Peano axioms, call this P {\\displaystyle P} . Then construct a set P − {\\displaystyle P^{-}} which is disjoint from P {\\displaystyle P} and in one-to-one correspondence with P {\\displaystyle P} via a function ψ {\\displaystyle \\psi } . For example, take P − {\\displaystyle P^{-}} to be the ordered pairs ( 1 , n ) {\\displaystyle (1,n)} with the mapping ψ = n ↦ ( 1 , n ) {\\displaystyle \\psi =n\\mapsto (1,n)} . Finally let 0 be some object not in P {\\displaystyle P} or P − {\\displaystyle P^{-}} , for example the ordered pair ( 0 , 0 ) {\\displaystyle (0,0)} . Then the integers are defined to be the union P ∪ P − ∪ { 0 } {\\displaystyle P\\cup P^{-}\\cup \\{0\\}} .",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The traditional arithmetic operations can then be defined on the integers in a piecewise fashion, for each of positive numbers, negative numbers, and zero. For example negation is defined as follows:",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The traditional style of definition leads to many different cases (each arithmetic operation needs to be defined on each combination of types of integer) and makes it tedious to prove that integers obey the various laws of arithmetic.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In modern set-theoretic mathematics, a more abstract construction allowing one to define arithmetical operations without any case distinction is often used instead. The integers can thus be formally constructed as the equivalence classes of ordered pairs of natural numbers (a,b).",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The intuition is that (a,b) stands for the result of subtracting b from a. To confirm our expectation that 1 − 2 and 4 − 5 denote the same number, we define an equivalence relation ~ on these pairs with the following rule:",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "precisely when",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Addition and multiplication of integers can be defined in terms of the equivalent operations on the natural numbers; by using [(a,b)] to denote the equivalence class having (a,b) as a member, one has:",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The negation (or additive inverse) of an integer is obtained by reversing the order of the pair:",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Hence subtraction can be defined as the addition of the additive inverse:",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The standard ordering on the integers is given by:",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "It is easily verified that these definitions are independent of the choice of representatives of the equivalence classes.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Every equivalence class has a unique member that is of the form (n,0) or (0,n) (or both at once). The natural number n is identified with the class [(n,0)] (i.e., the natural numbers are embedded into the integers by map sending n to [(n,0)]), and the class [(0,n)] is denoted −n (this covers all remaining classes, and gives the class [(0,0)] a second time since −0 = 0.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Thus, [(a,b)] is denoted by",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "If the natural numbers are identified with the corresponding integers (using the embedding mentioned above), this convention creates no ambiguity.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "This notation recovers the familiar representation of the integers as {..., −2, −1, 0, 1, 2, ...} .",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Some examples are:",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In theoretical computer science, other approaches for the construction of integers are used by automated theorem provers and term rewrite engines. Integers are represented as algebraic terms built using a few basic operations (e.g., zero, succ, pred) and, possibly, using natural numbers, which are assumed to be already constructed (using, say, the Peano approach).",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "There exist at least ten such constructions of signed integers. These constructions differ in several ways: the number of basic operations used for the construction, the number (usually, between 0 and 2) and the types of arguments accepted by these operations; the presence or absence of natural numbers as arguments of some of these operations, and the fact that these operations are free constructors or not, i.e., that the same integer can be represented using only one or many algebraic terms.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The technique for the construction of integers presented in the previous section corresponds to the particular case where there is a single basic operation pair ( x , y ) {\\displaystyle (x,y)} that takes as arguments two natural numbers x {\\displaystyle x} and y {\\displaystyle y} , and returns an integer (equal to x − y {\\displaystyle x-y} ). This operation is not free since the integer 0 can be written pair(0,0), or pair(1,1), or pair(2,2), etc. This technique of construction is used by the proof assistant Isabelle; however, many other tools use alternative construction techniques, notable those based upon free constructors, which are simpler and can be implemented more efficiently in computers.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "An integer is often a primitive data type in computer languages. However, integer data types can only represent a subset of all integers, since practical computers are of finite capacity. Also, in the common two's complement representation, the inherent definition of sign distinguishes between \"negative\" and \"non-negative\" rather than \"negative, positive, and 0\". (It is, however, certainly possible for a computer to determine whether an integer value is truly positive.) Fixed length integer approximation data types (or subsets) are denoted int or Integer in several programming languages (such as Algol68, C, Java, Delphi, etc.).",
"title": "Computer science"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Variable-length representations of integers, such as bignums, can store any integer that fits in the computer's memory. Other integer data types are implemented with a fixed size, usually a number of bits which is a power of 2 (4, 8, 16, etc.) or a memorable number of decimal digits (e.g., 9 or 10).",
"title": "Computer science"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The cardinality of the set of integers is equal to ℵ0 (aleph-null). This is readily demonstrated by the construction of a bijection, that is, a function that is injective and surjective from Z {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {Z} } to N = { 0 , 1 , 2 , . . . } . {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {N} =\\{0,1,2,...\\}.} Such a function may be defined as",
"title": "Cardinality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "with graph (set of the pairs ( x , f ( x ) ) {\\displaystyle (x,f(x))} is",
"title": "Cardinality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Its inverse function is defined by",
"title": "Cardinality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "with graph",
"title": "Cardinality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "This article incorporates material from Integer on PlanetMath, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| An integer is the number zero (0), a positive natural number or a negative integer with a minus sign. The negative numbers are the additive inverses of the corresponding positive numbers. In the language of mathematics, the set of integers is often denoted by the boldface Z or blackboard bold Z . The set of natural numbers N is a subset of Z , which in turn is a subset of the set of all rational numbers Q , itself a subset of the real numbers R . Like the natural numbers, Z is countably infinite. An integer may be regarded as a real number that can be written without a fractional component. For example, 21, 4, 0, and −2048 are integers, while 9.75, 5+1/2, and √2 are not. The integers form the smallest group and the smallest ring containing the natural numbers. In algebraic number theory, the integers are sometimes qualified as rational integers to distinguish them from the more general algebraic integers. In fact, (rational) integers are algebraic integers that are also rational numbers. | 2001-08-18T02:43:05Z | 2023-11-08T06:13:24Z | [
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14,566 | Impressionism in music | Impressionism in music was a movement among various composers in Western classical music (mainly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries) whose music focuses on mood and atmosphere, "conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject rather than a detailed tone‐picture". "Impressionism" is a philosophical and aesthetic term borrowed from late 19th-century French painting after Monet's Impression, Sunrise. Composers were labeled Impressionists by analogy to the Impressionist painters who use starkly contrasting colors, effect of light on an object, blurry foreground and background, flattening perspective, etc. to make the observer focus their attention on the overall impression.
The most prominent feature in musical Impressionism is the use of "color", or in musical terms, timbre, which can be achieved through orchestration, harmonic usage, texture, etc. Other elements of musical Impressionism also involve new chord combinations, ambiguous tonality, extended harmonies, use of modes and exotic scales, parallel motion, extra-musicality, and evocative titles such as “Reflets dans l'eau” (“Reflections on the water”), “Brouillards” (“Mists”), etc.
Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are two leading figures in Impressionism, though Debussy rejected this label (in a 1908 letter he wrote "imbeciles call [what I am trying to write in Images] 'impressionism', a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy, especially by art critics who use it as a label to stick on Turner, the finest creator of mystery in the whole of art!") and Ravel displayed discomfort with it, at one point claiming that it could not be adequately applied to music at all. Debussy's Impressionist works typically "evoke a mood, feeling, atmosphere, or scene" by creating musical images through characteristic motifs, harmony, exotic scales (e.g., whole-tone and pentatonic scales), instrumental timbre, large unresolved chords (e.g., 9ths, 11ths, 13ths), parallel motion, ambiguous tonality, extreme chromaticism, heavy use of the piano pedals, and other elements. “The perception of Debussy’s compositional language as decidedly post-romantic/Impressionistic—nuanced, understated, and subtle—is firmly solidified among today’s musicians and well-informed audiences." Some Impressionist composers, Debussy and Ravel in particular, are also labeled as symbolist composers. One trait shared with both aesthetic trends is "a sense of detached observation: rather than expressing deeply felt emotion or telling a story"; as in symbolist poetry, the normal syntax is usually disrupted and individual images that carry the work's meaning are evoked.
In 1912, the French composer Ernest Fanelli (1860–1917) received significant attention and coverage in the Parisian press following a performance of a symphonic poem he wrote in 1886, titled Thèbes, incorporating elements associated with Impressionism, such as extended chords and whole-tone scales. Ravel was unimpressed by Fanelli's novelties, maintaining that these were already utilized by past composers such as Franz Liszt. He also opined that Fanelli's Impressionism stemmed from Hector Berlioz rather than Liszt or Russian composers.
Other composers linked to Impressionism include Lili Boulanger, Isaac Albéniz, Frederick Delius, Paul Dukas, Alexander Scriabin, Manuel de Falla, John Alden Carpenter, Ottorino Respighi, Albert Roussel, Karol Szymanowski, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, and Federico Mompou. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius is also associated with Impressionism, and his tone poem The Swan of Tuonela (1893) predates Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (regarded as a seminal work of musical Impressionism) by a year. The American composer Howard Hanson also borrowed from both Sibelius and Impressionism generally in works such as his Second Symphony.
One of the most important tools of musical Impressionism was the tensionless harmony. The dissonance of chords was not resolved, but was used as timbre. These chords were often shifted parallel. In the melodic field the whole tone scale, the pentatonic and church tonal turns were used. The melodics were characterized by their circular melodic movements. The timbre became the stylistic device of Impressionism instead of concise themes or other traditional forms. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Impressionism in music was a movement among various composers in Western classical music (mainly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries) whose music focuses on mood and atmosphere, \"conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject rather than a detailed tone‐picture\". \"Impressionism\" is a philosophical and aesthetic term borrowed from late 19th-century French painting after Monet's Impression, Sunrise. Composers were labeled Impressionists by analogy to the Impressionist painters who use starkly contrasting colors, effect of light on an object, blurry foreground and background, flattening perspective, etc. to make the observer focus their attention on the overall impression.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "The most prominent feature in musical Impressionism is the use of \"color\", or in musical terms, timbre, which can be achieved through orchestration, harmonic usage, texture, etc. Other elements of musical Impressionism also involve new chord combinations, ambiguous tonality, extended harmonies, use of modes and exotic scales, parallel motion, extra-musicality, and evocative titles such as “Reflets dans l'eau” (“Reflections on the water”), “Brouillards” (“Mists”), etc.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are two leading figures in Impressionism, though Debussy rejected this label (in a 1908 letter he wrote \"imbeciles call [what I am trying to write in Images] 'impressionism', a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy, especially by art critics who use it as a label to stick on Turner, the finest creator of mystery in the whole of art!\") and Ravel displayed discomfort with it, at one point claiming that it could not be adequately applied to music at all. Debussy's Impressionist works typically \"evoke a mood, feeling, atmosphere, or scene\" by creating musical images through characteristic motifs, harmony, exotic scales (e.g., whole-tone and pentatonic scales), instrumental timbre, large unresolved chords (e.g., 9ths, 11ths, 13ths), parallel motion, ambiguous tonality, extreme chromaticism, heavy use of the piano pedals, and other elements. “The perception of Debussy’s compositional language as decidedly post-romantic/Impressionistic—nuanced, understated, and subtle—is firmly solidified among today’s musicians and well-informed audiences.\" Some Impressionist composers, Debussy and Ravel in particular, are also labeled as symbolist composers. One trait shared with both aesthetic trends is \"a sense of detached observation: rather than expressing deeply felt emotion or telling a story\"; as in symbolist poetry, the normal syntax is usually disrupted and individual images that carry the work's meaning are evoked.",
"title": "History"
},
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"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1912, the French composer Ernest Fanelli (1860–1917) received significant attention and coverage in the Parisian press following a performance of a symphonic poem he wrote in 1886, titled Thèbes, incorporating elements associated with Impressionism, such as extended chords and whole-tone scales. Ravel was unimpressed by Fanelli's novelties, maintaining that these were already utilized by past composers such as Franz Liszt. He also opined that Fanelli's Impressionism stemmed from Hector Berlioz rather than Liszt or Russian composers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Other composers linked to Impressionism include Lili Boulanger, Isaac Albéniz, Frederick Delius, Paul Dukas, Alexander Scriabin, Manuel de Falla, John Alden Carpenter, Ottorino Respighi, Albert Roussel, Karol Szymanowski, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, and Federico Mompou. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius is also associated with Impressionism, and his tone poem The Swan of Tuonela (1893) predates Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (regarded as a seminal work of musical Impressionism) by a year. The American composer Howard Hanson also borrowed from both Sibelius and Impressionism generally in works such as his Second Symphony.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "One of the most important tools of musical Impressionism was the tensionless harmony. The dissonance of chords was not resolved, but was used as timbre. These chords were often shifted parallel. In the melodic field the whole tone scale, the pentatonic and church tonal turns were used. The melodics were characterized by their circular melodic movements. The timbre became the stylistic device of Impressionism instead of concise themes or other traditional forms.",
"title": "Characteristics"
}
]
| Impressionism in music was a movement among various composers in Western classical music whose music focuses on mood and atmosphere, "conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject rather than a detailed tone‐picture". "Impressionism" is a philosophical and aesthetic term borrowed from late 19th-century French painting after Monet's Impression, Sunrise. Composers were labeled Impressionists by analogy to the Impressionist painters who use starkly contrasting colors, effect of light on an object, blurry foreground and background, flattening perspective, etc. to make the observer focus their attention on the overall impression. The most prominent feature in musical Impressionism is the use of "color", or in musical terms, timbre, which can be achieved through orchestration, harmonic usage, texture, etc. Other elements of musical Impressionism also involve new chord combinations, ambiguous tonality, extended harmonies, use of modes and exotic scales, parallel motion, extra-musicality, and evocative titles such as “Reflets dans l'eau”
(“Reflections on the water”), “Brouillards” (“Mists”), etc. | 2001-03-18T21:36:33Z | 2023-08-27T00:57:13Z | [
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14,567 | International trade | International trade is the exchange of capital, goods, and services across international borders or territories because there is a need or want of goods or services. (see: World economy)
In most countries, such trade represents a significant share of gross domestic product (GDP). While international trade has existed throughout history (for example Uttarapatha, Silk Road, Amber Road, scramble for Africa, Atlantic slave trade, salt roads), its economic, social, and political importance has been on the rise in recent centuries.
Carrying out trade at an international level is a complex process when compared to domestic trade. When trade takes place between two or more states, factors like currency, government policies, economy, judicial system, laws, and markets influence trade.
To ease and justify the process of trade between countries of different economic standing in the modern era, some international economic organizations were formed, such as the World Trade Organization. These organizations work towards the facilitation and growth of international trade. Statistical services of intergovernmental and supranational organizations and governmental statistical agencies publish official statistics on international trade.
A product that is transferred or sold from a party in one country to a party in another country is an export from the originating country, and an import to the country receiving that product. Imports and exports are accounted for in a country's current account in the balance of payments.
Trading globally may give consumers and countries the opportunity to be exposed to new markets and products. Almost every kind of product can be found in the international market, for example: food, clothes, spare parts, oil, jewellery, wine, stocks, currencies, and water. Services are also traded, such as in tourism, banking, consulting, and transportation.
Advanced technology (including transportation), globalization, industrialization, outsourcing and multinational corporations have major impacts on the international trade systems
International trade is, in principle, not different from domestic trade as the motivation and the behavior of parties involved in a trade do not change fundamentally regardless of whether trade is across a border or not.
However, in practical terms, carrying out trade at an international level is typically a more complex process than domestic trade. The main difference is that international trade is typically more costly than domestic trade. This is due to the fact that cross-border trade typically incurs additional costs such as explicit tariffs as well as explicit or implicit non-tariff barriers such as time costs (due to border delays), language and cultural differences, product safety, the legal system, and so on.
Another difference between domestic and international trade is that factors of production such as capital and labor are often more mobile within a country than across countries. Thus, international trade is mostly restricted to trade in goods and services, and only to a lesser extent to trade in capital, labour, or other factors of production. Trade in goods and services can serve as a substitute for trade in factors of production. Instead of importing a factor of production, a country can import goods that make intensive use of that factor of production and thus embody it. An example of this is the import of labor-intensive goods by the United States from China. Instead of importing Chinese labor, the United States imports goods that were produced with Chinese labor. One report in 2010, suggested that international trade was increased when a country hosted a network of immigrants, but the trade effect was weakened when the immigrants became assimilated into their new country.
The history of international trade chronicles notable events that have affected trading among various economies.
There are several models that seek to explain the factors behind international trade, the welfare consequences of trade and the pattern of trade.
The following table is a list of the 25 largest trading states according to the World Trade Organization in 2021 and 2022.
Source: International Trade Centre
In the US, the various U.S. Presidents have held observances to promote big and small companies to be more involved with the export and import of goods and services. President George W. Bush observed World Trade Week on May 18, 2001, and May 17, 2002. On May 13, 2016, President Barack Obama proclaimed May 15 through May 21, 2016, World Trade Week, 2016. On May 19, 2017, President Donald Trump proclaimed May 21 through May 27, 2017, World Trade Week, 2017. World Trade Week is the third week of May. Every year the President declares that week to be World Trade Week.
In the case of not the food production trade-offs in forms of local food and distant food production are controversial with limited studies comparing environmental impact and scientists cautioning that regionally specific environmental impacts should be considered. Effects of local food on greenhouse gas emissions may vary per origin and target region of the production. According to the 2022 IPCC report on climate change, that in international trade net Carbon emissions has reduced between 2006 and 2016. A 2020 study indicated that local food crop production alone cannot meet the demand for most food crops with "current production and consumption patterns" and the locations of food production at the time of the study for 72–89% of the global population and 100–km radiuses as of early 2020. Studies found that food miles are a relatively minor factor of carbon emissions, albeit increased food localization may also enable additional, more significant, environmental benefits such as recycling of energy, water, and nutrients. For specific foods regional differences in harvest seasons may make it more environmentally friendly to import from distant regions than more local production and storage or local production in greenhouses.
Qualitative differences between substitutive products of different production regions may exist due to different legal requirements and quality standards or different levels of controllability by local production- and governance-systems which may have aspects of security beyond resource security, environmental protection, product quality and product design and health. The process of transforming supply as well as labor rights may differ as well.
Local production has been reported to increase local employment in many cases. A 2018 study claimed that international trade can increase local employment. A 2016 study found that local employment and total labor income in both manufacturing and nonmanufacturing were negatively affected by rising exposure to imports.
Local production in high-income countries, rather than distant regions may require higher wages for workers. Higher wages incentivize automation which could allow for automated workers' time to be reallocated by society and its economic mechanisms or be converted into leisure-like time.
Local production may require knowledge transfer, technology transfer and may not be able to compete in efficiency initially with specialized, established industries and businesses, or in consumer demand without policy measures such as eco-tariffs. Regional differences may cause specific regions to be more suitable for a specific production, thereby increasing the advantages of specific trade over specific local production. Forms of local products that are highly localized may not be able to meet the efficiency of more large-scale, highly consolidated production in terms of efficiency, including environmental impact.
A systematic, and possibly first large-scale, cross-sectoral analysis of water, energy and land in security in 189 countries that links total and sectorial consumption to sources showed that countries and sectors are highly exposed to over-exploited, insecure, and degraded such resources with economic globalization having decreased security of global supply chains. The 2020 study finds that most countries exhibit greater exposure to resource risks via international trade – mainly from remote production sources – and that diversifying trading partners is unlikely to help countries and sectors to reduce these or to improve their resource self-sufficiency.
A number of people in Africa, including children, were using informal or "artisanal" methods to produce gold. While millions were making a livelihood through the small-scale mining, governments of Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia complaint about the increase in illegal production and gold smuggling. Sometimes the procedure involved criminal operations and even human and environmental cost. Investigative reports based on Africa's export data revealed that gold in large quantities is smuggled out of the country through the United Arab Emirates, without any taxes being paid to the producing states. Analysis also reflected discrepancies in the amount exported from Africa and the total gold imported into the UAE.
In July 2020, a report by Swissaid highlighted that the Dubai-based precious metal refining firms, including Kaloti Jewellery International Group and Trust One Financial Services (T1FS), received most of their gold from poor African states like Sudan. The gold mines in Sudan were seldom under the militias involved in war crimes and human rights abuses. The Swissaid report also highlighted that the illicit gold coming into Dubai from Africa is imported in large quantities by the world's largest refinery in Switzerland, Valcambi.
Another report in March 2022 revealed the contradiction between the lucrative gold trade of West African countries and the illicit dealings. Like Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ghana and other states, differences were recorded in the gold production in Mali and its trade with Dubai, UAE. The third largest gold exporter in Africa, Mali imposed taxes only on first 50kg gold exports per month, which allowed several small-scale miners to enjoy tax exemptions and smuggle gold worth millions. In 2014, Mali's gold production was of 45.8 tonnes, while the UAE's gold import were at 59.9 tonnes.
Lists
Data on the value of exports and imports and their quantities often broken down by detailed lists of products are available in statistical collections on international trade published by the statistical services of intergovernmental and supranational organisations and national statistical institutes. The definitions and methodological concepts applied for the various statistical collections on international trade often differ in terms of definition (e.g. special trade vs. general trade) and coverage (reporting thresholds, inclusion of trade in services, estimates for smuggled goods and cross-border provision of illegal services). Metadata providing information on definitions and methods are often published along with the data. | [
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"title": ""
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{
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"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "To ease and justify the process of trade between countries of different economic standing in the modern era, some international economic organizations were formed, such as the World Trade Organization. These organizations work towards the facilitation and growth of international trade. Statistical services of intergovernmental and supranational organizations and governmental statistical agencies publish official statistics on international trade.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "A product that is transferred or sold from a party in one country to a party in another country is an export from the originating country, and an import to the country receiving that product. Imports and exports are accounted for in a country's current account in the balance of payments.",
"title": "Characteristics of global trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Trading globally may give consumers and countries the opportunity to be exposed to new markets and products. Almost every kind of product can be found in the international market, for example: food, clothes, spare parts, oil, jewellery, wine, stocks, currencies, and water. Services are also traded, such as in tourism, banking, consulting, and transportation.",
"title": "Characteristics of global trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Advanced technology (including transportation), globalization, industrialization, outsourcing and multinational corporations have major impacts on the international trade systems",
"title": "Characteristics of global trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "International trade is, in principle, not different from domestic trade as the motivation and the behavior of parties involved in a trade do not change fundamentally regardless of whether trade is across a border or not.",
"title": "Differences from domestic trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "However, in practical terms, carrying out trade at an international level is typically a more complex process than domestic trade. The main difference is that international trade is typically more costly than domestic trade. This is due to the fact that cross-border trade typically incurs additional costs such as explicit tariffs as well as explicit or implicit non-tariff barriers such as time costs (due to border delays), language and cultural differences, product safety, the legal system, and so on.",
"title": "Differences from domestic trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Another difference between domestic and international trade is that factors of production such as capital and labor are often more mobile within a country than across countries. Thus, international trade is mostly restricted to trade in goods and services, and only to a lesser extent to trade in capital, labour, or other factors of production. Trade in goods and services can serve as a substitute for trade in factors of production. Instead of importing a factor of production, a country can import goods that make intensive use of that factor of production and thus embody it. An example of this is the import of labor-intensive goods by the United States from China. Instead of importing Chinese labor, the United States imports goods that were produced with Chinese labor. One report in 2010, suggested that international trade was increased when a country hosted a network of immigrants, but the trade effect was weakened when the immigrants became assimilated into their new country.",
"title": "Differences from domestic trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The history of international trade chronicles notable events that have affected trading among various economies.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "There are several models that seek to explain the factors behind international trade, the welfare consequences of trade and the pattern of trade.",
"title": "Theories and models"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The following table is a list of the 25 largest trading states according to the World Trade Organization in 2021 and 2022.",
"title": "Largest countries or regions by total international trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Source: International Trade Centre",
"title": "Top traded commodities by value (exports)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In the US, the various U.S. Presidents have held observances to promote big and small companies to be more involved with the export and import of goods and services. President George W. Bush observed World Trade Week on May 18, 2001, and May 17, 2002. On May 13, 2016, President Barack Obama proclaimed May 15 through May 21, 2016, World Trade Week, 2016. On May 19, 2017, President Donald Trump proclaimed May 21 through May 27, 2017, World Trade Week, 2017. World Trade Week is the third week of May. Every year the President declares that week to be World Trade Week.",
"title": "Observances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the case of not the food production trade-offs in forms of local food and distant food production are controversial with limited studies comparing environmental impact and scientists cautioning that regionally specific environmental impacts should be considered. Effects of local food on greenhouse gas emissions may vary per origin and target region of the production. According to the 2022 IPCC report on climate change, that in international trade net Carbon emissions has reduced between 2006 and 2016. A 2020 study indicated that local food crop production alone cannot meet the demand for most food crops with \"current production and consumption patterns\" and the locations of food production at the time of the study for 72–89% of the global population and 100–km radiuses as of early 2020. Studies found that food miles are a relatively minor factor of carbon emissions, albeit increased food localization may also enable additional, more significant, environmental benefits such as recycling of energy, water, and nutrients. For specific foods regional differences in harvest seasons may make it more environmentally friendly to import from distant regions than more local production and storage or local production in greenhouses.",
"title": "International trade versus local production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Qualitative differences between substitutive products of different production regions may exist due to different legal requirements and quality standards or different levels of controllability by local production- and governance-systems which may have aspects of security beyond resource security, environmental protection, product quality and product design and health. The process of transforming supply as well as labor rights may differ as well.",
"title": "International trade versus local production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Local production has been reported to increase local employment in many cases. A 2018 study claimed that international trade can increase local employment. A 2016 study found that local employment and total labor income in both manufacturing and nonmanufacturing were negatively affected by rising exposure to imports.",
"title": "International trade versus local production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Local production in high-income countries, rather than distant regions may require higher wages for workers. Higher wages incentivize automation which could allow for automated workers' time to be reallocated by society and its economic mechanisms or be converted into leisure-like time.",
"title": "International trade versus local production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Local production may require knowledge transfer, technology transfer and may not be able to compete in efficiency initially with specialized, established industries and businesses, or in consumer demand without policy measures such as eco-tariffs. Regional differences may cause specific regions to be more suitable for a specific production, thereby increasing the advantages of specific trade over specific local production. Forms of local products that are highly localized may not be able to meet the efficiency of more large-scale, highly consolidated production in terms of efficiency, including environmental impact.",
"title": "International trade versus local production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A systematic, and possibly first large-scale, cross-sectoral analysis of water, energy and land in security in 189 countries that links total and sectorial consumption to sources showed that countries and sectors are highly exposed to over-exploited, insecure, and degraded such resources with economic globalization having decreased security of global supply chains. The 2020 study finds that most countries exhibit greater exposure to resource risks via international trade – mainly from remote production sources – and that diversifying trading partners is unlikely to help countries and sectors to reduce these or to improve their resource self-sufficiency.",
"title": "International trade versus local production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A number of people in Africa, including children, were using informal or \"artisanal\" methods to produce gold. While millions were making a livelihood through the small-scale mining, governments of Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia complaint about the increase in illegal production and gold smuggling. Sometimes the procedure involved criminal operations and even human and environmental cost. Investigative reports based on Africa's export data revealed that gold in large quantities is smuggled out of the country through the United Arab Emirates, without any taxes being paid to the producing states. Analysis also reflected discrepancies in the amount exported from Africa and the total gold imported into the UAE.",
"title": "Illicit trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In July 2020, a report by Swissaid highlighted that the Dubai-based precious metal refining firms, including Kaloti Jewellery International Group and Trust One Financial Services (T1FS), received most of their gold from poor African states like Sudan. The gold mines in Sudan were seldom under the militias involved in war crimes and human rights abuses. The Swissaid report also highlighted that the illicit gold coming into Dubai from Africa is imported in large quantities by the world's largest refinery in Switzerland, Valcambi.",
"title": "Illicit trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Another report in March 2022 revealed the contradiction between the lucrative gold trade of West African countries and the illicit dealings. Like Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ghana and other states, differences were recorded in the gold production in Mali and its trade with Dubai, UAE. The third largest gold exporter in Africa, Mali imposed taxes only on first 50kg gold exports per month, which allowed several small-scale miners to enjoy tax exemptions and smuggle gold worth millions. In 2014, Mali's gold production was of 45.8 tonnes, while the UAE's gold import were at 59.9 tonnes.",
"title": "Illicit trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Lists",
"title": "See also"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Data on the value of exports and imports and their quantities often broken down by detailed lists of products are available in statistical collections on international trade published by the statistical services of intergovernmental and supranational organisations and national statistical institutes. The definitions and methodological concepts applied for the various statistical collections on international trade often differ in terms of definition (e.g. special trade vs. general trade) and coverage (reporting thresholds, inclusion of trade in services, estimates for smuggled goods and cross-border provision of illegal services). Metadata providing information on definitions and methods are often published along with the data.",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| International trade is the exchange of capital, goods, and services across international borders or territories because there is a need or want of goods or services. In most countries, such trade represents a significant share of gross domestic product (GDP). While international trade has existed throughout history, its economic, social, and political importance has been on the rise in recent centuries. Carrying out trade at an international level is a complex process when compared to domestic trade. When trade takes place between two or more states, factors like currency, government policies, economy, judicial system, laws, and markets influence trade. To ease and justify the process of trade between countries of different economic standing in the modern era, some international economic organizations were formed, such as the World Trade Organization. These organizations work towards the facilitation and growth of international trade. Statistical services of intergovernmental and supranational organizations and governmental statistical agencies publish official statistics on international trade. | 2001-04-03T08:15:49Z | 2023-09-20T02:12:10Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_trade |
14,569 | Interpolation | In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a type of estimation, a method of constructing (finding) new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points.
In engineering and science, one often has a number of data points, obtained by sampling or experimentation, which represent the values of a function for a limited number of values of the independent variable. It is often required to interpolate; that is, estimate the value of that function for an intermediate value of the independent variable.
A closely related problem is the approximation of a complicated function by a simple function. Suppose the formula for some given function is known, but too complicated to evaluate efficiently. A few data points from the original function can be interpolated to produce a simpler function which is still fairly close to the original. The resulting gain in simplicity may outweigh the loss from interpolation error and give better performance in calculation process.
This table gives some values of an unknown function f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} .
Interpolation provides a means of estimating the function at intermediate points, such as x = 2.5. {\displaystyle x=2.5.}
We describe some methods of interpolation, differing in such properties as: accuracy, cost, number of data points needed, and smoothness of the resulting interpolant function.
The simplest interpolation method is to locate the nearest data value, and assign the same value. In simple problems, this method is unlikely to be used, as linear interpolation (see below) is almost as easy, but in higher-dimensional multivariate interpolation, this could be a favourable choice for its speed and simplicity.
One of the simplest methods is linear interpolation (sometimes known as lerp). Consider the above example of estimating f(2.5). Since 2.5 is midway between 2 and 3, it is reasonable to take f(2.5) midway between f(2) = 0.9093 and f(3) = 0.1411, which yields 0.5252.
Generally, linear interpolation takes two data points, say (xa,ya) and (xb,yb), and the interpolant is given by:
This previous equation states that the slope of the new line between ( x a , y a ) {\displaystyle (x_{a},y_{a})} and ( x , y ) {\displaystyle (x,y)} is the same as the slope of the line between ( x a , y a ) {\displaystyle (x_{a},y_{a})} and ( x b , y b ) {\displaystyle (x_{b},y_{b})}
Linear interpolation is quick and easy, but it is not very precise. Another disadvantage is that the interpolant is not differentiable at the point xk.
The following error estimate shows that linear interpolation is not very precise. Denote the function which we want to interpolate by g, and suppose that x lies between xa and xb and that g is twice continuously differentiable. Then the linear interpolation error is
In words, the error is proportional to the square of the distance between the data points. The error in some other methods, including polynomial interpolation and spline interpolation (described below), is proportional to higher powers of the distance between the data points. These methods also produce smoother interpolants.
Polynomial interpolation is a generalization of linear interpolation. Note that the linear interpolant is a linear function. We now replace this interpolant with a polynomial of higher degree.
Consider again the problem given above. The following sixth degree polynomial goes through all the seven points:
Substituting x = 2.5, we find that f(2.5) = ~0.59678.
Generally, if we have n data points, there is exactly one polynomial of degree at most n−1 going through all the data points. The interpolation error is proportional to the distance between the data points to the power n. Furthermore, the interpolant is a polynomial and thus infinitely differentiable. So, we see that polynomial interpolation overcomes most of the problems of linear interpolation.
However, polynomial interpolation also has some disadvantages. Calculating the interpolating polynomial is computationally expensive (see computational complexity) compared to linear interpolation. Furthermore, polynomial interpolation may exhibit oscillatory artifacts, especially at the end points (see Runge's phenomenon).
Polynomial interpolation can estimate local maxima and minima that are outside the range of the samples, unlike linear interpolation. For example, the interpolant above has a local maximum at x ≈ 1.566, f(x) ≈ 1.003 and a local minimum at x ≈ 4.708, f(x) ≈ −1.003. However, these maxima and minima may exceed the theoretical range of the function; for example, a function that is always positive may have an interpolant with negative values, and whose inverse therefore contains false vertical asymptotes.
More generally, the shape of the resulting curve, especially for very high or low values of the independent variable, may be contrary to commonsense; that is, to what is known about the experimental system which has generated the data points. These disadvantages can be reduced by using spline interpolation or restricting attention to Chebyshev polynomials.
Linear interpolation uses a linear function for each of intervals [xk,xk+1]. Spline interpolation uses low-degree polynomials in each of the intervals, and chooses the polynomial pieces such that they fit smoothly together. The resulting function is called a spline.
For instance, the natural cubic spline is piecewise cubic and twice continuously differentiable. Furthermore, its second derivative is zero at the end points. The natural cubic spline interpolating the points in the table above is given by
In this case we get f(2.5) = 0.5972.
Like polynomial interpolation, spline interpolation incurs a smaller error than linear interpolation, while the interpolant is smoother and easier to evaluate than the high-degree polynomials used in polynomial interpolation. However, the global nature of the basis functions leads to ill-conditioning. This is completely mitigated by using splines of compact support, such as are implemented in Boost.Math and discussed in Kress.
Depending on the underlying discretisation of fields, different interpolants may be required. In contrast to other interpolation methods, which estimate functions on target points, mimetic interpolation evaluates the integral of fields on target lines, areas or volumes, depending on the type of field (scalar, vector, pseudo-vector or pseudo-scalar).
A key feature of mimetic interpolation is that vector calculus identities are satisfied, including Stokes' theorem and the divergence theorem. As a result, mimetic interpolation conserves line, area and volume integrals. Conservation of line integrals might be desirable when interpolating the electric field, for instance, since the line integral gives the electric potential difference at the endpoints of the integration path. Mimetic interpolation ensures that the error of estimating the line integral of an electric field is the same as the error obtained by interpolating the potential at the end points of the integration path, regardless of the length of the integration path.
Linear, bilinear and trilinear interpolation are also considered mimetic, even if it is the field values that are conserved (not the integral of the field). Apart from linear interpolation, area weighted interpolation can be considered one of the first mimetic interpolation methods to have been developed.
Interpolation is a common way to approximate functions. Given a function f : [ a , b ] → R {\displaystyle f:[a,b]\to \mathbb {R} } with a set of points x 1 , x 2 , … , x n ∈ [ a , b ] {\displaystyle x_{1},x_{2},\dots ,x_{n}\in [a,b]} one can form a function s : [ a , b ] → R {\displaystyle s:[a,b]\to \mathbb {R} } such that f ( x i ) = s ( x i ) {\displaystyle f(x_{i})=s(x_{i})} for i = 1 , 2 , … , n {\displaystyle i=1,2,\dots ,n} (that is, that s {\displaystyle s} interpolates f {\displaystyle f} at these points). In general, an interpolant need not be a good approximation, but there are well known and often reasonable conditions where it will. For example, if f ∈ C 4 ( [ a , b ] ) {\displaystyle f\in C^{4}([a,b])} (four times continuously differentiable) then cubic spline interpolation has an error bound given by ‖ f − s ‖ ∞ ≤ C ‖ f ( 4 ) ‖ ∞ h 4 {\displaystyle \|f-s\|_{\infty }\leq C\|f^{(4)}\|_{\infty }h^{4}} where h max i = 1 , 2 , … , n − 1 | x i + 1 − x i | {\displaystyle h\max _{i=1,2,\dots ,n-1}|x_{i+1}-x_{i}|} and C {\displaystyle C} is a constant.
Gaussian process is a powerful non-linear interpolation tool. Many popular interpolation tools are actually equivalent to particular Gaussian processes. Gaussian processes can be used not only for fitting an interpolant that passes exactly through the given data points but also for regression; that is, for fitting a curve through noisy data. In the geostatistics community Gaussian process regression is also known as Kriging.
Other forms of interpolation can be constructed by picking a different class of interpolants. For instance, rational interpolation is interpolation by rational functions using Padé approximant, and trigonometric interpolation is interpolation by trigonometric polynomials using Fourier series. Another possibility is to use wavelets.
The Whittaker–Shannon interpolation formula can be used if the number of data points is infinite or if the function to be interpolated has compact support.
Sometimes, we know not only the value of the function that we want to interpolate, at some points, but also its derivative. This leads to Hermite interpolation problems.
When each data point is itself a function, it can be useful to see the interpolation problem as a partial advection problem between each data point. This idea leads to the displacement interpolation problem used in transportation theory.
Multivariate interpolation is the interpolation of functions of more than one variable. Methods include bilinear interpolation and bicubic interpolation in two dimensions, and trilinear interpolation in three dimensions. They can be applied to gridded or scattered data. Mimetic interpolation generalizes to n {\displaystyle n} dimensional spaces where n > 3 {\displaystyle n>3} .
In the domain of digital signal processing, the term interpolation refers to the process of converting a sampled digital signal (such as a sampled audio signal) to that of a higher sampling rate (Upsampling) using various digital filtering techniques (for example, convolution with a frequency-limited impulse signal). In this application there is a specific requirement that the harmonic content of the original signal be preserved without creating aliased harmonic content of the original signal above the original Nyquist limit of the signal (that is, above fs/2 of the original signal sample rate). An early and fairly elementary discussion on this subject can be found in Rabiner and Crochiere's book Multirate Digital Signal Processing.
The term extrapolation is used to find data points outside the range of known data points.
In curve fitting problems, the constraint that the interpolant has to go exactly through the data points is relaxed. It is only required to approach the data points as closely as possible (within some other constraints). This requires parameterizing the potential interpolants and having some way of measuring the error. In the simplest case this leads to least squares approximation.
Approximation theory studies how to find the best approximation to a given function by another function from some predetermined class, and how good this approximation is. This clearly yields a bound on how well the interpolant can approximate the unknown function.
If we consider x {\displaystyle x} as a variable in a topological space, and the function f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} mapping to a Banach space, then the problem is treated as "interpolation of operators". The classical results about interpolation of operators are the Riesz–Thorin theorem and the Marcinkiewicz theorem. There are also many other subsequent results. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a type of estimation, a method of constructing (finding) new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In engineering and science, one often has a number of data points, obtained by sampling or experimentation, which represent the values of a function for a limited number of values of the independent variable. It is often required to interpolate; that is, estimate the value of that function for an intermediate value of the independent variable.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "A closely related problem is the approximation of a complicated function by a simple function. Suppose the formula for some given function is known, but too complicated to evaluate efficiently. A few data points from the original function can be interpolated to produce a simpler function which is still fairly close to the original. The resulting gain in simplicity may outweigh the loss from interpolation error and give better performance in calculation process.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "This table gives some values of an unknown function f ( x ) {\\displaystyle f(x)} .",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Interpolation provides a means of estimating the function at intermediate points, such as x = 2.5. {\\displaystyle x=2.5.}",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "We describe some methods of interpolation, differing in such properties as: accuracy, cost, number of data points needed, and smoothness of the resulting interpolant function.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The simplest interpolation method is to locate the nearest data value, and assign the same value. In simple problems, this method is unlikely to be used, as linear interpolation (see below) is almost as easy, but in higher-dimensional multivariate interpolation, this could be a favourable choice for its speed and simplicity.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "One of the simplest methods is linear interpolation (sometimes known as lerp). Consider the above example of estimating f(2.5). Since 2.5 is midway between 2 and 3, it is reasonable to take f(2.5) midway between f(2) = 0.9093 and f(3) = 0.1411, which yields 0.5252.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Generally, linear interpolation takes two data points, say (xa,ya) and (xb,yb), and the interpolant is given by:",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "This previous equation states that the slope of the new line between ( x a , y a ) {\\displaystyle (x_{a},y_{a})} and ( x , y ) {\\displaystyle (x,y)} is the same as the slope of the line between ( x a , y a ) {\\displaystyle (x_{a},y_{a})} and ( x b , y b ) {\\displaystyle (x_{b},y_{b})}",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Linear interpolation is quick and easy, but it is not very precise. Another disadvantage is that the interpolant is not differentiable at the point xk.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The following error estimate shows that linear interpolation is not very precise. Denote the function which we want to interpolate by g, and suppose that x lies between xa and xb and that g is twice continuously differentiable. Then the linear interpolation error is",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In words, the error is proportional to the square of the distance between the data points. The error in some other methods, including polynomial interpolation and spline interpolation (described below), is proportional to higher powers of the distance between the data points. These methods also produce smoother interpolants.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Polynomial interpolation is a generalization of linear interpolation. Note that the linear interpolant is a linear function. We now replace this interpolant with a polynomial of higher degree.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Consider again the problem given above. The following sixth degree polynomial goes through all the seven points:",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Substituting x = 2.5, we find that f(2.5) = ~0.59678.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Generally, if we have n data points, there is exactly one polynomial of degree at most n−1 going through all the data points. The interpolation error is proportional to the distance between the data points to the power n. Furthermore, the interpolant is a polynomial and thus infinitely differentiable. So, we see that polynomial interpolation overcomes most of the problems of linear interpolation.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "However, polynomial interpolation also has some disadvantages. Calculating the interpolating polynomial is computationally expensive (see computational complexity) compared to linear interpolation. Furthermore, polynomial interpolation may exhibit oscillatory artifacts, especially at the end points (see Runge's phenomenon).",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Polynomial interpolation can estimate local maxima and minima that are outside the range of the samples, unlike linear interpolation. For example, the interpolant above has a local maximum at x ≈ 1.566, f(x) ≈ 1.003 and a local minimum at x ≈ 4.708, f(x) ≈ −1.003. However, these maxima and minima may exceed the theoretical range of the function; for example, a function that is always positive may have an interpolant with negative values, and whose inverse therefore contains false vertical asymptotes.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "More generally, the shape of the resulting curve, especially for very high or low values of the independent variable, may be contrary to commonsense; that is, to what is known about the experimental system which has generated the data points. These disadvantages can be reduced by using spline interpolation or restricting attention to Chebyshev polynomials.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Linear interpolation uses a linear function for each of intervals [xk,xk+1]. Spline interpolation uses low-degree polynomials in each of the intervals, and chooses the polynomial pieces such that they fit smoothly together. The resulting function is called a spline.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "For instance, the natural cubic spline is piecewise cubic and twice continuously differentiable. Furthermore, its second derivative is zero at the end points. The natural cubic spline interpolating the points in the table above is given by",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In this case we get f(2.5) = 0.5972.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Like polynomial interpolation, spline interpolation incurs a smaller error than linear interpolation, while the interpolant is smoother and easier to evaluate than the high-degree polynomials used in polynomial interpolation. However, the global nature of the basis functions leads to ill-conditioning. This is completely mitigated by using splines of compact support, such as are implemented in Boost.Math and discussed in Kress.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Depending on the underlying discretisation of fields, different interpolants may be required. In contrast to other interpolation methods, which estimate functions on target points, mimetic interpolation evaluates the integral of fields on target lines, areas or volumes, depending on the type of field (scalar, vector, pseudo-vector or pseudo-scalar).",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A key feature of mimetic interpolation is that vector calculus identities are satisfied, including Stokes' theorem and the divergence theorem. As a result, mimetic interpolation conserves line, area and volume integrals. Conservation of line integrals might be desirable when interpolating the electric field, for instance, since the line integral gives the electric potential difference at the endpoints of the integration path. Mimetic interpolation ensures that the error of estimating the line integral of an electric field is the same as the error obtained by interpolating the potential at the end points of the integration path, regardless of the length of the integration path.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Linear, bilinear and trilinear interpolation are also considered mimetic, even if it is the field values that are conserved (not the integral of the field). Apart from linear interpolation, area weighted interpolation can be considered one of the first mimetic interpolation methods to have been developed.",
"title": "Example"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Interpolation is a common way to approximate functions. Given a function f : [ a , b ] → R {\\displaystyle f:[a,b]\\to \\mathbb {R} } with a set of points x 1 , x 2 , … , x n ∈ [ a , b ] {\\displaystyle x_{1},x_{2},\\dots ,x_{n}\\in [a,b]} one can form a function s : [ a , b ] → R {\\displaystyle s:[a,b]\\to \\mathbb {R} } such that f ( x i ) = s ( x i ) {\\displaystyle f(x_{i})=s(x_{i})} for i = 1 , 2 , … , n {\\displaystyle i=1,2,\\dots ,n} (that is, that s {\\displaystyle s} interpolates f {\\displaystyle f} at these points). In general, an interpolant need not be a good approximation, but there are well known and often reasonable conditions where it will. For example, if f ∈ C 4 ( [ a , b ] ) {\\displaystyle f\\in C^{4}([a,b])} (four times continuously differentiable) then cubic spline interpolation has an error bound given by ‖ f − s ‖ ∞ ≤ C ‖ f ( 4 ) ‖ ∞ h 4 {\\displaystyle \\|f-s\\|_{\\infty }\\leq C\\|f^{(4)}\\|_{\\infty }h^{4}} where h max i = 1 , 2 , … , n − 1 | x i + 1 − x i | {\\displaystyle h\\max _{i=1,2,\\dots ,n-1}|x_{i+1}-x_{i}|} and C {\\displaystyle C} is a constant.",
"title": "Function approximation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Gaussian process is a powerful non-linear interpolation tool. Many popular interpolation tools are actually equivalent to particular Gaussian processes. Gaussian processes can be used not only for fitting an interpolant that passes exactly through the given data points but also for regression; that is, for fitting a curve through noisy data. In the geostatistics community Gaussian process regression is also known as Kriging.",
"title": "Via Gaussian processes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Other forms of interpolation can be constructed by picking a different class of interpolants. For instance, rational interpolation is interpolation by rational functions using Padé approximant, and trigonometric interpolation is interpolation by trigonometric polynomials using Fourier series. Another possibility is to use wavelets.",
"title": "Other forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Whittaker–Shannon interpolation formula can be used if the number of data points is infinite or if the function to be interpolated has compact support.",
"title": "Other forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Sometimes, we know not only the value of the function that we want to interpolate, at some points, but also its derivative. This leads to Hermite interpolation problems.",
"title": "Other forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "When each data point is itself a function, it can be useful to see the interpolation problem as a partial advection problem between each data point. This idea leads to the displacement interpolation problem used in transportation theory.",
"title": "Other forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Multivariate interpolation is the interpolation of functions of more than one variable. Methods include bilinear interpolation and bicubic interpolation in two dimensions, and trilinear interpolation in three dimensions. They can be applied to gridded or scattered data. Mimetic interpolation generalizes to n {\\displaystyle n} dimensional spaces where n > 3 {\\displaystyle n>3} .",
"title": "In higher dimensions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In the domain of digital signal processing, the term interpolation refers to the process of converting a sampled digital signal (such as a sampled audio signal) to that of a higher sampling rate (Upsampling) using various digital filtering techniques (for example, convolution with a frequency-limited impulse signal). In this application there is a specific requirement that the harmonic content of the original signal be preserved without creating aliased harmonic content of the original signal above the original Nyquist limit of the signal (that is, above fs/2 of the original signal sample rate). An early and fairly elementary discussion on this subject can be found in Rabiner and Crochiere's book Multirate Digital Signal Processing.",
"title": "In digital signal processing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The term extrapolation is used to find data points outside the range of known data points.",
"title": "Related concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In curve fitting problems, the constraint that the interpolant has to go exactly through the data points is relaxed. It is only required to approach the data points as closely as possible (within some other constraints). This requires parameterizing the potential interpolants and having some way of measuring the error. In the simplest case this leads to least squares approximation.",
"title": "Related concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Approximation theory studies how to find the best approximation to a given function by another function from some predetermined class, and how good this approximation is. This clearly yields a bound on how well the interpolant can approximate the unknown function.",
"title": "Related concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "If we consider x {\\displaystyle x} as a variable in a topological space, and the function f ( x ) {\\displaystyle f(x)} mapping to a Banach space, then the problem is treated as \"interpolation of operators\". The classical results about interpolation of operators are the Riesz–Thorin theorem and the Marcinkiewicz theorem. There are also many other subsequent results.",
"title": "Generalization"
}
]
| In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a type of estimation, a method of constructing (finding) new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points. In engineering and science, one often has a number of data points, obtained by sampling or experimentation, which represent the values of a function for a limited number of values of the independent variable. It is often required to interpolate; that is, estimate the value of that function for an intermediate value of the independent variable. A closely related problem is the approximation of a complicated function by a simple function. Suppose the formula for some given function is known, but too complicated to evaluate efficiently. A few data points from the original function can be interpolated to produce a simpler function which is still fairly close to the original. The resulting gain in simplicity may outweigh the loss from interpolation error and give better performance in calculation process. | 2001-03-21T18:13:00Z | 2023-10-11T10:19:19Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation |
14,570 | Intension | In any of several fields of study that treat the use of signs—for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, semiotics, and philosophy of language—an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase, or another symbol. In the case of a word, the word's definition often implies an intension. For instance, the intensions of the word plant include properties such as "being composed of cellulose (not always true)", "alive", and "organism", among others. A comprehension is the collection of all such intensions.
The meaning of a word can be thought of as the bond between the idea the word means and the physical form of the word. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) contrasts three concepts:
Without intension of some sort, a word has no meaning. For instance, the terms rantans or brillig have no intension and hence no meaning. Such terms may be suggestive, but a term can be suggestive without being meaningful. For instance, ran tan is an archaic onomatopoeia for chaotic noise or din and may suggest to English speakers a din or meaningless noise, and brillig though made up by Lewis Carroll may be suggestive of 'brilliant' or 'frigid'. Such terms, it may be argued, are always intensional since they connote the property 'meaningless term', but this is only an apparent paradox and does not constitute a counterexample to the claim that without intension a word has no meaning. Part of its intension is that it has no extension. Intension is analogous to the signified in the Saussurean system, extension to the referent.
In philosophical arguments about dualism versus monism, it is noted that thoughts have intensionality and physical objects do not (S. E. Palmer, 1999), but rather have extension in space and time.
A statement-form is simply a form obtained by putting blanks into a sentence where one or more expressions with extensions occur—for instance, "The quick brown ___ jumped over the lazy ___'s back." An instance of the form is a statement obtained by filling the blanks in.
An intensional statement-form is a statement-form with at least one instance such that substituting co-extensive expressions into it does not always preserve logical value. An intensional statement is a statement that is an instance of an intensional statement-form. Here co-extensive expressions are expressions with the same extension.
That is, a statement-form is intensional if it has, as one of its instances, a statement for which there are two co-extensive expressions (in the relevant language) such that one of them occurs in the statement, and if the other one is put in its place (uniformly, so that it replaces the former expression wherever it occurs in the statement), the result is a (different) statement with a different logical value. An intensional statement, then, is an instance of such a form; it has the same form as a statement in which substitution of co-extensive terms fails to preserve logical value.
To see that these are intensional, make the following substitutions: (1) "Mark Twain" → "The author of 'Corn-pone Opinions'"; (2) "Aristotle" → "the tutor of Alexander the Great"; (3) can be seen to be intensional given "had a sister" → "had a female sibling."
The intensional statements above feature expressions like "knows", "possible", and "pleased". Such expressions always, or nearly always, produce intensional statements when added (in some intelligible manner) to an extensional statement, and thus they (or more complex expressions like "It is possible that") are sometimes called intensional operators. A large class of intensional statements, but by no means all, can be spotted from the fact that they contain intensional operators.
An extensional statement is a non-intensional statement. Substitution of co-extensive expressions into it always preserves logical value. A language is intensional if it contains intensional statements, and extensional otherwise. All natural languages are intensional. The only extensional languages are artificially constructed languages used in mathematical logic or for other special purposes and small fragments of natural languages.
Note that if "Samuel Clemens" is put into (1) in place of "Mark Twain", the result is as true as the original statement. It should be clear that no matter what is put for "Mark Twain", so long as it is a singular term picking out the same man, the statement remains true. Likewise, we can put in place of the predicate any other predicate belonging to Mark Twain and only to Mark Twain, without changing the logical value. For (2), likewise, consider the following substitutions: "Aristotle" → "The tutor of Alexander the Great"; "Aristotle" → "The author of the 'Prior Analytics'"; "had a sister" → "had a sibling whose body was capable of producing egg cells"; "had a sister" → "had a parent who had a female child". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In any of several fields of study that treat the use of signs—for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, semiotics, and philosophy of language—an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase, or another symbol. In the case of a word, the word's definition often implies an intension. For instance, the intensions of the word plant include properties such as \"being composed of cellulose (not always true)\", \"alive\", and \"organism\", among others. A comprehension is the collection of all such intensions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The meaning of a word can be thought of as the bond between the idea the word means and the physical form of the word. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) contrasts three concepts:",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Without intension of some sort, a word has no meaning. For instance, the terms rantans or brillig have no intension and hence no meaning. Such terms may be suggestive, but a term can be suggestive without being meaningful. For instance, ran tan is an archaic onomatopoeia for chaotic noise or din and may suggest to English speakers a din or meaningless noise, and brillig though made up by Lewis Carroll may be suggestive of 'brilliant' or 'frigid'. Such terms, it may be argued, are always intensional since they connote the property 'meaningless term', but this is only an apparent paradox and does not constitute a counterexample to the claim that without intension a word has no meaning. Part of its intension is that it has no extension. Intension is analogous to the signified in the Saussurean system, extension to the referent.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In philosophical arguments about dualism versus monism, it is noted that thoughts have intensionality and physical objects do not (S. E. Palmer, 1999), but rather have extension in space and time.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "A statement-form is simply a form obtained by putting blanks into a sentence where one or more expressions with extensions occur—for instance, \"The quick brown ___ jumped over the lazy ___'s back.\" An instance of the form is a statement obtained by filling the blanks in.",
"title": "Statement forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "An intensional statement-form is a statement-form with at least one instance such that substituting co-extensive expressions into it does not always preserve logical value. An intensional statement is a statement that is an instance of an intensional statement-form. Here co-extensive expressions are expressions with the same extension.",
"title": "Statement forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "That is, a statement-form is intensional if it has, as one of its instances, a statement for which there are two co-extensive expressions (in the relevant language) such that one of them occurs in the statement, and if the other one is put in its place (uniformly, so that it replaces the former expression wherever it occurs in the statement), the result is a (different) statement with a different logical value. An intensional statement, then, is an instance of such a form; it has the same form as a statement in which substitution of co-extensive terms fails to preserve logical value.",
"title": "Statement forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "To see that these are intensional, make the following substitutions: (1) \"Mark Twain\" → \"The author of 'Corn-pone Opinions'\"; (2) \"Aristotle\" → \"the tutor of Alexander the Great\"; (3) can be seen to be intensional given \"had a sister\" → \"had a female sibling.\"",
"title": "Statement forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The intensional statements above feature expressions like \"knows\", \"possible\", and \"pleased\". Such expressions always, or nearly always, produce intensional statements when added (in some intelligible manner) to an extensional statement, and thus they (or more complex expressions like \"It is possible that\") are sometimes called intensional operators. A large class of intensional statements, but by no means all, can be spotted from the fact that they contain intensional operators.",
"title": "Statement forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "An extensional statement is a non-intensional statement. Substitution of co-extensive expressions into it always preserves logical value. A language is intensional if it contains intensional statements, and extensional otherwise. All natural languages are intensional. The only extensional languages are artificially constructed languages used in mathematical logic or for other special purposes and small fragments of natural languages.",
"title": "Statement forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Note that if \"Samuel Clemens\" is put into (1) in place of \"Mark Twain\", the result is as true as the original statement. It should be clear that no matter what is put for \"Mark Twain\", so long as it is a singular term picking out the same man, the statement remains true. Likewise, we can put in place of the predicate any other predicate belonging to Mark Twain and only to Mark Twain, without changing the logical value. For (2), likewise, consider the following substitutions: \"Aristotle\" → \"The tutor of Alexander the Great\"; \"Aristotle\" → \"The author of the 'Prior Analytics'\"; \"had a sister\" → \"had a sibling whose body was capable of producing egg cells\"; \"had a sister\" → \"had a parent who had a female child\".",
"title": "Statement forms"
}
]
| In any of several fields of study that treat the use of signs—for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, semiotics, and philosophy of language—an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase, or another symbol. In the case of a word, the word's definition often implies an intension. For instance, the intensions of the word plant include properties such as "being composed of cellulose", "alive", and "organism", among others. A comprehension is the collection of all such intensions. | 2001-03-22T18:23:35Z | 2023-08-04T15:28:25Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intension |
14,573 | Isaac Asimov | Isaac Asimov (/ˈæzɪmɒv/ AZ-ih-mov; c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction.
Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation series, the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. His other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are set in the much earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, with Foundation and Earth (1986), he linked this distant future to the Robot series, creating a unified "future history" for his works. He also wrote over 380 short stories, including the social science fiction novelette "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.
Most of his popular science books explain concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. Examples include Guide to Science, the three-volume Understanding Physics, and Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. He wrote on numerous other scientific and non-scientific topics, such as chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, history, biblical exegesis, and literary criticism.
He was the president of the American Humanist Association. Several entities have been named in his honor, including the asteroid (5020) Asimov, a crater on Mars, a Brooklyn elementary school, Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO, and four literary awards.
There are three very simple English words: 'Has', 'him' and 'of'. Put them together like this—'has-him-of'—and say it in the ordinary fashion. Now leave out the two h's and say it again and you have Asimov.
Asimov's family name derives from the first part of озимый хлеб (ozímyj khleb), meaning 'winter grain' (specifically rye) in which his great-great-great-grandfather dealt, with the Russian patronymic ending -ov added. Azimov is spelled Азимов in the Cyrillic alphabet. When the family arrived in the United States in 1923 and their name had to be spelled in the Latin alphabet, Asimov's father spelled it with an S, believing this letter to be pronounced like Z (as in German), and so it became Asimov. This later inspired one of Asimov's short stories, "Spell My Name with an S".
Asimov refused early suggestions of using a more common name as a pseudonym, believing that its recognizability helped his career. After becoming famous, he often met readers who believed that "Isaac Asimov" was a distinctive pseudonym created by an author with a common name.
Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russian SFSR, on an unknown date between October 4, 1919, and January 2, 1920, inclusive. Asimov celebrated his birthday on January 2.
Asimov's parents were Anna Rachel (née Berman) and Judah Asimov, a family of Russian Jewish millers. He was named Isaac after his mother's father, Isaac Berman. Asimov wrote of his father, "My father, for all his education as an Orthodox Jew, was not Orthodox in his heart", noting that "he didn't recite the myriad prayers prescribed for every action, and he never made any attempt to teach them to me."
In 1921, Asimov and 16 other children in Petrovichi developed double pneumonia. Only Asimov survived. He later had two younger siblings: a sister, Marcia (born Manya; June 17, 1922 – April 2, 2011), and a brother, Stanley (July 25, 1929 – August 16, 1995), who would become vice-president of the Long Island Newsday.
Asimov's family travelled to the United States via Liverpool on the RMS Baltic, arriving on February 3, 1923 when he was three years old. His parents spoke Yiddish and English to him; he never learned Russian, his parents using it as a secret language "when they wanted to discuss something privately that my big ears were not to hear". Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five (and later taught his sister to read as well, enabling her to enter school in the second grade). His mother got him into first grade a year early by claiming he was born on September 7, 1919. In third grade he learned about the "error" and insisted on an official correction of the date to January 2. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1928 at the age of eight.
After becoming established in the U.S., his parents owned a succession of candy stores in which everyone in the family was expected to work. The candy stores sold newspapers and magazines, which Asimov credited as a major influence in his lifelong love of the written word, as it presented him as a child with an unending supply of new reading material (including pulp science fiction magazines) that he could not have otherwise afforded. Asimov began reading science fiction at age nine, at the time that the genre was becoming more science-centered. Asimov was also a frequent patron of the Brooklyn Public Library during his formative years.
Asimov attended New York City public schools from age five, including Boys High School in Brooklyn. Graduating at 15, he attended the City College of New York for several days before accepting a scholarship at Seth Low Junior College. This was a branch of Columbia University in Downtown Brooklyn designed to absorb some of the academically qualified Jewish and Italian-American students who applied to the more prestigious Columbia College, but exceeded the unwritten ethnic admission quotas which were common at the time. Originally a zoology major, Asimov switched to chemistry after his first semester because he disapproved of "dissecting an alley cat". After Seth Low Junior College closed in 1936, Asimov finished his Bachelor of Science degree at Columbia's Morningside Heights campus (later the Columbia University School of General Studies) in 1939.
After two rounds of rejections by medical schools, Asimov applied to the graduate program in chemistry at Columbia in 1939; initially he was rejected and then only accepted on a probationary basis. He completed his Master of Arts degree in chemistry in 1941 and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry in 1948. During his chemistry studies, he also learned French and German.
From 1942 to 1945 during World War II, between his masters and doctoral studies, Asimov worked as a civilian chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station and lived in the Walnut Hill section of West Philadelphia. In September 1945, he was conscripted into the post-war U.S. Army; if he had not had his birth date corrected while at school, he would have been officially 26 years old and ineligible. In 1946, a bureaucratic error caused his military allotment to be stopped, and he was removed from a task force days before it sailed to participate in Operation Crossroads nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll. He was promoted to corporal on July 11 before receiving an honorable discharge on July 26, 1946.
After completing his doctorate and a postdoctoral year with Robert Elderfield, Asimov was offered the position of associate professor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine. This was in large part due to his years-long correspondence with William Boyd, a former associate professor of biochemistry at Boston University, who first reached out to compliment Asimov on his story Nightfall. Upon receiving a promotion to professor of immunochemistry, Boyd reached out to Asimov, requesting him to be his replacement. The initial offer of professorship was withdrawn and Asimov was offered the position of instructor of biochemistry instead, which he accepted. He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary (equivalent to $61,000 in 2022), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students. In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he reached an agreement with the university that he would keep his title and give the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry. Asimov's personal papers from 1965 onward are archived at the university's Mugar Memorial Library, to which he donated them at the request of curator Howard Gotlieb.
In 1959, after a recommendation from Arthur Obermayer, Asimov's friend and a scientist on the U.S. missile defense project, Asimov was approached by DARPA to join Obermayer's team. Asimov declined on the grounds that his ability to write freely would be impaired should he receive classified information, but submitted a paper to DARPA titled "On Creativity" containing ideas on how government-based science projects could encourage team members to think more creatively.
Asimov met his first wife, Gertrude Blugerman (May 16, 1917, Toronto, Canada – October 17, 1990, Boston, U.S.), on a blind date on February 14, 1942, and married her on July 26. The couple lived in an apartment in West Philadelphia while Asimov was employed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard (where two of his co-workers were L. Sprague de Camp and Robert A. Heinlein). Gertrude returned to Brooklyn while he was in the army, and they both lived there from July 1946 before moving to Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan, in July 1948. They moved to Boston in May 1949, then to nearby suburbs Somerville in July 1949, Waltham in May 1951, and, finally, West Newton in 1956. They had two children, David (born 1951) and Robyn Joan (born 1955). In 1970, they separated and Asimov moved back to New York, this time to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he lived for the rest of his life. He began seeing Janet O. Jeppson, a psychiatrist and science-fiction writer, and married her on November 30, 1973, two weeks after his divorce from Gertrude.
Asimov was a claustrophile: he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. In the third volume of his autobiography, he recalls a childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City Subway station, within which he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of passing trains while reading.
Asimov was afraid of flying, doing so only twice: once in the course of his work at the Naval Air Experimental Station and once returning home from Oʻahu in 1946. Consequently, he seldom traveled great distances. This phobia influenced several of his fiction works, such as the Wendell Urth mystery stories and the Robot novels featuring Elijah Baley. In his later years, Asimov found enjoyment traveling on cruise ships, beginning in 1972 when he viewed the Apollo 17 launch from a cruise ship. On several cruises, he was part of the entertainment program, giving science-themed talks aboard ships such as the Queen Elizabeth 2. He sailed to England in June 1974 on the SS France for a trip mostly devoted to lectures in London and Birmingham, though he also found time to visit Stonehenge.
He was an able public speaker and was regularly invited to give talks about science in his distinct New York accent. He participated in many science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and approachable. He patiently answered tens of thousands of questions and other mail with postcards and was pleased to give autographs. He was of medium height, 5 ft 9 in (1.75 m) and stocky build. In his later years, he adopted a signature style of "mutton-chop" sideburns. He took to wearing bolo ties after his wife Janet objected to his clip-on bow ties. He never learned to swim or ride a bicycle, but did learn to drive a car after he moved to Boston. In his humor book Asimov Laughs Again, he describes Boston driving as "anarchy on wheels".
Asimov's wide interests included his participation in later years in organizations devoted to the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and in The Wolfe Pack, a group of devotees of the Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout. Many of his short stories mention or quote Gilbert and Sullivan. He was a prominent member of The Baker Street Irregulars, the leading Sherlock Holmes society, for whom he wrote an essay arguing that Professor Moriarty's work "The Dynamics of An Asteroid" involved the willful destruction of an ancient, civilized planet. He was also a member of the male-only literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of his fictional group of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers. He later used his essay on Moriarty's work as the basis for a Black Widowers story, "The Ultimate Crime", which appeared in More Tales of the Black Widowers.
In 1984, the American Humanist Association (AHA) named him the Humanist of the Year. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. From 1985 until his death in 1992, he served as honorary president of the AHA, and was succeeded by his friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut. He was also a close friend of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and earned a screen credit as "special science consultant" on Star Trek: The Motion Picture for his advice during production.
Asimov was a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, CSICOP (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) and is listed in its Pantheon of Skeptics. In a discussion with James Randi at CSICon 2016 regarding the founding of CSICOP, Kendrick Frazier said that Asimov was "a key figure in the Skeptical movement who is less well known and appreciated today, but was very much in the public eye back then." He said that Asimov being associated with CSICOP "gave it immense status and authority" in his eyes.
Asimov described Carl Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own. The other, he claimed, was the computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky. Asimov was an on-and-off member and honorary vice president of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs".
After his father died in 1969, Asimov annually contributed to a Judah Asimov Scholarship Fund at Brandeis University.
In 1977, Asimov had a heart attack. In December 1983, he had triple bypass surgery at NYU Medical Center, during which he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. His HIV status was kept secret out of concern that the anti-AIDS prejudice might extend to his family members.
He died in Manhattan on April 6, 1992, and was cremated. The cause of death was reported as heart and kidney failure. Ten years following Asimov's death, Janet and Robyn Asimov agreed that the HIV story should be made public; Janet revealed it in her edition of his autobiography, It's Been a Good Life.
[T]he only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes.
Asimov's career can be divided into several periods. His early career, dominated by science fiction, began with short stories in 1939 and novels in 1950. This lasted until about 1958, all but ending after publication of The Naked Sun (1957). He began publishing nonfiction as co-author of a college-level textbook called Biochemistry and Human Metabolism. Following the brief orbit of the first human-made satellite Sputnik I by the USSR in 1957, he wrote more nonfiction, particularly popular science books, and less science fiction. Over the next quarter-century, he wrote only four science fiction novels, and 120 nonfiction books.
Starting in 1982, the second half of his science fiction career began with the publication of Foundation's Edge. From then until his death, Asimov published several more sequels and prequels to his existing novels, tying them together in a way he had not originally anticipated, making a unified series. There are many inconsistencies in this unification, especially in his earlier stories. Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin published about 60% of his work up to 1969, Asimov stating that "both represent a father image".
Asimov believed his most enduring contributions would be his "Three Laws of Robotics" and the Foundation series. The Oxford English Dictionary credits his science fiction for introducing into the English language the words "robotics", "positronic" (an entirely fictional technology), and "psychohistory" (which is also used for a different study on historical motivations). Asimov coined the term "robotics" without suspecting that it might be an original word; at the time, he believed it was simply the natural analogue of words such as mechanics and hydraulics, but for robots. Unlike his word "psychohistory", the word "robotics" continues in mainstream technical use with Asimov's original definition. Star Trek: The Next Generation featured androids with "positronic brains" and the first-season episode "Datalore" called the positronic brain "Asimov's dream".
Asimov was so prolific and diverse in his writing that his books span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for category 100, philosophy and psychology. However, he wrote several essays about psychology, and forewords for the books The Humanist Way (1988) and In Pursuit of Truth (1982), which were classified in the 100s category, but none of his own books were classified in that category.
According to UNESCO's Index Translationum database, Asimov is the world's 24th-most-translated author.
No matter how various the subject matter I write on, I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified.
Asimov became a science fiction fan in 1929, when he began reading the pulp magazines sold in his family's candy store. At first his father forbade reading pulps until Asimov persuaded him that because the science fiction magazines had "Science" in the title, they must be educational. At age 18 he joined the Futurians science fiction fan club, where he made friends who went on to become science fiction writers or editors.
Asimov began writing at the age of 11, imitating The Rover Boys with eight chapters of The Greenville Chums at College. His father bought him a used typewriter at age 16. His first published work was a humorous item on the birth of his brother for Boys High School's literary journal in 1934. In May 1937 he first thought of writing professionally, and began writing his first science fiction story, "Cosmic Corkscrew" (now lost), that year. On May 17, 1938, puzzled by a change in the schedule of Astounding Science Fiction, Asimov visited its publisher Street & Smith Publications. Inspired by the visit, he finished the story on June 19, 1938, and personally submitted it to Astounding editor John W. Campbell two days later. Campbell met with Asimov for more than an hour and promised to read the story himself. Two days later he received a detailed rejection letter. This was the first of what became almost weekly meetings with the editor while Asimov lived in New York, until moving to Boston in 1949; Campbell had a strong formative influence on Asimov and became a personal friend.
By the end of the month, Asimov completed a second story, "Stowaway". Campbell rejected it on July 22 but—in "the nicest possible letter you could imagine"—encouraged him to continue writing, promising that Asimov might sell his work after another year and a dozen stories of practice. On October 21, 1938, he sold the third story he finished, "Marooned Off Vesta", to Amazing Stories, edited by Raymond A. Palmer, and it appeared in the March 1939 issue. Asimov was paid $64 (equivalent to $1,331 in 2022), or one cent a word. Two more stories appeared that year, "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use" in the May Amazing and "Trends" in the July Astounding, the issue fans later selected as the start of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. For 1940, ISFDB catalogs seven stories in four different pulp magazines, including one in Astounding. His earnings became enough to pay for his education, but not yet enough for him to become a full-time writer.
He later said that unlike other Golden Age writers Robert Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt—also first published in 1939, and whose talent and stardom were immediately obvious—Asimov "(this is not false modesty) came up only gradually". Through July 29, 1940, Asimov wrote 22 stories in 25 months, of which 13 were published; he wrote in 1972 that from that date he never wrote a science fiction story that was not published (except for two "special cases"). By 1941 Asimov was famous enough that Donald Wollheim told him that he purchased "The Secret Sense" for a new magazine only because of his name, and the December 1940 issue of Astonishing—featuring Asimov's name in bold—was the first magazine to base cover art on his work, but Asimov later said that neither he nor anyone else—except perhaps Campbell—considered him better than an often published "third rater".
Based on a conversation with Campbell, Asimov wrote "Nightfall", his 32nd story, in March and April 1941, and Astounding published it in September 1941. In 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted "Nightfall" the best science fiction short story ever written. In Nightfall and Other Stories Asimov wrote, "The writing of 'Nightfall' was a watershed in my professional career ... I was suddenly taken seriously and the world of science fiction became aware that I existed. As the years passed, in fact, it became evident that I had written a 'classic'." "Nightfall" is an archetypal example of social science fiction, a term he created to describe a new trend in the 1940s, led by authors including him and Heinlein, away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition.
After writing "Victory Unintentional" in January and February 1942, Asimov did not write another story for a year. He expected to make chemistry his career, and was paid $2,600 annually at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, enough to marry his girlfriend; he did not expect to make much more from writing than the $1,788.50 he had earned from the 28 stories he had already sold over four years. Asimov left science fiction fandom and no longer read new magazines, and might have left the writing profession had not Heinlein and de Camp been his coworkers at the Navy Yard and previously sold stories continued to appear.
In 1942, Asimov published the first of his Foundation stories—later collected in the Foundation trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). The books describe the fall of a vast interstellar empire and the establishment of its eventual successor. They feature his fictional science of psychohistory, whose theories could predict the future course of history according to dynamical laws.
Campbell raised his rate per word, Orson Welles purchased rights to "Evidence", and anthologies reprinted his stories. By the end of the war Asimov was earning as a writer an amount equal to half of his Navy Yard salary, even after a raise, but Asimov still did not believe that writing could support him, his wife, and future children.
His "positronic" robot stories—many of which were collected in I, Robot (1950)—were begun at about the same time. They promulgated a set of rules of ethics for robots (see Three Laws of Robotics) and intelligent machines that greatly influenced other writers and thinkers in their treatment of the subject. Asimov notes in his introduction to the short story collection The Complete Robot (1982) that he was largely inspired by the tendency of robots up to that time to fall consistently into a Frankenstein plot in which they destroyed their creators. The Robot series has led to film adaptations. With Asimov's collaboration, in about 1977, Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay of I, Robot that Asimov hoped would lead to "the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction film ever made". The screenplay has never been filmed and was eventually published in book form in 1994. The 2004 movie I, Robot, starring Will Smith, was based on an unrelated script by Jeff Vintar titled Hardwired, with Asimov's ideas incorporated later after the rights to Asimov's title were acquired. (The title was not original to Asimov but had previously been used for a story by Eando Binder.) Also, one of Asimov's robot short stories, "The Bicentennial Man", was expanded into a novel The Positronic Man by Asimov and Robert Silverberg, and this was adapted into the 1999 movie Bicentennial Man, starring Robin Williams.
In 1966 the Foundation trilogy won the Hugo Award for the all-time best series of science fiction and fantasy novels, and they along with the Robot series are his most famous science fiction. Besides movies, his Foundation and Robot stories have inspired other derivative works of science fiction literature, many by well-known and established authors such as Roger MacBride Allen, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Donald Kingsbury. At least some of these appear to have been done with the blessing of, or at the request of, Asimov's widow, Janet Asimov.
In 1948, he also wrote a spoof chemistry article, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". At the time, Asimov was preparing his own doctoral dissertation, which would include an oral examination. Fearing a prejudicial reaction from his graduate school evaluation board at Columbia University, Asimov asked his editor that it be released under a pseudonym. When it nevertheless appeared under his own name, Asimov grew concerned that his doctoral examiners might think he wasn't taking science seriously. At the end of the examination, one evaluator turned to him, smiling, and said, "What can you tell us, Mr. Asimov, about the thermodynamic properties of the compound known as thiotimoline". Laughing hysterically with relief, Asimov had to be led out of the room. After a five-minute wait, he was summoned back into the room and congratulated as "Dr. Asimov".
Demand for science fiction greatly increased during the 1950s, making it possible for a genre author to write full-time. In 1949, book publisher Doubleday's science fiction editor Walter I. Bradbury accepted Asimov's unpublished "Grow Old with Me" (40,000 words), but requested that it be extended to a full novel of 70,000 words. The book appeared under the Doubleday imprint in January 1950 with the title of Pebble in the Sky. Doubleday published five more original science fiction novels by Asimov in the 1950s, along with the six juvenile Lucky Starr novels, the latter under the pseudonym "Paul French". Doubleday also published collections of Asimov's short stories, beginning with The Martian Way and Other Stories in 1955. The early 1950s also saw Gnome Press publish one collection of Asimov's positronic robot stories as I, Robot and his Foundation stories and novelettes as the three books of the Foundation trilogy. More positronic robot stories were republished in book form as The Rest of the Robots.
Book publishers and the magazines Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction ended Asimov's dependence on Astounding. He later described the era as his "'mature' period". Asimov's "The Last Question" (1956), on the ability of humankind to cope with and potentially reverse the process of entropy, was his personal favorite story.
In 1972, his stand-alone novel The Gods Themselves was published to general acclaim, winning Best Novel in the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards.
In December 1974, former Beatle Paul McCartney approached Asimov and asked him to write the screenplay for a science-fiction movie musical. McCartney had a vague idea for the plot and a small scrap of dialogue, about a rock band whose members discover they are being impersonated by extraterrestrials. The band and their impostors would likely be played by McCartney's group Wings, then at the height of their career. Though not generally a fan of rock music, Asimov was intrigued by the idea and quickly produced a treatment outline of the story adhering to McCartney's overall idea but omitting McCartney's scrap of dialogue. McCartney rejected it, and the treatment now exists only in the Boston University archives.
Asimov said in 1969 that he had "the happiest of all my associations with science fiction magazines" with Fantasy & Science Fiction; "I have no complaints about Astounding, Galaxy, or any of the rest, heaven knows, but F&SF has become something special to me". Beginning in 1977, Asimov lent his name to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov's Science Fiction) and wrote an editorial for each issue. There was also a short-lived Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine and a companion Asimov's Science Fiction Anthology reprint series, published as magazines (in the same manner as the stablemates Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine's and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine's "anthologies").
Due to pressure by fans on Asimov to write another book in his Foundation series, he did so with Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), and then went back to before the original trilogy with Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1992), his last novel.
Just say I am one of the most versatile writers in the world, and the greatest popularizer of many subjects.
Asimov and two colleagues published a textbook in 1949, with two more editions by 1969. During the late 1950s and 1960s, Asimov substantially decreased his fiction output (he published only four adult novels between 1957's The Naked Sun and 1982's Foundation's Edge, two of which were mysteries). He greatly increased his nonfiction production, writing mostly on science topics; the launch of Sputnik in 1957 engendered public concern over a "science gap". Asimov explained in The Rest of the Robots that he had been unable to write substantial fiction since the summer of 1958, and observers understood him as saying that his fiction career had ended, or was permanently interrupted. Asimov recalled in 1969 that "the United States went into a kind of tizzy, and so did I. I was overcome by the ardent desire to write popular science for an America that might be in great danger through its neglect of science, and a number of publishers got an equally ardent desire to publish popular science for the same reason".
Fantasy and Science Fiction invited Asimov to continue his regular nonfiction column, begun in the now-folded bimonthly companion magazine Venture Science Fiction Magazine. The first of 399 monthly F&SF columns appeared in November 1958 and they continued until his terminal illness. These columns, periodically collected into books by Doubleday, gave Asimov a reputation as a "Great Explainer" of science; he described them as his only popular science writing in which he never had to assume complete ignorance of the subjects on the part of his readers. The column was ostensibly dedicated to popular science but Asimov had complete editorial freedom, and wrote about contemporary social issues in essays such as "Thinking About Thinking" and "Knock Plastic!". In 1975 he wrote of these essays: "I get more pleasure out of them than out of any other writing assignment."
Asimov's first wide-ranging reference work, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1960), was nominated for a National Book Award, and in 1963 he won a Hugo Award—his first—for his essays for F&SF. The popularity of his science books and the income he derived from them allowed him to give up most academic responsibilities and become a full-time freelance writer. He encouraged other science fiction writers to write popular science, stating in 1967 that "the knowledgeable, skillful science writer is worth his weight in contracts", with "twice as much work as he can possibly handle".
The great variety of information covered in Asimov's writings prompted Kurt Vonnegut to ask, "How does it feel to know everything?" Asimov replied that he only knew how it felt to have the 'reputation' of omniscience: "Uneasy". Floyd C. Gale said that "Asimov has a rare talent. He can make your mental mouth water over dry facts", and "science fiction's loss has been science popularization's gain". Asimov said that "Of all the writing I do, fiction, non-fiction, adult, or juvenile, these F & SF articles are by far the most fun". He regretted, however, that he had less time for fiction—causing dissatisfied readers to send him letters of complaint—stating in 1969 that "In the last ten years, I've done a couple of novels, some collections, a dozen or so stories, but that's nothing".
In his essay "To Tell a Chemist" (1965), Asimov proposed a simple shibboleth for distinguishing chemists from non-chemists: ask the person to read the word "unionized". Chemists, he noted, will read un-ionized (electrically neutral), while non-chemists will read union-ized (belonging to a trade union).
Asimov coined the term "robotics" in his 1941 story "Liar!", though he later remarked that he believed then that he was merely using an existing word, as he stated in Gold ("The Robot Chronicles"). While acknowledging the Oxford Dictionary reference, he incorrectly states that the word was first printed about one third of the way down the first column of page 100, Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942 printing of his short story "Runaround".
In the same story, Asimov also coined the term "positronic" (the counterpart to "electronic" for positrons).
Asimov coined the term "psychohistory" in his Foundation stories to name a fictional branch of science which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. Asimov said later that he should have called it psychosociology. It was first introduced in the five short stories (1942–1944) which would later be collected as the 1951 fix-up novel Foundation. Somewhat later, the term "psychohistory" was applied by others to research of the effects of psychology on history.
In addition to his interest in science, Asimov was interested in history. Starting in the 1960s, he wrote 14 popular history books, including The Greeks: A Great Adventure (1965), The Roman Republic (1966), The Roman Empire (1967), The Egyptians (1967) The Near East: 10,000 Years of History (1968), and Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991).
He published Asimov's Guide to the Bible in two volumes—covering the Old Testament in 1967 and the New Testament in 1969—and then combined them into one 1,300-page volume in 1981. Complete with maps and tables, the guide goes through the books of the Bible in order, explaining the history of each one and the political influences that affected it, as well as biographical information about the important characters. His interest in literature manifested itself in several annotations of literary works, including Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare (1970), Asimov's Annotated Don Juan (1972), Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost (1974), and The Annotated Gulliver's Travels (1980).
Asimov was also a noted mystery author and a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He began by writing science fiction mysteries such as his Wendell Urth stories, but soon moved on to writing "pure" mysteries. He published two full-length mystery novels, and wrote 66 stories about the Black Widowers, a group of men who met monthly for dinner, conversation, and a puzzle. He got the idea for the Widowers from his own association in a stag group called the Trap Door Spiders, and all of the main characters (with the exception of the waiter, Henry, who he admitted resembled Wodehouse's Jeeves) were modeled after his closest friends. A parody of the Black Widowers, "An Evening with the White Divorcés," was written by author, critic, and librarian Jon L. Breen. Asimov joked, "all I can do ... is to wait until I catch him in a dark alley, someday."
Toward the end of his life, Asimov published a series of collections of limericks, mostly written by himself, starting with Lecherous Limericks, which appeared in 1975. Limericks: Too Gross, whose title displays Asimov's love of puns, contains 144 limericks by Asimov and an equal number by John Ciardi. He even created a slim volume of Sherlockian limericks. Asimov featured Yiddish humor in Azazel, The Two Centimeter Demon. The two main characters, both Jewish, talk over dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, about anecdotes of "George" and his friend Azazel. Asimov's Treasury of Humor is both a working joke book and a treatise propounding his views on humor theory. According to Asimov, the most essential element of humor is an abrupt change in point of view, one that suddenly shifts focus from the important to the trivial, or from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Particularly in his later years, Asimov to some extent cultivated an image of himself as an amiable lecher. In 1971, as a response to the popularity of sexual guidebooks such as The Sensuous Woman (by "J") and The Sensuous Man (by "M"), Asimov published The Sensuous Dirty Old Man under the byline "Dr. 'A'" (although his full name was printed on the paperback edition, first published 1972). However, by 2016, Asimov's habit of groping women was seen as sexual harassment and came under criticism, and was cited as an early example of inappropriate behavior that can occur at science fiction conventions.
Asimov published three volumes of autobiography. In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980) cover his life up to 1978. The third volume, I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), covered his whole life (rather than following on from where the second volume left off). The epilogue was written by his widow Janet Asimov after his death. The book won a Hugo Award in 1995. Janet Asimov edited It's Been a Good Life (2002), a condensed version of his three autobiographies. He also published three volumes of retrospectives of his writing, Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984).
In 1987, the Asimovs co-wrote How to Enjoy Writing: A Book of Aid and Comfort. In it they offer advice on how to maintain a positive attitude and stay productive when dealing with discouragement, distractions, rejection, and thick-headed editors. The book includes many quotations, essays, anecdotes, and husband-wife dialogues about the ups and downs of being an author.
Asimov and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry developed a unique relationship during Star Trek's initial launch in the late 1960s. Asimov wrote a critical essay on Star Trek's scientific accuracy for TV Guide magazine. Roddenberry retorted respectfully with a personal letter explaining the limitations of accuracy when writing a weekly series. Asimov corrected himself with a follow-up essay to TV Guide claiming that despite its inaccuracies, Star Trek was a fresh and intellectually challenging science fiction television show. The two remained friends to the point where Asimov even served as an advisor on a number of Star Trek projects.
In 1973, Asimov published a proposal for calendar reform, called the World Season Calendar. It divides the year into four seasons (named A–D) of 13 weeks (91 days) each. This allows days to be named, e.g., "D-73" instead of December 1 (due to December 1 being the 73rd day of the 4th quarter). An extra 'year day' is added for a total of 365 days.
Asimov won more than a dozen annual awards for particular works of science fiction and a half-dozen lifetime awards. He also received 14 honorary doctorate degrees from universities.
I have an informal style, which means I tend to use short words and simple sentence structure, to say nothing of occasional colloquialisms. This grates on people who like things that are poetic, weighty, complex, and, above all, obscure. On the other hand, the informal style pleases people who enjoy the sensation of reading an essay without being aware that they are reading and of feeling that ideas are flowing from the writer's brain into their own without mental friction.
Asimov was his own secretary, typist, indexer, proofreader, and literary agent. He wrote a typed first draft composed at the keyboard at 90 words per minute; he imagined an ending first, then a beginning, then "let everything in-between work itself out as I come to it". (Asimov used an outline only once, later describing it as "like trying to play the piano from inside a straitjacket".) After correcting a draft by hand, he retyped the document as the final copy and only made one revision with minor editor-requested changes; a word processor did not save him much time, Asimov said, because 95% of the first draft was unchanged.
After disliking making multiple revisions of "Black Friar of the Flame", Asimov refused to make major, second, or non-editorial revisions ("like chewing used gum"), stating that "too large a revision, or too many revisions, indicate that the piece of writing is a failure. In the time it would take to salvage such a failure, I could write a new piece altogether and have infinitely more fun in the process". He submitted "failures" to another editor.
Asimov's fiction style is extremely unornamented. In 1980, science fiction scholar James Gunn wrote of I, Robot:
Except for two stories—"Liar!" and "Evidence"—they are not stories in which character plays a significant part. Virtually all plot develops in conversation with little if any action. Nor is there a great deal of local color or description of any kind. The dialogue is, at best, functional and the style is, at best, transparent. ... . The robot stories and, as a matter of fact, almost all Asimov fiction—play themselves on a relatively bare stage.
Asimov addressed such criticism in 1989 at the beginning of Nemesis:
I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be 'clear'. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.
Gunn cited examples of a more complex style, such as the climax of "Liar!". Sharply drawn characters occur at key junctures of his storylines: Susan Calvin in "Liar!" and "Evidence", Arkady Darell in Second Foundation, Elijah Baley in The Caves of Steel, and Hari Seldon in the Foundation prequels.
Other than books by Gunn and Joseph Patrouch, there is relatively little literary criticism on Asimov (particularly when compared to the sheer volume of his output). Cowart and Wymer's Dictionary of Literary Biography (1981) gives a possible reason:
His words do not easily lend themselves to traditional literary criticism because he has the habit of centering his fiction on plot and clearly stating to his reader, in rather direct terms, what is happening in his stories and why it is happening. In fact, most of the dialogue in an Asimov story, and particularly in the Foundation trilogy, is devoted to such exposition. Stories that clearly state what they mean in unambiguous language are the most difficult for a scholar to deal with because there is little to be interpreted.
Gunn's and Patrouch's studies of Asimov both state that a clear, direct prose style is still a style. Gunn's 1982 book comments in detail on each of Asimov's novels. He does not praise all of Asimov's fiction (nor does Patrouch), but calls some passages in The Caves of Steel "reminiscent of Proust". When discussing how that novel depicts night falling over futuristic New York City, Gunn says that Asimov's prose "need not be ashamed anywhere in literary society".
Although he prided himself on his unornamented prose style (for which he credited Clifford D. Simak as an early influence), and said in 1973 that his style had not changed, Asimov also enjoyed giving his longer stories complicated narrative structures, often by arranging chapters in nonchronological ways. Some readers have been put off by this, complaining that the nonlinearity is not worth the trouble and adversely affects the clarity of the story. For example, the first third of The Gods Themselves begins with Chapter 6, then backtracks to fill in earlier material. (John Campbell advised Asimov to begin his stories as late in the plot as possible. This advice helped Asimov create "Reason", one of the early Robot stories). Patrouch found that the interwoven and nested flashbacks of The Currents of Space did serious harm to that novel, to such an extent that only a "dyed-in-the-kyrt Asimov fan" could enjoy it. In his later novel Nemesis one group of characters lives in the "present" and another group starts in the "past", beginning 15 years earlier and gradually moving toward the time of the first group.
Asimov once explained that his reluctance to write about aliens came from an incident early in his career when Astounding's editor John Campbell rejected one of his science fiction stories because the alien characters were portrayed as superior to the humans. The nature of the rejection led him to believe that Campbell may have based his bias towards humans in stories on a real-world racial bias. Unwilling to write only weak alien races, and concerned that a confrontation would jeopardize his and Campbell's friendship, he decided he would not write about aliens at all. Nevertheless, in response to these criticisms, he wrote The Gods Themselves, which contains aliens and alien sex. The book won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1972, and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1973. Asimov said that of all his writings, he was most proud of the middle section of The Gods Themselves, the part that deals with those themes.
In the Hugo Award-winning novelette "Gold", Asimov describes an author, based on himself, who has one of his books (The Gods Themselves) adapted into a "compu-drama", essentially photo-realistic computer animation. The director criticizes the fictionalized Asimov ("Gregory Laborian") for having an extremely nonvisual style, making it difficult to adapt his work, and the author explains that he relies on ideas and dialogue rather than description to get his points across.
In the early days of science fiction some authors and critics felt that the romantic elements were inappropriate in science fiction stories, which were supposedly to be focused on science and technology. Isaac Asimov was a supporter of this point of view, expressed in his 1938-1939 letters to Astounding, where he described such elements as "mush" and "slop". To his dismay, these letters were met with a strong opposition.
Asimov attributed the lack of romance and sex in his fiction to the "early imprinting" from starting his writing career when he had never been on a date and "didn't know anything about girls". He was sometimes criticized for the general absence of sex (and of extraterrestrial life) in his science fiction. He claimed he wrote The Gods Themselves (1972) to respond to these criticisms, which often came from New Wave science fiction (and often British) writers. The second part (of three) of the novel is set on an alien world with three sexes, and the sexual behavior of these creatures is extensively depicted.
There is a perennial question among readers as to whether the views contained in a story reflect the views of the author. The answer is, "Not necessarily—" And yet one ought to add another short phrase "—but usually."
Asimov was an atheist, and a humanist. He did not oppose religious conviction in others, but he frequently railed against superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs that tried to pass themselves off as genuine science. During his childhood, his father and mother observed the traditions of Orthodox Judaism less stringently than they had in Petrovichi; they did not force their beliefs upon young Isaac, and he grew up without strong religious influences, coming to believe that the Torah represented Hebrew mythology in the same way that the Iliad recorded Greek mythology. When he was 13, he chose not to have a bar mitzvah. As his books Treasury of Humor and Asimov Laughs Again record, Asimov was willing to tell jokes involving God, Satan, the Garden of Eden, Jerusalem, and other religious topics, expressing the viewpoint that a good joke can do more to provoke thought than hours of philosophical discussion.
For a brief while, his father worked in the local synagogue to enjoy the familiar surroundings and, as Isaac put it, "shine as a learned scholar" versed in the sacred writings. This scholarship was a seed for his later authorship and publication of Asimov's Guide to the Bible, an analysis of the historic foundations for the Old and New Testaments. For many years, Asimov called himself an atheist; he considered the term somewhat inadequate, as it described what he did not believe rather than what he did. Eventually, he described himself as a "humanist" and considered that term more practical. Asimov continued to identify himself as a secular Jew, as stated in his introduction to Jack Dann's anthology of Jewish science fiction, Wandering Stars: "I attend no services and follow no ritual and have never undergone that curious puberty rite, the Bar Mitzvah. It doesn't matter. I am Jewish."
When asked in an interview in 1982 if he was an atheist, Asimov replied,
I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
Likewise, he said about religious education: "I would not be satisfied to have my kids choose to be religious without trying to argue them out of it, just as I would not be satisfied to have them decide to smoke regularly or engage in any other practice I consider detrimental to mind or body."
In his last volume of autobiography, Asimov wrote,
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
The same memoir states his belief that Hell is "the drooling dream of a sadist" crudely affixed to an all-merciful God; if even human governments were willing to curtail cruel and unusual punishments, wondered Asimov, why would punishment in the afterlife not be restricted to a limited term? Asimov rejected the idea that a human belief or action could merit infinite punishment. If an afterlife existed, he claimed, the longest and most severe punishment would be reserved for those who "slandered God by inventing Hell".
Asimov said about using religious motifs in his writing:
I tend to ignore religion in my own stories altogether, except when I absolutely have to have it. ... and, whenever I bring in a religious motif, that religion is bound to seem vaguely Christian because that is the only religion I know anything about, even though it is not mine. An unsympathetic reader might think that I am "burlesquing" Christianity, but I am not. Then too, it is impossible to write science fiction and really ignore religion.
Asimov became a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party during the New Deal, and thereafter remained a political liberal. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and in a television interview during the early 1970s he publicly endorsed George McGovern. He was unhappy about what he considered an "irrationalist" viewpoint taken by many radical political activists from the late 1960s and onwards. In his second volume of autobiography, In Joy Still Felt, Asimov recalled meeting the counterculture figure Abbie Hoffman. Asimov's impression was that the 1960s' counterculture heroes had ridden an emotional wave which, in the end, left them stranded in a "no-man's land of the spirit" from which he wondered if they would ever return.
Asimov vehemently opposed Richard Nixon, considering him "a crook and a liar". He closely followed Watergate, and was pleased when the president was forced to resign. Asimov was dismayed over the pardon extended to Nixon by his successor: "I was not impressed by the argument that it has spared the nation an ordeal. To my way of thinking, the ordeal was necessary to make certain it would never happen again."
After Asimov's name appeared in the mid-1960s on a list of people the Communist Party USA "considered amenable" to its goals, the FBI investigated him. Because of his academic background, the bureau briefly considered Asimov as a possible candidate for known Soviet spy ROBPROF, but found nothing suspicious in his life or background.
Asimov appeared to hold an equivocal attitude towards Israel. In his first autobiography, he indicates his support for the safety of Israel, though insisting that he was not a Zionist. In his third autobiography, Asimov stated his opposition to the creation of a Jewish state, on the grounds that he was opposed to having nation-states in general, and supported the notion of a single humanity. Asimov especially worried about the safety of Israel given that it had been created among Muslim neighbors, and said that Jews had merely created for themselves another "Jewish ghetto".
Asimov believed that "science fiction ... serve[s] the good of humanity". He considered himself a feminist even before women's liberation became a widespread movement; he argued that the issue of women's rights was closely connected to that of population control. Furthermore, he believed that homosexuality must be considered a "moral right" on population grounds, as must all consenting adult sexual activity that does not lead to reproduction. He issued many appeals for population control, reflecting a perspective articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R. Ehrlich.
In a 1988 interview by Bill Moyers, Asimov proposed computer-aided learning, where people would use computers to find information on subjects in which they were interested. He thought this would make learning more interesting, since people would have the freedom to choose what to learn, and would help spread knowledge around the world. Also, the one-to-one model would let students learn at their own pace. Asimov thought that people would live in space by 2019.
In 1983 Asimov wrote:
Computerization will undoubtedly continue onward inevitably... This means that a vast change in the nature of education must take place, and entire populations must be made "computer-literate" and must be taught to deal with a "high-tech" world.
He continues on education:
Education, which must be revolutionized in the new world, will be revolutionized by the very agency that requires the revolution — the computer.
Schools will undoubtedly still exist, but a good schoolteacher can do no better than to inspire curiosity which an interested student can then satisfy at home at the console of his computer outlet.
There will be an opportunity finally for every youngster, and indeed, every person, to learn what he or she wants to learn, in his or her own time, at his or her own speed, in his or her own way.
Education will become fun because it will bubble up from within and not be forced in from without.
Asimov would often fondle, kiss and pinch women at conventions and elsewhere without regard for their consent. According to Alec Nevala-Lee, author of an Asimov biography and writer on the history of science fiction, he often defended himself by saying that far from showing objections, these women cooperated. In a 1971 satirical piece, The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, Asimov wrote: "The question then is not whether or not a girl should be touched. The question is merely where, when, and how she should be touched."
According to Nevala-Lee, however, "many of these encounters were clearly nonconsensual." He wrote that Asimov's behaviour, as a leading science-fiction author and personality, contributed to an undesirable atmosphere for women in the male-dominated science fiction community. In support of this, he quoted some of Asimov's contemporary fellow-authors such as Judith Merril, Harlan Ellison and Frederik Pohl, as well as editors such as Timothy Seldes. Additional specific incidents were reported by other people including Edward L. Ferman, long-time editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who wrote "... instead of shaking my date's hand, he shook her left breast".
Asimov's defense of civil applications of nuclear power, even after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant incident, damaged his relations with some of his fellow liberals. In a letter reprinted in Yours, Isaac Asimov, he states that although he would prefer living in "no danger whatsoever" than near a nuclear reactor, he would still prefer a home near a nuclear power plant than in a slum on Love Canal or near "a Union Carbide plant producing methyl isocyanate", the latter being a reference to the Bhopal disaster.
In the closing years of his life, Asimov blamed the deterioration of the quality of life that he perceived in New York City on the shrinking tax base caused by the middle-class flight to the suburbs, though he continued to support high taxes on the middle class to pay for social programs. His last nonfiction book, Our Angry Earth (1991, co-written with his long-time friend, science fiction author Frederik Pohl), deals with elements of the environmental crisis such as overpopulation, oil dependence, war, global warming, and the destruction of the ozone layer. In response to being presented by Bill Moyers with the question "What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?", Asimov responded:
It's going to destroy it all ... if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears.
Asimov enjoyed the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and used The Lord of the Rings as a plot point in a Black Widowers story, titled Nothing like Murder. In the essay "All or Nothing" (for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan 1981), Asimov said that he admired Tolkien and that he had read The Lord of the Rings five times. (The feelings were mutual, with Tolkien saying that he had enjoyed Asimov's science fiction. This would make Asimov an exception to Tolkien's earlier claim that he rarely found "any modern books" that were interesting to him.)
He acknowledged other writers as superior to himself in talent, saying of Harlan Ellison, "He is (in my opinion) one of the best writers in the world, far more skilled at the art than I am." Asimov disapproved of the New Wave's growing influence, stating in 1967 "I want science fiction. I think science fiction isn't really science fiction if it lacks science. And I think the better and truer the science, the better and truer the science fiction".
The feelings of friendship and respect between Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were demonstrated by the so-called "Clarke–Asimov Treaty of Park Avenue", negotiated as they shared a cab in New York. This stated that Asimov was required to insist that Clarke was the best science fiction writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself), while Clarke was required to insist that Asimov was the best science writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself). Thus, the dedication in Clarke's book Report on Planet Three (1972) reads: "In accordance with the terms of the Clarke–Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer."
Asimov became a fan of mystery stories at the same time as science fiction. He preferred to read the former because "I read every [science fiction] story keenly aware that it might be worse than mine, in which case I had no patience with it, or that it might be better, in which case I felt miserable". Asimov wrote "I make no secret of the fact that in my mysteries I use Agatha Christie as my model. In my opinion, her mysteries are the best ever written, far better than the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Hercule Poirot is the best detective fiction has seen. Why should I not use as my model what I consider the best?" He enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, but considered Arthur Conan Doyle to be "a slapdash and sloppy writer."
Asimov also enjoyed humorous stories, particularly those of P. G. Wodehouse.
In non-fiction writing, Asimov particularly admired the writing style of Martin Gardner, and tried to emulate it in his own science books. On meeting Gardner for the first time in 1965, Asimov told him this, to which Gardner answered that he had based his own style on Asimov's.
Paul Krugman, holder of a Nobel Prize in Economics, stated Asimov's concept of psychohistory inspired him to become an economist.
John Jenkins, who has reviewed the vast majority of Asimov's written output, once observed, "It has been pointed out that most science fiction writers since the 1950s have been affected by Asimov, either modeling their style on his or deliberately avoiding anything like his style." Along with such figures as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, Asimov left his mark as one of the most distinguished interdisciplinarians of the 20th century. "Few individuals", writes James L. Christian, "understood better than Isaac Asimov what synoptic thinking is all about. His almost 500 books—which he wrote as a specialist, a knowledgeable authority, or just an excited layman—range over almost all conceivable subjects: the sciences, history, literature, religion, and of course, science fiction."
Over a space of 40 years, I published an average of 1,000 words a day. Over the space of the second 20 years, I published an average of 1,700 words a day.
Depending on the counting convention used, and including all titles, charts, and edited collections, there may be currently over 500 books in Asimov's bibliography—as well as his individual short stories, individual essays, and criticism. For his 100th, 200th, and 300th books (based on his personal count), Asimov published Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984), celebrating his writing. An extensive bibliography of Isaac Asimov's works has been compiled by Ed Seiler. He published enough that his book writing rate could be analysed, showing that the writing became faster as he wrote more.
An online exhibit in West Virginia University Libraries' virtually complete Asimov Collection displays features, visuals, and descriptions of some of his over 600 books, games, audio recordings, videos, and wall charts. Many first, rare, and autographed editions are in the Libraries' Rare Book Room. Book jackets and autographs are presented online along with descriptions and images of children's books, science fiction art, multimedia, and other materials in the collection.
The Robot series was originally separate from the Foundation series. The Galactic Empire novels were published as independent stories, set earlier in the same future as Foundation. Later in life, Asimov synthesized the Robot series into a single coherent "history" that appeared in the extension of the Foundation series.
All of these books were published by Doubleday & Co, except the original Foundation trilogy which was originally published by Gnome Books before being bought and republished by Doubleday.
All published by Doubleday & Co
All published by Walker & Company
Novels marked with an asterisk (*) have minor connections to Foundation universe.
The following books collected essays which were originally published as monthly columns in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and collected by Doubleday & Co
All published by Doubleday
All published by Houghton Mifflin except where otherwise stated | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Isaac Asimov (/ˈæzɪmɒv/ AZ-ih-mov; c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the \"Big Three\" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation series, the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for \"Best All-Time Series\" in 1966. His other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are set in the much earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, with Foundation and Earth (1986), he linked this distant future to the Robot series, creating a unified \"future history\" for his works. He also wrote over 380 short stories, including the social science fiction novelette \"Nightfall\", which in 1964 was voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Most of his popular science books explain concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. Examples include Guide to Science, the three-volume Understanding Physics, and Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. He wrote on numerous other scientific and non-scientific topics, such as chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, history, biblical exegesis, and literary criticism.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "He was the president of the American Humanist Association. Several entities have been named in his honor, including the asteroid (5020) Asimov, a crater on Mars, a Brooklyn elementary school, Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO, and four literary awards.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "There are three very simple English words: 'Has', 'him' and 'of'. Put them together like this—'has-him-of'—and say it in the ordinary fashion. Now leave out the two h's and say it again and you have Asimov.",
"title": "Surname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Asimov's family name derives from the first part of озимый хлеб (ozímyj khleb), meaning 'winter grain' (specifically rye) in which his great-great-great-grandfather dealt, with the Russian patronymic ending -ov added. Azimov is spelled Азимов in the Cyrillic alphabet. When the family arrived in the United States in 1923 and their name had to be spelled in the Latin alphabet, Asimov's father spelled it with an S, believing this letter to be pronounced like Z (as in German), and so it became Asimov. This later inspired one of Asimov's short stories, \"Spell My Name with an S\".",
"title": "Surname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Asimov refused early suggestions of using a more common name as a pseudonym, believing that its recognizability helped his career. After becoming famous, he often met readers who believed that \"Isaac Asimov\" was a distinctive pseudonym created by an author with a common name.",
"title": "Surname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russian SFSR, on an unknown date between October 4, 1919, and January 2, 1920, inclusive. Asimov celebrated his birthday on January 2.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Asimov's parents were Anna Rachel (née Berman) and Judah Asimov, a family of Russian Jewish millers. He was named Isaac after his mother's father, Isaac Berman. Asimov wrote of his father, \"My father, for all his education as an Orthodox Jew, was not Orthodox in his heart\", noting that \"he didn't recite the myriad prayers prescribed for every action, and he never made any attempt to teach them to me.\"",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1921, Asimov and 16 other children in Petrovichi developed double pneumonia. Only Asimov survived. He later had two younger siblings: a sister, Marcia (born Manya; June 17, 1922 – April 2, 2011), and a brother, Stanley (July 25, 1929 – August 16, 1995), who would become vice-president of the Long Island Newsday.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Asimov's family travelled to the United States via Liverpool on the RMS Baltic, arriving on February 3, 1923 when he was three years old. His parents spoke Yiddish and English to him; he never learned Russian, his parents using it as a secret language \"when they wanted to discuss something privately that my big ears were not to hear\". Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five (and later taught his sister to read as well, enabling her to enter school in the second grade). His mother got him into first grade a year early by claiming he was born on September 7, 1919. In third grade he learned about the \"error\" and insisted on an official correction of the date to January 2. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1928 at the age of eight.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After becoming established in the U.S., his parents owned a succession of candy stores in which everyone in the family was expected to work. The candy stores sold newspapers and magazines, which Asimov credited as a major influence in his lifelong love of the written word, as it presented him as a child with an unending supply of new reading material (including pulp science fiction magazines) that he could not have otherwise afforded. Asimov began reading science fiction at age nine, at the time that the genre was becoming more science-centered. Asimov was also a frequent patron of the Brooklyn Public Library during his formative years.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Asimov attended New York City public schools from age five, including Boys High School in Brooklyn. Graduating at 15, he attended the City College of New York for several days before accepting a scholarship at Seth Low Junior College. This was a branch of Columbia University in Downtown Brooklyn designed to absorb some of the academically qualified Jewish and Italian-American students who applied to the more prestigious Columbia College, but exceeded the unwritten ethnic admission quotas which were common at the time. Originally a zoology major, Asimov switched to chemistry after his first semester because he disapproved of \"dissecting an alley cat\". After Seth Low Junior College closed in 1936, Asimov finished his Bachelor of Science degree at Columbia's Morningside Heights campus (later the Columbia University School of General Studies) in 1939.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After two rounds of rejections by medical schools, Asimov applied to the graduate program in chemistry at Columbia in 1939; initially he was rejected and then only accepted on a probationary basis. He completed his Master of Arts degree in chemistry in 1941 and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry in 1948. During his chemistry studies, he also learned French and German.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "From 1942 to 1945 during World War II, between his masters and doctoral studies, Asimov worked as a civilian chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station and lived in the Walnut Hill section of West Philadelphia. In September 1945, he was conscripted into the post-war U.S. Army; if he had not had his birth date corrected while at school, he would have been officially 26 years old and ineligible. In 1946, a bureaucratic error caused his military allotment to be stopped, and he was removed from a task force days before it sailed to participate in Operation Crossroads nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll. He was promoted to corporal on July 11 before receiving an honorable discharge on July 26, 1946.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "After completing his doctorate and a postdoctoral year with Robert Elderfield, Asimov was offered the position of associate professor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine. This was in large part due to his years-long correspondence with William Boyd, a former associate professor of biochemistry at Boston University, who first reached out to compliment Asimov on his story Nightfall. Upon receiving a promotion to professor of immunochemistry, Boyd reached out to Asimov, requesting him to be his replacement. The initial offer of professorship was withdrawn and Asimov was offered the position of instructor of biochemistry instead, which he accepted. He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary (equivalent to $61,000 in 2022), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students. In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, due to his lack of research. After a struggle over two years, he reached an agreement with the university that he would keep his title and give the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class. On October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry. Asimov's personal papers from 1965 onward are archived at the university's Mugar Memorial Library, to which he donated them at the request of curator Howard Gotlieb.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1959, after a recommendation from Arthur Obermayer, Asimov's friend and a scientist on the U.S. missile defense project, Asimov was approached by DARPA to join Obermayer's team. Asimov declined on the grounds that his ability to write freely would be impaired should he receive classified information, but submitted a paper to DARPA titled \"On Creativity\" containing ideas on how government-based science projects could encourage team members to think more creatively.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Asimov met his first wife, Gertrude Blugerman (May 16, 1917, Toronto, Canada – October 17, 1990, Boston, U.S.), on a blind date on February 14, 1942, and married her on July 26. The couple lived in an apartment in West Philadelphia while Asimov was employed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard (where two of his co-workers were L. Sprague de Camp and Robert A. Heinlein). Gertrude returned to Brooklyn while he was in the army, and they both lived there from July 1946 before moving to Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan, in July 1948. They moved to Boston in May 1949, then to nearby suburbs Somerville in July 1949, Waltham in May 1951, and, finally, West Newton in 1956. They had two children, David (born 1951) and Robyn Joan (born 1955). In 1970, they separated and Asimov moved back to New York, this time to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he lived for the rest of his life. He began seeing Janet O. Jeppson, a psychiatrist and science-fiction writer, and married her on November 30, 1973, two weeks after his divorce from Gertrude.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Asimov was a claustrophile: he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. In the third volume of his autobiography, he recalls a childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City Subway station, within which he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of passing trains while reading.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Asimov was afraid of flying, doing so only twice: once in the course of his work at the Naval Air Experimental Station and once returning home from Oʻahu in 1946. Consequently, he seldom traveled great distances. This phobia influenced several of his fiction works, such as the Wendell Urth mystery stories and the Robot novels featuring Elijah Baley. In his later years, Asimov found enjoyment traveling on cruise ships, beginning in 1972 when he viewed the Apollo 17 launch from a cruise ship. On several cruises, he was part of the entertainment program, giving science-themed talks aboard ships such as the Queen Elizabeth 2. He sailed to England in June 1974 on the SS France for a trip mostly devoted to lectures in London and Birmingham, though he also found time to visit Stonehenge.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "He was an able public speaker and was regularly invited to give talks about science in his distinct New York accent. He participated in many science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and approachable. He patiently answered tens of thousands of questions and other mail with postcards and was pleased to give autographs. He was of medium height, 5 ft 9 in (1.75 m) and stocky build. In his later years, he adopted a signature style of \"mutton-chop\" sideburns. He took to wearing bolo ties after his wife Janet objected to his clip-on bow ties. He never learned to swim or ride a bicycle, but did learn to drive a car after he moved to Boston. In his humor book Asimov Laughs Again, he describes Boston driving as \"anarchy on wheels\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Asimov's wide interests included his participation in later years in organizations devoted to the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and in The Wolfe Pack, a group of devotees of the Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout. Many of his short stories mention or quote Gilbert and Sullivan. He was a prominent member of The Baker Street Irregulars, the leading Sherlock Holmes society, for whom he wrote an essay arguing that Professor Moriarty's work \"The Dynamics of An Asteroid\" involved the willful destruction of an ancient, civilized planet. He was also a member of the male-only literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of his fictional group of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers. He later used his essay on Moriarty's work as the basis for a Black Widowers story, \"The Ultimate Crime\", which appeared in More Tales of the Black Widowers.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1984, the American Humanist Association (AHA) named him the Humanist of the Year. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. From 1985 until his death in 1992, he served as honorary president of the AHA, and was succeeded by his friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut. He was also a close friend of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and earned a screen credit as \"special science consultant\" on Star Trek: The Motion Picture for his advice during production.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Asimov was a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, CSICOP (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) and is listed in its Pantheon of Skeptics. In a discussion with James Randi at CSICon 2016 regarding the founding of CSICOP, Kendrick Frazier said that Asimov was \"a key figure in the Skeptical movement who is less well known and appreciated today, but was very much in the public eye back then.\" He said that Asimov being associated with CSICOP \"gave it immense status and authority\" in his eyes.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Asimov described Carl Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own. The other, he claimed, was the computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky. Asimov was an on-and-off member and honorary vice president of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as \"brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs\".",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "After his father died in 1969, Asimov annually contributed to a Judah Asimov Scholarship Fund at Brandeis University.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1977, Asimov had a heart attack. In December 1983, he had triple bypass surgery at NYU Medical Center, during which he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. His HIV status was kept secret out of concern that the anti-AIDS prejudice might extend to his family members.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "He died in Manhattan on April 6, 1992, and was cremated. The cause of death was reported as heart and kidney failure. Ten years following Asimov's death, Janet and Robyn Asimov agreed that the HIV story should be made public; Janet revealed it in her edition of his autobiography, It's Been a Good Life.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "[T]he only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Asimov's career can be divided into several periods. His early career, dominated by science fiction, began with short stories in 1939 and novels in 1950. This lasted until about 1958, all but ending after publication of The Naked Sun (1957). He began publishing nonfiction as co-author of a college-level textbook called Biochemistry and Human Metabolism. Following the brief orbit of the first human-made satellite Sputnik I by the USSR in 1957, he wrote more nonfiction, particularly popular science books, and less science fiction. Over the next quarter-century, he wrote only four science fiction novels, and 120 nonfiction books.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Starting in 1982, the second half of his science fiction career began with the publication of Foundation's Edge. From then until his death, Asimov published several more sequels and prequels to his existing novels, tying them together in a way he had not originally anticipated, making a unified series. There are many inconsistencies in this unification, especially in his earlier stories. Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin published about 60% of his work up to 1969, Asimov stating that \"both represent a father image\".",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Asimov believed his most enduring contributions would be his \"Three Laws of Robotics\" and the Foundation series. The Oxford English Dictionary credits his science fiction for introducing into the English language the words \"robotics\", \"positronic\" (an entirely fictional technology), and \"psychohistory\" (which is also used for a different study on historical motivations). Asimov coined the term \"robotics\" without suspecting that it might be an original word; at the time, he believed it was simply the natural analogue of words such as mechanics and hydraulics, but for robots. Unlike his word \"psychohistory\", the word \"robotics\" continues in mainstream technical use with Asimov's original definition. Star Trek: The Next Generation featured androids with \"positronic brains\" and the first-season episode \"Datalore\" called the positronic brain \"Asimov's dream\".",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Asimov was so prolific and diverse in his writing that his books span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for category 100, philosophy and psychology. However, he wrote several essays about psychology, and forewords for the books The Humanist Way (1988) and In Pursuit of Truth (1982), which were classified in the 100s category, but none of his own books were classified in that category.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "According to UNESCO's Index Translationum database, Asimov is the world's 24th-most-translated author.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "No matter how various the subject matter I write on, I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Asimov became a science fiction fan in 1929, when he began reading the pulp magazines sold in his family's candy store. At first his father forbade reading pulps until Asimov persuaded him that because the science fiction magazines had \"Science\" in the title, they must be educational. At age 18 he joined the Futurians science fiction fan club, where he made friends who went on to become science fiction writers or editors.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Asimov began writing at the age of 11, imitating The Rover Boys with eight chapters of The Greenville Chums at College. His father bought him a used typewriter at age 16. His first published work was a humorous item on the birth of his brother for Boys High School's literary journal in 1934. In May 1937 he first thought of writing professionally, and began writing his first science fiction story, \"Cosmic Corkscrew\" (now lost), that year. On May 17, 1938, puzzled by a change in the schedule of Astounding Science Fiction, Asimov visited its publisher Street & Smith Publications. Inspired by the visit, he finished the story on June 19, 1938, and personally submitted it to Astounding editor John W. Campbell two days later. Campbell met with Asimov for more than an hour and promised to read the story himself. Two days later he received a detailed rejection letter. This was the first of what became almost weekly meetings with the editor while Asimov lived in New York, until moving to Boston in 1949; Campbell had a strong formative influence on Asimov and became a personal friend.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "By the end of the month, Asimov completed a second story, \"Stowaway\". Campbell rejected it on July 22 but—in \"the nicest possible letter you could imagine\"—encouraged him to continue writing, promising that Asimov might sell his work after another year and a dozen stories of practice. On October 21, 1938, he sold the third story he finished, \"Marooned Off Vesta\", to Amazing Stories, edited by Raymond A. Palmer, and it appeared in the March 1939 issue. Asimov was paid $64 (equivalent to $1,331 in 2022), or one cent a word. Two more stories appeared that year, \"The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use\" in the May Amazing and \"Trends\" in the July Astounding, the issue fans later selected as the start of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. For 1940, ISFDB catalogs seven stories in four different pulp magazines, including one in Astounding. His earnings became enough to pay for his education, but not yet enough for him to become a full-time writer.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "He later said that unlike other Golden Age writers Robert Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt—also first published in 1939, and whose talent and stardom were immediately obvious—Asimov \"(this is not false modesty) came up only gradually\". Through July 29, 1940, Asimov wrote 22 stories in 25 months, of which 13 were published; he wrote in 1972 that from that date he never wrote a science fiction story that was not published (except for two \"special cases\"). By 1941 Asimov was famous enough that Donald Wollheim told him that he purchased \"The Secret Sense\" for a new magazine only because of his name, and the December 1940 issue of Astonishing—featuring Asimov's name in bold—was the first magazine to base cover art on his work, but Asimov later said that neither he nor anyone else—except perhaps Campbell—considered him better than an often published \"third rater\".",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Based on a conversation with Campbell, Asimov wrote \"Nightfall\", his 32nd story, in March and April 1941, and Astounding published it in September 1941. In 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted \"Nightfall\" the best science fiction short story ever written. In Nightfall and Other Stories Asimov wrote, \"The writing of 'Nightfall' was a watershed in my professional career ... I was suddenly taken seriously and the world of science fiction became aware that I existed. As the years passed, in fact, it became evident that I had written a 'classic'.\" \"Nightfall\" is an archetypal example of social science fiction, a term he created to describe a new trend in the 1940s, led by authors including him and Heinlein, away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "After writing \"Victory Unintentional\" in January and February 1942, Asimov did not write another story for a year. He expected to make chemistry his career, and was paid $2,600 annually at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, enough to marry his girlfriend; he did not expect to make much more from writing than the $1,788.50 he had earned from the 28 stories he had already sold over four years. Asimov left science fiction fandom and no longer read new magazines, and might have left the writing profession had not Heinlein and de Camp been his coworkers at the Navy Yard and previously sold stories continued to appear.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 1942, Asimov published the first of his Foundation stories—later collected in the Foundation trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). The books describe the fall of a vast interstellar empire and the establishment of its eventual successor. They feature his fictional science of psychohistory, whose theories could predict the future course of history according to dynamical laws.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Campbell raised his rate per word, Orson Welles purchased rights to \"Evidence\", and anthologies reprinted his stories. By the end of the war Asimov was earning as a writer an amount equal to half of his Navy Yard salary, even after a raise, but Asimov still did not believe that writing could support him, his wife, and future children.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "His \"positronic\" robot stories—many of which were collected in I, Robot (1950)—were begun at about the same time. They promulgated a set of rules of ethics for robots (see Three Laws of Robotics) and intelligent machines that greatly influenced other writers and thinkers in their treatment of the subject. Asimov notes in his introduction to the short story collection The Complete Robot (1982) that he was largely inspired by the tendency of robots up to that time to fall consistently into a Frankenstein plot in which they destroyed their creators. The Robot series has led to film adaptations. With Asimov's collaboration, in about 1977, Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay of I, Robot that Asimov hoped would lead to \"the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction film ever made\". The screenplay has never been filmed and was eventually published in book form in 1994. The 2004 movie I, Robot, starring Will Smith, was based on an unrelated script by Jeff Vintar titled Hardwired, with Asimov's ideas incorporated later after the rights to Asimov's title were acquired. (The title was not original to Asimov but had previously been used for a story by Eando Binder.) Also, one of Asimov's robot short stories, \"The Bicentennial Man\", was expanded into a novel The Positronic Man by Asimov and Robert Silverberg, and this was adapted into the 1999 movie Bicentennial Man, starring Robin Williams.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 1966 the Foundation trilogy won the Hugo Award for the all-time best series of science fiction and fantasy novels, and they along with the Robot series are his most famous science fiction. Besides movies, his Foundation and Robot stories have inspired other derivative works of science fiction literature, many by well-known and established authors such as Roger MacBride Allen, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Donald Kingsbury. At least some of these appear to have been done with the blessing of, or at the request of, Asimov's widow, Janet Asimov.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In 1948, he also wrote a spoof chemistry article, \"The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline\". At the time, Asimov was preparing his own doctoral dissertation, which would include an oral examination. Fearing a prejudicial reaction from his graduate school evaluation board at Columbia University, Asimov asked his editor that it be released under a pseudonym. When it nevertheless appeared under his own name, Asimov grew concerned that his doctoral examiners might think he wasn't taking science seriously. At the end of the examination, one evaluator turned to him, smiling, and said, \"What can you tell us, Mr. Asimov, about the thermodynamic properties of the compound known as thiotimoline\". Laughing hysterically with relief, Asimov had to be led out of the room. After a five-minute wait, he was summoned back into the room and congratulated as \"Dr. Asimov\".",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Demand for science fiction greatly increased during the 1950s, making it possible for a genre author to write full-time. In 1949, book publisher Doubleday's science fiction editor Walter I. Bradbury accepted Asimov's unpublished \"Grow Old with Me\" (40,000 words), but requested that it be extended to a full novel of 70,000 words. The book appeared under the Doubleday imprint in January 1950 with the title of Pebble in the Sky. Doubleday published five more original science fiction novels by Asimov in the 1950s, along with the six juvenile Lucky Starr novels, the latter under the pseudonym \"Paul French\". Doubleday also published collections of Asimov's short stories, beginning with The Martian Way and Other Stories in 1955. The early 1950s also saw Gnome Press publish one collection of Asimov's positronic robot stories as I, Robot and his Foundation stories and novelettes as the three books of the Foundation trilogy. More positronic robot stories were republished in book form as The Rest of the Robots.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Book publishers and the magazines Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction ended Asimov's dependence on Astounding. He later described the era as his \"'mature' period\". Asimov's \"The Last Question\" (1956), on the ability of humankind to cope with and potentially reverse the process of entropy, was his personal favorite story.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 1972, his stand-alone novel The Gods Themselves was published to general acclaim, winning Best Novel in the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In December 1974, former Beatle Paul McCartney approached Asimov and asked him to write the screenplay for a science-fiction movie musical. McCartney had a vague idea for the plot and a small scrap of dialogue, about a rock band whose members discover they are being impersonated by extraterrestrials. The band and their impostors would likely be played by McCartney's group Wings, then at the height of their career. Though not generally a fan of rock music, Asimov was intrigued by the idea and quickly produced a treatment outline of the story adhering to McCartney's overall idea but omitting McCartney's scrap of dialogue. McCartney rejected it, and the treatment now exists only in the Boston University archives.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Asimov said in 1969 that he had \"the happiest of all my associations with science fiction magazines\" with Fantasy & Science Fiction; \"I have no complaints about Astounding, Galaxy, or any of the rest, heaven knows, but F&SF has become something special to me\". Beginning in 1977, Asimov lent his name to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov's Science Fiction) and wrote an editorial for each issue. There was also a short-lived Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine and a companion Asimov's Science Fiction Anthology reprint series, published as magazines (in the same manner as the stablemates Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine's and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine's \"anthologies\").",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Due to pressure by fans on Asimov to write another book in his Foundation series, he did so with Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), and then went back to before the original trilogy with Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1992), his last novel.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Just say I am one of the most versatile writers in the world, and the greatest popularizer of many subjects.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Asimov and two colleagues published a textbook in 1949, with two more editions by 1969. During the late 1950s and 1960s, Asimov substantially decreased his fiction output (he published only four adult novels between 1957's The Naked Sun and 1982's Foundation's Edge, two of which were mysteries). He greatly increased his nonfiction production, writing mostly on science topics; the launch of Sputnik in 1957 engendered public concern over a \"science gap\". Asimov explained in The Rest of the Robots that he had been unable to write substantial fiction since the summer of 1958, and observers understood him as saying that his fiction career had ended, or was permanently interrupted. Asimov recalled in 1969 that \"the United States went into a kind of tizzy, and so did I. I was overcome by the ardent desire to write popular science for an America that might be in great danger through its neglect of science, and a number of publishers got an equally ardent desire to publish popular science for the same reason\".",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Fantasy and Science Fiction invited Asimov to continue his regular nonfiction column, begun in the now-folded bimonthly companion magazine Venture Science Fiction Magazine. The first of 399 monthly F&SF columns appeared in November 1958 and they continued until his terminal illness. These columns, periodically collected into books by Doubleday, gave Asimov a reputation as a \"Great Explainer\" of science; he described them as his only popular science writing in which he never had to assume complete ignorance of the subjects on the part of his readers. The column was ostensibly dedicated to popular science but Asimov had complete editorial freedom, and wrote about contemporary social issues in essays such as \"Thinking About Thinking\" and \"Knock Plastic!\". In 1975 he wrote of these essays: \"I get more pleasure out of them than out of any other writing assignment.\"",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Asimov's first wide-ranging reference work, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1960), was nominated for a National Book Award, and in 1963 he won a Hugo Award—his first—for his essays for F&SF. The popularity of his science books and the income he derived from them allowed him to give up most academic responsibilities and become a full-time freelance writer. He encouraged other science fiction writers to write popular science, stating in 1967 that \"the knowledgeable, skillful science writer is worth his weight in contracts\", with \"twice as much work as he can possibly handle\".",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The great variety of information covered in Asimov's writings prompted Kurt Vonnegut to ask, \"How does it feel to know everything?\" Asimov replied that he only knew how it felt to have the 'reputation' of omniscience: \"Uneasy\". Floyd C. Gale said that \"Asimov has a rare talent. He can make your mental mouth water over dry facts\", and \"science fiction's loss has been science popularization's gain\". Asimov said that \"Of all the writing I do, fiction, non-fiction, adult, or juvenile, these F & SF articles are by far the most fun\". He regretted, however, that he had less time for fiction—causing dissatisfied readers to send him letters of complaint—stating in 1969 that \"In the last ten years, I've done a couple of novels, some collections, a dozen or so stories, but that's nothing\".",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In his essay \"To Tell a Chemist\" (1965), Asimov proposed a simple shibboleth for distinguishing chemists from non-chemists: ask the person to read the word \"unionized\". Chemists, he noted, will read un-ionized (electrically neutral), while non-chemists will read union-ized (belonging to a trade union).",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Asimov coined the term \"robotics\" in his 1941 story \"Liar!\", though he later remarked that he believed then that he was merely using an existing word, as he stated in Gold (\"The Robot Chronicles\"). While acknowledging the Oxford Dictionary reference, he incorrectly states that the word was first printed about one third of the way down the first column of page 100, Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942 printing of his short story \"Runaround\".",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In the same story, Asimov also coined the term \"positronic\" (the counterpart to \"electronic\" for positrons).",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Asimov coined the term \"psychohistory\" in his Foundation stories to name a fictional branch of science which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. Asimov said later that he should have called it psychosociology. It was first introduced in the five short stories (1942–1944) which would later be collected as the 1951 fix-up novel Foundation. Somewhat later, the term \"psychohistory\" was applied by others to research of the effects of psychology on history.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In addition to his interest in science, Asimov was interested in history. Starting in the 1960s, he wrote 14 popular history books, including The Greeks: A Great Adventure (1965), The Roman Republic (1966), The Roman Empire (1967), The Egyptians (1967) The Near East: 10,000 Years of History (1968), and Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991).",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "He published Asimov's Guide to the Bible in two volumes—covering the Old Testament in 1967 and the New Testament in 1969—and then combined them into one 1,300-page volume in 1981. Complete with maps and tables, the guide goes through the books of the Bible in order, explaining the history of each one and the political influences that affected it, as well as biographical information about the important characters. His interest in literature manifested itself in several annotations of literary works, including Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare (1970), Asimov's Annotated Don Juan (1972), Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost (1974), and The Annotated Gulliver's Travels (1980).",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Asimov was also a noted mystery author and a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He began by writing science fiction mysteries such as his Wendell Urth stories, but soon moved on to writing \"pure\" mysteries. He published two full-length mystery novels, and wrote 66 stories about the Black Widowers, a group of men who met monthly for dinner, conversation, and a puzzle. He got the idea for the Widowers from his own association in a stag group called the Trap Door Spiders, and all of the main characters (with the exception of the waiter, Henry, who he admitted resembled Wodehouse's Jeeves) were modeled after his closest friends. A parody of the Black Widowers, \"An Evening with the White Divorcés,\" was written by author, critic, and librarian Jon L. Breen. Asimov joked, \"all I can do ... is to wait until I catch him in a dark alley, someday.\"",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Toward the end of his life, Asimov published a series of collections of limericks, mostly written by himself, starting with Lecherous Limericks, which appeared in 1975. Limericks: Too Gross, whose title displays Asimov's love of puns, contains 144 limericks by Asimov and an equal number by John Ciardi. He even created a slim volume of Sherlockian limericks. Asimov featured Yiddish humor in Azazel, The Two Centimeter Demon. The two main characters, both Jewish, talk over dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, about anecdotes of \"George\" and his friend Azazel. Asimov's Treasury of Humor is both a working joke book and a treatise propounding his views on humor theory. According to Asimov, the most essential element of humor is an abrupt change in point of view, one that suddenly shifts focus from the important to the trivial, or from the sublime to the ridiculous.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Particularly in his later years, Asimov to some extent cultivated an image of himself as an amiable lecher. In 1971, as a response to the popularity of sexual guidebooks such as The Sensuous Woman (by \"J\") and The Sensuous Man (by \"M\"), Asimov published The Sensuous Dirty Old Man under the byline \"Dr. 'A'\" (although his full name was printed on the paperback edition, first published 1972). However, by 2016, Asimov's habit of groping women was seen as sexual harassment and came under criticism, and was cited as an early example of inappropriate behavior that can occur at science fiction conventions.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Asimov published three volumes of autobiography. In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980) cover his life up to 1978. The third volume, I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), covered his whole life (rather than following on from where the second volume left off). The epilogue was written by his widow Janet Asimov after his death. The book won a Hugo Award in 1995. Janet Asimov edited It's Been a Good Life (2002), a condensed version of his three autobiographies. He also published three volumes of retrospectives of his writing, Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984).",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In 1987, the Asimovs co-wrote How to Enjoy Writing: A Book of Aid and Comfort. In it they offer advice on how to maintain a positive attitude and stay productive when dealing with discouragement, distractions, rejection, and thick-headed editors. The book includes many quotations, essays, anecdotes, and husband-wife dialogues about the ups and downs of being an author.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Asimov and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry developed a unique relationship during Star Trek's initial launch in the late 1960s. Asimov wrote a critical essay on Star Trek's scientific accuracy for TV Guide magazine. Roddenberry retorted respectfully with a personal letter explaining the limitations of accuracy when writing a weekly series. Asimov corrected himself with a follow-up essay to TV Guide claiming that despite its inaccuracies, Star Trek was a fresh and intellectually challenging science fiction television show. The two remained friends to the point where Asimov even served as an advisor on a number of Star Trek projects.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In 1973, Asimov published a proposal for calendar reform, called the World Season Calendar. It divides the year into four seasons (named A–D) of 13 weeks (91 days) each. This allows days to be named, e.g., \"D-73\" instead of December 1 (due to December 1 being the 73rd day of the 4th quarter). An extra 'year day' is added for a total of 365 days.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Asimov won more than a dozen annual awards for particular works of science fiction and a half-dozen lifetime awards. He also received 14 honorary doctorate degrees from universities.",
"title": "Writings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "I have an informal style, which means I tend to use short words and simple sentence structure, to say nothing of occasional colloquialisms. This grates on people who like things that are poetic, weighty, complex, and, above all, obscure. On the other hand, the informal style pleases people who enjoy the sensation of reading an essay without being aware that they are reading and of feeling that ideas are flowing from the writer's brain into their own without mental friction.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Asimov was his own secretary, typist, indexer, proofreader, and literary agent. He wrote a typed first draft composed at the keyboard at 90 words per minute; he imagined an ending first, then a beginning, then \"let everything in-between work itself out as I come to it\". (Asimov used an outline only once, later describing it as \"like trying to play the piano from inside a straitjacket\".) After correcting a draft by hand, he retyped the document as the final copy and only made one revision with minor editor-requested changes; a word processor did not save him much time, Asimov said, because 95% of the first draft was unchanged.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "After disliking making multiple revisions of \"Black Friar of the Flame\", Asimov refused to make major, second, or non-editorial revisions (\"like chewing used gum\"), stating that \"too large a revision, or too many revisions, indicate that the piece of writing is a failure. In the time it would take to salvage such a failure, I could write a new piece altogether and have infinitely more fun in the process\". He submitted \"failures\" to another editor.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Asimov's fiction style is extremely unornamented. In 1980, science fiction scholar James Gunn wrote of I, Robot:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Except for two stories—\"Liar!\" and \"Evidence\"—they are not stories in which character plays a significant part. Virtually all plot develops in conversation with little if any action. Nor is there a great deal of local color or description of any kind. The dialogue is, at best, functional and the style is, at best, transparent. ... . The robot stories and, as a matter of fact, almost all Asimov fiction—play themselves on a relatively bare stage.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Asimov addressed such criticism in 1989 at the beginning of Nemesis:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be 'clear'. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Gunn cited examples of a more complex style, such as the climax of \"Liar!\". Sharply drawn characters occur at key junctures of his storylines: Susan Calvin in \"Liar!\" and \"Evidence\", Arkady Darell in Second Foundation, Elijah Baley in The Caves of Steel, and Hari Seldon in the Foundation prequels.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Other than books by Gunn and Joseph Patrouch, there is relatively little literary criticism on Asimov (particularly when compared to the sheer volume of his output). Cowart and Wymer's Dictionary of Literary Biography (1981) gives a possible reason:",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "His words do not easily lend themselves to traditional literary criticism because he has the habit of centering his fiction on plot and clearly stating to his reader, in rather direct terms, what is happening in his stories and why it is happening. In fact, most of the dialogue in an Asimov story, and particularly in the Foundation trilogy, is devoted to such exposition. Stories that clearly state what they mean in unambiguous language are the most difficult for a scholar to deal with because there is little to be interpreted.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Gunn's and Patrouch's studies of Asimov both state that a clear, direct prose style is still a style. Gunn's 1982 book comments in detail on each of Asimov's novels. He does not praise all of Asimov's fiction (nor does Patrouch), but calls some passages in The Caves of Steel \"reminiscent of Proust\". When discussing how that novel depicts night falling over futuristic New York City, Gunn says that Asimov's prose \"need not be ashamed anywhere in literary society\".",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Although he prided himself on his unornamented prose style (for which he credited Clifford D. Simak as an early influence), and said in 1973 that his style had not changed, Asimov also enjoyed giving his longer stories complicated narrative structures, often by arranging chapters in nonchronological ways. Some readers have been put off by this, complaining that the nonlinearity is not worth the trouble and adversely affects the clarity of the story. For example, the first third of The Gods Themselves begins with Chapter 6, then backtracks to fill in earlier material. (John Campbell advised Asimov to begin his stories as late in the plot as possible. This advice helped Asimov create \"Reason\", one of the early Robot stories). Patrouch found that the interwoven and nested flashbacks of The Currents of Space did serious harm to that novel, to such an extent that only a \"dyed-in-the-kyrt Asimov fan\" could enjoy it. In his later novel Nemesis one group of characters lives in the \"present\" and another group starts in the \"past\", beginning 15 years earlier and gradually moving toward the time of the first group.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Asimov once explained that his reluctance to write about aliens came from an incident early in his career when Astounding's editor John Campbell rejected one of his science fiction stories because the alien characters were portrayed as superior to the humans. The nature of the rejection led him to believe that Campbell may have based his bias towards humans in stories on a real-world racial bias. Unwilling to write only weak alien races, and concerned that a confrontation would jeopardize his and Campbell's friendship, he decided he would not write about aliens at all. Nevertheless, in response to these criticisms, he wrote The Gods Themselves, which contains aliens and alien sex. The book won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1972, and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1973. Asimov said that of all his writings, he was most proud of the middle section of The Gods Themselves, the part that deals with those themes.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In the Hugo Award-winning novelette \"Gold\", Asimov describes an author, based on himself, who has one of his books (The Gods Themselves) adapted into a \"compu-drama\", essentially photo-realistic computer animation. The director criticizes the fictionalized Asimov (\"Gregory Laborian\") for having an extremely nonvisual style, making it difficult to adapt his work, and the author explains that he relies on ideas and dialogue rather than description to get his points across.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In the early days of science fiction some authors and critics felt that the romantic elements were inappropriate in science fiction stories, which were supposedly to be focused on science and technology. Isaac Asimov was a supporter of this point of view, expressed in his 1938-1939 letters to Astounding, where he described such elements as \"mush\" and \"slop\". To his dismay, these letters were met with a strong opposition.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Asimov attributed the lack of romance and sex in his fiction to the \"early imprinting\" from starting his writing career when he had never been on a date and \"didn't know anything about girls\". He was sometimes criticized for the general absence of sex (and of extraterrestrial life) in his science fiction. He claimed he wrote The Gods Themselves (1972) to respond to these criticisms, which often came from New Wave science fiction (and often British) writers. The second part (of three) of the novel is set on an alien world with three sexes, and the sexual behavior of these creatures is extensively depicted.",
"title": "Writing style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "There is a perennial question among readers as to whether the views contained in a story reflect the views of the author. The answer is, \"Not necessarily—\" And yet one ought to add another short phrase \"—but usually.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Asimov was an atheist, and a humanist. He did not oppose religious conviction in others, but he frequently railed against superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs that tried to pass themselves off as genuine science. During his childhood, his father and mother observed the traditions of Orthodox Judaism less stringently than they had in Petrovichi; they did not force their beliefs upon young Isaac, and he grew up without strong religious influences, coming to believe that the Torah represented Hebrew mythology in the same way that the Iliad recorded Greek mythology. When he was 13, he chose not to have a bar mitzvah. As his books Treasury of Humor and Asimov Laughs Again record, Asimov was willing to tell jokes involving God, Satan, the Garden of Eden, Jerusalem, and other religious topics, expressing the viewpoint that a good joke can do more to provoke thought than hours of philosophical discussion.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "For a brief while, his father worked in the local synagogue to enjoy the familiar surroundings and, as Isaac put it, \"shine as a learned scholar\" versed in the sacred writings. This scholarship was a seed for his later authorship and publication of Asimov's Guide to the Bible, an analysis of the historic foundations for the Old and New Testaments. For many years, Asimov called himself an atheist; he considered the term somewhat inadequate, as it described what he did not believe rather than what he did. Eventually, he described himself as a \"humanist\" and considered that term more practical. Asimov continued to identify himself as a secular Jew, as stated in his introduction to Jack Dann's anthology of Jewish science fiction, Wandering Stars: \"I attend no services and follow no ritual and have never undergone that curious puberty rite, the Bar Mitzvah. It doesn't matter. I am Jewish.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "When asked in an interview in 1982 if he was an atheist, Asimov replied,",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Likewise, he said about religious education: \"I would not be satisfied to have my kids choose to be religious without trying to argue them out of it, just as I would not be satisfied to have them decide to smoke regularly or engage in any other practice I consider detrimental to mind or body.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In his last volume of autobiography, Asimov wrote,",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The same memoir states his belief that Hell is \"the drooling dream of a sadist\" crudely affixed to an all-merciful God; if even human governments were willing to curtail cruel and unusual punishments, wondered Asimov, why would punishment in the afterlife not be restricted to a limited term? Asimov rejected the idea that a human belief or action could merit infinite punishment. If an afterlife existed, he claimed, the longest and most severe punishment would be reserved for those who \"slandered God by inventing Hell\".",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Asimov said about using religious motifs in his writing:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "I tend to ignore religion in my own stories altogether, except when I absolutely have to have it. ... and, whenever I bring in a religious motif, that religion is bound to seem vaguely Christian because that is the only religion I know anything about, even though it is not mine. An unsympathetic reader might think that I am \"burlesquing\" Christianity, but I am not. Then too, it is impossible to write science fiction and really ignore religion.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Asimov became a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party during the New Deal, and thereafter remained a political liberal. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and in a television interview during the early 1970s he publicly endorsed George McGovern. He was unhappy about what he considered an \"irrationalist\" viewpoint taken by many radical political activists from the late 1960s and onwards. In his second volume of autobiography, In Joy Still Felt, Asimov recalled meeting the counterculture figure Abbie Hoffman. Asimov's impression was that the 1960s' counterculture heroes had ridden an emotional wave which, in the end, left them stranded in a \"no-man's land of the spirit\" from which he wondered if they would ever return.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Asimov vehemently opposed Richard Nixon, considering him \"a crook and a liar\". He closely followed Watergate, and was pleased when the president was forced to resign. Asimov was dismayed over the pardon extended to Nixon by his successor: \"I was not impressed by the argument that it has spared the nation an ordeal. To my way of thinking, the ordeal was necessary to make certain it would never happen again.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "After Asimov's name appeared in the mid-1960s on a list of people the Communist Party USA \"considered amenable\" to its goals, the FBI investigated him. Because of his academic background, the bureau briefly considered Asimov as a possible candidate for known Soviet spy ROBPROF, but found nothing suspicious in his life or background.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Asimov appeared to hold an equivocal attitude towards Israel. In his first autobiography, he indicates his support for the safety of Israel, though insisting that he was not a Zionist. In his third autobiography, Asimov stated his opposition to the creation of a Jewish state, on the grounds that he was opposed to having nation-states in general, and supported the notion of a single humanity. Asimov especially worried about the safety of Israel given that it had been created among Muslim neighbors, and said that Jews had merely created for themselves another \"Jewish ghetto\".",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Asimov believed that \"science fiction ... serve[s] the good of humanity\". He considered himself a feminist even before women's liberation became a widespread movement; he argued that the issue of women's rights was closely connected to that of population control. Furthermore, he believed that homosexuality must be considered a \"moral right\" on population grounds, as must all consenting adult sexual activity that does not lead to reproduction. He issued many appeals for population control, reflecting a perspective articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R. Ehrlich.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "In a 1988 interview by Bill Moyers, Asimov proposed computer-aided learning, where people would use computers to find information on subjects in which they were interested. He thought this would make learning more interesting, since people would have the freedom to choose what to learn, and would help spread knowledge around the world. Also, the one-to-one model would let students learn at their own pace. Asimov thought that people would live in space by 2019.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "In 1983 Asimov wrote:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Computerization will undoubtedly continue onward inevitably... This means that a vast change in the nature of education must take place, and entire populations must be made \"computer-literate\" and must be taught to deal with a \"high-tech\" world.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "He continues on education:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Education, which must be revolutionized in the new world, will be revolutionized by the very agency that requires the revolution — the computer.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Schools will undoubtedly still exist, but a good schoolteacher can do no better than to inspire curiosity which an interested student can then satisfy at home at the console of his computer outlet.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "There will be an opportunity finally for every youngster, and indeed, every person, to learn what he or she wants to learn, in his or her own time, at his or her own speed, in his or her own way.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Education will become fun because it will bubble up from within and not be forced in from without.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Asimov would often fondle, kiss and pinch women at conventions and elsewhere without regard for their consent. According to Alec Nevala-Lee, author of an Asimov biography and writer on the history of science fiction, he often defended himself by saying that far from showing objections, these women cooperated. In a 1971 satirical piece, The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, Asimov wrote: \"The question then is not whether or not a girl should be touched. The question is merely where, when, and how she should be touched.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "According to Nevala-Lee, however, \"many of these encounters were clearly nonconsensual.\" He wrote that Asimov's behaviour, as a leading science-fiction author and personality, contributed to an undesirable atmosphere for women in the male-dominated science fiction community. In support of this, he quoted some of Asimov's contemporary fellow-authors such as Judith Merril, Harlan Ellison and Frederik Pohl, as well as editors such as Timothy Seldes. Additional specific incidents were reported by other people including Edward L. Ferman, long-time editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who wrote \"... instead of shaking my date's hand, he shook her left breast\".",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Asimov's defense of civil applications of nuclear power, even after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant incident, damaged his relations with some of his fellow liberals. In a letter reprinted in Yours, Isaac Asimov, he states that although he would prefer living in \"no danger whatsoever\" than near a nuclear reactor, he would still prefer a home near a nuclear power plant than in a slum on Love Canal or near \"a Union Carbide plant producing methyl isocyanate\", the latter being a reference to the Bhopal disaster.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "In the closing years of his life, Asimov blamed the deterioration of the quality of life that he perceived in New York City on the shrinking tax base caused by the middle-class flight to the suburbs, though he continued to support high taxes on the middle class to pay for social programs. His last nonfiction book, Our Angry Earth (1991, co-written with his long-time friend, science fiction author Frederik Pohl), deals with elements of the environmental crisis such as overpopulation, oil dependence, war, global warming, and the destruction of the ozone layer. In response to being presented by Bill Moyers with the question \"What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?\", Asimov responded:",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "It's going to destroy it all ... if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Asimov enjoyed the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and used The Lord of the Rings as a plot point in a Black Widowers story, titled Nothing like Murder. In the essay \"All or Nothing\" (for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan 1981), Asimov said that he admired Tolkien and that he had read The Lord of the Rings five times. (The feelings were mutual, with Tolkien saying that he had enjoyed Asimov's science fiction. This would make Asimov an exception to Tolkien's earlier claim that he rarely found \"any modern books\" that were interesting to him.)",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "He acknowledged other writers as superior to himself in talent, saying of Harlan Ellison, \"He is (in my opinion) one of the best writers in the world, far more skilled at the art than I am.\" Asimov disapproved of the New Wave's growing influence, stating in 1967 \"I want science fiction. I think science fiction isn't really science fiction if it lacks science. And I think the better and truer the science, the better and truer the science fiction\".",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "The feelings of friendship and respect between Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were demonstrated by the so-called \"Clarke–Asimov Treaty of Park Avenue\", negotiated as they shared a cab in New York. This stated that Asimov was required to insist that Clarke was the best science fiction writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself), while Clarke was required to insist that Asimov was the best science writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself). Thus, the dedication in Clarke's book Report on Planet Three (1972) reads: \"In accordance with the terms of the Clarke–Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Asimov became a fan of mystery stories at the same time as science fiction. He preferred to read the former because \"I read every [science fiction] story keenly aware that it might be worse than mine, in which case I had no patience with it, or that it might be better, in which case I felt miserable\". Asimov wrote \"I make no secret of the fact that in my mysteries I use Agatha Christie as my model. In my opinion, her mysteries are the best ever written, far better than the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Hercule Poirot is the best detective fiction has seen. Why should I not use as my model what I consider the best?\" He enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, but considered Arthur Conan Doyle to be \"a slapdash and sloppy writer.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Asimov also enjoyed humorous stories, particularly those of P. G. Wodehouse.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "In non-fiction writing, Asimov particularly admired the writing style of Martin Gardner, and tried to emulate it in his own science books. On meeting Gardner for the first time in 1965, Asimov told him this, to which Gardner answered that he had based his own style on Asimov's.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "Paul Krugman, holder of a Nobel Prize in Economics, stated Asimov's concept of psychohistory inspired him to become an economist.",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "John Jenkins, who has reviewed the vast majority of Asimov's written output, once observed, \"It has been pointed out that most science fiction writers since the 1950s have been affected by Asimov, either modeling their style on his or deliberately avoiding anything like his style.\" Along with such figures as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, Asimov left his mark as one of the most distinguished interdisciplinarians of the 20th century. \"Few individuals\", writes James L. Christian, \"understood better than Isaac Asimov what synoptic thinking is all about. His almost 500 books—which he wrote as a specialist, a knowledgeable authority, or just an excited layman—range over almost all conceivable subjects: the sciences, history, literature, religion, and of course, science fiction.\"",
"title": "Influence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "Over a space of 40 years, I published an average of 1,000 words a day. Over the space of the second 20 years, I published an average of 1,700 words a day.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Depending on the counting convention used, and including all titles, charts, and edited collections, there may be currently over 500 books in Asimov's bibliography—as well as his individual short stories, individual essays, and criticism. For his 100th, 200th, and 300th books (based on his personal count), Asimov published Opus 100 (1969), Opus 200 (1979), and Opus 300 (1984), celebrating his writing. An extensive bibliography of Isaac Asimov's works has been compiled by Ed Seiler. He published enough that his book writing rate could be analysed, showing that the writing became faster as he wrote more.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "An online exhibit in West Virginia University Libraries' virtually complete Asimov Collection displays features, visuals, and descriptions of some of his over 600 books, games, audio recordings, videos, and wall charts. Many first, rare, and autographed editions are in the Libraries' Rare Book Room. Book jackets and autographs are presented online along with descriptions and images of children's books, science fiction art, multimedia, and other materials in the collection.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "The Robot series was originally separate from the Foundation series. The Galactic Empire novels were published as independent stories, set earlier in the same future as Foundation. Later in life, Asimov synthesized the Robot series into a single coherent \"history\" that appeared in the extension of the Foundation series.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "All of these books were published by Doubleday & Co, except the original Foundation trilogy which was originally published by Gnome Books before being bought and republished by Doubleday.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "All published by Doubleday & Co",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "All published by Walker & Company",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "Novels marked with an asterisk (*) have minor connections to Foundation universe.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "The following books collected essays which were originally published as monthly columns in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and collected by Doubleday & Co",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "All published by Doubleday",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "All published by Houghton Mifflin except where otherwise stated",
"title": "Bibliography"
}
]
| Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation series, the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. His other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are set in the much earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, with Foundation and Earth (1986), he linked this distant future to the Robot series, creating a unified "future history" for his works. He also wrote over 380 short stories, including the social science fiction novelette "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French. Most of his popular science books explain concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. Examples include Guide to Science, the three-volume Understanding Physics, and Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. He wrote on numerous other scientific and non-scientific topics, such as chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, history, biblical exegesis, and literary criticism. He was the president of the American Humanist Association. Several entities have been named in his honor, including the asteroid (5020) Asimov, a crater on Mars, a Brooklyn elementary school, Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO, and four literary awards. | 2001-08-29T03:52:27Z | 2023-12-30T18:17:10Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov |
14,575 | Izabella Scorupco | Izabella Scorupco (born Izabela Dorota Skorupko; 4 June 1970) is a Polish-Swedish actress, singer and model. She is best known for having played a Bond girl, Natalya Simonova, in the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye. She is also known for her cover of the Shirley & Company song "Shame, Shame, Shame" which was released in 1992 and became a European hit.
Scorupco was born to Lech, a musician, and Magdalena Skorupko, a doctor, in Białystok, Poland, in 1970. When she was one year old, her parents separated, and she remained with her mother. In 1978, they moved to Bredäng in Stockholm, Sweden, where Scorupco learned to speak Swedish, English and French.
On 25 December 1996, Scorupco married Polish ice hockey player Mariusz Czerkawski. They had one daughter together, Julia (born 16 September 1997). They divorced in 1998.
On 30 January 2003, Scorupco married an American, Jeffrey Raymond; they have a son, Jakob (born 24 July 2003). They divorced in 2015. She now lives in Los Angeles and New York City. Since 2017, Scorupco has been in a relationship with Karl Rosengren. They married on 6 October 2019. In 2014, Scorupco became an American citizen.
In the late 1980s, Scorupco travelled throughout Europe working as a model, and appeared on the cover of Vogue. In 1987, she was discovered by director Staffan Hildebrand and starred in the film Ingen kan älska som vi ("Nobody can love like us"). In the early 1990s, she had a brief but successful career as a pop singer, releasing the album IZA, which was certified gold in Sweden in 1991. Her 1992 cover version of "Shame, Shame, Shame" was a hit in several European countries.
In 2011, Scorupco reprised her singing career, duetting with Swedish musician Peter Jöback in his single Jag Har Dig Nu and featuring in the song's music video. She also starred in Jöback's short extension film La vie, L'amour, La mort. Scorupco went on to host the spring 2012 series of Sweden's Next Top Model but did not continue it for a second series.
Scorupco moved into comedy in July 2013 when she was named to a lead role in a Swedish romantic comedy film, Micke & Veronica, alongside David Hellenius. It premiered on 25 December 2014. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Izabella Scorupco (born Izabela Dorota Skorupko; 4 June 1970) is a Polish-Swedish actress, singer and model. She is best known for having played a Bond girl, Natalya Simonova, in the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye. She is also known for her cover of the Shirley & Company song \"Shame, Shame, Shame\" which was released in 1992 and became a European hit.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Scorupco was born to Lech, a musician, and Magdalena Skorupko, a doctor, in Białystok, Poland, in 1970. When she was one year old, her parents separated, and she remained with her mother. In 1978, they moved to Bredäng in Stockholm, Sweden, where Scorupco learned to speak Swedish, English and French.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "On 25 December 1996, Scorupco married Polish ice hockey player Mariusz Czerkawski. They had one daughter together, Julia (born 16 September 1997). They divorced in 1998.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "On 30 January 2003, Scorupco married an American, Jeffrey Raymond; they have a son, Jakob (born 24 July 2003). They divorced in 2015. She now lives in Los Angeles and New York City. Since 2017, Scorupco has been in a relationship with Karl Rosengren. They married on 6 October 2019. In 2014, Scorupco became an American citizen.",
"title": "Life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the late 1980s, Scorupco travelled throughout Europe working as a model, and appeared on the cover of Vogue. In 1987, she was discovered by director Staffan Hildebrand and starred in the film Ingen kan älska som vi (\"Nobody can love like us\"). In the early 1990s, she had a brief but successful career as a pop singer, releasing the album IZA, which was certified gold in Sweden in 1991. Her 1992 cover version of \"Shame, Shame, Shame\" was a hit in several European countries.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 2011, Scorupco reprised her singing career, duetting with Swedish musician Peter Jöback in his single Jag Har Dig Nu and featuring in the song's music video. She also starred in Jöback's short extension film La vie, L'amour, La mort. Scorupco went on to host the spring 2012 series of Sweden's Next Top Model but did not continue it for a second series.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Scorupco moved into comedy in July 2013 when she was named to a lead role in a Swedish romantic comedy film, Micke & Veronica, alongside David Hellenius. It premiered on 25 December 2014.",
"title": "Career"
}
]
| Izabella Scorupco is a Polish-Swedish actress, singer and model. She is best known for having played a Bond girl, Natalya Simonova, in the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye. She is also known for her cover of the Shirley & Company song "Shame, Shame, Shame" which was released in 1992 and became a European hit. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-02T00:02:03Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izabella_Scorupco |
14,579 | Indonesia | Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guinea. Indonesia is the world's largest island country and the 14th-largest country by area, at 1,904,569 square kilometres (735,358 square miles). With over 279 million people, Indonesia is the world's fourth-most populous country and the most populous Muslim-majority country. Java, the world's most populous island, is home to more than half of the country's population.
Indonesia is a presidential republic with an elected legislature. It has 38 provinces, of which nine have special status. The country's capital, Jakarta, is the world's second-most populous urban area. Indonesia shares land borders with Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and the eastern part of Malaysia, as well as maritime borders with Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, Palau, and India. Despite its large population and densely populated regions, Indonesia has vast areas of wilderness that support one of the world's highest levels of biodiversity.
The Indonesian archipelago has been a valuable region for trade since at least the seventh century when the Srivijaya and later Majapahit Kingdoms traded with entities from mainland China and the Indian subcontinent. Local rulers gradually absorbed foreign influences from the early centuries, and Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms flourished. Sunni traders and Sufi scholars later brought Islam, and European powers fought one another to monopolise trade in the Spice Islands of Maluku during the Age of Discovery. Following three and a half centuries of Dutch colonialism, Indonesia secured its independence after World War II. Indonesia's history has since been turbulent, with challenges posed by natural disasters, corruption, separatism, a democratisation process, and periods of rapid economic growth.
Indonesia consists of thousands of distinct native ethnic and hundreds of linguistic groups, with Javanese being the largest. A shared identity has developed with the motto "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika" ("Unity in Diversity" literally, "many, yet one"), defined by a national language, cultural diversity, religious pluralism within a Muslim-majority population, and a history of colonialism and rebellion against it. The economy of Indonesia is the world's 16th-largest by nominal GDP and the 7th-largest by PPP. It is the world's third-largest democracy, a regional power and is considered a middle power in global affairs. The country is a member of several multilateral organisations, including the United Nations, World Trade Organization, G20, and a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, East Asia Summit, D-8 and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
The name Indonesia derives from the Greek words Indos (Ἰνδός) and nesos (νῆσος), meaning "Indian islands". The name dates back to the 19th century, far predating the formation of independent Indonesia. In 1850, George Windsor Earl, an English ethnologist, proposed the terms Indunesians—and, his preference, Malayunesians—for the inhabitants of the "Indian Archipelago or Malay Archipelago". In the same publication, one of his students, James Richardson Logan, used Indonesia as a synonym for Indian Archipelago. Dutch academics writing in East Indies publications were reluctant to use Indonesia. They preferred Malay Archipelago (Dutch: Maleische Archipel); the Netherlands East Indies (Nederlandsch Oost Indië), popularly Indië; the East (de Oost); and Insulinde.
After 1900, Indonesia became more common in academic circles outside the Netherlands, and native nationalist groups adopted it for political expression. Adolf Bastian of the University of Berlin popularized the name through his book Indonesien oder die Inseln des Malayischen Archipels, 1884–1894. The first native scholar to use the name was Ki Hajar Dewantara when in 1913, he established a press bureau in the Netherlands, Indonesisch Pers-bureau.
Fossilised remains of Homo erectus, popularly known as the "Java Man", suggest the Indonesian archipelago was inhabited two million to 500,000 years ago. Homo sapiens reached the region around 43,000 BCE. Austronesian peoples, who form the majority of the modern population, migrated to Southeast Asia from what is now Taiwan. They arrived in the archipelago around 2,000 BCE and confined the native Melanesians to the far eastern regions as they spread east.
Ideal agricultural conditions and the mastering of wet-field rice cultivation as early as the eighth century BCE allowed villages, towns, and small kingdoms to flourish by the first century CE. The archipelago's strategic sea-lane position fostered inter-island and international trade, including with Indian kingdoms and Chinese dynasties, from several centuries BCE. Trade has since fundamentally shaped Indonesian history.
From the seventh century CE, the Srivijaya naval kingdom flourished due to trade and the influences of Hinduism and Buddhism. Between the eighth and tenth centuries CE, the agricultural Buddhist Sailendra and Hindu Mataram dynasties thrived and declined in inland Java, leaving grand religious monuments such as Sailendra's Borobudur and Mataram's Prambanan. The Hindu Majapahit kingdom was founded in eastern Java in the late 13th century, and under Gajah Mada, its influence stretched over much of present-day Indonesia. This period is often referred to as a "Golden Age" in Indonesian history.
The earliest evidence of Islamized populations in the archipelago dates to the 13th century in northern Sumatra. Other parts of the archipelago gradually adopted Islam, and it was the dominant religion in Java and Sumatra by the end of the 16th century. For the most part, Islam overlaid and mixed with existing cultural and religious influences, which shaped the predominant form of Islam in Indonesia, particularly in Java.
The first Europeans arrived in the archipelago in 1512, when Portuguese traders, led by Francisco Serrão, sought to monopolise the sources of nutmeg, cloves, and cubeb pepper in the Maluku Islands. Dutch and British traders followed. In 1602, the Dutch established the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and became the dominant European power for almost 200 years. The VOC was dissolved in 1799 following bankruptcy, and the Netherlands established the Dutch East Indies as a nationalised colony.
For most of the colonial period, Dutch control over the archipelago was tenuous. Dutch forces were engaged continuously in quelling rebellions on and off Java. The influence of local leaders such as Prince Diponegoro in central Java, Imam Bonjol in central Sumatra, Pattimura in Maluku, and the bloody thirty-year Aceh War weakened the Dutch and tied up the colonial military forces. Only in the early 20th century did Dutch dominance extend to what was to become Indonesia's current boundaries.
The Japanese invasion and occupation during World War II ended Dutch rule and encouraged the independence movement. Two days after the surrender of Japan in August 1945, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta issued the Proclamation of Indonesian Independence. Then, Sukarno, Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, influential nationalist leaders, were appointed president, vice-president and prime minister respectively.
The Netherlands attempted to re-establish their rule, beginning the Indonesian National Revolution which ended in December 1949 when the Dutch recognised Indonesian independence in the face of international pressure. Despite extraordinary political, social, and sectarian divisions, Indonesians, on the whole, found unity in their fight for independence.
As president, Sukarno moved Indonesia from democracy towards authoritarianism and maintained power by balancing the opposing forces of the military, political Islam, and the increasingly powerful Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). Tensions between the military and the PKI culminated in an attempted coup in 1965. The army, led by Major General Suharto, countered by instigating a violent anti-communist purge that killed between 500,000 and one million people and incarcerated roughly a million more in concentration camps. The PKI was blamed for the coup and effectively destroyed. Suharto capitalised on Sukarno's weakened position, and following a drawn-out power play with Sukarno, Suharto was appointed president in March 1968. His "New Order" administration, supported by the United States, encouraged foreign direct investment, which was a crucial factor in the subsequent three decades of substantial economic growth.
Indonesia was the country hardest hit by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. It brought out popular discontent with the New Order's corruption and suppression of political opposition and ultimately ended Suharto's presidency. In 1999, East Timor seceded from Indonesia, following its 1975 invasion by Indonesia and a 25-year occupation marked by international condemnation of human rights abuses.
Since 1998, democratic processes have been strengthened by enhancing regional autonomy and instituting the country's first direct presidential election in 2004. Political, economic and social instability, corruption, and instances of terrorism remained problems in the 2000s; however, the economy has performed strongly since 2007. Although relations among the diverse population are mostly harmonious, acute sectarian discontent and violence remain problematic in some areas. A political settlement to an armed separatist conflict in Aceh was achieved in 2005.
On 27 December 2023, hundreds of students from various universities in Aceh, such as Abulyatama University, Bina Bangsa Getsempena University, and University of Muhammadiyah Aceh, stormed a shelter for Rohingya refugees and forced them out of a convention centre in the city of Banda Aceh, demanding they be deported. The students also seen kicking the belongings of the Rohingya men, women, and children who were seated on the floor and crying in fear. They burned tyres and chanted “Kick them out” and “Reject Rohingya in Aceh”.
Indonesia lies between latitudes 11°S and 6°N and longitudes 95°E and 141°E. A transcontinental country spanning Southeast Asia and Oceania, it is the world's largest archipelagic state, extending 5,120 kilometres (3,181 mi) from east to west and 1,760 kilometres (1,094 mi) from north to south. The country's Coordinating Ministry for Maritime and Investments Affairs says Indonesia has 17,504 islands (with 16,056 registered at the UN) scattered over both sides of the equator, around 6,000 of which are inhabited. The largest are Sumatra, Java, Borneo (shared with Brunei and Malaysia), Sulawesi, and New Guinea (shared with Papua New Guinea). Indonesia shares land borders with Malaysia on Borneo and Sebatik, Papua New Guinea on the island of New Guinea, East Timor on the island of Timor, and maritime borders with Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Palau, and Australia.
At 4,884 metres (16,024 ft), Puncak Jaya is Indonesia's highest peak, and Lake Toba in Sumatra is the largest lake, with an area of 1,145 km2 (442 sq mi). Indonesia's largest rivers are in Kalimantan and New Guinea and include Kapuas, Barito, Mamberamo, Sepik and Mahakam. They serve as communication and transport links between the island's river settlements.
Indonesia lies along the equator, and its climate tends to be relatively even year-round. Indonesia has two seasons—a wet season and a dry season—with no extremes of summer or winter. For most of Indonesia, the dry season falls between May and October, with the wet season between November and April. Indonesia's climate is almost entirely tropical, dominated by the tropical rainforest climate found on every large island of Indonesia. More cooling climate types do exist in mountainous regions that are 1,300 to 1,500 metres (4,300 to 4,900 feet) above sea level. The oceanic climate (Köppen Cfb) prevails in highland areas adjacent to rainforest climates, with reasonably uniform precipitation year-round. In highland areas near the tropical monsoon and tropical savanna climates, the subtropical highland climate (Köppen Cwb) is prevalent with a more pronounced dry season.
Some regions, such as Kalimantan and Sumatra, experience only slight differences in rainfall and temperature between the seasons, whereas others, such as Nusa Tenggara, experience far more pronounced differences with droughts in the dry season and floods in the wet. Rainfall varies across regions, with more in western Sumatra, Java, and the interiors of Kalimantan and Papua, and less in areas closer to Australia, such as Nusa Tenggara, which tends to be dry. The almost uniformly warm waters that constitute 81% of Indonesia's area ensure that land temperatures remain relatively constant. Humidity is quite high, at between 70 and 90%. Winds are moderate and generally predictable, with monsoons usually blowing in from the south and east in June through October and from the northwest in November through March. Typhoons and large-scale storms pose little hazard to mariners; significant dangers come from swift currents in channels, such as the Lombok and Sape straits.
Several studies consider Indonesia to be at severe risk from the projected effects of climate change. These include unreduced emissions resulting in an average temperature rise of around 1 °C (2 °F) by mid-century, raising the frequency of drought and food shortages (with an impact on precipitation and the patterns of wet and dry seasons, and thus Indonesia's agriculture system) as well as numerous diseases and wildfires. Rising sea levels would also threaten most of Indonesia's population, who live in low-lying coastal areas. Impoverished communities would likely be affected the most by climate change.
Tectonically, most of Indonesia's area is highly unstable, making it a site of numerous volcanoes and frequent earthquakes. It lies on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the Indo-Australian Plate and the Pacific Plate are pushed under the Eurasian plate, where they melt at about 100 kilometres (62 miles) deep. A string of volcanoes runs through Sumatra, Java, Bali and Nusa Tenggara, and then to the Banda Islands of Maluku to northeastern Sulawesi. Of the 400 volcanoes, around 130 are active. Between 1972 and 1991, there were 29 volcanic eruptions, mostly on Java. Volcanic ash has made agricultural conditions unpredictable in some areas. However, it has also resulted in fertile soils, a factor in historically sustaining the high population densities of Java and Bali.
A massive supervolcano erupted at present-day Lake Toba around 70,000 BCE. It is believed to have caused a global volcanic winter and cooling of the climate and subsequently led to a genetic bottleneck in human evolution, though this is still in debate. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora and the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa were among the largest in recorded history. The former caused 92,000 deaths and created an umbrella of volcanic ash that spread and blanketed parts of the archipelago and made much of the Northern Hemisphere without summer in 1816. The latter produced the loudest sound in recorded history and caused 36,000 deaths due to the eruption itself and the resulting tsunamis, with significant additional effects around the world years after the event. Recent catastrophic disasters due to seismic activity include the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake.
Indonesia's size, tropical climate, and archipelagic geography support one of the world's highest levels of biodiversity, and it is among the 17 megadiverse countries identified by Conservation International. Its flora and fauna are a mixture of Asian and Australasian species. The Sunda Shelf islands (Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Bali) were once linked to mainland Asia and have a wealth of Asian fauna. Large species such as the Sumatran tiger, rhinoceros, orangutan, Asian elephant, and leopard were once abundant as far east as Bali, but numbers and distribution have dwindled drastically. Having been long separated from the continental landmasses, Sulawesi, Nusa Tenggara, and Maluku have developed their unique flora and fauna. Papua was part of the Australian landmass and is home to a unique fauna and flora closely related to that of Australia, including over 600 bird species.
Indonesia is second only to Australia in terms of total endemic species, with 36% of its 1,531 species of bird and 39% of its 515 species of mammal being endemic. Tropical seas surround Indonesia's 80,000 kilometres (50,000 miles) of coastline. The country has a range of sea and coastal ecosystems, including beaches, dunes, estuaries, mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass beds, coastal mudflats, tidal flats, algal beds, and small island ecosystems. Indonesia is one of the Coral Triangle countries with the world's most enormous diversity of coral reef fish, with more than 1,650 species in eastern Indonesia only.
British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace described a dividing line (Wallace Line) between the distribution of Indonesia's Asian and Australasian species. It runs roughly north–south along the edge of the Sunda Shelf, between Kalimantan and Sulawesi, and along the deep Lombok Strait, between Lombok and Bali. Flora and fauna on the west of the line are generally Asian, while east from Lombok is increasingly Australian until the tipping point at the Weber Line. In his 1869 book, The Malay Archipelago, Wallace described numerous species unique to the area. The region of islands between his line and New Guinea is now termed Wallacea.
Indonesia's large and growing population and rapid industrialisation present serious environmental issues. They are often given a lower priority due to high poverty levels and weak, under-resourced governance. Problems include the destruction of peatlands, large-scale illegal deforestation (causing extensive haze across parts of Southeast Asia), over-exploitation of marine resources, air pollution, garbage management, and reliable water and wastewater services. These issues contribute to Indonesia's low ranking (number 116 out of 180 countries) in the 2020 Environmental Performance Index. The report also indicates that Indonesia's performance is generally below average in both regional and global context.
Indonesia has one of the world's fastest deforestation rates. In 2020, forests covered approximately 49.1% of the country's land area, down from 87% in 1950. Since the 1970s, log production, various plantations and agriculture have been responsible for much of the deforestation in Indonesia. Most recently, it has been driven by the palm oil industry, which has been criticised for its environmental impact and displacement of local communities. The situation has made Indonesia the world's largest forest-based emitter of greenhouse gases. It also threatens the survival of indigenous and endemic species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) identified 140 species of mammals as threatened and 15 as critically endangered, including the Bali myna, Sumatran orangutan, and Javan rhinoceros. Some academics describe the deforestation and other environmental destruction in the country as an ecocide.
Indonesia is a republic with a presidential system. Following the fall of the New Order in 1998, political and governmental structures have undergone sweeping reforms, with four constitutional amendments revamping the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Chief among them is the delegation of power and authority to various regional entities while remaining a unitary state. The President of Indonesia is the head of state and head of government, commander-in-chief of the Indonesian National Armed Forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, TNI), and the director of domestic governance, policy-making, and foreign affairs. The president may serve a maximum of two consecutive five-year terms.
The highest representative body at the national level is the People's Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, MPR). Its main functions are supporting and amending the constitution, inaugurating and impeaching the president, and formalising broad outlines of state policy. The MPR comprises two houses; the People's Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR), with 575 members, and the Regional Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, DPD), with 136. The DPR passes legislation and monitors the executive branch. Reforms since 1998 have markedly increased its role in national governance, while the DPD is a new chamber for matters of regional management.
Most civil disputes appear before the State Court (Pengadilan Negeri); appeals are heard before the High Court (Pengadilan Tinggi). The Supreme Court of Indonesia (Mahkamah Agung) is the highest level of the judicial branch and hears final cessation appeals and conducts case reviews. Other courts include the Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi) which listens to constitutional and political matters, and the Religious Court (Pengadilan Agama), which deals with codified Islamic Personal Law (sharia) cases. Additionally, the Judicial Commission (Komisi Yudisial) monitors the performance of judges.
Since 1999, Indonesia has had a multi-party system. In all legislative elections since the fall of the New Order, no political party has won an overall majority of seats. The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which secured the most votes in the 2019 elections, is the party of the incumbent president, Joko Widodo. Other notable parties include the Party of the Functional Groups (Golkar), the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), the Democratic Party, and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS).
The first general election was held in 1955 to elect members of the DPR and the Constitutional Assembly (Konstituante). The most recent elections in 2019 resulted in nine political parties in the DPR, with a parliamentary threshold of 4% of the national vote. At the national level, Indonesians did not elect a president until 2004. Since then, the president is elected for a five-year term, as are the party-aligned members of the DPR and the non-partisan DPD. Beginning with the 2015 local elections, elections for governors and mayors have occurred on the same date. In 2014, the Constitutional Court ruled that legislative and presidential elections would be held simultaneously, starting in 2019.
Indonesia has several levels of subdivisions. The first level are the provinces, which have a legislature (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah, DPRD) and an elected governor. A total of 38 provinces have been established from the original eight in 1945, with the most recent change being the split of Southwest Papua from the province of West Papua in 2022. The second level are the regencies (kabupaten) and cities (kota), led by regents (bupati) and mayors (walikota) respectively and a legislature (DPRD Kabupaten/Kota). The third level are the districts (kecamatan, distrik in Papua, or kapanewon and kemantren in Yogyakarta), and the fourth are the villages (either desa, kelurahan, kampung, nagari in West Sumatra, or gampong in Aceh).
The village is the lowest level of government administration. It is divided into several community groups (rukun warga, RW), which are further divided into neighbourhood groups (rukun tetangga, RT). In Java, the village (desa) is divided into smaller units called dusun or dukuh (hamlets), which are the same as RW. Following the implementation of regional autonomy measures in 2001, regencies and cities have become chief administrative units responsible for providing most government services. The village administration level is the most influential on a citizen's daily life and handles village or neighbourhood matters through an elected village head (lurah or kepala desa).
Nine provinces—Aceh, Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Papua, Central Papua, Highland Papua, South Papua, Southwest Papua and West Papua—are granted a special autonomous status (otonomi khusus) from the central government. Aceh, a conservative Islamic territory, has the right to create some aspects of an independent legal system implementing sharia. Jakarta is the only city with a provincial government due to its position as the capital of Indonesia. Yogyakarta is the only pre-colonial monarchy legally recognised within Indonesia, with the positions of governor and vice governor being prioritised for the reigning Sultan of Yogyakarta and Duke of Pakualaman, respectively. The six Papuan provinces are the only ones where the indigenous people have privileges in their local government.
Indonesia maintains 132 diplomatic missions abroad, including 95 embassies. The country adheres to what it calls a "free and active" foreign policy, seeking a role in regional affairs in proportion to its size and location but avoiding involvement in conflicts among other countries.
Indonesia was a significant battleground during the Cold War. Numerous attempts by the United States and the Soviet Union, and China to some degree, culminated in the 1965 coup attempt and subsequent upheaval that led to a reorientation of foreign policy. Quiet alignment with the Western world while maintaining a non-aligned stance has characterised Indonesia's foreign policy since then. Today, it maintains close relations with its neighbours and is a founding member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the East Asia Summit. In common with most of the Muslim world, Indonesia does not have diplomatic relations with Israel and has actively supported Palestine. However, observers have pointed out that Indonesia has ties with Israel, albeit discreetly.
Indonesia has been a member of the United Nations since 1950 and was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Indonesia is a signatory to the ASEAN Free Trade Area agreement, the Cairns Group, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and a former member of OPEC. Indonesia has been a humanitarian and development aid recipient since 1967, and recently, the country established its first overseas aid programme in late 2019.
Indonesia's Armed Forces (TNI) include the Army (TNI–AD), Navy (TNI–AL, which includes Marine Corps), and Air Force (TNI–AU). The army has about 400,000 active-duty personnel. Defence spending in the national budget was 0.7% of GDP in 2018, with controversial involvement of military-owned commercial interests and foundations. The Armed Forces were formed during the Indonesian National Revolution when it undertook guerrilla warfare along with informal militia. Since then, territorial lines have formed the basis of all TNI branches' structure, aimed at maintaining domestic stability and deterring foreign threats. The military has possessed a strong political influence since its founding, which peaked during the New Order. Political reforms in 1998 included the removal of the TNI's formal representation from the legislature. Nevertheless, its political influence remains, albeit at a reduced level.
Since independence, the country has struggled to maintain unity against local insurgencies and separatist movements. Some, notably in Aceh and Papua, have led to an armed conflict and subsequent allegations of human rights abuses and brutality from all sides. The former was resolved peacefully in 2005, while the latter has continued amid a significant, albeit imperfect, implementation of regional autonomy laws and a reported decline in the levels of violence and human rights abuses as of 2006. Other engagements of the army include the conflict against the Netherlands over the Dutch New Guinea, the opposition to the British-sponsored creation of Malaysia ("Konfrontasi"), the mass killings of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and the invasion of East Timor, which remains Indonesia's most massive military operation.
Indonesia has a mixed economy in which the private sector and government play vital roles. As the only G20 member state in Southeast Asia, the country has the largest economy in the region and is classified as a newly industrialised country. Per a 2023 estimate, it is the world's 16th largest economy by nominal GDP and 7th in terms of GDP at PPP, estimated to be US$1.417 trillion and US$4.393 trillion, respectively. Per capita GDP in PPP is US$15,835, while nominal per capita GDP is US$5,108. Services are the economy's largest sector and account for 43.4% of GDP (2018), followed by industry (39.7%) and agriculture (12.8%). Since 2009, it has employed more people than other sectors, accounting for 47.7% of the total labour force, followed by agriculture (30.2%) and industry (21.9%).
Over time, the structure of the economy has changed considerably. Historically, it has been weighted heavily towards agriculture, reflecting both its stage of economic development and government policies in the 1950s and 1960s to promote agricultural self-sufficiency. A gradual process of industrialisation and urbanisation began in the late 1960s and accelerated in the 1980s as falling oil prices saw the government focus on diversifying away from oil exports and towards manufactured exports. This development continued throughout the 1980s and into the next decade despite the 1990 oil price shock, during which the GDP rose at an average rate of 7.1%. As a result, the official poverty rate fell from 60% to 15%. Trade barriers reduction from the mid-1980s made the economy more globally integrated. The growth ended with the 1997 Asian financial crisis that severely impacted the economy, including a 13.1% real GDP contraction in 1998 and a 78% inflation. The economy reached its low point in mid-1999 with only 0.8% real GDP growth.
Relatively steady inflation and an increase in GDP deflator and the Consumer Price Index have contributed to strong economic growth in recent years. From 2007 to 2019, annual growth accelerated to between 4% and 6% due to improvements in the banking sector and domestic consumption, helping Indonesia weather the 2008–2009 Great Recession, and regain in 2011 the investment grade rating it had lost in 1997. As of 2019, 9.41% of the population lived below the poverty line, and the official open unemployment rate was 5.28%. During the first year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the economy suffered its first recession since the 1997 crisis but recovered in the following year.
Indonesia has abundant natural resources. Its primary industries are fishing, petroleum, timber, paper products, cotton cloth, tourism, petroleum mining, natural gas, bauxite, coal and tin. Its main agricultural products are rice, coconuts, soybeans, bananas, coffee, tea, palm, rubber, and sugar cane. These commodities make up a large portion of the country's exports, with palm oil and coal briquettes as the leading export commodities. In addition to refined and crude petroleum as the primary imports, telephones, vehicle parts and wheat cover the majority of additional imports. China, the United States, Japan, Singapore, India, Malaysia, South Korea and Thailand are Indonesia's principal export markets and import partners.
Indonesia's transport system has been shaped over time by the economic resource base of an archipelago and the distribution of its 275 million people highly concentrated on Java. All transport modes play a role in the country's transport system and are generally complementary rather than competitive. In 2016, the transport sector generated about 5.2% of GDP.
The road transport system is predominant, with a total length of 542,310 kilometres (336,980 miles) as of 2018. Jakarta has the most extended bus rapid transit system globally, boasting 251.2 kilometres (156.1 miles) in 13 corridors and ten cross-corridor routes. Rickshaws such as bajaj and becak and share taxis such as Angkot and Minibus are a regular sight in the country.
Most railways are in Java, and partly Sumatra and Sulawesi, used for freight and passenger transport, such as local commuter rail services (mainly in Greater Jakarta and Yogyakarta–Solo) complementing the inter-city rail network in several cities. In the late 2010s, Jakarta and Palembang were the first cities in Indonesia to have rapid transit systems, with more planned for other cities in the future. In 2023, a high-speed rail connecting the cities of Jakarta and Bandung commenced operations, a first for Southeast Asia and the Southern Hemisphere.
Indonesia's largest airport, Soekarno–Hatta International Airport, is among the busiest in the Southern Hemisphere, serving 54 million passengers in 2019. Ngurah Rai International Airport and Juanda International Airport are the country's second-and third-busiest airport, respectively. Garuda Indonesia, the country's flag carrier since 1949, is one of the world's leading airlines and a member of the global airline alliance SkyTeam. The Port of Tanjung Priok is the busiest and most advanced Indonesian port, handling more than 50% of Indonesia's trans-shipment cargo traffic.
In 2019, Indonesia produced 4,999 terawatt-hours (17.059 quadrillion British thermal units) and consumed 2,357 terawatt-hours (8.043 quadrillion British thermal units) worth of energy. The country has substantial energy resources, including 22 billion barrels (3.5 billion cubic metres) of conventional oil and gas reserves (of which about 4 billion barrels are recoverable), 8 billion barrels of oil-equivalent of coal-based methane (CBM) resources, and 28 billion tonnes of recoverable coal.
In late 2020, Indonesia's total national installed power generation capacity stands at 72,750.72 MW. Although reliance on domestic coal and imported oil has increased between 2010 and 2019, Indonesia has seen progress in renewable energy, with hydropower and geothermal being the most abundant sources that account for more than 8% in the country's energy mix. A prime example of the former is the country's largest dam, Jatiluhur, which has an installed capacity of 186.5 MW that feeds into the Java grid managed by the State Electricity Company (Perusahaan Listrik Negara, PLN). Furthermore, Indonesia has the potential for solar, wind, biomass and ocean energy, although as of 2021, power generation from these sources remain small.
Government expenditure on research and development is relatively low (0.3% of GDP in 2019), and Indonesia only ranked 61st on the 2023 Global Innovation Index report up from 87th in 2021. Historical examples of scientific and technological developments include the paddy cultivation technique terasering, which is common in Southeast Asia, and the pinisi boats by the Bugis and Makassar people. In the 1980s, Indonesian engineer Tjokorda Raka Sukawati invented a road construction technique named Sosrobahu that later became widely used in several countries. The country is also an active producer of passenger trains and freight wagons with its state-owned company, the Indonesian Railway Industry (INKA), and has exported trains abroad.
Indonesia has a long history of developing military and small commuter aircraft. It is the only country in Southeast Asia to build and produce aircraft. The state-owned Indonesian Aerospace company (PT. Dirgantara Indonesia) has provided components for Boeing and Airbus. The company also collaborated with EADS CASA of Spain to develop the CN-235, which has been used by several countries. Former President B. J. Habibie played a vital role in this achievement. Indonesia has also joined the South Korean programme to manufacture the 4.5-generation fighter jet KAI KF-21 Boramae.
Indonesia has a space programme and space agency, the National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (Lembaga Penerbangan dan Antariksa Nasional, LAPAN). In the 1970s, Indonesia became the first developing country to operate a satellite system called Palapa, a series of communication satellites owned by Indosat. The first satellite, PALAPA A1, was launched on 8 July 1976 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, United States. As of 2019, Indonesia has launched 18 satellites for various purposes.
Tourism contributed around US$9.8 billion to GDP in 2020, and in the previous year, Indonesia received 15.4 million visitors. Overall, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and Japan are the top five sources of visitors to Indonesia. Since 2011, Wonderful Indonesia has been the country's international marketing campaign slogan to promote tourism.
Nature and culture are prime attractions of Indonesian tourism. The country has a well-preserved natural ecosystem with rainforests stretching over about 57% of Indonesia's land (225 million acres). Forests on Sumatra and Kalimantan are examples of popular destinations, such as the Orangutan wildlife reserve. Moreover, Indonesia has one of the world's longest coastlines, measuring 54,716 kilometres (33,999 mi). The ancient Borobudur and Prambanan temples, as well as Toraja and Bali with their traditional festivities, are some of the popular destinations for cultural tourism.
Indonesia has ten UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including the Komodo National Park and the Cosmological Axis of Yogyakarta and its Historic Landmarks; and a further 18 in a tentative list that includes Bunaken National Park and Raja Ampat Islands. Other attractions include specific points in Indonesian history, such as the colonial heritage of the Dutch East Indies in the old towns of Jakarta and Semarang and the royal palaces of Pagaruyung and Ubud.
The 2020 census recorded Indonesia's population as 270.2 million, the fourth largest in the world, with a moderately high population growth rate of 1.25%. Java is the world's most populous island, where 56% of the country's population lives. The population density is 141 people per km (365 per sq mi), ranking 88th in the world, although Java has a population density of 1,067 people per km (2,435 per sq mi). In 1961, the first post-colonial census recorded a total of 97 million people. It is expected to grow to around 295 million by 2030 and 321 million by 2050. The country currently possesses a relatively young population, with a median age of 30.2 years (2017 estimate).
The spread of the population is uneven throughout the archipelago, with a varying habitats and levels of development, ranging from the megacity of Jakarta to uncontacted tribes in Papua. As of 2017, about 54.7% of the population lives in urban areas. Jakarta is the country's primate city and the second-most populous urban area globally, with over 34 million residents. About 8 million Indonesians live overseas; most settled in Malaysia, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, the United States, and Australia.
Indonesia is an ethnically diverse country, with around 1,300 distinct native ethnic groups. Most Indonesians are descended from Austronesian peoples whose languages had origins in Proto-Austronesian, which possibly originated in what is now Taiwan. Another major grouping is the Melanesians, who inhabit eastern Indonesia (the Maluku Islands, Western New Guinea and the eastern part of the Lesser Sunda Islands).
The Javanese are the largest ethnic group, constituting 40.2% of the population, and are politically dominant. They are predominantly located in the central to eastern parts of Java and also in sizeable numbers in most provinces. The Sundanese are the next largest group (15.4%), followed by Batak, Madurese, Betawi, Minangkabau, Bugis and Malay people. A sense of Indonesian nationhood exists alongside strong regional identities.
The country's official language is Indonesian, a variant of Malay based on its prestige dialect, which had been the archipelago's lingua franca for centuries. It was promoted by nationalists in the 1920s and achieved official status in 1945 under the name Bahasa Indonesia. Due to centuries-long contact with other languages, it is rich in local and foreign influences. Nearly every Indonesian speaks the language due to its widespread use in education, academics, communications, business, politics, and mass media. Most Indonesians also speak at least one of more than 700 local languages, often as their first language. Most belong to the Austronesian language family, while over 270 Papuan languages are spoken in eastern Indonesia. Of these, Javanese is the most widely spoken and has co-official status in the Special Region of Yogyakarta.
In 1930, Dutch and other Europeans (Totok), Eurasians, and derivative people like the Indos, numbered 240,000 or 0.4% of the total population. Historically, they constituted only a tiny fraction of the native population and remain so today. Also, the Dutch language never had a substantial number of speakers or official status despite the Dutch presence for almost 350 years. The small minorities that can speak it or Dutch-based creole languages fluently are the aforementioned ethnic groups and descendants of Dutch colonisers. This reflected the Dutch colonial empire's primary purpose, which was commercial exchange as opposed to sovereignty over homogeneous landmasses. Today, there is some degree of fluency by either educated members of the oldest generation or legal professionals, as specific law codes are still only available in Dutch.
Despite guaranteeing religious freedom in the constitution, the government officially recognises only six religions: Islam, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, with indigenous religions only partly acknowledged. With 231 million adherents (86.7%) in 2018, Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, with Sunnis being the majority (99%). The Shias and Ahmadis, respectively, constitute 1% (1–3 million) and 0.2% (200,000–400,000) of Muslims. About 10% of Indonesians are Christians, who form the majority in several provinces in eastern Indonesia. Most Hindus are Balinese, and most Buddhists are Chinese Indonesians.
The natives of the Indonesian archipelago originally practised indigenous animism and dynamism, beliefs that are common to Austronesian peoples. They worshipped and revered ancestral spirits and believed that supernatural spirits (hyang) might inhabit certain places such as large trees, stones, forests, mountains, or sacred sites. Examples of Indonesian native belief systems include the Sundanese Sunda Wiwitan, Dayak's Kaharingan, and the Javanese Kejawèn. They have significantly impacted how other faiths are practised, evidenced by a large proportion of people—such as the Javanese abangan, Balinese Hindus, and Dayak Christians—practising a less orthodox, syncretic form of their religion.
Hindu influences reached the archipelago as early as the first century CE. The Sundanese Kingdom of Salakanagara in western Java around 130 was the first historically recorded Indianised kingdom in the archipelago. Buddhism arrived around the 6th century, and its history in Indonesia is closely related to that of Hinduism, as some empires based on Buddhism had their roots around the same period. The archipelago has witnessed the rise and fall of powerful and influential Hindu and Buddhist empires such as Majapahit, Sailendra, Srivijaya, and Mataram. Though no longer a majority, Hinduism and Buddhism remain to have a substantial influence on Indonesian culture.
Islam was introduced by Sunni traders of the Shafi'i school as well as Sufi traders from the Indian subcontinent and southern Arabia as early as the 8th century CE. For the most part, Islam overlaid and mixed with existing cultural and religious influences, resulting in a distinct form of Islam (santri). Trade, Islamic missionary activity such as by the Wali Sanga and Chinese explorer Zheng He, and military campaigns by several sultanates helped accelerate the spread of Islam. By the end of the 16th century, it had supplanted Hinduism and Buddhism as the dominant religion of Java and Sumatra.
Catholicism was brought by Portuguese traders and missionaries such as Jesuit Francis Xavier, who visited and baptised several thousand locals. Its spread faced difficulty due to the Dutch East India Company policy of banning the religion and the Dutch hostility due to the Eighty Years' War against Catholic Spain's rule. Protestantism is mostly a result of Calvinist and Lutheran missionary efforts during the Dutch colonial era. Although they are the most common branch, there is a multitude of other denominations elsewhere in the country.
There was a small Jewish presence in the archipelago until 1945, mostly Dutch and some Baghdadi Jews. Since most left after Indonesia proclaimed independence, Judaism was never accorded official status, and only a tiny number of Jews remain today, mostly in Jakarta and Surabaya.
At the national and local level, Indonesia's political leadership and civil society groups have played a crucial role in interfaith relations, both positively and negatively. The invocation of the first principle of Indonesia's philosophical foundation, Pancasila (i.e. the belief in the one and only God), often serves as a reminder of religious tolerance, though instances of intolerance have occurred. An overwhelming majority of Indonesians consider religion to be essential and an integral part of life.
Education is compulsory for 12 years. Parents can choose between state-run, non-sectarian schools or private or semi-private religious (usually Islamic) schools, supervised by the ministries of Education and Religion, respectively. Private international schools that do not follow the national curriculum are also available. The enrolment rate is 93% for primary education, 79% for secondary education, and 36% for tertiary education (2018). The literacy rate is 96% (2018), and the government spends about 3.6% of GDP (2015) on education. In 2018, there were 4,670 higher educational institutions in Indonesia, with most (74%) located in Sumatra and Java. According to the QS World University Rankings, Indonesia's top universities are the University of Indonesia, Gadjah Mada University and the Bandung Institute of Technology.
Government expenditure on healthcare was about 3.3% of GDP in 2016. As part of an attempt to achieve universal health care, the government launched the National Health Insurance (Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional, JKN) in 2014. It includes coverage for a range of services from the public and also private firms that have opted to join the scheme. Despite remarkable improvements in recent decades, such as rising life expectancy (from 62.3 years in 1990 to 71.7 years in 2019) and declining child mortality (from 84 deaths per 1,000 births in 1990 to 23.9 deaths in 2019), challenges remain, including maternal and child health, low air quality, malnutrition, high rate of smoking, and infectious diseases.
In the economic sphere, there is a gap in wealth, unemployment rate, and health between densely populated islands and economic centres (such as Sumatra and Java) and sparsely populated, disadvantaged areas (such as Maluku and Papua). This is created by a situation in which nearly 80% of Indonesia's population lives in the western parts of the archipelago and yet grows slower than the rest of the country.
In the social arena, numerous cases of racism and discrimination, especially against Chinese Indonesians and Papuans, have been well documented throughout Indonesia's history. Such cases have sometimes led to violent conflicts, most notably the May 1998 riots and the Papua conflict, which has continued since 1962. LGBT people also regularly face challenges. Although LGBT issues have been relatively obscure, the 2010s (especially after 2016) has seen a rapid surge of anti-LGBT rhetoric, putting LGBT Indonesians into a frequent subject of intimidation, discrimination, and even violence. In addition, Indonesia has been reported to have sizeable numbers of child and forced labourers, with the former being prevalent in the palm oil and tobacco industries, while the latter in the fishing industry.
The cultural history of the Indonesian archipelago spans more than two millennia. Influences from the Indian subcontinent, mainland China, the Middle East, Europe, Melanesian and Austronesian peoples have historically shaped the cultural, linguistic and religious makeup of the archipelago. As a result, modern-day Indonesia has a multicultural, multilingual and multi-ethnic society, with a complex cultural mixture that differs significantly from the original indigenous cultures. Indonesia currently holds thirteen items of UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage, including a wayang puppet theatre, kris, batik, pencak silat, angklung, gamelan, and the three genres of traditional Balinese dance.
Indonesian arts include both age-old art forms developed through centuries and recently developed contemporary art. Despite often displaying local ingenuity, Indonesian arts have absorbed foreign influences—most notably from India, the Arab world, China and Europe, due to contacts and interactions facilitated, and often motivated by trade. Painting is an established and developed art in Bali, where its people are famed for their artistry. Their painting tradition started as classical Kamasan or Wayang style visual narrative, derived from visual art discovered on candi bas reliefs in eastern Java.
There have been numerous discoveries of megalithic sculptures in Indonesia. Subsequently, tribal art has flourished within the culture of Nias, Batak, Asmat, Dayak and Toraja. Wood and stone are common materials used as the media for sculpting among these tribes. Between the 8th and 15th centuries, the Javanese civilisation developed refined stone sculpting art and architecture influenced by the Hindu-Buddhist Dharmic civilisation. The temples of Borobudur and Prambanan are among the most famous examples of the practice.
As with the arts, Indonesian architecture has absorbed foreign influences that have brought cultural changes and profound effects on building styles and techniques. The most dominant has traditionally been Indian; however, Chinese, Arab, and European influences have also been significant. Traditional carpentry, masonry, stone and woodwork techniques and decorations have thrived in vernacular architecture, with numbers of traditional houses' (rumah adat) styles that have been developed. The traditional houses and settlements vary by ethnic group, and each has a specific custom and history. Examples include Toraja's Tongkonan, Minangkabau's Rumah Gadang and Rangkiang, Javanese style Pendopo pavilion with Joglo style roof, Dayak's longhouses, various Malay houses, Balinese houses and temples, and also different forms of rice barns (lumbung).
The music of Indonesia predates historical records. Various indigenous tribes incorporate chants and songs accompanied by musical instruments in their rituals. Angklung, kacapi suling, gong, gamelan, talempong, kulintang, and sasando are examples of traditional Indonesian instruments. The diverse world of Indonesian music genres results from the musical creativity of its people and subsequent cultural encounters with foreign influences. These include gambus and qasida from the Middle East, keroncong from Portugal, and dangdut—one of Indonesia's most popular music genres—with notable Hindi influence as well as Malay orchestras. Today, the Indonesian music industry enjoys both nationwide and regional popularity in Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, due to the common culture and mutual intelligibility between Indonesian and Malay.
Indonesian dances have a diverse history, with more than 3,000 original dances. Scholars believe that they had their beginning in rituals and religious worship. Examples include war dances, a dance of witch doctors, and a dance to call for rain or any agricultural rituals such as Hudoq. Indonesian dances derive their influences from the archipelago's prehistoric and tribal, Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic periods. Recently, modern dances and urban teen dances have gained popularity due to the influence of Western culture and those of Japan and South Korea to some extent. However, various traditional dances, including those of Java, Bali and Dayak, remain a living and dynamic tradition.
Indonesia has various clothing styles due to its long and rich cultural history. The national costume originates from the country's indigenous culture and traditional textile traditions. The Javanese Batik and Kebaya are arguably Indonesia's most recognised national costumes, though they have Sundanese and Balinese origins as well. Each province has a representation of traditional attire and dress, such as Ulos of Batak from North Sumatra; Songket of Malay and Minangkabau from Sumatra; and Ikat of Sasak from Lombok. People wear national and regional costumes during traditional weddings, formal ceremonies, music performances, government and official occasions, and they vary from traditional to modern attire.
Wayang, the Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese shadow puppet theatre displays several legends from Hindu mythology such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Other forms of local drama include the Javanese Ludruk and Ketoprak, the Sundanese Sandiwara, Betawi Lenong, and various Balinese dance dramas. They incorporate humour and jest and often involve audiences in their performances. Some theatre traditions also include music, dancing and silat martial art, such as Randai from the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra. It is usually performed for traditional ceremonies and festivals and based on semi-historical Minangkabau legends and love story. Modern performing art also developed in Indonesia with its distinct style of drama. Notable theatre, dance, and drama troupe such as Teater Koma are famous as it often portrays social and political satire of Indonesian society.
The first film produced in the archipelago was Loetoeng Kasaroeng, a silent film by Dutch director L. Heuveldorp. The film industry expanded after independence, with six films made in 1949 rising to 58 in 1955. Usmar Ismail, who made significant imprints in the 1950s and 1960s, is generally considered the pioneer of Indonesian films. The latter part of the Sukarno era saw the use of cinema for nationalistic, anti-Western purposes, and foreign films were subsequently banned, while the New Order utilised a censorship code that aimed to maintain social order. Production of films peaked during the 1980s, although it declined significantly in the next decade. Notable films in this period include Pengabdi Setan (1980), Nagabonar (1987), Tjoet Nja' Dhien (1988), Catatan Si Boy (1989), and Warkop's comedy films.
Independent film making was a rebirth of the film industry since 1998, when films started addressing previously banned topics, such as religion, race, and love. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of films released each year steadily increased. Riri Riza and Mira Lesmana were among the new generation of filmmakers who co-directed Kuldesak (1999), Petualangan Sherina (2000), Ada Apa dengan Cinta? (2002), and Laskar Pelangi (2008). In 2022, KKN di Desa Penari smashed box office records, becoming the most-watched Indonesian film with 9.2 million tickets sold. Indonesia has held annual film festivals and awards, including the Indonesian Film Festival (Festival Film Indonesia) held intermittently since 1955. It hands out the Citra Award, the film industry's most prestigious award. From 1973 to 1992, the festival was held annually and then discontinued until its revival in 2004.
Media freedom increased considerably after the fall of the New Order, during which the Ministry of Information monitored and controlled domestic media and restricted foreign media. The television market includes several national commercial networks and provincial networks that compete with public TVRI, which held a monopoly on TV broadcasting from 1962 to 1989. By the early 21st century, the improved communications system had brought television signals to every village, and people can choose from up to 11 channels. Private radio stations carry news bulletins while foreign broadcasters supply programmes. The number of printed publications has increased significantly since 1998.
Like other developing countries, Indonesia began developing Internet in the early 1990s. Its first commercial Internet service provider, PT. Indo Internet began operation in Jakarta in 1994. The country had 171 million Internet users in 2018, with a penetration rate that keeps increasing annually. Most are between the ages of 15 and 19 and depend primarily on mobile phones for access, outnumbering laptops and computers.
The oldest evidence of writing in the Indonesian archipelago is a series of Sanskrit inscriptions dated to the 5th century. Many of Indonesia's peoples have firmly rooted oral traditions, which help define and preserve their cultural identities. In written poetry and prose, several traditional forms dominate, mainly syair, pantun, gurindam, hikayat and babad. Examples of these forms include Syair Abdul Muluk, Hikayat Hang Tuah, Sulalatus Salatin, and Babad Tanah Jawi.
Early modern Indonesian literature originates in the Sumatran tradition. Literature and poetry flourished during the decades leading up to and after independence. Balai Pustaka, the government bureau for popular literature, was instituted in 1917 to promote the development of indigenous literature. Many scholars consider the 1950s and 1960s to be the Golden Age of Indonesian Literature. The style and characteristics of modern Indonesian literature vary according to the dynamics of the country's political and social landscape, most notably the war of independence in the second half of the 1940s and the anti-communist mass killings in the mid-1960s. Notable literary figures of the modern era include Hamka, Chairil Anwar, Mohammad Yamin, Merari Siregar, Marah Roesli, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Ayu Utami.
Indonesian cuisine is one of the world's most diverse, vibrant, and colourful, full of intense flavour. Many regional cuisines exist, often based upon indigenous culture and foreign influences such as Chinese, European, Middle Eastern, and Indian precedents. Rice is the leading staple food and is served with side dishes of meat and vegetables. Spices (notably chilli), coconut milk, fish and chicken are fundamental ingredients.
Some popular dishes such as nasi goreng, gado-gado, sate, and soto are ubiquitous and considered national dishes. The Ministry of Tourism, however, chose tumpeng as the official national dish in 2014, describing it as binding the diversity of various culinary traditions. Other popular dishes include rendang, one of the many Minangkabau cuisines along with dendeng and gulai. Another fermented food is oncom, similar in some ways to tempeh but uses a variety of bases (not only soy), created by different fungi, and is prevalent in West Java.
Badminton and football are the most popular sports in Indonesia. Indonesia is among the few countries that have won the Thomas and Uber Cup, the world team championship of men's and women's badminton. Along with weightlifting, it is the sport that contributes the most to Indonesia's Olympic medal tally. Liga 1 is the country's premier football club league. On the international stage, Indonesia was the first Asian team to participate in the FIFA World Cup in 1938 as the Dutch East Indies. On a regional level, Indonesia won a bronze medal at the 1958 Asian Games as well as three gold medals at the 1987, 1991 and 2023 Southeast Asian Games (SEA Games). Indonesia's first appearance at the AFC Asian Cup was in 1996 and successfully qualified for a total of five tournaments, although they never make the knockout phase.
Other popular sports include boxing and basketball, which has a long history in Indonesia and was part of the first National Games (Pekan Olahraga Nasional, PON) in 1948. Sepak takraw and karapan sapi (bull racing) in Madura are some examples of Indonesia's traditional sports. In areas with a history of tribal warfare, mock fighting contests are held, such as caci in Flores and pasola in Sumba. Pencak Silat is an Indonesian martial art and, in 2018, became one of the sporting events in the Asian Games, with Indonesia appearing as one of the leading competitors. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia is one of the top sports powerhouses by topping the SEA Games medal table ten times since 1977, most recently in 2011.
5°S 120°E / 5°S 120°E / -5; 120 | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guinea. Indonesia is the world's largest island country and the 14th-largest country by area, at 1,904,569 square kilometres (735,358 square miles). With over 279 million people, Indonesia is the world's fourth-most populous country and the most populous Muslim-majority country. Java, the world's most populous island, is home to more than half of the country's population.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Indonesia is a presidential republic with an elected legislature. It has 38 provinces, of which nine have special status. The country's capital, Jakarta, is the world's second-most populous urban area. Indonesia shares land borders with Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and the eastern part of Malaysia, as well as maritime borders with Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, Palau, and India. Despite its large population and densely populated regions, Indonesia has vast areas of wilderness that support one of the world's highest levels of biodiversity.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Indonesian archipelago has been a valuable region for trade since at least the seventh century when the Srivijaya and later Majapahit Kingdoms traded with entities from mainland China and the Indian subcontinent. Local rulers gradually absorbed foreign influences from the early centuries, and Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms flourished. Sunni traders and Sufi scholars later brought Islam, and European powers fought one another to monopolise trade in the Spice Islands of Maluku during the Age of Discovery. Following three and a half centuries of Dutch colonialism, Indonesia secured its independence after World War II. Indonesia's history has since been turbulent, with challenges posed by natural disasters, corruption, separatism, a democratisation process, and periods of rapid economic growth.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Indonesia consists of thousands of distinct native ethnic and hundreds of linguistic groups, with Javanese being the largest. A shared identity has developed with the motto \"Bhinneka Tunggal Ika\" (\"Unity in Diversity\" literally, \"many, yet one\"), defined by a national language, cultural diversity, religious pluralism within a Muslim-majority population, and a history of colonialism and rebellion against it. The economy of Indonesia is the world's 16th-largest by nominal GDP and the 7th-largest by PPP. It is the world's third-largest democracy, a regional power and is considered a middle power in global affairs. The country is a member of several multilateral organisations, including the United Nations, World Trade Organization, G20, and a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, East Asia Summit, D-8 and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The name Indonesia derives from the Greek words Indos (Ἰνδός) and nesos (νῆσος), meaning \"Indian islands\". The name dates back to the 19th century, far predating the formation of independent Indonesia. In 1850, George Windsor Earl, an English ethnologist, proposed the terms Indunesians—and, his preference, Malayunesians—for the inhabitants of the \"Indian Archipelago or Malay Archipelago\". In the same publication, one of his students, James Richardson Logan, used Indonesia as a synonym for Indian Archipelago. Dutch academics writing in East Indies publications were reluctant to use Indonesia. They preferred Malay Archipelago (Dutch: Maleische Archipel); the Netherlands East Indies (Nederlandsch Oost Indië), popularly Indië; the East (de Oost); and Insulinde.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "After 1900, Indonesia became more common in academic circles outside the Netherlands, and native nationalist groups adopted it for political expression. Adolf Bastian of the University of Berlin popularized the name through his book Indonesien oder die Inseln des Malayischen Archipels, 1884–1894. The first native scholar to use the name was Ki Hajar Dewantara when in 1913, he established a press bureau in the Netherlands, Indonesisch Pers-bureau.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Fossilised remains of Homo erectus, popularly known as the \"Java Man\", suggest the Indonesian archipelago was inhabited two million to 500,000 years ago. Homo sapiens reached the region around 43,000 BCE. Austronesian peoples, who form the majority of the modern population, migrated to Southeast Asia from what is now Taiwan. They arrived in the archipelago around 2,000 BCE and confined the native Melanesians to the far eastern regions as they spread east.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Ideal agricultural conditions and the mastering of wet-field rice cultivation as early as the eighth century BCE allowed villages, towns, and small kingdoms to flourish by the first century CE. The archipelago's strategic sea-lane position fostered inter-island and international trade, including with Indian kingdoms and Chinese dynasties, from several centuries BCE. Trade has since fundamentally shaped Indonesian history.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "From the seventh century CE, the Srivijaya naval kingdom flourished due to trade and the influences of Hinduism and Buddhism. Between the eighth and tenth centuries CE, the agricultural Buddhist Sailendra and Hindu Mataram dynasties thrived and declined in inland Java, leaving grand religious monuments such as Sailendra's Borobudur and Mataram's Prambanan. The Hindu Majapahit kingdom was founded in eastern Java in the late 13th century, and under Gajah Mada, its influence stretched over much of present-day Indonesia. This period is often referred to as a \"Golden Age\" in Indonesian history.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The earliest evidence of Islamized populations in the archipelago dates to the 13th century in northern Sumatra. Other parts of the archipelago gradually adopted Islam, and it was the dominant religion in Java and Sumatra by the end of the 16th century. For the most part, Islam overlaid and mixed with existing cultural and religious influences, which shaped the predominant form of Islam in Indonesia, particularly in Java.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The first Europeans arrived in the archipelago in 1512, when Portuguese traders, led by Francisco Serrão, sought to monopolise the sources of nutmeg, cloves, and cubeb pepper in the Maluku Islands. Dutch and British traders followed. In 1602, the Dutch established the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and became the dominant European power for almost 200 years. The VOC was dissolved in 1799 following bankruptcy, and the Netherlands established the Dutch East Indies as a nationalised colony.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "For most of the colonial period, Dutch control over the archipelago was tenuous. Dutch forces were engaged continuously in quelling rebellions on and off Java. The influence of local leaders such as Prince Diponegoro in central Java, Imam Bonjol in central Sumatra, Pattimura in Maluku, and the bloody thirty-year Aceh War weakened the Dutch and tied up the colonial military forces. Only in the early 20th century did Dutch dominance extend to what was to become Indonesia's current boundaries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Japanese invasion and occupation during World War II ended Dutch rule and encouraged the independence movement. Two days after the surrender of Japan in August 1945, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta issued the Proclamation of Indonesian Independence. Then, Sukarno, Mohammad Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, influential nationalist leaders, were appointed president, vice-president and prime minister respectively.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Netherlands attempted to re-establish their rule, beginning the Indonesian National Revolution which ended in December 1949 when the Dutch recognised Indonesian independence in the face of international pressure. Despite extraordinary political, social, and sectarian divisions, Indonesians, on the whole, found unity in their fight for independence.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "As president, Sukarno moved Indonesia from democracy towards authoritarianism and maintained power by balancing the opposing forces of the military, political Islam, and the increasingly powerful Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). Tensions between the military and the PKI culminated in an attempted coup in 1965. The army, led by Major General Suharto, countered by instigating a violent anti-communist purge that killed between 500,000 and one million people and incarcerated roughly a million more in concentration camps. The PKI was blamed for the coup and effectively destroyed. Suharto capitalised on Sukarno's weakened position, and following a drawn-out power play with Sukarno, Suharto was appointed president in March 1968. His \"New Order\" administration, supported by the United States, encouraged foreign direct investment, which was a crucial factor in the subsequent three decades of substantial economic growth.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Indonesia was the country hardest hit by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. It brought out popular discontent with the New Order's corruption and suppression of political opposition and ultimately ended Suharto's presidency. In 1999, East Timor seceded from Indonesia, following its 1975 invasion by Indonesia and a 25-year occupation marked by international condemnation of human rights abuses.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Since 1998, democratic processes have been strengthened by enhancing regional autonomy and instituting the country's first direct presidential election in 2004. Political, economic and social instability, corruption, and instances of terrorism remained problems in the 2000s; however, the economy has performed strongly since 2007. Although relations among the diverse population are mostly harmonious, acute sectarian discontent and violence remain problematic in some areas. A political settlement to an armed separatist conflict in Aceh was achieved in 2005.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "On 27 December 2023, hundreds of students from various universities in Aceh, such as Abulyatama University, Bina Bangsa Getsempena University, and University of Muhammadiyah Aceh, stormed a shelter for Rohingya refugees and forced them out of a convention centre in the city of Banda Aceh, demanding they be deported. The students also seen kicking the belongings of the Rohingya men, women, and children who were seated on the floor and crying in fear. They burned tyres and chanted “Kick them out” and “Reject Rohingya in Aceh”.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Indonesia lies between latitudes 11°S and 6°N and longitudes 95°E and 141°E. A transcontinental country spanning Southeast Asia and Oceania, it is the world's largest archipelagic state, extending 5,120 kilometres (3,181 mi) from east to west and 1,760 kilometres (1,094 mi) from north to south. The country's Coordinating Ministry for Maritime and Investments Affairs says Indonesia has 17,504 islands (with 16,056 registered at the UN) scattered over both sides of the equator, around 6,000 of which are inhabited. The largest are Sumatra, Java, Borneo (shared with Brunei and Malaysia), Sulawesi, and New Guinea (shared with Papua New Guinea). Indonesia shares land borders with Malaysia on Borneo and Sebatik, Papua New Guinea on the island of New Guinea, East Timor on the island of Timor, and maritime borders with Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Palau, and Australia.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "At 4,884 metres (16,024 ft), Puncak Jaya is Indonesia's highest peak, and Lake Toba in Sumatra is the largest lake, with an area of 1,145 km2 (442 sq mi). Indonesia's largest rivers are in Kalimantan and New Guinea and include Kapuas, Barito, Mamberamo, Sepik and Mahakam. They serve as communication and transport links between the island's river settlements.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Indonesia lies along the equator, and its climate tends to be relatively even year-round. Indonesia has two seasons—a wet season and a dry season—with no extremes of summer or winter. For most of Indonesia, the dry season falls between May and October, with the wet season between November and April. Indonesia's climate is almost entirely tropical, dominated by the tropical rainforest climate found on every large island of Indonesia. More cooling climate types do exist in mountainous regions that are 1,300 to 1,500 metres (4,300 to 4,900 feet) above sea level. The oceanic climate (Köppen Cfb) prevails in highland areas adjacent to rainforest climates, with reasonably uniform precipitation year-round. In highland areas near the tropical monsoon and tropical savanna climates, the subtropical highland climate (Köppen Cwb) is prevalent with a more pronounced dry season.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Some regions, such as Kalimantan and Sumatra, experience only slight differences in rainfall and temperature between the seasons, whereas others, such as Nusa Tenggara, experience far more pronounced differences with droughts in the dry season and floods in the wet. Rainfall varies across regions, with more in western Sumatra, Java, and the interiors of Kalimantan and Papua, and less in areas closer to Australia, such as Nusa Tenggara, which tends to be dry. The almost uniformly warm waters that constitute 81% of Indonesia's area ensure that land temperatures remain relatively constant. Humidity is quite high, at between 70 and 90%. Winds are moderate and generally predictable, with monsoons usually blowing in from the south and east in June through October and from the northwest in November through March. Typhoons and large-scale storms pose little hazard to mariners; significant dangers come from swift currents in channels, such as the Lombok and Sape straits.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Several studies consider Indonesia to be at severe risk from the projected effects of climate change. These include unreduced emissions resulting in an average temperature rise of around 1 °C (2 °F) by mid-century, raising the frequency of drought and food shortages (with an impact on precipitation and the patterns of wet and dry seasons, and thus Indonesia's agriculture system) as well as numerous diseases and wildfires. Rising sea levels would also threaten most of Indonesia's population, who live in low-lying coastal areas. Impoverished communities would likely be affected the most by climate change.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Tectonically, most of Indonesia's area is highly unstable, making it a site of numerous volcanoes and frequent earthquakes. It lies on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the Indo-Australian Plate and the Pacific Plate are pushed under the Eurasian plate, where they melt at about 100 kilometres (62 miles) deep. A string of volcanoes runs through Sumatra, Java, Bali and Nusa Tenggara, and then to the Banda Islands of Maluku to northeastern Sulawesi. Of the 400 volcanoes, around 130 are active. Between 1972 and 1991, there were 29 volcanic eruptions, mostly on Java. Volcanic ash has made agricultural conditions unpredictable in some areas. However, it has also resulted in fertile soils, a factor in historically sustaining the high population densities of Java and Bali.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "A massive supervolcano erupted at present-day Lake Toba around 70,000 BCE. It is believed to have caused a global volcanic winter and cooling of the climate and subsequently led to a genetic bottleneck in human evolution, though this is still in debate. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora and the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa were among the largest in recorded history. The former caused 92,000 deaths and created an umbrella of volcanic ash that spread and blanketed parts of the archipelago and made much of the Northern Hemisphere without summer in 1816. The latter produced the loudest sound in recorded history and caused 36,000 deaths due to the eruption itself and the resulting tsunamis, with significant additional effects around the world years after the event. Recent catastrophic disasters due to seismic activity include the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Indonesia's size, tropical climate, and archipelagic geography support one of the world's highest levels of biodiversity, and it is among the 17 megadiverse countries identified by Conservation International. Its flora and fauna are a mixture of Asian and Australasian species. The Sunda Shelf islands (Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Bali) were once linked to mainland Asia and have a wealth of Asian fauna. Large species such as the Sumatran tiger, rhinoceros, orangutan, Asian elephant, and leopard were once abundant as far east as Bali, but numbers and distribution have dwindled drastically. Having been long separated from the continental landmasses, Sulawesi, Nusa Tenggara, and Maluku have developed their unique flora and fauna. Papua was part of the Australian landmass and is home to a unique fauna and flora closely related to that of Australia, including over 600 bird species.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Indonesia is second only to Australia in terms of total endemic species, with 36% of its 1,531 species of bird and 39% of its 515 species of mammal being endemic. Tropical seas surround Indonesia's 80,000 kilometres (50,000 miles) of coastline. The country has a range of sea and coastal ecosystems, including beaches, dunes, estuaries, mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass beds, coastal mudflats, tidal flats, algal beds, and small island ecosystems. Indonesia is one of the Coral Triangle countries with the world's most enormous diversity of coral reef fish, with more than 1,650 species in eastern Indonesia only.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace described a dividing line (Wallace Line) between the distribution of Indonesia's Asian and Australasian species. It runs roughly north–south along the edge of the Sunda Shelf, between Kalimantan and Sulawesi, and along the deep Lombok Strait, between Lombok and Bali. Flora and fauna on the west of the line are generally Asian, while east from Lombok is increasingly Australian until the tipping point at the Weber Line. In his 1869 book, The Malay Archipelago, Wallace described numerous species unique to the area. The region of islands between his line and New Guinea is now termed Wallacea.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Indonesia's large and growing population and rapid industrialisation present serious environmental issues. They are often given a lower priority due to high poverty levels and weak, under-resourced governance. Problems include the destruction of peatlands, large-scale illegal deforestation (causing extensive haze across parts of Southeast Asia), over-exploitation of marine resources, air pollution, garbage management, and reliable water and wastewater services. These issues contribute to Indonesia's low ranking (number 116 out of 180 countries) in the 2020 Environmental Performance Index. The report also indicates that Indonesia's performance is generally below average in both regional and global context.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Indonesia has one of the world's fastest deforestation rates. In 2020, forests covered approximately 49.1% of the country's land area, down from 87% in 1950. Since the 1970s, log production, various plantations and agriculture have been responsible for much of the deforestation in Indonesia. Most recently, it has been driven by the palm oil industry, which has been criticised for its environmental impact and displacement of local communities. The situation has made Indonesia the world's largest forest-based emitter of greenhouse gases. It also threatens the survival of indigenous and endemic species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) identified 140 species of mammals as threatened and 15 as critically endangered, including the Bali myna, Sumatran orangutan, and Javan rhinoceros. Some academics describe the deforestation and other environmental destruction in the country as an ecocide.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Indonesia is a republic with a presidential system. Following the fall of the New Order in 1998, political and governmental structures have undergone sweeping reforms, with four constitutional amendments revamping the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Chief among them is the delegation of power and authority to various regional entities while remaining a unitary state. The President of Indonesia is the head of state and head of government, commander-in-chief of the Indonesian National Armed Forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, TNI), and the director of domestic governance, policy-making, and foreign affairs. The president may serve a maximum of two consecutive five-year terms.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The highest representative body at the national level is the People's Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, MPR). Its main functions are supporting and amending the constitution, inaugurating and impeaching the president, and formalising broad outlines of state policy. The MPR comprises two houses; the People's Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR), with 575 members, and the Regional Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, DPD), with 136. The DPR passes legislation and monitors the executive branch. Reforms since 1998 have markedly increased its role in national governance, while the DPD is a new chamber for matters of regional management.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Most civil disputes appear before the State Court (Pengadilan Negeri); appeals are heard before the High Court (Pengadilan Tinggi). The Supreme Court of Indonesia (Mahkamah Agung) is the highest level of the judicial branch and hears final cessation appeals and conducts case reviews. Other courts include the Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi) which listens to constitutional and political matters, and the Religious Court (Pengadilan Agama), which deals with codified Islamic Personal Law (sharia) cases. Additionally, the Judicial Commission (Komisi Yudisial) monitors the performance of judges.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Since 1999, Indonesia has had a multi-party system. In all legislative elections since the fall of the New Order, no political party has won an overall majority of seats. The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which secured the most votes in the 2019 elections, is the party of the incumbent president, Joko Widodo. Other notable parties include the Party of the Functional Groups (Golkar), the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), the Democratic Party, and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS).",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The first general election was held in 1955 to elect members of the DPR and the Constitutional Assembly (Konstituante). The most recent elections in 2019 resulted in nine political parties in the DPR, with a parliamentary threshold of 4% of the national vote. At the national level, Indonesians did not elect a president until 2004. Since then, the president is elected for a five-year term, as are the party-aligned members of the DPR and the non-partisan DPD. Beginning with the 2015 local elections, elections for governors and mayors have occurred on the same date. In 2014, the Constitutional Court ruled that legislative and presidential elections would be held simultaneously, starting in 2019.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Indonesia has several levels of subdivisions. The first level are the provinces, which have a legislature (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah, DPRD) and an elected governor. A total of 38 provinces have been established from the original eight in 1945, with the most recent change being the split of Southwest Papua from the province of West Papua in 2022. The second level are the regencies (kabupaten) and cities (kota), led by regents (bupati) and mayors (walikota) respectively and a legislature (DPRD Kabupaten/Kota). The third level are the districts (kecamatan, distrik in Papua, or kapanewon and kemantren in Yogyakarta), and the fourth are the villages (either desa, kelurahan, kampung, nagari in West Sumatra, or gampong in Aceh).",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The village is the lowest level of government administration. It is divided into several community groups (rukun warga, RW), which are further divided into neighbourhood groups (rukun tetangga, RT). In Java, the village (desa) is divided into smaller units called dusun or dukuh (hamlets), which are the same as RW. Following the implementation of regional autonomy measures in 2001, regencies and cities have become chief administrative units responsible for providing most government services. The village administration level is the most influential on a citizen's daily life and handles village or neighbourhood matters through an elected village head (lurah or kepala desa).",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Nine provinces—Aceh, Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Papua, Central Papua, Highland Papua, South Papua, Southwest Papua and West Papua—are granted a special autonomous status (otonomi khusus) from the central government. Aceh, a conservative Islamic territory, has the right to create some aspects of an independent legal system implementing sharia. Jakarta is the only city with a provincial government due to its position as the capital of Indonesia. Yogyakarta is the only pre-colonial monarchy legally recognised within Indonesia, with the positions of governor and vice governor being prioritised for the reigning Sultan of Yogyakarta and Duke of Pakualaman, respectively. The six Papuan provinces are the only ones where the indigenous people have privileges in their local government.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Indonesia maintains 132 diplomatic missions abroad, including 95 embassies. The country adheres to what it calls a \"free and active\" foreign policy, seeking a role in regional affairs in proportion to its size and location but avoiding involvement in conflicts among other countries.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Indonesia was a significant battleground during the Cold War. Numerous attempts by the United States and the Soviet Union, and China to some degree, culminated in the 1965 coup attempt and subsequent upheaval that led to a reorientation of foreign policy. Quiet alignment with the Western world while maintaining a non-aligned stance has characterised Indonesia's foreign policy since then. Today, it maintains close relations with its neighbours and is a founding member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the East Asia Summit. In common with most of the Muslim world, Indonesia does not have diplomatic relations with Israel and has actively supported Palestine. However, observers have pointed out that Indonesia has ties with Israel, albeit discreetly.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Indonesia has been a member of the United Nations since 1950 and was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Indonesia is a signatory to the ASEAN Free Trade Area agreement, the Cairns Group, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and a former member of OPEC. Indonesia has been a humanitarian and development aid recipient since 1967, and recently, the country established its first overseas aid programme in late 2019.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Indonesia's Armed Forces (TNI) include the Army (TNI–AD), Navy (TNI–AL, which includes Marine Corps), and Air Force (TNI–AU). The army has about 400,000 active-duty personnel. Defence spending in the national budget was 0.7% of GDP in 2018, with controversial involvement of military-owned commercial interests and foundations. The Armed Forces were formed during the Indonesian National Revolution when it undertook guerrilla warfare along with informal militia. Since then, territorial lines have formed the basis of all TNI branches' structure, aimed at maintaining domestic stability and deterring foreign threats. The military has possessed a strong political influence since its founding, which peaked during the New Order. Political reforms in 1998 included the removal of the TNI's formal representation from the legislature. Nevertheless, its political influence remains, albeit at a reduced level.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Since independence, the country has struggled to maintain unity against local insurgencies and separatist movements. Some, notably in Aceh and Papua, have led to an armed conflict and subsequent allegations of human rights abuses and brutality from all sides. The former was resolved peacefully in 2005, while the latter has continued amid a significant, albeit imperfect, implementation of regional autonomy laws and a reported decline in the levels of violence and human rights abuses as of 2006. Other engagements of the army include the conflict against the Netherlands over the Dutch New Guinea, the opposition to the British-sponsored creation of Malaysia (\"Konfrontasi\"), the mass killings of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and the invasion of East Timor, which remains Indonesia's most massive military operation.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Indonesia has a mixed economy in which the private sector and government play vital roles. As the only G20 member state in Southeast Asia, the country has the largest economy in the region and is classified as a newly industrialised country. Per a 2023 estimate, it is the world's 16th largest economy by nominal GDP and 7th in terms of GDP at PPP, estimated to be US$1.417 trillion and US$4.393 trillion, respectively. Per capita GDP in PPP is US$15,835, while nominal per capita GDP is US$5,108. Services are the economy's largest sector and account for 43.4% of GDP (2018), followed by industry (39.7%) and agriculture (12.8%). Since 2009, it has employed more people than other sectors, accounting for 47.7% of the total labour force, followed by agriculture (30.2%) and industry (21.9%).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Over time, the structure of the economy has changed considerably. Historically, it has been weighted heavily towards agriculture, reflecting both its stage of economic development and government policies in the 1950s and 1960s to promote agricultural self-sufficiency. A gradual process of industrialisation and urbanisation began in the late 1960s and accelerated in the 1980s as falling oil prices saw the government focus on diversifying away from oil exports and towards manufactured exports. This development continued throughout the 1980s and into the next decade despite the 1990 oil price shock, during which the GDP rose at an average rate of 7.1%. As a result, the official poverty rate fell from 60% to 15%. Trade barriers reduction from the mid-1980s made the economy more globally integrated. The growth ended with the 1997 Asian financial crisis that severely impacted the economy, including a 13.1% real GDP contraction in 1998 and a 78% inflation. The economy reached its low point in mid-1999 with only 0.8% real GDP growth.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Relatively steady inflation and an increase in GDP deflator and the Consumer Price Index have contributed to strong economic growth in recent years. From 2007 to 2019, annual growth accelerated to between 4% and 6% due to improvements in the banking sector and domestic consumption, helping Indonesia weather the 2008–2009 Great Recession, and regain in 2011 the investment grade rating it had lost in 1997. As of 2019, 9.41% of the population lived below the poverty line, and the official open unemployment rate was 5.28%. During the first year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the economy suffered its first recession since the 1997 crisis but recovered in the following year.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Indonesia has abundant natural resources. Its primary industries are fishing, petroleum, timber, paper products, cotton cloth, tourism, petroleum mining, natural gas, bauxite, coal and tin. Its main agricultural products are rice, coconuts, soybeans, bananas, coffee, tea, palm, rubber, and sugar cane. These commodities make up a large portion of the country's exports, with palm oil and coal briquettes as the leading export commodities. In addition to refined and crude petroleum as the primary imports, telephones, vehicle parts and wheat cover the majority of additional imports. China, the United States, Japan, Singapore, India, Malaysia, South Korea and Thailand are Indonesia's principal export markets and import partners.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Indonesia's transport system has been shaped over time by the economic resource base of an archipelago and the distribution of its 275 million people highly concentrated on Java. All transport modes play a role in the country's transport system and are generally complementary rather than competitive. In 2016, the transport sector generated about 5.2% of GDP.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The road transport system is predominant, with a total length of 542,310 kilometres (336,980 miles) as of 2018. Jakarta has the most extended bus rapid transit system globally, boasting 251.2 kilometres (156.1 miles) in 13 corridors and ten cross-corridor routes. Rickshaws such as bajaj and becak and share taxis such as Angkot and Minibus are a regular sight in the country.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Most railways are in Java, and partly Sumatra and Sulawesi, used for freight and passenger transport, such as local commuter rail services (mainly in Greater Jakarta and Yogyakarta–Solo) complementing the inter-city rail network in several cities. In the late 2010s, Jakarta and Palembang were the first cities in Indonesia to have rapid transit systems, with more planned for other cities in the future. In 2023, a high-speed rail connecting the cities of Jakarta and Bandung commenced operations, a first for Southeast Asia and the Southern Hemisphere.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Indonesia's largest airport, Soekarno–Hatta International Airport, is among the busiest in the Southern Hemisphere, serving 54 million passengers in 2019. Ngurah Rai International Airport and Juanda International Airport are the country's second-and third-busiest airport, respectively. Garuda Indonesia, the country's flag carrier since 1949, is one of the world's leading airlines and a member of the global airline alliance SkyTeam. The Port of Tanjung Priok is the busiest and most advanced Indonesian port, handling more than 50% of Indonesia's trans-shipment cargo traffic.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In 2019, Indonesia produced 4,999 terawatt-hours (17.059 quadrillion British thermal units) and consumed 2,357 terawatt-hours (8.043 quadrillion British thermal units) worth of energy. The country has substantial energy resources, including 22 billion barrels (3.5 billion cubic metres) of conventional oil and gas reserves (of which about 4 billion barrels are recoverable), 8 billion barrels of oil-equivalent of coal-based methane (CBM) resources, and 28 billion tonnes of recoverable coal.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In late 2020, Indonesia's total national installed power generation capacity stands at 72,750.72 MW. Although reliance on domestic coal and imported oil has increased between 2010 and 2019, Indonesia has seen progress in renewable energy, with hydropower and geothermal being the most abundant sources that account for more than 8% in the country's energy mix. A prime example of the former is the country's largest dam, Jatiluhur, which has an installed capacity of 186.5 MW that feeds into the Java grid managed by the State Electricity Company (Perusahaan Listrik Negara, PLN). Furthermore, Indonesia has the potential for solar, wind, biomass and ocean energy, although as of 2021, power generation from these sources remain small.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Government expenditure on research and development is relatively low (0.3% of GDP in 2019), and Indonesia only ranked 61st on the 2023 Global Innovation Index report up from 87th in 2021. Historical examples of scientific and technological developments include the paddy cultivation technique terasering, which is common in Southeast Asia, and the pinisi boats by the Bugis and Makassar people. In the 1980s, Indonesian engineer Tjokorda Raka Sukawati invented a road construction technique named Sosrobahu that later became widely used in several countries. The country is also an active producer of passenger trains and freight wagons with its state-owned company, the Indonesian Railway Industry (INKA), and has exported trains abroad.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Indonesia has a long history of developing military and small commuter aircraft. It is the only country in Southeast Asia to build and produce aircraft. The state-owned Indonesian Aerospace company (PT. Dirgantara Indonesia) has provided components for Boeing and Airbus. The company also collaborated with EADS CASA of Spain to develop the CN-235, which has been used by several countries. Former President B. J. Habibie played a vital role in this achievement. Indonesia has also joined the South Korean programme to manufacture the 4.5-generation fighter jet KAI KF-21 Boramae.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Indonesia has a space programme and space agency, the National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (Lembaga Penerbangan dan Antariksa Nasional, LAPAN). In the 1970s, Indonesia became the first developing country to operate a satellite system called Palapa, a series of communication satellites owned by Indosat. The first satellite, PALAPA A1, was launched on 8 July 1976 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, United States. As of 2019, Indonesia has launched 18 satellites for various purposes.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Tourism contributed around US$9.8 billion to GDP in 2020, and in the previous year, Indonesia received 15.4 million visitors. Overall, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and Japan are the top five sources of visitors to Indonesia. Since 2011, Wonderful Indonesia has been the country's international marketing campaign slogan to promote tourism.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Nature and culture are prime attractions of Indonesian tourism. The country has a well-preserved natural ecosystem with rainforests stretching over about 57% of Indonesia's land (225 million acres). Forests on Sumatra and Kalimantan are examples of popular destinations, such as the Orangutan wildlife reserve. Moreover, Indonesia has one of the world's longest coastlines, measuring 54,716 kilometres (33,999 mi). The ancient Borobudur and Prambanan temples, as well as Toraja and Bali with their traditional festivities, are some of the popular destinations for cultural tourism.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Indonesia has ten UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including the Komodo National Park and the Cosmological Axis of Yogyakarta and its Historic Landmarks; and a further 18 in a tentative list that includes Bunaken National Park and Raja Ampat Islands. Other attractions include specific points in Indonesian history, such as the colonial heritage of the Dutch East Indies in the old towns of Jakarta and Semarang and the royal palaces of Pagaruyung and Ubud.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The 2020 census recorded Indonesia's population as 270.2 million, the fourth largest in the world, with a moderately high population growth rate of 1.25%. Java is the world's most populous island, where 56% of the country's population lives. The population density is 141 people per km (365 per sq mi), ranking 88th in the world, although Java has a population density of 1,067 people per km (2,435 per sq mi). In 1961, the first post-colonial census recorded a total of 97 million people. It is expected to grow to around 295 million by 2030 and 321 million by 2050. The country currently possesses a relatively young population, with a median age of 30.2 years (2017 estimate).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The spread of the population is uneven throughout the archipelago, with a varying habitats and levels of development, ranging from the megacity of Jakarta to uncontacted tribes in Papua. As of 2017, about 54.7% of the population lives in urban areas. Jakarta is the country's primate city and the second-most populous urban area globally, with over 34 million residents. About 8 million Indonesians live overseas; most settled in Malaysia, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, the United States, and Australia.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Indonesia is an ethnically diverse country, with around 1,300 distinct native ethnic groups. Most Indonesians are descended from Austronesian peoples whose languages had origins in Proto-Austronesian, which possibly originated in what is now Taiwan. Another major grouping is the Melanesians, who inhabit eastern Indonesia (the Maluku Islands, Western New Guinea and the eastern part of the Lesser Sunda Islands).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The Javanese are the largest ethnic group, constituting 40.2% of the population, and are politically dominant. They are predominantly located in the central to eastern parts of Java and also in sizeable numbers in most provinces. The Sundanese are the next largest group (15.4%), followed by Batak, Madurese, Betawi, Minangkabau, Bugis and Malay people. A sense of Indonesian nationhood exists alongside strong regional identities.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The country's official language is Indonesian, a variant of Malay based on its prestige dialect, which had been the archipelago's lingua franca for centuries. It was promoted by nationalists in the 1920s and achieved official status in 1945 under the name Bahasa Indonesia. Due to centuries-long contact with other languages, it is rich in local and foreign influences. Nearly every Indonesian speaks the language due to its widespread use in education, academics, communications, business, politics, and mass media. Most Indonesians also speak at least one of more than 700 local languages, often as their first language. Most belong to the Austronesian language family, while over 270 Papuan languages are spoken in eastern Indonesia. Of these, Javanese is the most widely spoken and has co-official status in the Special Region of Yogyakarta.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In 1930, Dutch and other Europeans (Totok), Eurasians, and derivative people like the Indos, numbered 240,000 or 0.4% of the total population. Historically, they constituted only a tiny fraction of the native population and remain so today. Also, the Dutch language never had a substantial number of speakers or official status despite the Dutch presence for almost 350 years. The small minorities that can speak it or Dutch-based creole languages fluently are the aforementioned ethnic groups and descendants of Dutch colonisers. This reflected the Dutch colonial empire's primary purpose, which was commercial exchange as opposed to sovereignty over homogeneous landmasses. Today, there is some degree of fluency by either educated members of the oldest generation or legal professionals, as specific law codes are still only available in Dutch.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Despite guaranteeing religious freedom in the constitution, the government officially recognises only six religions: Islam, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, with indigenous religions only partly acknowledged. With 231 million adherents (86.7%) in 2018, Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, with Sunnis being the majority (99%). The Shias and Ahmadis, respectively, constitute 1% (1–3 million) and 0.2% (200,000–400,000) of Muslims. About 10% of Indonesians are Christians, who form the majority in several provinces in eastern Indonesia. Most Hindus are Balinese, and most Buddhists are Chinese Indonesians.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The natives of the Indonesian archipelago originally practised indigenous animism and dynamism, beliefs that are common to Austronesian peoples. They worshipped and revered ancestral spirits and believed that supernatural spirits (hyang) might inhabit certain places such as large trees, stones, forests, mountains, or sacred sites. Examples of Indonesian native belief systems include the Sundanese Sunda Wiwitan, Dayak's Kaharingan, and the Javanese Kejawèn. They have significantly impacted how other faiths are practised, evidenced by a large proportion of people—such as the Javanese abangan, Balinese Hindus, and Dayak Christians—practising a less orthodox, syncretic form of their religion.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Hindu influences reached the archipelago as early as the first century CE. The Sundanese Kingdom of Salakanagara in western Java around 130 was the first historically recorded Indianised kingdom in the archipelago. Buddhism arrived around the 6th century, and its history in Indonesia is closely related to that of Hinduism, as some empires based on Buddhism had their roots around the same period. The archipelago has witnessed the rise and fall of powerful and influential Hindu and Buddhist empires such as Majapahit, Sailendra, Srivijaya, and Mataram. Though no longer a majority, Hinduism and Buddhism remain to have a substantial influence on Indonesian culture.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Islam was introduced by Sunni traders of the Shafi'i school as well as Sufi traders from the Indian subcontinent and southern Arabia as early as the 8th century CE. For the most part, Islam overlaid and mixed with existing cultural and religious influences, resulting in a distinct form of Islam (santri). Trade, Islamic missionary activity such as by the Wali Sanga and Chinese explorer Zheng He, and military campaigns by several sultanates helped accelerate the spread of Islam. By the end of the 16th century, it had supplanted Hinduism and Buddhism as the dominant religion of Java and Sumatra.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Catholicism was brought by Portuguese traders and missionaries such as Jesuit Francis Xavier, who visited and baptised several thousand locals. Its spread faced difficulty due to the Dutch East India Company policy of banning the religion and the Dutch hostility due to the Eighty Years' War against Catholic Spain's rule. Protestantism is mostly a result of Calvinist and Lutheran missionary efforts during the Dutch colonial era. Although they are the most common branch, there is a multitude of other denominations elsewhere in the country.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "There was a small Jewish presence in the archipelago until 1945, mostly Dutch and some Baghdadi Jews. Since most left after Indonesia proclaimed independence, Judaism was never accorded official status, and only a tiny number of Jews remain today, mostly in Jakarta and Surabaya.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "At the national and local level, Indonesia's political leadership and civil society groups have played a crucial role in interfaith relations, both positively and negatively. The invocation of the first principle of Indonesia's philosophical foundation, Pancasila (i.e. the belief in the one and only God), often serves as a reminder of religious tolerance, though instances of intolerance have occurred. An overwhelming majority of Indonesians consider religion to be essential and an integral part of life.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Education is compulsory for 12 years. Parents can choose between state-run, non-sectarian schools or private or semi-private religious (usually Islamic) schools, supervised by the ministries of Education and Religion, respectively. Private international schools that do not follow the national curriculum are also available. The enrolment rate is 93% for primary education, 79% for secondary education, and 36% for tertiary education (2018). The literacy rate is 96% (2018), and the government spends about 3.6% of GDP (2015) on education. In 2018, there were 4,670 higher educational institutions in Indonesia, with most (74%) located in Sumatra and Java. According to the QS World University Rankings, Indonesia's top universities are the University of Indonesia, Gadjah Mada University and the Bandung Institute of Technology.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Government expenditure on healthcare was about 3.3% of GDP in 2016. As part of an attempt to achieve universal health care, the government launched the National Health Insurance (Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional, JKN) in 2014. It includes coverage for a range of services from the public and also private firms that have opted to join the scheme. Despite remarkable improvements in recent decades, such as rising life expectancy (from 62.3 years in 1990 to 71.7 years in 2019) and declining child mortality (from 84 deaths per 1,000 births in 1990 to 23.9 deaths in 2019), challenges remain, including maternal and child health, low air quality, malnutrition, high rate of smoking, and infectious diseases.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In the economic sphere, there is a gap in wealth, unemployment rate, and health between densely populated islands and economic centres (such as Sumatra and Java) and sparsely populated, disadvantaged areas (such as Maluku and Papua). This is created by a situation in which nearly 80% of Indonesia's population lives in the western parts of the archipelago and yet grows slower than the rest of the country.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In the social arena, numerous cases of racism and discrimination, especially against Chinese Indonesians and Papuans, have been well documented throughout Indonesia's history. Such cases have sometimes led to violent conflicts, most notably the May 1998 riots and the Papua conflict, which has continued since 1962. LGBT people also regularly face challenges. Although LGBT issues have been relatively obscure, the 2010s (especially after 2016) has seen a rapid surge of anti-LGBT rhetoric, putting LGBT Indonesians into a frequent subject of intimidation, discrimination, and even violence. In addition, Indonesia has been reported to have sizeable numbers of child and forced labourers, with the former being prevalent in the palm oil and tobacco industries, while the latter in the fishing industry.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The cultural history of the Indonesian archipelago spans more than two millennia. Influences from the Indian subcontinent, mainland China, the Middle East, Europe, Melanesian and Austronesian peoples have historically shaped the cultural, linguistic and religious makeup of the archipelago. As a result, modern-day Indonesia has a multicultural, multilingual and multi-ethnic society, with a complex cultural mixture that differs significantly from the original indigenous cultures. Indonesia currently holds thirteen items of UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage, including a wayang puppet theatre, kris, batik, pencak silat, angklung, gamelan, and the three genres of traditional Balinese dance.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Indonesian arts include both age-old art forms developed through centuries and recently developed contemporary art. Despite often displaying local ingenuity, Indonesian arts have absorbed foreign influences—most notably from India, the Arab world, China and Europe, due to contacts and interactions facilitated, and often motivated by trade. Painting is an established and developed art in Bali, where its people are famed for their artistry. Their painting tradition started as classical Kamasan or Wayang style visual narrative, derived from visual art discovered on candi bas reliefs in eastern Java.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "There have been numerous discoveries of megalithic sculptures in Indonesia. Subsequently, tribal art has flourished within the culture of Nias, Batak, Asmat, Dayak and Toraja. Wood and stone are common materials used as the media for sculpting among these tribes. Between the 8th and 15th centuries, the Javanese civilisation developed refined stone sculpting art and architecture influenced by the Hindu-Buddhist Dharmic civilisation. The temples of Borobudur and Prambanan are among the most famous examples of the practice.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "As with the arts, Indonesian architecture has absorbed foreign influences that have brought cultural changes and profound effects on building styles and techniques. The most dominant has traditionally been Indian; however, Chinese, Arab, and European influences have also been significant. Traditional carpentry, masonry, stone and woodwork techniques and decorations have thrived in vernacular architecture, with numbers of traditional houses' (rumah adat) styles that have been developed. The traditional houses and settlements vary by ethnic group, and each has a specific custom and history. Examples include Toraja's Tongkonan, Minangkabau's Rumah Gadang and Rangkiang, Javanese style Pendopo pavilion with Joglo style roof, Dayak's longhouses, various Malay houses, Balinese houses and temples, and also different forms of rice barns (lumbung).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The music of Indonesia predates historical records. Various indigenous tribes incorporate chants and songs accompanied by musical instruments in their rituals. Angklung, kacapi suling, gong, gamelan, talempong, kulintang, and sasando are examples of traditional Indonesian instruments. The diverse world of Indonesian music genres results from the musical creativity of its people and subsequent cultural encounters with foreign influences. These include gambus and qasida from the Middle East, keroncong from Portugal, and dangdut—one of Indonesia's most popular music genres—with notable Hindi influence as well as Malay orchestras. Today, the Indonesian music industry enjoys both nationwide and regional popularity in Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei, due to the common culture and mutual intelligibility between Indonesian and Malay.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Indonesian dances have a diverse history, with more than 3,000 original dances. Scholars believe that they had their beginning in rituals and religious worship. Examples include war dances, a dance of witch doctors, and a dance to call for rain or any agricultural rituals such as Hudoq. Indonesian dances derive their influences from the archipelago's prehistoric and tribal, Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic periods. Recently, modern dances and urban teen dances have gained popularity due to the influence of Western culture and those of Japan and South Korea to some extent. However, various traditional dances, including those of Java, Bali and Dayak, remain a living and dynamic tradition.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Indonesia has various clothing styles due to its long and rich cultural history. The national costume originates from the country's indigenous culture and traditional textile traditions. The Javanese Batik and Kebaya are arguably Indonesia's most recognised national costumes, though they have Sundanese and Balinese origins as well. Each province has a representation of traditional attire and dress, such as Ulos of Batak from North Sumatra; Songket of Malay and Minangkabau from Sumatra; and Ikat of Sasak from Lombok. People wear national and regional costumes during traditional weddings, formal ceremonies, music performances, government and official occasions, and they vary from traditional to modern attire.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Wayang, the Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese shadow puppet theatre displays several legends from Hindu mythology such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Other forms of local drama include the Javanese Ludruk and Ketoprak, the Sundanese Sandiwara, Betawi Lenong, and various Balinese dance dramas. They incorporate humour and jest and often involve audiences in their performances. Some theatre traditions also include music, dancing and silat martial art, such as Randai from the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra. It is usually performed for traditional ceremonies and festivals and based on semi-historical Minangkabau legends and love story. Modern performing art also developed in Indonesia with its distinct style of drama. Notable theatre, dance, and drama troupe such as Teater Koma are famous as it often portrays social and political satire of Indonesian society.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "The first film produced in the archipelago was Loetoeng Kasaroeng, a silent film by Dutch director L. Heuveldorp. The film industry expanded after independence, with six films made in 1949 rising to 58 in 1955. Usmar Ismail, who made significant imprints in the 1950s and 1960s, is generally considered the pioneer of Indonesian films. The latter part of the Sukarno era saw the use of cinema for nationalistic, anti-Western purposes, and foreign films were subsequently banned, while the New Order utilised a censorship code that aimed to maintain social order. Production of films peaked during the 1980s, although it declined significantly in the next decade. Notable films in this period include Pengabdi Setan (1980), Nagabonar (1987), Tjoet Nja' Dhien (1988), Catatan Si Boy (1989), and Warkop's comedy films.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Independent film making was a rebirth of the film industry since 1998, when films started addressing previously banned topics, such as religion, race, and love. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of films released each year steadily increased. Riri Riza and Mira Lesmana were among the new generation of filmmakers who co-directed Kuldesak (1999), Petualangan Sherina (2000), Ada Apa dengan Cinta? (2002), and Laskar Pelangi (2008). In 2022, KKN di Desa Penari smashed box office records, becoming the most-watched Indonesian film with 9.2 million tickets sold. Indonesia has held annual film festivals and awards, including the Indonesian Film Festival (Festival Film Indonesia) held intermittently since 1955. It hands out the Citra Award, the film industry's most prestigious award. From 1973 to 1992, the festival was held annually and then discontinued until its revival in 2004.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Media freedom increased considerably after the fall of the New Order, during which the Ministry of Information monitored and controlled domestic media and restricted foreign media. The television market includes several national commercial networks and provincial networks that compete with public TVRI, which held a monopoly on TV broadcasting from 1962 to 1989. By the early 21st century, the improved communications system had brought television signals to every village, and people can choose from up to 11 channels. Private radio stations carry news bulletins while foreign broadcasters supply programmes. The number of printed publications has increased significantly since 1998.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Like other developing countries, Indonesia began developing Internet in the early 1990s. Its first commercial Internet service provider, PT. Indo Internet began operation in Jakarta in 1994. The country had 171 million Internet users in 2018, with a penetration rate that keeps increasing annually. Most are between the ages of 15 and 19 and depend primarily on mobile phones for access, outnumbering laptops and computers.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The oldest evidence of writing in the Indonesian archipelago is a series of Sanskrit inscriptions dated to the 5th century. Many of Indonesia's peoples have firmly rooted oral traditions, which help define and preserve their cultural identities. In written poetry and prose, several traditional forms dominate, mainly syair, pantun, gurindam, hikayat and babad. Examples of these forms include Syair Abdul Muluk, Hikayat Hang Tuah, Sulalatus Salatin, and Babad Tanah Jawi.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Early modern Indonesian literature originates in the Sumatran tradition. Literature and poetry flourished during the decades leading up to and after independence. Balai Pustaka, the government bureau for popular literature, was instituted in 1917 to promote the development of indigenous literature. Many scholars consider the 1950s and 1960s to be the Golden Age of Indonesian Literature. The style and characteristics of modern Indonesian literature vary according to the dynamics of the country's political and social landscape, most notably the war of independence in the second half of the 1940s and the anti-communist mass killings in the mid-1960s. Notable literary figures of the modern era include Hamka, Chairil Anwar, Mohammad Yamin, Merari Siregar, Marah Roesli, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and Ayu Utami.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Indonesian cuisine is one of the world's most diverse, vibrant, and colourful, full of intense flavour. Many regional cuisines exist, often based upon indigenous culture and foreign influences such as Chinese, European, Middle Eastern, and Indian precedents. Rice is the leading staple food and is served with side dishes of meat and vegetables. Spices (notably chilli), coconut milk, fish and chicken are fundamental ingredients.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Some popular dishes such as nasi goreng, gado-gado, sate, and soto are ubiquitous and considered national dishes. The Ministry of Tourism, however, chose tumpeng as the official national dish in 2014, describing it as binding the diversity of various culinary traditions. Other popular dishes include rendang, one of the many Minangkabau cuisines along with dendeng and gulai. Another fermented food is oncom, similar in some ways to tempeh but uses a variety of bases (not only soy), created by different fungi, and is prevalent in West Java.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Badminton and football are the most popular sports in Indonesia. Indonesia is among the few countries that have won the Thomas and Uber Cup, the world team championship of men's and women's badminton. Along with weightlifting, it is the sport that contributes the most to Indonesia's Olympic medal tally. Liga 1 is the country's premier football club league. On the international stage, Indonesia was the first Asian team to participate in the FIFA World Cup in 1938 as the Dutch East Indies. On a regional level, Indonesia won a bronze medal at the 1958 Asian Games as well as three gold medals at the 1987, 1991 and 2023 Southeast Asian Games (SEA Games). Indonesia's first appearance at the AFC Asian Cup was in 1996 and successfully qualified for a total of five tournaments, although they never make the knockout phase.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Other popular sports include boxing and basketball, which has a long history in Indonesia and was part of the first National Games (Pekan Olahraga Nasional, PON) in 1948. Sepak takraw and karapan sapi (bull racing) in Madura are some examples of Indonesia's traditional sports. In areas with a history of tribal warfare, mock fighting contests are held, such as caci in Flores and pasola in Sumba. Pencak Silat is an Indonesian martial art and, in 2018, became one of the sporting events in the Asian Games, with Indonesia appearing as one of the leading competitors. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia is one of the top sports powerhouses by topping the SEA Games medal table ten times since 1977, most recently in 2011.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "5°S 120°E / 5°S 120°E / -5; 120",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guinea. Indonesia is the world's largest island country and the 14th-largest country by area, at 1,904,569 square kilometres. With over 279 million people, Indonesia is the world's fourth-most populous country and the most populous Muslim-majority country. Java, the world's most populous island, is home to more than half of the country's population. Indonesia is a presidential republic with an elected legislature. It has 38 provinces, of which nine have special status. The country's capital, Jakarta, is the world's second-most populous urban area. Indonesia shares land borders with Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and the eastern part of Malaysia, as well as maritime borders with Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, Palau, and India. Despite its large population and densely populated regions, Indonesia has vast areas of wilderness that support one of the world's highest levels of biodiversity. The Indonesian archipelago has been a valuable region for trade since at least the seventh century when the Srivijaya and later Majapahit Kingdoms traded with entities from mainland China and the Indian subcontinent. Local rulers gradually absorbed foreign influences from the early centuries, and Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms flourished. Sunni traders and Sufi scholars later brought Islam, and European powers fought one another to monopolise trade in the Spice Islands of Maluku during the Age of Discovery. Following three and a half centuries of Dutch colonialism, Indonesia secured its independence after World War II. Indonesia's history has since been turbulent, with challenges posed by natural disasters, corruption, separatism, a democratisation process, and periods of rapid economic growth. Indonesia consists of thousands of distinct native ethnic and hundreds of linguistic groups, with Javanese being the largest. A shared identity has developed with the motto "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika", defined by a national language, cultural diversity, religious pluralism within a Muslim-majority population, and a history of colonialism and rebellion against it. The economy of Indonesia is the world's 16th-largest by nominal GDP and the 7th-largest by PPP. It is the world's third-largest democracy, a regional power and is considered a middle power in global affairs. The country is a member of several multilateral organisations, including the United Nations, World Trade Organization, G20, and a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, East Asia Summit, D-8 and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. | 2001-07-14T01:39:29Z | 2023-12-30T04:47:26Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia |
14,580 | Indian Ocean | The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering 70,560,000 km (27,240,000 sq mi) or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by the Southern Ocean or Antarctica depending on the definition in use. Along its core, the Indian Ocean has some large marginal or regional seas such as the Arabian Sea, Laccadive Sea, Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.
The Indian Ocean has been known by its present name since at least 1515 when the Latin form Oceanus Orientalis Indicus ("Indian Eastern Ocean") is attested, named after India, which projects into it. It was earlier known as the Eastern Ocean, a term that was still in use during the mid-18th century (see map), as opposed to the Western Ocean (Atlantic) before the Pacific was surmised.
The Hindi name for the Ocean is हिंद महासागर (Hind Mahāsāgar; lit. transl. Ocean of India).
Conversely, Chinese explorers (e.g., Zheng He during the Ming dynasty) who traveled to the Indian Ocean during the 15th century called it the Western Oceans.
In Ancient Greek geography, the Indian Ocean region known to the Greeks was called the Erythraean Sea.
The borders of the Indian Ocean, as delineated by the International Hydrographic Organization in 1953 included the Southern Ocean but not the marginal seas along the northern rim but in 2002 the IHO delimited the Southern Ocean separately, which removed waters south of 60°S from the Indian Ocean but included the northern marginal seas. Meridionally, the Indian Ocean is delimited from the Atlantic Ocean by the 20° east meridian, running south from Cape Agulhas, South Africa, and from the Pacific Ocean by the meridian of 146°49'E, running south from South East Cape on the island of Tasmania in Australia. The northernmost extent of the Indian Ocean (including marginal seas) is approximately 30° north in the Persian Gulf.
The Indian Ocean covers 70,560,000 km (27,240,000 sq mi), including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf but excluding the Southern Ocean, or 19.5% of the world's oceans; its volume is 264,000,000 km (63,000,000 cu mi) or 19.8% of the world's oceans' volume; it has an average depth of 3,741 m (12,274 ft) and a maximum depth of 7,290 m (23,920 ft).
All of the Indian Ocean is in the Eastern Hemisphere and the centre of the Eastern Hemisphere, the 90th meridian east, passes through the Ninety East Ridge.
In contrast to the Atlantic and Pacific, the Indian Ocean is enclosed by major landmasses and an archipelago on three sides and does not stretch from pole to pole, and can be likened to an embayed ocean. It is centered on the Indian Peninsula. Although this subcontinent has played a significant role in its history, the Indian Ocean has foremostly been a cosmopolitan stage, interlinking diverse regions by innovations, trade, and religion since early in human history.
The active margins of the Indian Ocean have an average width (horizontal distance from land to shelf break) of 19 ± 0.61 km (11.81 ± 0.38 mi) with a maximum width of 175 km (109 mi). The passive margins have an average width of 47.6 ± 0.8 km (29.58 ± 0.50 mi). The average width of the slopes (horizontal distance from shelf break to foot of slope) of the continental shelves are 50.4–52.4 km (31.3–32.6 mi) for active and passive margins respectively, with a maximum width of 205.3–255.2 km (127.6–158.6 mi).
In correspondence of the Shelf break, also known as Hinge zone, the Bouguer gravity ranges from 0 to 30 mGals that is unusual for a continental region of around 16 km thick sediments. It has been hypothesized that the "Hinge zone may represent the relict of continental and proto-oceanic crustal boundary formed during the rifting of India from Antarctica."
Australia, Indonesia, and India are the three countries with the longest shorelines and exclusive economic zones. The continental shelf makes up 15% of the Indian Ocean. More than two billion people live in countries bordering the Indian Ocean, compared to 1.7 billion for the Atlantic and 2.7 billion for the Pacific (some countries border more than one ocean).
The Indian Ocean drainage basin covers 21,100,000 km (8,100,000 sq mi), virtually identical to that of the Pacific Ocean and half that of the Atlantic basin, or 30% of its ocean surface (compared to 15% for the Pacific). The Indian Ocean drainage basin is divided into roughly 800 individual basins, half that of the Pacific, of which 50% are located in Asia, 30% in Africa, and 20% in Australasia. The rivers of the Indian Ocean are shorter on average (740 km (460 mi)) than those of the other major oceans. The largest rivers are (order 5) the Zambezi, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Jubba, and Murray rivers and (order 4) the Shatt al-Arab, Wadi Ad Dawasir (a dried-out river system on the Arabian Peninsula) and Limpopo rivers. After the breakup of East Gondwana and the formation of the Himalayas, the Ganges-Brahmaputra rivers flow into the world's largest delta known as the Bengal delta or Sunderbans.
Marginal seas, gulfs, bays and straits of the Indian Ocean include:
Along the east coast of Africa, the Mozambique Channel separates Madagascar from mainland Africa, while the Sea of Zanj is located north of Madagascar.
On the northern coast of the Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden is connected to the Red Sea by the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. In the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Tadjoura is located in Djibouti and the Guardafui Channel separates Socotra island from the Horn of Africa. The northern end of the Red Sea terminates in the Gulf of Aqaba and Gulf of Suez. The Indian Ocean is artificially connected to the Mediterranean Sea without ship lock through the Suez Canal, which is accessible via the Red Sea. The Arabian Sea is connected to the Persian Gulf by the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz. In the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Bahrain separates Qatar from the Arabic Peninsula.
Along the west coast of India, the Gulf of Kutch and Gulf of Khambat are located in Gujarat in the northern end while the Laccadive Sea separates the Maldives from the southern tip of India. The Bay of Bengal is off the east coast of India. The Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait separate Sri Lanka from India, while Adam's Bridge separates the two. The Andaman Sea is located between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Islands.
In Indonesia, the so-called Indonesian Seaway is composed of the Malacca, Sunda and Torres Straits. The Gulf of Carpentaria of located on the Australian north coast while the Great Australian Bight constitutes a large part of its southern coast.
Several features make the Indian Ocean unique. It constitutes the core of the large-scale Tropical Warm Pool which, when interacting with the atmosphere, affects the climate both regionally and globally. Asia blocks heat export and prevents the ventilation of the Indian Ocean thermocline. That continent also drives the Indian Ocean monsoon, the strongest on Earth, which causes large-scale seasonal variations in ocean currents, including the reversal of the Somali Current and Indian Monsoon Current. Because of the Indian Ocean Walker circulation there are no continuous equatorial easterlies. Upwelling occurs near the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula in the Northern Hemisphere and north of the trade winds in the Southern Hemisphere. The Indonesian Throughflow is a unique Equatorial connection to the Pacific.
The climate north of the equator is affected by a monsoon climate. Strong north-east winds blow from October until April; from May until October south and west winds prevail. In the Arabian Sea, the violent Monsoon brings rain to the Indian subcontinent. In the southern hemisphere, the winds are generally milder, but summer storms near Mauritius can be severe. When the monsoon winds change, cyclones sometimes strike the shores of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Some 80% of the total annual rainfall in India occurs during summer and the region is so dependent on this rainfall that many civilisations perished when the Monsoon failed in the past. The huge variability in the Indian Summer Monsoon has also occurred pre-historically, with a strong, wet phase 33,500–32,500 BP; a weak, dry phase 26,000–23,500 BC; and a very weak phase 17,000–15,000 BP, corresponding to a series of dramatic global events: Bølling–Allerød warming, Heinrich, and Younger Dryas.
The Indian Ocean is the warmest ocean in the world. Long-term ocean temperature records show a rapid, continuous warming in the Indian Ocean, at about 1.2 °C (34.2 °F) (compared to 0.7 °C (33.3 °F) for the warm pool region) during 1901–2012. Research indicates that human induced greenhouse warming, and changes in the frequency and magnitude of El Niño (or the Indian Ocean Dipole), events are a trigger to this strong warming in the Indian Ocean.
South of the Equator (20–5°S), the Indian Ocean is gaining heat from June to October, during the austral winter, while it is losing heat from November to March, during the austral summer.
In 1999, the Indian Ocean Experiment showed that fossil fuel and biomass burning in South and Southeast Asia caused air pollution (also known as the Asian brown cloud) that reach as far as the Intertropical Convergence Zone. This pollution has implications on both a local and global scale.
Forty percent of the sediment of the Indian Ocean is found in the Indus and Ganges fans. The oceanic basins adjacent to the continental slopes mostly contain terrigenous sediments. The ocean south of the polar front (roughly 50° south latitude) is high in biologic productivity and dominated by non-stratified sediment composed mostly of siliceous oozes. Near the three major mid-ocean ridges the ocean floor is relatively young and therefore bare of sediment, except for the Southwest Indian Ridge due to its ultra-slow spreading rate.
The ocean's currents are mainly controlled by the monsoon. Two large gyres, one in the northern hemisphere flowing clockwise and one south of the equator moving anticlockwise (including the Agulhas Current and Agulhas Return Current), constitute the dominant flow pattern. During the winter monsoon (November–February), however, circulation is reversed north of 30°S and winds are weakened during winter and the transitional periods between the monsoons.
The Indian Ocean contains the largest submarine fans of the world, the Bengal Fan and Indus Fan, and the largest areas of slope terraces and rift valleys.
The inflow of deep water into the Indian Ocean is 11 Sv, most of which comes from the Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW). The CDW enters the Indian Ocean through the Crozet and Madagascar basins and crosses the Southwest Indian Ridge at 30°S. In the Mascarene Basin the CDW becomes a deep western boundary current before it is met by a re-circulated branch of itself, the North Indian Deep Water. This mixed water partly flows north into the Somali Basin whilst most of it flows clockwise in the Mascarene Basin where an oscillating flow is produced by Rossby waves.
Water circulation in the Indian Ocean is dominated by the Subtropical Anticyclonic Gyre, the eastern extension of which is blocked by the Southeast Indian Ridge and the 90°E Ridge. Madagascar and the Southwest Indian Ridge separate three cells south of Madagascar and off South Africa. North Atlantic Deep Water reaches into the Indian Ocean south of Africa at a depth of 2,000–3,000 m (6,600–9,800 ft) and flows north along the eastern continental slope of Africa. Deeper than NADW, Antarctic Bottom Water flows from Enderby Basin to Agulhas Basin across deep channels (<4,000 m (13,000 ft)) in the Southwest Indian Ridge, from where it continues into the Mozambique Channel and Prince Edward Fracture Zone.
North of 20° south latitude the minimum surface temperature is 22 °C (72 °F), exceeding 28 °C (82 °F) to the east. Southward of 40° south latitude, temperatures drop quickly.
The Bay of Bengal contributes more than half (2,950 km or 710 cu mi) of the runoff water to the Indian Ocean. Mainly in summer, this runoff flows into the Arabian Sea but also south across the Equator where it mixes with fresher seawater from the Indonesian Throughflow. This mixed freshwater joins the South Equatorial Current in the southern tropical Indian Ocean. Sea surface salinity is highest (more than 36 PSU) in the Arabian Sea because evaporation exceeds precipitation there. In the Southeast Arabian Sea salinity drops to less than 34 PSU. It is the lowest (c. 33 PSU) in the Bay of Bengal because of river runoff and precipitation. The Indonesian Throughflow and precipitation results in lower salinity (34 PSU) along the Sumatran west coast. Monsoonal variation results in eastward transportation of saltier water from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal from June to September and in westerly transport by the East India Coastal Current to the Arabian Sea from January to April.
An Indian Ocean garbage patch was discovered in 2010 covering at least 5 million square kilometres (1.9 million square miles). Riding the southern Indian Ocean Gyre, this vortex of plastic garbage constantly circulates the ocean from Australia to Africa, down the Mozambique Channel, and back to Australia in a period of six years, except for debris that gets indefinitely stuck in the centre of the gyre. The garbage patch in the Indian Ocean will, according to a 2012 study, decrease in size after several decades to vanish completely over centuries. Over several millennia, however, the global system of garbage patches will accumulate in the North Pacific.
There are two amphidromes of opposite rotation in the Indian Ocean, probably caused by Rossby wave propagation.
Icebergs drift as far north as 55° south latitude, similar to the Pacific but less than in the Atlantic where icebergs reach up to 45°S. The volume of iceberg loss in the Indian Ocean between 2004 and 2012 was 24 Gt.
Since the 1960s, anthropogenic warming of the global ocean combined with contributions of freshwater from retreating land ice causes a global rise in sea level. Sea level also increases in the Indian Ocean, except in the south tropical Indian Ocean where it decreases, a pattern most likely caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases.
Among the tropical oceans, the western Indian Ocean hosts one of the largest concentrations of phytoplankton blooms in summer, due to the strong monsoon winds. The monsoonal wind forcing leads to a strong coastal and open ocean upwelling, which introduces nutrients into the upper zones where sufficient light is available for photosynthesis and phytoplankton production. These phytoplankton blooms support the marine ecosystem, as the base of the marine food web, and eventually the larger fish species. The Indian Ocean accounts for the second-largest share of the most economically valuable tuna catch. Its fish are of great and growing importance to the bordering countries for domestic consumption and export. Fishing fleets from Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan also exploit the Indian Ocean, mainly for shrimp and tuna.
Research indicates that increasing ocean temperatures are taking a toll on the marine ecosystem. A study on the phytoplankton changes in the Indian Ocean indicates a decline of up to 20% in the marine plankton in the Indian Ocean, during the past six decades. The tuna catch rates have also declined 50–90% during the past half-century, mostly due to increased industrial fisheries, with the ocean warming adding further stress to the fish species.
Endangered and vulnerable marine mammals and turtles:
80% of the Indian Ocean is open ocean and includes nine large marine ecosystems: the Agulhas Current, Somali Coastal Current, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, Gulf of Thailand, West Central Australian Shelf, Northwest Australian Shelf and Southwest Australian Shelf. Coral reefs cover c. 200,000 km (77,000 sq mi). The coasts of the Indian Ocean includes beaches and intertidal zones covering 3,000 km (1,200 sq mi) and 246 larger estuaries. Upwelling areas are small but important. The hypersaline salterns in India covers between 5,000–10,000 km (1,900–3,900 sq mi) and species adapted for this environment, such as Artemia salina and Dunaliella salina, are important to bird life.
Coral reefs, sea grass beds, and mangrove forests are the most productive ecosystems of the Indian Ocean — coastal areas produce 20 tones of fish per square kilometre. These areas, however, are also being urbanised with populations often exceeding several thousand people per square kilometre and fishing techniques become more effective and often destructive beyond sustainable levels while the increase in sea surface temperature spreads coral bleaching.
Mangroves covers 80,984 km (31,268 sq mi) in the Indian Ocean region, or almost half of the world's mangrove habitat, of which 42,500 km (16,400 sq mi) is located in Indonesia, or 50% of mangroves in the Indian Ocean. Mangroves originated in the Indian Ocean region and have adapted to a wide range of its habitats but it is also where it suffers its biggest loss of habitat.
In 2016, six new animal species were identified at hydrothermal vents in the Southwest Indian Ridge: a "Hoff" crab, a "giant peltospirid" snail, a whelk-like snail, a limpet, a scaleworm and a polychaete worm.
The West Indian Ocean coelacanth was discovered in the Indian Ocean off South Africa in the 1930s and in the late 1990s another species, the Indonesian coelacanth, was discovered off Sulawesi Island, Indonesia. Most extant coelacanths have been found in the Comoros. Although both species represent an order of lobe-finned fishes known from the Early Devonian (410 mya) and though extinct 66 mya, they are morphologically distinct from their Devonian ancestors. Over millions of years, coelacanths evolved to inhabit different environments — lungs adapted for shallow, brackish waters evolved into gills adapted for deep marine waters.
Of Earth's 36 biodiversity hotspot nine (or 25%) are located on the margins of the Indian Ocean.
The origin of this diversity is debated; the break-up of Gondwana can explain vicariance older than 100 mya, but the diversity on the younger, smaller islands must have required a Cenozoic dispersal from the rims of the Indian Ocean to the islands. A "reverse colonisation", from islands to continents, apparently occurred more recently; the chameleons, for example, first diversified on Madagascar and then colonised Africa. Several species on the islands of the Indian Ocean are textbook cases of evolutionary processes; the dung beetles, day geckos, and lemurs are all examples of adaptive radiation. Many bones (250 bones per square metre) of recently extinct vertebrates have been found in the Mare aux Songes swamp in Mauritius, including bones of the Dodo bird (Raphus cucullatus) and Cylindraspis giant tortoise. An analysis of these remains suggests a process of aridification began in the southwest Indian Ocean began around 4,000 years ago.
Mammalian megafauna once widespread in the MPA was driven to near extinction in the early 20th century. Some species have been successfully recovered since then — the population of white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum simum) increased from less than 20 individuals in 1895 to more than 17,000 as of 2013. Other species still depend on fenced areas and management programs, including black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis minor), African wild dog (Lycaon pictus), cheetah (Acynonix jubatus), elephant (Loxodonta africana), and lion (Panthera leo).
This biodiversity hotspot (and namesake ecoregion and "Endemic Bird Area") is a patchwork of small forested areas, often with a unique assemblage of species within each, located within 200 km (120 mi) from the coast and covering a total area of c. 6,200 km (2,400 sq mi). It also encompasses coastal islands, including Zanzibar and Pemba, and Mafia.
This area, one of the only two hotspots that are entirely arid, includes the Ethiopian Highlands, the East African Rift valley, the Socotra islands, as well as some small islands in the Red Sea and areas on the southern Arabic Peninsula. Endemic and threatened mammals include the dibatag (Ammodorcas clarkei) and Speke's gazelle (Gazella spekei); the Somali wild ass (Equus africanus somaliensis) and hamadryas baboon (Papio hamadryas). It also contains many reptiles. In Somalia, the centre of the 1,500,000 km (580,000 sq mi) hotspot, the landscape is dominated by Acacia-Commiphora deciduous bushland, but also includes the Yeheb nut (Cordeauxia edulus) and species discovered more recently such as the Somali cyclamen (Cyclamen somalense), the only cyclamen outside the Mediterranean. Warsangli linnet (Carduelis johannis) is an endemic bird found only in northern Somalia. An unstable political situation and mismanagement has resulted in overgrazing which has produced one of the most degraded hotspots where only c. 5 % of the original habitat remains.
Encompassing the west coast of India and Sri Lanka, until c. 10,000 years ago a landbridge connected Sri Lanka to the Indian Subcontinent, hence this region shares a common community of species.
Indo-Burma encompasses a series of mountain ranges, five of Asia's largest river systems, and a wide range of habitats. The region has a long and complex geological history, and long periods rising sea levels and glaciations have isolated ecosystems and thus promoted a high degree of endemism and speciation. The region includes two centres of endemism: the Annamite Mountains and the northern highlands on the China-Vietnam border. Several distinct floristic regions, the Indian, Malesian, Sino-Himalayan, and Indochinese regions, meet in a unique way in Indo-Burma and the hotspot contains an estimated 15,000–25,000 species of vascular plants, many of them endemic.
Sundaland encompasses 17,000 islands of which Borneo and Sumatra are the largest. Endangered mammals include the Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, the proboscis monkey, and the Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses.
Stretching from Shark Bay to Israelite Bay and isolated by the arid Nullarbor Plain, the southwestern corner of Australia is a floristic region with a stable climate in which one of the world's largest floral biodiversity and an 80% endemism has evolved. From June to September it is an explosion of colours and the Wildflower Festival in Perth in September attracts more than half a million visitors.
As the youngest of the major oceans, the Indian Ocean has active spreading ridges that are part of the worldwide system of mid-ocean ridges. In the Indian Ocean these spreading ridges meet at the Rodrigues Triple Point with the Central Indian Ridge, including the Carlsberg Ridge, separating the African Plate from the Indian Plate; the Southwest Indian Ridge separating the African Plate from the Antarctic Plate; and the Southeast Indian Ridge separating the Australian Plate from the Antarctic Plate. The Central Indian Ridge is intercepted by the Owen Fracture Zone. Since the late 1990s, however, it has become clear that this traditional definition of the Indo-Australian Plate cannot be correct; it consists of three plates — the Indian Plate, the Capricorn Plate, and Australian Plate — separated by diffuse boundary zones. Since 20 Ma the African Plate is being divided by the East African Rift System into the Nubian and Somalia plates.
There are only two trenches in the Indian Ocean: the 6,000 km (3,700 mi)-long Java Trench between Java and the Sunda Trench and the 900 km (560 mi)-long Makran Trench south of Iran and Pakistan.
A series of ridges and seamount chains produced by hotspots pass over the Indian Ocean. The Réunion hotspot (active 70–40 million years ago) connects Réunion and the Mascarene Plateau to the Chagos-Laccadive Ridge and the Deccan Traps in north-western India; the Kerguelen hotspot (100–35 million years ago) connects the Kerguelen Islands and Kerguelen Plateau to the Ninety East Ridge and the Rajmahal Traps in north-eastern India; the Marion hotspot (100–70 million years ago) possibly connects Prince Edward Islands to the Eighty Five East Ridge. These hotspot tracks have been broken by the still active spreading ridges mentioned above.
There are fewer seamounts in the Indian Ocean than in the Atlantic and Pacific. These are typically deeper than 3,000 m (9,800 ft) and located north of 55°S and west of 80°E. Most originated at spreading ridges but some are now located in basins far away from these ridges. The ridges of the Indian Ocean form ranges of seamounts, sometimes very long, including the Carlsberg Ridge, Madagascar Ridge, Central Indian Ridge, Southwest Indian Ridge, Chagos-Laccadive Ridge, 85°E Ridge, 90°E Ridge, Southeast Indian Ridge, Broken Ridge, and East Indiaman Ridge. The Agulhas Plateau and Mascarene Plateau are the two major shallow areas.
The opening of the Indian Ocean began c. 156 Ma when Africa separated from East Gondwana. The Indian Subcontinent began to separate from Australia-Antarctica 135–125 Ma and as the Tethys Ocean north of India began to close 118–84 Ma the Indian Ocean opened behind it.
The Indian Ocean, together with the Mediterranean, has connected people since ancient times, whereas the Atlantic and Pacific have had the roles of barriers or mare incognitum. The written history of the Indian Ocean, however, has been Eurocentric and largely dependent on the availability of written sources from the European colonial era. This history is often divided into an ancient period followed by an Islamic period; the subsequent periods are often subdivided into Portuguese, Dutch, and British periods.
A concept of an "Indian Ocean World" (IOW), similar to that of the "Atlantic World", exists but emerged much more recently and is not well established. The IOW is, nevertheless, sometimes referred to as the "first global economy" and was based on the monsoon which linked Asia, China, India, and Mesopotamia. It developed independently from the European global trade in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and remained largely independent from them until European 19th-century colonial dominance.
The diverse history of the Indian Ocean is a unique mix of cultures, ethnic groups, natural resources, and shipping routes. It grew in importance beginning in the 1960s and 1970s and, after the Cold War, it has undergone periods of political instability, most recently with the emergence of India and China as regional powers.
Pleistocene fossils of Homo erectus and other pre–H. sapiens hominid fossils, similar to H. heidelbergensis in Europe, have been found in India. According to the Toba catastrophe theory, a supereruption c. 74,000 years ago at Lake Toba, Sumatra, covered India with volcanic ashes and wiped out one or more lineages of such archaic humans in India and Southeast Asia.
The Out of Africa theory states that Homo sapiens spread from Africa into mainland Eurasia. The more recent Southern Dispersal or Coastal hypothesis instead advocates that modern humans spread along the coasts of the Arabic Peninsula and southern Asia. This hypothesis is supported by mtDNA research which reveals a rapid dispersal event during the Late Pleistocene (11,000 years ago). This coastal dispersal, however, began in East Africa 75,000 years ago and occurred intermittently from estuary to estuary along the northern perimeter of the Indian Ocean at a rate of 0.7–4.0 km (0.43–2.49 mi) per year. It eventually resulted in modern humans migrating from Sunda over Wallacea to Sahul (Southeast Asia to Australia). Since then, waves of migration have resettled people and, clearly, the Indian Ocean littoral had been inhabited long before the first civilisations emerged. 5000–6000 years ago six distinct cultural centres had evolved around the Indian Ocean: East Africa, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, South East Asia, the Malay World and Australia; each interlinked to its neighbours.
Food globalisation began on the Indian Ocean littoral c. 4.000 years ago. Five African crops — sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, cowpea and hyacinth bean — somehow found their way to Gujarat in India during the Late Harappan (2000–1700 BCE). Gujarati merchants evolved into the first explorers of the Indian Ocean as they traded African goods such as ivory, tortoise shells, and slaves. Broomcorn millet found its way from Central Asia to Africa, together with chicken and zebu cattle, although the exact timing is disputed. Around 2000 BCE black pepper and sesame, both native to Asia, appear in Egypt, albeit in small quantities. Around the same time the black rat and the house mouse emigrate from Asia to Egypt. Banana reached Africa around 3000 years ago.
At least eleven prehistoric tsunamis have struck the Indian Ocean coast of Indonesia between 7400 and 2900 years ago. Analysing sand beds in caves in the Aceh region, scientists concluded that the intervals between these tsunamis have varied from series of minor tsunamis over a century to dormant periods of more than 2000 years preceding megathrusts in the Sunda Trench. Although the risk for future tsunamis is high, a major megathrust such as the one in 2004 is likely to be followed by a long dormant period.
A group of scientists have argued that two large-scale impact events have occurred in the Indian Ocean: the Burckle Crater in the southern Indian Ocean in 2800 BCE and the Kanmare and Tabban craters in the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia in 536 CE. Evidences for these impacts, the team argue, are micro-ejecta and Chevron dunes in southern Madagascar and in the Australian gulf. Geological evidences suggest the tsunamis caused by these impacts reached 205 m (673 ft) above sea level and 45 km (28 mi) inland. The impact events must have disrupted human settlements and perhaps even contributed to major climate changes.
The history of the Indian Ocean is marked by maritime trade; cultural and commercial exchange probably date back at least seven thousand years. Human culture spread early on the shores of the Indian Ocean and was always linked to the cultures of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Before c. 2000 BCE, however, cultures on its shores were only loosely tied to each other; bronze, for example, was developed in Mesopotamia c. 3000 BCE but remained uncommon in Egypt before 1800 BCE. During this period, independent, short-distance oversea communications along its littoral margins evolved into an all-embracing network. The début of this network was not the achievement of a centralised or advanced civilisation but of local and regional exchange in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Sea. Sherds of Ubaid (2500–500 BCE) pottery have been found in the western Gulf at Dilmun, present-day Bahrain; traces of exchange between this trading centre and Mesopotamia. The Sumerians traded grain, pottery, and bitumen (used for reed boats) for copper, stone, timber, tin, dates, onions, and pearls. Coast-bound vessels transported goods between the Indus Valley civilisation (2600–1900 BCE) in the Indian subcontinent (modern-day Pakistan and Northwest India) and the Persian Gulf and Egypt.
The Red Sea, one of the main trade routes in Antiquity, was explored by Egyptians and Phoenicians during the last two millennia BCE. In the 6th century, BCE Greek explorer Scylax of Caryanda made a journey to India, working for the Persian king Darius, and his now-lost account put the Indian Ocean on the maps of Greek geographers. The Greeks began to explore the Indian Ocean following the conquests of Alexander the Great, who ordered a circumnavigation of the Arabian Peninsula in 323 BCE. During the two centuries that followed the reports of the explorers of Ptolemaic Egypt resulted in the best maps of the region until the Portuguese era many centuries later. The main interest in the region for the Ptolemies was not commercial but military; they explored Africa to hunt for war elephants.
The Rub' al Khali desert isolates the southern parts of the Arabic Peninsula and the Indian Ocean from the Arabic world. This encouraged the development of maritime trade in the region linking the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to East Africa and India. The monsoon (from mawsim, the Arabic word for season), however, was used by sailors long before being "discovered" by Hippalus in the 1st century. Indian wood have been found in Sumerian cities, there is evidence of Akkad coastal trade in the region, and contacts between India and the Red Sea dates back to 2300 B.C. The archipelagoes of the central Indian Ocean, the Laccadive and Maldive islands, were probably populated during the 2nd century B.C. from the Indian mainland. They appear in written history in the account of merchant Sulaiman al-Tajir in the 9th century but the treacherous reefs of the islands were most likely cursed by the sailors of Aden long before the islands were even settled.
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, an Alexandrian guide to the world beyond the Red Sea — including Africa and India — from the first century CE, not only gives insights into trade in the region but also shows that Roman and Greek sailors had already gained knowledge about the monsoon winds. The contemporaneous settlement of Madagascar by Austronesian sailors shows that the littoral margins of the Indian Ocean were being both well-populated and regularly traversed at least by this time. Albeit the monsoon must have been common knowledge in the Indian Ocean for centuries.
The Indian Ocean's relatively calmer waters opened the areas bordering it to trade earlier than the Atlantic or Pacific oceans. The powerful monsoons also meant ships could easily sail west early in the season, then wait a few months and return eastwards. This allowed ancient Indonesian peoples to cross the Indian Ocean to settle in Madagascar around 1 CE.
In the 2nd or 1st century BCE, Eudoxus of Cyzicus was the first Greek to cross the Indian Ocean. The probably fictitious sailor Hippalus is said to have learnt the direct route from Arabia to India around this time. During the 1st and 2nd centuries AD intensive trade relations developed between Roman Egypt and the Tamil kingdoms of the Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas in Southern India. Like the Indonesian people above, the western sailors used the monsoon to cross the ocean. The unknown author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes this route, as well as the commodities that were traded along various commercial ports on the coasts of the Horn of Africa and India circa 1 CE. Among these trading settlements were Mosylon and Opone on the Red Sea littoral.
Unlike the Pacific Ocean where the civilization of the Polynesians reached most of the far-flung islands and atolls and populated them, almost all the islands, archipelagos and atolls of the Indian Ocean were uninhabited until colonial times. Although there were numerous ancient civilizations in the coastal states of Asia and parts of Africa, the Maldives were the only island group in the Central Indian Ocean region where an ancient civilization flourished. Maldivians, on their annual trade trip, took their oceangoing trade ships to Sri Lanka rather than mainland India, which is much closer, because their ships were dependent of the Indian Monsoon Current.
Arabic missionaries and merchants began to spread Islam along the western shores of the Indian Ocean from the 8th century, if not earlier. A Swahili stone mosque dating to the 8th–15th centuries has been found in Shanga, Kenya. Trade across the Indian Ocean gradually introduced Arabic script and rice as a staple in Eastern Africa. Muslim merchants traded an estimated 1000 African slaves annually between 800 and 1700, a number that grew to c. 4000 during the 18th century, and 3700 during the period 1800–1870. Slave trade also occurred in the eastern Indian Ocean before the Dutch settled there around 1600 but the volume of this trade is unknown.
From 1405 to 1433 admiral Zheng He said to have led large fleets of the Ming Dynasty on several treasure voyages through the Indian Ocean, ultimately reaching the coastal countries of East Africa.
The Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope during his first voyage in 1497 and became the first European to sail to India. The Swahili people he encountered along the African east coast lived in a series of cities and had established trade routes to India and to China. Among them, the Portuguese kidnapped most of their pilots in coastal raids and on board ships. A few of the pilots, however, were gifts by local Swahili rulers, including the sailor from Gujarat, a gift by a Malindi ruler in Kenya, who helped the Portuguese to reach India. In expeditions after 1500, the Portuguese attacked and colonised cities along the African coast. European slave trade in the Indian Ocean began when Portugal established Estado da Índia in the early 16th century. From then until the 1830s, c. 200 slaves were exported from Mozambique annually and similar figures has been estimated for slaves brought from Asia to the Philippines during the Iberian Union (1580–1640).
The Ottoman Empire began its expansion into the Indian Ocean in 1517 with the conquest of Egypt under Sultan Selim I. Although the Ottomans shared the same religion as the trading communities in the Indian Ocean the region was unexplored by them. Maps that included the Indian Ocean had been produced by Muslim geographers centuries before the Ottoman conquests; Muslim scholars, such as Ibn Battuta in the 14th century, had visited most parts of the known world; contemporarily with Vasco da Gama, Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Mājid had compiled a guide to navigation in the Indian Ocean; the Ottomans, nevertheless, began their own parallel era of discovery which rivalled the European expansion.
The establishment of the Dutch East India Company in the early 17th century lead to a quick increase in the volume of the slave trade in the region; there were perhaps up to 500,000 slaves in various Dutch colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries in the Indian Ocean. For example, some 4000 African slaves were used to build the Colombo fortress in Dutch Ceylon. Bali and neighbouring islands supplied regional networks with c. 100,000–150,000 slaves 1620–1830. Indian and Chinese slave traders supplied Dutch Indonesia with perhaps 250,000 slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The East India Company (EIC) was established during the same period and in 1622 one of its ships carried slaves from the Coromandel Coast to Dutch East Indies. The EIC mostly traded in African slaves but also some Asian slaves purchased from Indian, Indonesian and Chinese slave traders. The French established colonies on the islands of Réunion and Mauritius in 1721; by 1735 some 7,200 slaves populated the Mascarene Islands, a number which had reached 133,000 in 1807. The British captured the islands in 1810, however, and because the British had prohibited the slave trade in 1807 a system of clandestine slave trade developed to bring slaves to French planters on the islands; in all 336,000–388,000 slaves were exported to the Mascarene Islands from 1670 until 1848.
In all, European traders exported 567,900–733,200 slaves within the Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1850 and almost that same amount were exported from the Indian Ocean to the Americas during the same period. Slave trade in the Indian Ocean was, nevertheless, very limited compared to c. 12,000,000 slaves exported across the Atlantic. The island of Zanzibar was the center of the Indian Ocean slave trade in the 19th century. In the mid-19th century, as many as 50,000 slaves passed annually through the port.
Scientifically, the Indian Ocean remained poorly explored before the International Indian Ocean Expedition in the early 1960s. However, the Challenger expedition 1872–1876 only reported from south of the polar front. The Valdivia expedition 1898–1899 made deep samples in the Indian Ocean. In the 1930s, the John Murray Expedition mainly studied shallow-water habitats. The Swedish Deep Sea Expedition 1947–1948 also sampled the Indian Ocean on its global tour and the Danish Galathea sampled deep-water fauna from Sri Lanka to South Africa on its second expedition 1950–1952. The Soviet research vessel Vityaz also did research in the Indian Ocean.
The Suez Canal opened in 1869 when the Industrial Revolution dramatically changed global shipping – the sailing ship declined in importance as did the importance of European trade in favour of trade in East Asia and Australia. The construction of the canal introduced many non-indigenous species into the Mediterranean. For example, the goldband goatfish (Upeneus moluccensis) has replaced the red mullet (Mullus barbatus); since the 1980s huge swarms of scyphozoan jellyfish (Rhopilema nomadica) have affected tourism and fisheries along the Levantian coast and clogged power and desalination plants. Plans announced in 2014 to build a new, much larger Suez Canal parallel to the 19th-century canal will most likely boost the economy in the region but also cause ecological damage in a much wider area.
Throughout the colonial era, islands such as Mauritius were important shipping nodes for the Dutch, French, and British. Mauritius, an inhabited island, became populated by slaves from Africa and indenture labour from India. The end of World War II marked the end of the colonial era. The British left Mauritius in 1974 and with 70% of the population of Indian descent, Mauritius became a close ally of India. In the 1980s, during the Cold War, the South African regime acted to destabilise several island nations in the Indian Ocean, including the Seychelles, Comoros, and Madagascar. India intervened in Mauritius to prevent a coup d'état, backed up by the United States who feared the Soviet Union could gain access to Port Louis and threaten the U.S. base on Diego Garcia. Iranrud is an unrealised plan by Iran and the Soviet Union to build a canal between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf.
Testimonies from the colonial era are stories of African slaves, Indian indentured labourers and white settlers. But, while there was a clear racial line between free men and slaves in the Atlantic World, this delineation is less distinct in the Indian Ocean — there were Indian slaves and settlers as well as black indentured labourers. There were also a string of prison camps across the Indian Ocean, such as Cellular Jail in the Andamans, in which prisoners, exiles, POWs, forced labourers, merchants and people of different faiths were forcefully united. On the islands of the Indian Ocean, therefore, a trend of creolisation emerged.
On 26 December 2004, fourteen countries around the Indian Ocean were hit by a wave of tsunamis caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The waves radiated across the ocean at speeds exceeding 500 km/h (310 mph), reached up to 20 m (66 ft) in height, and resulted in an estimated 236,000 deaths.
In the late 2000s, the ocean evolved into a hub of pirate activity. By 2013, attacks off the Horn region's coast had steadily declined due to active private security and international navy patrols, especially by the Indian Navy.
Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 airliner with 239 persons on board, disappeared on 8 March 2014 and is alleged to have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean about 2,500 km (1,600 mi) from the coast of southwest Western Australia. Despite an extensive search, the whereabouts of the remains of the aircraft is unknown.
The Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island, which lies near South Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal, have been called by experts the most isolated people in the world.
The sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean is disputed between the United Kingdom and Mauritius. In February 2019, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an advisory opinion stating that the UK must transfer the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius.
The sea lanes in the Indian Ocean are considered among the most strategically important in the world with more than 80 percent of the world's seaborne trade in oil transits through the Indian Ocean and its vital chokepoints, with 40 percent passing through the Strait of Hormuz, 35 percent through the Strait of Malacca and 8 percent through the Bab el-Mandab Strait.
The Indian Ocean provides major sea routes connecting the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia with Europe and the Americas. It carries a particularly heavy traffic of petroleum and petroleum products from the oil fields of the Persian Gulf and Indonesia. Large reserves of hydrocarbons are being tapped in the offshore areas of Saudi Arabia, Iran, India, and Western Australia. An estimated 40% of the world's offshore oil production comes from the Indian Ocean. Beach sands rich in heavy minerals, and offshore placer deposits are actively exploited by bordering countries, particularly India, Pakistan, South Africa, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.
In particular, the maritime part of the Silk Road leads through the Indian Ocean on which a large part of the global container trade is carried out. The Silk Road runs with its connections from the Chinese coast and its large container ports to the south via Hanoi to Jakarta, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur through the Strait of Malacca via the Sri Lankan Colombo opposite the southern tip of India via Malé, the capital of the Maldives, to the East African Mombasa, from there to Djibouti, then through the Red Sea over the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, there via Haifa, Istanbul and Athens to the Upper Adriatic to the northern Italian junction of Trieste with its international free port and its rail connections to Central and Eastern Europe.
The Silk Road has become internationally important again on the one hand through European integration, the end of the Cold War and free world trade and on the other hand through Chinese initiatives. Chinese companies have made investments in several Indian Ocean ports, including Gwadar, Hambantota, Colombo and Sonadia. This has sparked a debate about the strategic implications of these investments. There are also Chinese investments and related efforts to intensify trade in East Africa and in European ports such as Piraeus and Trieste. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering 70,560,000 km (27,240,000 sq mi) or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by the Southern Ocean or Antarctica depending on the definition in use. Along its core, the Indian Ocean has some large marginal or regional seas such as the Arabian Sea, Laccadive Sea, Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The Indian Ocean has been known by its present name since at least 1515 when the Latin form Oceanus Orientalis Indicus (\"Indian Eastern Ocean\") is attested, named after India, which projects into it. It was earlier known as the Eastern Ocean, a term that was still in use during the mid-18th century (see map), as opposed to the Western Ocean (Atlantic) before the Pacific was surmised.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Hindi name for the Ocean is हिंद महासागर (Hind Mahāsāgar; lit. transl. Ocean of India).",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Conversely, Chinese explorers (e.g., Zheng He during the Ming dynasty) who traveled to the Indian Ocean during the 15th century called it the Western Oceans.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In Ancient Greek geography, the Indian Ocean region known to the Greeks was called the Erythraean Sea.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The borders of the Indian Ocean, as delineated by the International Hydrographic Organization in 1953 included the Southern Ocean but not the marginal seas along the northern rim but in 2002 the IHO delimited the Southern Ocean separately, which removed waters south of 60°S from the Indian Ocean but included the northern marginal seas. Meridionally, the Indian Ocean is delimited from the Atlantic Ocean by the 20° east meridian, running south from Cape Agulhas, South Africa, and from the Pacific Ocean by the meridian of 146°49'E, running south from South East Cape on the island of Tasmania in Australia. The northernmost extent of the Indian Ocean (including marginal seas) is approximately 30° north in the Persian Gulf.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Indian Ocean covers 70,560,000 km (27,240,000 sq mi), including the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf but excluding the Southern Ocean, or 19.5% of the world's oceans; its volume is 264,000,000 km (63,000,000 cu mi) or 19.8% of the world's oceans' volume; it has an average depth of 3,741 m (12,274 ft) and a maximum depth of 7,290 m (23,920 ft).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "All of the Indian Ocean is in the Eastern Hemisphere and the centre of the Eastern Hemisphere, the 90th meridian east, passes through the Ninety East Ridge.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In contrast to the Atlantic and Pacific, the Indian Ocean is enclosed by major landmasses and an archipelago on three sides and does not stretch from pole to pole, and can be likened to an embayed ocean. It is centered on the Indian Peninsula. Although this subcontinent has played a significant role in its history, the Indian Ocean has foremostly been a cosmopolitan stage, interlinking diverse regions by innovations, trade, and religion since early in human history.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The active margins of the Indian Ocean have an average width (horizontal distance from land to shelf break) of 19 ± 0.61 km (11.81 ± 0.38 mi) with a maximum width of 175 km (109 mi). The passive margins have an average width of 47.6 ± 0.8 km (29.58 ± 0.50 mi). The average width of the slopes (horizontal distance from shelf break to foot of slope) of the continental shelves are 50.4–52.4 km (31.3–32.6 mi) for active and passive margins respectively, with a maximum width of 205.3–255.2 km (127.6–158.6 mi).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In correspondence of the Shelf break, also known as Hinge zone, the Bouguer gravity ranges from 0 to 30 mGals that is unusual for a continental region of around 16 km thick sediments. It has been hypothesized that the \"Hinge zone may represent the relict of continental and proto-oceanic crustal boundary formed during the rifting of India from Antarctica.\"",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Australia, Indonesia, and India are the three countries with the longest shorelines and exclusive economic zones. The continental shelf makes up 15% of the Indian Ocean. More than two billion people live in countries bordering the Indian Ocean, compared to 1.7 billion for the Atlantic and 2.7 billion for the Pacific (some countries border more than one ocean).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Indian Ocean drainage basin covers 21,100,000 km (8,100,000 sq mi), virtually identical to that of the Pacific Ocean and half that of the Atlantic basin, or 30% of its ocean surface (compared to 15% for the Pacific). The Indian Ocean drainage basin is divided into roughly 800 individual basins, half that of the Pacific, of which 50% are located in Asia, 30% in Africa, and 20% in Australasia. The rivers of the Indian Ocean are shorter on average (740 km (460 mi)) than those of the other major oceans. The largest rivers are (order 5) the Zambezi, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Jubba, and Murray rivers and (order 4) the Shatt al-Arab, Wadi Ad Dawasir (a dried-out river system on the Arabian Peninsula) and Limpopo rivers. After the breakup of East Gondwana and the formation of the Himalayas, the Ganges-Brahmaputra rivers flow into the world's largest delta known as the Bengal delta or Sunderbans.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Marginal seas, gulfs, bays and straits of the Indian Ocean include:",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Along the east coast of Africa, the Mozambique Channel separates Madagascar from mainland Africa, while the Sea of Zanj is located north of Madagascar.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "On the northern coast of the Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden is connected to the Red Sea by the strait of Bab-el-Mandeb. In the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Tadjoura is located in Djibouti and the Guardafui Channel separates Socotra island from the Horn of Africa. The northern end of the Red Sea terminates in the Gulf of Aqaba and Gulf of Suez. The Indian Ocean is artificially connected to the Mediterranean Sea without ship lock through the Suez Canal, which is accessible via the Red Sea. The Arabian Sea is connected to the Persian Gulf by the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz. In the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Bahrain separates Qatar from the Arabic Peninsula.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Along the west coast of India, the Gulf of Kutch and Gulf of Khambat are located in Gujarat in the northern end while the Laccadive Sea separates the Maldives from the southern tip of India. The Bay of Bengal is off the east coast of India. The Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait separate Sri Lanka from India, while Adam's Bridge separates the two. The Andaman Sea is located between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Islands.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In Indonesia, the so-called Indonesian Seaway is composed of the Malacca, Sunda and Torres Straits. The Gulf of Carpentaria of located on the Australian north coast while the Great Australian Bight constitutes a large part of its southern coast.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Several features make the Indian Ocean unique. It constitutes the core of the large-scale Tropical Warm Pool which, when interacting with the atmosphere, affects the climate both regionally and globally. Asia blocks heat export and prevents the ventilation of the Indian Ocean thermocline. That continent also drives the Indian Ocean monsoon, the strongest on Earth, which causes large-scale seasonal variations in ocean currents, including the reversal of the Somali Current and Indian Monsoon Current. Because of the Indian Ocean Walker circulation there are no continuous equatorial easterlies. Upwelling occurs near the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula in the Northern Hemisphere and north of the trade winds in the Southern Hemisphere. The Indonesian Throughflow is a unique Equatorial connection to the Pacific.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The climate north of the equator is affected by a monsoon climate. Strong north-east winds blow from October until April; from May until October south and west winds prevail. In the Arabian Sea, the violent Monsoon brings rain to the Indian subcontinent. In the southern hemisphere, the winds are generally milder, but summer storms near Mauritius can be severe. When the monsoon winds change, cyclones sometimes strike the shores of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Some 80% of the total annual rainfall in India occurs during summer and the region is so dependent on this rainfall that many civilisations perished when the Monsoon failed in the past. The huge variability in the Indian Summer Monsoon has also occurred pre-historically, with a strong, wet phase 33,500–32,500 BP; a weak, dry phase 26,000–23,500 BC; and a very weak phase 17,000–15,000 BP, corresponding to a series of dramatic global events: Bølling–Allerød warming, Heinrich, and Younger Dryas.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Indian Ocean is the warmest ocean in the world. Long-term ocean temperature records show a rapid, continuous warming in the Indian Ocean, at about 1.2 °C (34.2 °F) (compared to 0.7 °C (33.3 °F) for the warm pool region) during 1901–2012. Research indicates that human induced greenhouse warming, and changes in the frequency and magnitude of El Niño (or the Indian Ocean Dipole), events are a trigger to this strong warming in the Indian Ocean.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "South of the Equator (20–5°S), the Indian Ocean is gaining heat from June to October, during the austral winter, while it is losing heat from November to March, during the austral summer.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1999, the Indian Ocean Experiment showed that fossil fuel and biomass burning in South and Southeast Asia caused air pollution (also known as the Asian brown cloud) that reach as far as the Intertropical Convergence Zone. This pollution has implications on both a local and global scale.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Forty percent of the sediment of the Indian Ocean is found in the Indus and Ganges fans. The oceanic basins adjacent to the continental slopes mostly contain terrigenous sediments. The ocean south of the polar front (roughly 50° south latitude) is high in biologic productivity and dominated by non-stratified sediment composed mostly of siliceous oozes. Near the three major mid-ocean ridges the ocean floor is relatively young and therefore bare of sediment, except for the Southwest Indian Ridge due to its ultra-slow spreading rate.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The ocean's currents are mainly controlled by the monsoon. Two large gyres, one in the northern hemisphere flowing clockwise and one south of the equator moving anticlockwise (including the Agulhas Current and Agulhas Return Current), constitute the dominant flow pattern. During the winter monsoon (November–February), however, circulation is reversed north of 30°S and winds are weakened during winter and the transitional periods between the monsoons.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Indian Ocean contains the largest submarine fans of the world, the Bengal Fan and Indus Fan, and the largest areas of slope terraces and rift valleys.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The inflow of deep water into the Indian Ocean is 11 Sv, most of which comes from the Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW). The CDW enters the Indian Ocean through the Crozet and Madagascar basins and crosses the Southwest Indian Ridge at 30°S. In the Mascarene Basin the CDW becomes a deep western boundary current before it is met by a re-circulated branch of itself, the North Indian Deep Water. This mixed water partly flows north into the Somali Basin whilst most of it flows clockwise in the Mascarene Basin where an oscillating flow is produced by Rossby waves.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Water circulation in the Indian Ocean is dominated by the Subtropical Anticyclonic Gyre, the eastern extension of which is blocked by the Southeast Indian Ridge and the 90°E Ridge. Madagascar and the Southwest Indian Ridge separate three cells south of Madagascar and off South Africa. North Atlantic Deep Water reaches into the Indian Ocean south of Africa at a depth of 2,000–3,000 m (6,600–9,800 ft) and flows north along the eastern continental slope of Africa. Deeper than NADW, Antarctic Bottom Water flows from Enderby Basin to Agulhas Basin across deep channels (<4,000 m (13,000 ft)) in the Southwest Indian Ridge, from where it continues into the Mozambique Channel and Prince Edward Fracture Zone.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "North of 20° south latitude the minimum surface temperature is 22 °C (72 °F), exceeding 28 °C (82 °F) to the east. Southward of 40° south latitude, temperatures drop quickly.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Bay of Bengal contributes more than half (2,950 km or 710 cu mi) of the runoff water to the Indian Ocean. Mainly in summer, this runoff flows into the Arabian Sea but also south across the Equator where it mixes with fresher seawater from the Indonesian Throughflow. This mixed freshwater joins the South Equatorial Current in the southern tropical Indian Ocean. Sea surface salinity is highest (more than 36 PSU) in the Arabian Sea because evaporation exceeds precipitation there. In the Southeast Arabian Sea salinity drops to less than 34 PSU. It is the lowest (c. 33 PSU) in the Bay of Bengal because of river runoff and precipitation. The Indonesian Throughflow and precipitation results in lower salinity (34 PSU) along the Sumatran west coast. Monsoonal variation results in eastward transportation of saltier water from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal from June to September and in westerly transport by the East India Coastal Current to the Arabian Sea from January to April.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "An Indian Ocean garbage patch was discovered in 2010 covering at least 5 million square kilometres (1.9 million square miles). Riding the southern Indian Ocean Gyre, this vortex of plastic garbage constantly circulates the ocean from Australia to Africa, down the Mozambique Channel, and back to Australia in a period of six years, except for debris that gets indefinitely stuck in the centre of the gyre. The garbage patch in the Indian Ocean will, according to a 2012 study, decrease in size after several decades to vanish completely over centuries. Over several millennia, however, the global system of garbage patches will accumulate in the North Pacific.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "There are two amphidromes of opposite rotation in the Indian Ocean, probably caused by Rossby wave propagation.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Icebergs drift as far north as 55° south latitude, similar to the Pacific but less than in the Atlantic where icebergs reach up to 45°S. The volume of iceberg loss in the Indian Ocean between 2004 and 2012 was 24 Gt.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Since the 1960s, anthropogenic warming of the global ocean combined with contributions of freshwater from retreating land ice causes a global rise in sea level. Sea level also increases in the Indian Ocean, except in the south tropical Indian Ocean where it decreases, a pattern most likely caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases.",
"title": "Oceanography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Among the tropical oceans, the western Indian Ocean hosts one of the largest concentrations of phytoplankton blooms in summer, due to the strong monsoon winds. The monsoonal wind forcing leads to a strong coastal and open ocean upwelling, which introduces nutrients into the upper zones where sufficient light is available for photosynthesis and phytoplankton production. These phytoplankton blooms support the marine ecosystem, as the base of the marine food web, and eventually the larger fish species. The Indian Ocean accounts for the second-largest share of the most economically valuable tuna catch. Its fish are of great and growing importance to the bordering countries for domestic consumption and export. Fishing fleets from Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan also exploit the Indian Ocean, mainly for shrimp and tuna.",
"title": "Marine life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Research indicates that increasing ocean temperatures are taking a toll on the marine ecosystem. A study on the phytoplankton changes in the Indian Ocean indicates a decline of up to 20% in the marine plankton in the Indian Ocean, during the past six decades. The tuna catch rates have also declined 50–90% during the past half-century, mostly due to increased industrial fisheries, with the ocean warming adding further stress to the fish species.",
"title": "Marine life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Endangered and vulnerable marine mammals and turtles:",
"title": "Marine life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "80% of the Indian Ocean is open ocean and includes nine large marine ecosystems: the Agulhas Current, Somali Coastal Current, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, Gulf of Thailand, West Central Australian Shelf, Northwest Australian Shelf and Southwest Australian Shelf. Coral reefs cover c. 200,000 km (77,000 sq mi). The coasts of the Indian Ocean includes beaches and intertidal zones covering 3,000 km (1,200 sq mi) and 246 larger estuaries. Upwelling areas are small but important. The hypersaline salterns in India covers between 5,000–10,000 km (1,900–3,900 sq mi) and species adapted for this environment, such as Artemia salina and Dunaliella salina, are important to bird life.",
"title": "Marine life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Coral reefs, sea grass beds, and mangrove forests are the most productive ecosystems of the Indian Ocean — coastal areas produce 20 tones of fish per square kilometre. These areas, however, are also being urbanised with populations often exceeding several thousand people per square kilometre and fishing techniques become more effective and often destructive beyond sustainable levels while the increase in sea surface temperature spreads coral bleaching.",
"title": "Marine life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Mangroves covers 80,984 km (31,268 sq mi) in the Indian Ocean region, or almost half of the world's mangrove habitat, of which 42,500 km (16,400 sq mi) is located in Indonesia, or 50% of mangroves in the Indian Ocean. Mangroves originated in the Indian Ocean region and have adapted to a wide range of its habitats but it is also where it suffers its biggest loss of habitat.",
"title": "Marine life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In 2016, six new animal species were identified at hydrothermal vents in the Southwest Indian Ridge: a \"Hoff\" crab, a \"giant peltospirid\" snail, a whelk-like snail, a limpet, a scaleworm and a polychaete worm.",
"title": "Marine life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The West Indian Ocean coelacanth was discovered in the Indian Ocean off South Africa in the 1930s and in the late 1990s another species, the Indonesian coelacanth, was discovered off Sulawesi Island, Indonesia. Most extant coelacanths have been found in the Comoros. Although both species represent an order of lobe-finned fishes known from the Early Devonian (410 mya) and though extinct 66 mya, they are morphologically distinct from their Devonian ancestors. Over millions of years, coelacanths evolved to inhabit different environments — lungs adapted for shallow, brackish waters evolved into gills adapted for deep marine waters.",
"title": "Marine life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Of Earth's 36 biodiversity hotspot nine (or 25%) are located on the margins of the Indian Ocean.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The origin of this diversity is debated; the break-up of Gondwana can explain vicariance older than 100 mya, but the diversity on the younger, smaller islands must have required a Cenozoic dispersal from the rims of the Indian Ocean to the islands. A \"reverse colonisation\", from islands to continents, apparently occurred more recently; the chameleons, for example, first diversified on Madagascar and then colonised Africa. Several species on the islands of the Indian Ocean are textbook cases of evolutionary processes; the dung beetles, day geckos, and lemurs are all examples of adaptive radiation. Many bones (250 bones per square metre) of recently extinct vertebrates have been found in the Mare aux Songes swamp in Mauritius, including bones of the Dodo bird (Raphus cucullatus) and Cylindraspis giant tortoise. An analysis of these remains suggests a process of aridification began in the southwest Indian Ocean began around 4,000 years ago.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Mammalian megafauna once widespread in the MPA was driven to near extinction in the early 20th century. Some species have been successfully recovered since then — the population of white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum simum) increased from less than 20 individuals in 1895 to more than 17,000 as of 2013. Other species still depend on fenced areas and management programs, including black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis minor), African wild dog (Lycaon pictus), cheetah (Acynonix jubatus), elephant (Loxodonta africana), and lion (Panthera leo).",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "This biodiversity hotspot (and namesake ecoregion and \"Endemic Bird Area\") is a patchwork of small forested areas, often with a unique assemblage of species within each, located within 200 km (120 mi) from the coast and covering a total area of c. 6,200 km (2,400 sq mi). It also encompasses coastal islands, including Zanzibar and Pemba, and Mafia.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "This area, one of the only two hotspots that are entirely arid, includes the Ethiopian Highlands, the East African Rift valley, the Socotra islands, as well as some small islands in the Red Sea and areas on the southern Arabic Peninsula. Endemic and threatened mammals include the dibatag (Ammodorcas clarkei) and Speke's gazelle (Gazella spekei); the Somali wild ass (Equus africanus somaliensis) and hamadryas baboon (Papio hamadryas). It also contains many reptiles. In Somalia, the centre of the 1,500,000 km (580,000 sq mi) hotspot, the landscape is dominated by Acacia-Commiphora deciduous bushland, but also includes the Yeheb nut (Cordeauxia edulus) and species discovered more recently such as the Somali cyclamen (Cyclamen somalense), the only cyclamen outside the Mediterranean. Warsangli linnet (Carduelis johannis) is an endemic bird found only in northern Somalia. An unstable political situation and mismanagement has resulted in overgrazing which has produced one of the most degraded hotspots where only c. 5 % of the original habitat remains.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Encompassing the west coast of India and Sri Lanka, until c. 10,000 years ago a landbridge connected Sri Lanka to the Indian Subcontinent, hence this region shares a common community of species.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Indo-Burma encompasses a series of mountain ranges, five of Asia's largest river systems, and a wide range of habitats. The region has a long and complex geological history, and long periods rising sea levels and glaciations have isolated ecosystems and thus promoted a high degree of endemism and speciation. The region includes two centres of endemism: the Annamite Mountains and the northern highlands on the China-Vietnam border. Several distinct floristic regions, the Indian, Malesian, Sino-Himalayan, and Indochinese regions, meet in a unique way in Indo-Burma and the hotspot contains an estimated 15,000–25,000 species of vascular plants, many of them endemic.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Sundaland encompasses 17,000 islands of which Borneo and Sumatra are the largest. Endangered mammals include the Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, the proboscis monkey, and the Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Stretching from Shark Bay to Israelite Bay and isolated by the arid Nullarbor Plain, the southwestern corner of Australia is a floristic region with a stable climate in which one of the world's largest floral biodiversity and an 80% endemism has evolved. From June to September it is an explosion of colours and the Wildflower Festival in Perth in September attracts more than half a million visitors.",
"title": "Biodiversity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "As the youngest of the major oceans, the Indian Ocean has active spreading ridges that are part of the worldwide system of mid-ocean ridges. In the Indian Ocean these spreading ridges meet at the Rodrigues Triple Point with the Central Indian Ridge, including the Carlsberg Ridge, separating the African Plate from the Indian Plate; the Southwest Indian Ridge separating the African Plate from the Antarctic Plate; and the Southeast Indian Ridge separating the Australian Plate from the Antarctic Plate. The Central Indian Ridge is intercepted by the Owen Fracture Zone. Since the late 1990s, however, it has become clear that this traditional definition of the Indo-Australian Plate cannot be correct; it consists of three plates — the Indian Plate, the Capricorn Plate, and Australian Plate — separated by diffuse boundary zones. Since 20 Ma the African Plate is being divided by the East African Rift System into the Nubian and Somalia plates.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "There are only two trenches in the Indian Ocean: the 6,000 km (3,700 mi)-long Java Trench between Java and the Sunda Trench and the 900 km (560 mi)-long Makran Trench south of Iran and Pakistan.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "A series of ridges and seamount chains produced by hotspots pass over the Indian Ocean. The Réunion hotspot (active 70–40 million years ago) connects Réunion and the Mascarene Plateau to the Chagos-Laccadive Ridge and the Deccan Traps in north-western India; the Kerguelen hotspot (100–35 million years ago) connects the Kerguelen Islands and Kerguelen Plateau to the Ninety East Ridge and the Rajmahal Traps in north-eastern India; the Marion hotspot (100–70 million years ago) possibly connects Prince Edward Islands to the Eighty Five East Ridge. These hotspot tracks have been broken by the still active spreading ridges mentioned above.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "There are fewer seamounts in the Indian Ocean than in the Atlantic and Pacific. These are typically deeper than 3,000 m (9,800 ft) and located north of 55°S and west of 80°E. Most originated at spreading ridges but some are now located in basins far away from these ridges. The ridges of the Indian Ocean form ranges of seamounts, sometimes very long, including the Carlsberg Ridge, Madagascar Ridge, Central Indian Ridge, Southwest Indian Ridge, Chagos-Laccadive Ridge, 85°E Ridge, 90°E Ridge, Southeast Indian Ridge, Broken Ridge, and East Indiaman Ridge. The Agulhas Plateau and Mascarene Plateau are the two major shallow areas.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The opening of the Indian Ocean began c. 156 Ma when Africa separated from East Gondwana. The Indian Subcontinent began to separate from Australia-Antarctica 135–125 Ma and as the Tethys Ocean north of India began to close 118–84 Ma the Indian Ocean opened behind it.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Indian Ocean, together with the Mediterranean, has connected people since ancient times, whereas the Atlantic and Pacific have had the roles of barriers or mare incognitum. The written history of the Indian Ocean, however, has been Eurocentric and largely dependent on the availability of written sources from the European colonial era. This history is often divided into an ancient period followed by an Islamic period; the subsequent periods are often subdivided into Portuguese, Dutch, and British periods.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "A concept of an \"Indian Ocean World\" (IOW), similar to that of the \"Atlantic World\", exists but emerged much more recently and is not well established. The IOW is, nevertheless, sometimes referred to as the \"first global economy\" and was based on the monsoon which linked Asia, China, India, and Mesopotamia. It developed independently from the European global trade in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and remained largely independent from them until European 19th-century colonial dominance.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The diverse history of the Indian Ocean is a unique mix of cultures, ethnic groups, natural resources, and shipping routes. It grew in importance beginning in the 1960s and 1970s and, after the Cold War, it has undergone periods of political instability, most recently with the emergence of India and China as regional powers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Pleistocene fossils of Homo erectus and other pre–H. sapiens hominid fossils, similar to H. heidelbergensis in Europe, have been found in India. According to the Toba catastrophe theory, a supereruption c. 74,000 years ago at Lake Toba, Sumatra, covered India with volcanic ashes and wiped out one or more lineages of such archaic humans in India and Southeast Asia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Out of Africa theory states that Homo sapiens spread from Africa into mainland Eurasia. The more recent Southern Dispersal or Coastal hypothesis instead advocates that modern humans spread along the coasts of the Arabic Peninsula and southern Asia. This hypothesis is supported by mtDNA research which reveals a rapid dispersal event during the Late Pleistocene (11,000 years ago). This coastal dispersal, however, began in East Africa 75,000 years ago and occurred intermittently from estuary to estuary along the northern perimeter of the Indian Ocean at a rate of 0.7–4.0 km (0.43–2.49 mi) per year. It eventually resulted in modern humans migrating from Sunda over Wallacea to Sahul (Southeast Asia to Australia). Since then, waves of migration have resettled people and, clearly, the Indian Ocean littoral had been inhabited long before the first civilisations emerged. 5000–6000 years ago six distinct cultural centres had evolved around the Indian Ocean: East Africa, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, South East Asia, the Malay World and Australia; each interlinked to its neighbours.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Food globalisation began on the Indian Ocean littoral c. 4.000 years ago. Five African crops — sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, cowpea and hyacinth bean — somehow found their way to Gujarat in India during the Late Harappan (2000–1700 BCE). Gujarati merchants evolved into the first explorers of the Indian Ocean as they traded African goods such as ivory, tortoise shells, and slaves. Broomcorn millet found its way from Central Asia to Africa, together with chicken and zebu cattle, although the exact timing is disputed. Around 2000 BCE black pepper and sesame, both native to Asia, appear in Egypt, albeit in small quantities. Around the same time the black rat and the house mouse emigrate from Asia to Egypt. Banana reached Africa around 3000 years ago.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "At least eleven prehistoric tsunamis have struck the Indian Ocean coast of Indonesia between 7400 and 2900 years ago. Analysing sand beds in caves in the Aceh region, scientists concluded that the intervals between these tsunamis have varied from series of minor tsunamis over a century to dormant periods of more than 2000 years preceding megathrusts in the Sunda Trench. Although the risk for future tsunamis is high, a major megathrust such as the one in 2004 is likely to be followed by a long dormant period.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "A group of scientists have argued that two large-scale impact events have occurred in the Indian Ocean: the Burckle Crater in the southern Indian Ocean in 2800 BCE and the Kanmare and Tabban craters in the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia in 536 CE. Evidences for these impacts, the team argue, are micro-ejecta and Chevron dunes in southern Madagascar and in the Australian gulf. Geological evidences suggest the tsunamis caused by these impacts reached 205 m (673 ft) above sea level and 45 km (28 mi) inland. The impact events must have disrupted human settlements and perhaps even contributed to major climate changes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The history of the Indian Ocean is marked by maritime trade; cultural and commercial exchange probably date back at least seven thousand years. Human culture spread early on the shores of the Indian Ocean and was always linked to the cultures of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Before c. 2000 BCE, however, cultures on its shores were only loosely tied to each other; bronze, for example, was developed in Mesopotamia c. 3000 BCE but remained uncommon in Egypt before 1800 BCE. During this period, independent, short-distance oversea communications along its littoral margins evolved into an all-embracing network. The début of this network was not the achievement of a centralised or advanced civilisation but of local and regional exchange in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Sea. Sherds of Ubaid (2500–500 BCE) pottery have been found in the western Gulf at Dilmun, present-day Bahrain; traces of exchange between this trading centre and Mesopotamia. The Sumerians traded grain, pottery, and bitumen (used for reed boats) for copper, stone, timber, tin, dates, onions, and pearls. Coast-bound vessels transported goods between the Indus Valley civilisation (2600–1900 BCE) in the Indian subcontinent (modern-day Pakistan and Northwest India) and the Persian Gulf and Egypt.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The Red Sea, one of the main trade routes in Antiquity, was explored by Egyptians and Phoenicians during the last two millennia BCE. In the 6th century, BCE Greek explorer Scylax of Caryanda made a journey to India, working for the Persian king Darius, and his now-lost account put the Indian Ocean on the maps of Greek geographers. The Greeks began to explore the Indian Ocean following the conquests of Alexander the Great, who ordered a circumnavigation of the Arabian Peninsula in 323 BCE. During the two centuries that followed the reports of the explorers of Ptolemaic Egypt resulted in the best maps of the region until the Portuguese era many centuries later. The main interest in the region for the Ptolemies was not commercial but military; they explored Africa to hunt for war elephants.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Rub' al Khali desert isolates the southern parts of the Arabic Peninsula and the Indian Ocean from the Arabic world. This encouraged the development of maritime trade in the region linking the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to East Africa and India. The monsoon (from mawsim, the Arabic word for season), however, was used by sailors long before being \"discovered\" by Hippalus in the 1st century. Indian wood have been found in Sumerian cities, there is evidence of Akkad coastal trade in the region, and contacts between India and the Red Sea dates back to 2300 B.C. The archipelagoes of the central Indian Ocean, the Laccadive and Maldive islands, were probably populated during the 2nd century B.C. from the Indian mainland. They appear in written history in the account of merchant Sulaiman al-Tajir in the 9th century but the treacherous reefs of the islands were most likely cursed by the sailors of Aden long before the islands were even settled.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, an Alexandrian guide to the world beyond the Red Sea — including Africa and India — from the first century CE, not only gives insights into trade in the region but also shows that Roman and Greek sailors had already gained knowledge about the monsoon winds. The contemporaneous settlement of Madagascar by Austronesian sailors shows that the littoral margins of the Indian Ocean were being both well-populated and regularly traversed at least by this time. Albeit the monsoon must have been common knowledge in the Indian Ocean for centuries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Indian Ocean's relatively calmer waters opened the areas bordering it to trade earlier than the Atlantic or Pacific oceans. The powerful monsoons also meant ships could easily sail west early in the season, then wait a few months and return eastwards. This allowed ancient Indonesian peoples to cross the Indian Ocean to settle in Madagascar around 1 CE.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In the 2nd or 1st century BCE, Eudoxus of Cyzicus was the first Greek to cross the Indian Ocean. The probably fictitious sailor Hippalus is said to have learnt the direct route from Arabia to India around this time. During the 1st and 2nd centuries AD intensive trade relations developed between Roman Egypt and the Tamil kingdoms of the Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas in Southern India. Like the Indonesian people above, the western sailors used the monsoon to cross the ocean. The unknown author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea describes this route, as well as the commodities that were traded along various commercial ports on the coasts of the Horn of Africa and India circa 1 CE. Among these trading settlements were Mosylon and Opone on the Red Sea littoral.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Unlike the Pacific Ocean where the civilization of the Polynesians reached most of the far-flung islands and atolls and populated them, almost all the islands, archipelagos and atolls of the Indian Ocean were uninhabited until colonial times. Although there were numerous ancient civilizations in the coastal states of Asia and parts of Africa, the Maldives were the only island group in the Central Indian Ocean region where an ancient civilization flourished. Maldivians, on their annual trade trip, took their oceangoing trade ships to Sri Lanka rather than mainland India, which is much closer, because their ships were dependent of the Indian Monsoon Current.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Arabic missionaries and merchants began to spread Islam along the western shores of the Indian Ocean from the 8th century, if not earlier. A Swahili stone mosque dating to the 8th–15th centuries has been found in Shanga, Kenya. Trade across the Indian Ocean gradually introduced Arabic script and rice as a staple in Eastern Africa. Muslim merchants traded an estimated 1000 African slaves annually between 800 and 1700, a number that grew to c. 4000 during the 18th century, and 3700 during the period 1800–1870. Slave trade also occurred in the eastern Indian Ocean before the Dutch settled there around 1600 but the volume of this trade is unknown.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "From 1405 to 1433 admiral Zheng He said to have led large fleets of the Ming Dynasty on several treasure voyages through the Indian Ocean, ultimately reaching the coastal countries of East Africa.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope during his first voyage in 1497 and became the first European to sail to India. The Swahili people he encountered along the African east coast lived in a series of cities and had established trade routes to India and to China. Among them, the Portuguese kidnapped most of their pilots in coastal raids and on board ships. A few of the pilots, however, were gifts by local Swahili rulers, including the sailor from Gujarat, a gift by a Malindi ruler in Kenya, who helped the Portuguese to reach India. In expeditions after 1500, the Portuguese attacked and colonised cities along the African coast. European slave trade in the Indian Ocean began when Portugal established Estado da Índia in the early 16th century. From then until the 1830s, c. 200 slaves were exported from Mozambique annually and similar figures has been estimated for slaves brought from Asia to the Philippines during the Iberian Union (1580–1640).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The Ottoman Empire began its expansion into the Indian Ocean in 1517 with the conquest of Egypt under Sultan Selim I. Although the Ottomans shared the same religion as the trading communities in the Indian Ocean the region was unexplored by them. Maps that included the Indian Ocean had been produced by Muslim geographers centuries before the Ottoman conquests; Muslim scholars, such as Ibn Battuta in the 14th century, had visited most parts of the known world; contemporarily with Vasco da Gama, Arab navigator Ahmad ibn Mājid had compiled a guide to navigation in the Indian Ocean; the Ottomans, nevertheless, began their own parallel era of discovery which rivalled the European expansion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The establishment of the Dutch East India Company in the early 17th century lead to a quick increase in the volume of the slave trade in the region; there were perhaps up to 500,000 slaves in various Dutch colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries in the Indian Ocean. For example, some 4000 African slaves were used to build the Colombo fortress in Dutch Ceylon. Bali and neighbouring islands supplied regional networks with c. 100,000–150,000 slaves 1620–1830. Indian and Chinese slave traders supplied Dutch Indonesia with perhaps 250,000 slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The East India Company (EIC) was established during the same period and in 1622 one of its ships carried slaves from the Coromandel Coast to Dutch East Indies. The EIC mostly traded in African slaves but also some Asian slaves purchased from Indian, Indonesian and Chinese slave traders. The French established colonies on the islands of Réunion and Mauritius in 1721; by 1735 some 7,200 slaves populated the Mascarene Islands, a number which had reached 133,000 in 1807. The British captured the islands in 1810, however, and because the British had prohibited the slave trade in 1807 a system of clandestine slave trade developed to bring slaves to French planters on the islands; in all 336,000–388,000 slaves were exported to the Mascarene Islands from 1670 until 1848.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In all, European traders exported 567,900–733,200 slaves within the Indian Ocean between 1500 and 1850 and almost that same amount were exported from the Indian Ocean to the Americas during the same period. Slave trade in the Indian Ocean was, nevertheless, very limited compared to c. 12,000,000 slaves exported across the Atlantic. The island of Zanzibar was the center of the Indian Ocean slave trade in the 19th century. In the mid-19th century, as many as 50,000 slaves passed annually through the port.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Scientifically, the Indian Ocean remained poorly explored before the International Indian Ocean Expedition in the early 1960s. However, the Challenger expedition 1872–1876 only reported from south of the polar front. The Valdivia expedition 1898–1899 made deep samples in the Indian Ocean. In the 1930s, the John Murray Expedition mainly studied shallow-water habitats. The Swedish Deep Sea Expedition 1947–1948 also sampled the Indian Ocean on its global tour and the Danish Galathea sampled deep-water fauna from Sri Lanka to South Africa on its second expedition 1950–1952. The Soviet research vessel Vityaz also did research in the Indian Ocean.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The Suez Canal opened in 1869 when the Industrial Revolution dramatically changed global shipping – the sailing ship declined in importance as did the importance of European trade in favour of trade in East Asia and Australia. The construction of the canal introduced many non-indigenous species into the Mediterranean. For example, the goldband goatfish (Upeneus moluccensis) has replaced the red mullet (Mullus barbatus); since the 1980s huge swarms of scyphozoan jellyfish (Rhopilema nomadica) have affected tourism and fisheries along the Levantian coast and clogged power and desalination plants. Plans announced in 2014 to build a new, much larger Suez Canal parallel to the 19th-century canal will most likely boost the economy in the region but also cause ecological damage in a much wider area.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Throughout the colonial era, islands such as Mauritius were important shipping nodes for the Dutch, French, and British. Mauritius, an inhabited island, became populated by slaves from Africa and indenture labour from India. The end of World War II marked the end of the colonial era. The British left Mauritius in 1974 and with 70% of the population of Indian descent, Mauritius became a close ally of India. In the 1980s, during the Cold War, the South African regime acted to destabilise several island nations in the Indian Ocean, including the Seychelles, Comoros, and Madagascar. India intervened in Mauritius to prevent a coup d'état, backed up by the United States who feared the Soviet Union could gain access to Port Louis and threaten the U.S. base on Diego Garcia. Iranrud is an unrealised plan by Iran and the Soviet Union to build a canal between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Testimonies from the colonial era are stories of African slaves, Indian indentured labourers and white settlers. But, while there was a clear racial line between free men and slaves in the Atlantic World, this delineation is less distinct in the Indian Ocean — there were Indian slaves and settlers as well as black indentured labourers. There were also a string of prison camps across the Indian Ocean, such as Cellular Jail in the Andamans, in which prisoners, exiles, POWs, forced labourers, merchants and people of different faiths were forcefully united. On the islands of the Indian Ocean, therefore, a trend of creolisation emerged.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "On 26 December 2004, fourteen countries around the Indian Ocean were hit by a wave of tsunamis caused by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The waves radiated across the ocean at speeds exceeding 500 km/h (310 mph), reached up to 20 m (66 ft) in height, and resulted in an estimated 236,000 deaths.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In the late 2000s, the ocean evolved into a hub of pirate activity. By 2013, attacks off the Horn region's coast had steadily declined due to active private security and international navy patrols, especially by the Indian Navy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 airliner with 239 persons on board, disappeared on 8 March 2014 and is alleged to have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean about 2,500 km (1,600 mi) from the coast of southwest Western Australia. Despite an extensive search, the whereabouts of the remains of the aircraft is unknown.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island, which lies near South Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal, have been called by experts the most isolated people in the world.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean is disputed between the United Kingdom and Mauritius. In February 2019, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an advisory opinion stating that the UK must transfer the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The sea lanes in the Indian Ocean are considered among the most strategically important in the world with more than 80 percent of the world's seaborne trade in oil transits through the Indian Ocean and its vital chokepoints, with 40 percent passing through the Strait of Hormuz, 35 percent through the Strait of Malacca and 8 percent through the Bab el-Mandab Strait.",
"title": "Trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The Indian Ocean provides major sea routes connecting the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia with Europe and the Americas. It carries a particularly heavy traffic of petroleum and petroleum products from the oil fields of the Persian Gulf and Indonesia. Large reserves of hydrocarbons are being tapped in the offshore areas of Saudi Arabia, Iran, India, and Western Australia. An estimated 40% of the world's offshore oil production comes from the Indian Ocean. Beach sands rich in heavy minerals, and offshore placer deposits are actively exploited by bordering countries, particularly India, Pakistan, South Africa, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.",
"title": "Trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "In particular, the maritime part of the Silk Road leads through the Indian Ocean on which a large part of the global container trade is carried out. The Silk Road runs with its connections from the Chinese coast and its large container ports to the south via Hanoi to Jakarta, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur through the Strait of Malacca via the Sri Lankan Colombo opposite the southern tip of India via Malé, the capital of the Maldives, to the East African Mombasa, from there to Djibouti, then through the Red Sea over the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, there via Haifa, Istanbul and Athens to the Upper Adriatic to the northern Italian junction of Trieste with its international free port and its rail connections to Central and Eastern Europe.",
"title": "Trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The Silk Road has become internationally important again on the one hand through European integration, the end of the Cold War and free world trade and on the other hand through Chinese initiatives. Chinese companies have made investments in several Indian Ocean ports, including Gwadar, Hambantota, Colombo and Sonadia. This has sparked a debate about the strategic implications of these investments. There are also Chinese investments and related efforts to intensify trade in East Africa and in European ports such as Piraeus and Trieste.",
"title": "Trade"
}
]
| The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering 70,560,000 km2 (27,240,000 sq mi) or ~19.8% of the water on Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia to the east. To the south it is bounded by the Southern Ocean or Antarctica depending on the definition in use. Along its core, the Indian Ocean has some large marginal or regional seas such as the Arabian Sea, Laccadive Sea, Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea. | 2001-05-04T23:27:14Z | 2023-12-31T11:36:00Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean |
14,581 | Ich bin ein Berliner | 52°29′06″N 13°20′40″E / 52.484932°N 13.344395°E / 52.484932; 13.344395 "Ich bin ein Berliner" (German pronunciation: [ɪç ˈbɪn ʔaɪn bɛʁˈliːnɐ]; "I am a Berliner") is a speech by United States President John F. Kennedy given on June 26, 1963, in West Berlin. It is one of the best-known speeches of the Cold War and among the most famous anti-communist speeches.
Twenty-two months earlier, East Germany had erected the Berlin Wall to prevent mass emigration to West Berlin. The speech was aimed as much at the Soviet Union as it was at West Berliners. Another phrase in the speech was also spoken in German, "Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen" ("Let them come to Berlin"), addressed at those who claimed "we can work with the Communists", a remark at which Nikita Khrushchev scoffed only days later.
The speech is considered one of Kennedy's finest, delivered at the height of the Cold War and the New Frontier.
Speaking to an audience of 120,000 on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg, Kennedy said,
Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum ["I am a Roman citizen"]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner!"... All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!"
Kennedy used the phrase twice in his speech, including at the end, pronouncing the sentence with his Boston accent and reading from his note "ish bin ein Bearleener", which he had written out using English orthography to approximate the German pronunciation – his actual pronunciation though is fairly close to correct German and much better than how he is usually quoted. He also used the classical Latin pronunciation of civis romanus sum, with the c pronounced [k] and the v as [w] (i.e. "kiwis romanus sum").
For decades, competing claims about the origins of the "Ich bin ein Berliner" overshadowed the history of the speech. In 2008, historian Andreas Daum provided a comprehensive explanation, based on archival sources and interviews with contemporaries and witnesses. He highlighted the authorship of Kennedy himself and his 1962 speech in New Orleans as a precedent, and demonstrated that by straying from the prepared script in Berlin, Kennedy created the climax of an emotionally charged political performance, which became a hallmark of the Cold War epoch.
There is a widespread misconception that Kennedy accidentally said that he was a Berliner, a type of German doughnut. This is an urban legend which emerged several decades after the speech, and it is not true that residents of Berlin in 1963 would have mainly understood the word "Berliner" to refer to a jelly doughnut or that the audience laughed at Kennedy's use of this expression – if nothing else because this type of doughnut is called "Pfannkuchen" (literally: Pan cake) in Berlin.
Germany's capital, Berlin, was deep within the area controlled by the Soviet Union after World War II. Initially governed in four sectors controlled by the four Allied powers (United States, United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union), tensions of the Cold War escalated until the Soviet forces implemented the Berlin Blockade of the city's western sectors, which the Western allies relieved with the dramatic airlift. Afterward, the sectors controlled by the NATO Allies became an effective exclave of West Germany, completely surrounded by East Germany. Starting in 1952, the border between East and West was closed everywhere but in Berlin. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans defected to the West via West Berlin, a labour drain that threatened East Germany with economic collapse.
In 1961, the East German government under Walter Ulbricht erected a barbed-wire barrier around West Berlin, officially called the antifaschistischer Schutzwall (anti-fascist protective barrier). The East German authorities argued that it was meant to prevent spies and agents of West Germany from crossing into the East. However, it was universally known as the Berlin Wall and its real purpose was to keep East German citizens from escaping to the West. Over a period of months the wall was rebuilt using concrete, and buildings were demolished to create a "death zone" in view of East German guards armed with machine guns. The Wall closed the biggest loophole in the Iron Curtain, and Berlin went from being one of the easiest places to cross from East Europe to West Europe to being one of the most difficult.
The West, including the U.S., was accused of failing to respond forcefully to the erection of the Wall. Officially, Berlin was under joint occupation by the four allied powers, each with primary responsibility for a certain zone. Kennedy's speech marked the first instance where the U.S. acknowledged that East Berlin was part of the Soviet bloc along with the rest of East Germany. On July 25, 1961, Kennedy insisted in a presidential address that the U.S. would defend West Berlin, asserting its Four-Power rights, while making it clear that challenging the Soviet presence in Germany was not possible.
The Ich bin ein Berliner speech is in part derived from a speech Kennedy gave at a Civic Reception on May 4, 1962, in New Orleans; there also he used the phrase civis Romanus sum by saying,
Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was to say, "I am a citizen of Rome." Today, I believe, in 1962 the proudest boast is to say, "I am a citizen of the United States." And it is not enough to merely say it; we must live it. Anyone can say it. But Americans who serve today in West Berlin—your sons and brothers—[...] are the Americans who are bearing the great burden.
The phrases "I am a Berliner" and "I am proud to be in Berlin" were typed already a week before the speech on a list of expressions to be used, including a phonetic transcription of the German translation. Such transcriptions are also found in the third draft of the speech (in Kennedy's own handwriting), from June 25. The final typed version of the speech does not contain the transcriptions, which are added by hand by Kennedy himself.
In practice sessions before the trip, Kennedy had run through a number of sentences, even paragraphs, to recite in German; in these sessions, he was helped by Margaret Plischke, a translator working for the US State Department; by Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's counsel and habitual speechwriter; and by an interpreter, Robert Lochner, who had grown up in Berlin. It became clear quickly that the president did not have a gift for languages and was more likely to embarrass himself if he were to cite in German for any length.
But there are differing accounts on the origin of the phrase Ich bin ein Berliner. Plischke wrote a 1997 account of visiting Kennedy at the White House weeks before the trip to help compose the speech and teach him the proper pronunciation; she also claims that the phrase had been translated stateside already by the translator scheduled to accompany him on the trip ("a rather unpleasant man who complained bitterly that he had had to interrupt his vacation just to watch the President’s mannerisms"). Additionally, Ted Sorensen claimed in his memoir Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (2008) to have had a hand in the speech, and said he had incorrectly inserted the word ein, incorrectly taking responsibility for the "jelly doughnut misconception", below, a claim apparently supported by Berlin mayor Willy Brandt but dismissed by later scholars since the final typed version, which does not contain the words, is the last one Sorensen could have worked on. Robert Lochner claimed in his memoirs that Kennedy had asked him for a translation of "I am a Berliner", and that they practiced the phrase in Brandt's office. Daum credited the origin of the phrase Ich bin ein Berliner to Kennedy and his 1962 speech in New Orleans quoted above. According to Daum, Kennedy was affected by seeing the Berlin Wall, so that he "falls back on the most memorable passage of his New Orleans speech given the year before, changing pride in being an American in being a Berliner."
Behind the long table set up on the steps of the Rathaus Schöneberg were U.S. and German dignitaries, including Dean Rusk (Kennedy's Secretary of State), Lucius D. Clay (the former US administrator of Germany), Konrad Adenauer (the German chancellor), Willy Brandt, the Mayor of Berlin and Otto Bach (President of the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin). The crowd was estimated at 450,000 people. Bach spoke first, of the recent developments in Berlin, especially the wall. He was followed by Konrad Adenauer, who spoke briefly and introduced the president.
Kennedy was accompanied not by Robert Lochner, but by Heinz Weber of the Berlin mission; Weber translated the president's speech to the audience. Besides the typescript, Kennedy had a cue card on which he himself had written the phonetic spelling, and he surprised everyone by completely disregarding the speech, which had taken weeks to prepare. Instead, he improvised: "He says more than he should, something different from what his advisers had recommended, and is more provocative than he had intended to be."
The speech culminated with the second use in the speech of the Ich bin ein Berliner phrase: "Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner!" The crowd was quiet while Weber translated and repeated the president's German line; Kennedy was obviously relieved at the crowd's positive response and thanked Weber for his translation. Weber translated this compliment also. According to Daum, after this first successful delivery, "Kennedy, who fiddles a bit with his suit jacket, is grinning like a boy who has just pulled off a coup."
Kennedy's National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy thought the speech had gone "a little too far", and the two revised the text of a second major speech scheduled at the Freie Universität Berlin later that day for a softer stance which "amounted to being a bit more conciliatory toward the Soviets."
While the immediate response from the West German population was positive, the Soviet authorities were less pleased with the combative Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen. Only two weeks before, in his American University speech (formally titled "A Strategy of Peace"), Kennedy had spoken in a more conciliatory tone, speaking of "improving relations with the Soviet Union": in response to Kennedy's Berlin speech, Nikita Khrushchev, days later, remarked that "one would think that the speeches were made by two different Presidents."
Ronald Reagan would evoke both the sentiment and the legacy of Kennedy's speech 24 years later in his "Tear down this wall!" speech.
There are commemorative sites to Kennedy in Berlin, such as the German-American John F. Kennedy School and the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies of the FU Berlin. The public square in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg was renamed John-F.-Kennedy-Platz. A large plaque dedicated to Kennedy is mounted on a column at the entrance of the building and the room above the entrance and overlooking the square is dedicated to Kennedy and his visit. A video of Kennedy delivering the speech plays as part of the main exhibit at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.
The original manuscript of the speech is stored with the National Archives and Records Administration.
There is a widespread false belief that Kennedy made an embarrassing mistake by saying Ich bin ein Berliner. By including the indefinite article "ein," he supposedly changed the meaning of the sentence from the intended "I am a citizen of Berlin" to "I am a Berliner" (a Berliner being a type of German pastry, similar to a jam- or jelly-filled doughnut), amusing Germans throughout the city. However, this is incorrect from both a grammatical perspective and a historical perspective.
While the phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner" can be understood as having a double meaning, it is neither wrong to use it the way Kennedy did nor was it embarrassing. According to some grammar texts, the indefinite article can be omitted in German when speaking of an individual's profession or origin but is in any case used when speaking in a figurative sense. Furthermore, although the word "Berliner" has traditionally been used for a doughnut filled with fruit jam or jelly in the north, west, and southwest of Germany, it has never been used in Berlin itself or the surrounding region, where the usual word is "Pfannkuchen" (literally "pancake"). Therefore, no Berliner would mistake Berliner for a doughnut.
A further part of the misconception is that the audience to his speech laughed at his supposed error. They actually cheered and applauded both times the phrase was used. They laughed and cheered a few seconds after the first use of the phrase when Kennedy joked with the interpreter: "I appreciate my interpreter translating my German."
The misconception appears to have originated in Len Deighton's 1983 spy novel Berlin Game, which contains the following passage, spoken by Bernard Samson:
'Ich bin ein Berliner,' I said. It was a joke. A Berliner is a doughnut. The day after President Kennedy made his famous proclamation, Berlin cartoonists had a field day with talking doughnuts.
In Deighton's novel, Samson is an unreliable narrator, and his words cannot be taken at face value. However, The New York Times' review of Deighton's novel appeared to treat Samson's remark as factual and added the detail that Kennedy's audience found his remark funny:
Here is where President Kennedy announced, Ich bin ein Berliner, and thereby amused the city's populace because in the local parlance a Berliner is a doughnut.
Four years later, it found its way into a New York Times op-ed:
It's worth recalling, again, President John F. Kennedy's use of a German phrase while standing before the Berlin Wall. It would be great, his wordsmiths thought, for him to declare himself a symbolic citizen of Berlin. Hence, Ich bin ein Berliner. What they did not know, but could easily have found out, was that such citizens never refer to themselves as 'Berliners.' They reserve that term for a favorite confection often munched at breakfast. So, while they understood and appreciated the sentiments behind the President's impassioned declaration, the residents tittered among themselves when he exclaimed, literally, "I am a jelly-filled doughnut."
The doughnut misconception has since been repeated by media such as the BBC (by Alistair Cooke in his Letter from America program), The Guardian, MSNBC, CNN, Time magazine, and The New York Times; mentioned in several books about Germany written by English-speaking authors, including Norman Davies and Kenneth C. Davis; and used in the manual for the Speech Synthesis Markup Language. It is also mentioned in Robert Dallek's 2003 biography of Kennedy, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963.
Another reference to this misconception appears in David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which contains the following passage:
Few foreigners realize that the German term Berliner is also the vulgate idiom for a common jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy's seminal 'Ich bin ein Berliner' was greeted by the Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political.
In the Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett, special envoy Sam Vimes, tasked with ending a war between the bellicose nation of Borogravia and an alliance of its aggrieved neighbours, intended to express his support for Borogravia by saying "I am a citizen of Borogravia" in its native language. However, Polly Perks, the main character, corrects him, saying he called himself a cherry pancake.
The stand up comedy tour Dress to Kill by comedian Eddie Izzard also mentioned Kennedy's speech, speculating the German audience thought it must just be American slang, for an American.
The jelly doughnut myth was largely unknown to Germans until the social web enhanced cross-cultural exchange in the 2000s. At the death of Robert Lochner in September 2003, German media retold the story on the creation of Kennedy's phrase without mentioning the myth, while on the same occasion English language media still added the myth as fact, as for example the New York Times informed by Associated Press. The German Historical Museum in Berlin opened an exhibition in 2003 without providing a hint to the myth either. The myth entered the German Wikipedia article "Ich bin Berliner" in May 2005 brought over from the English version where it had been discussed since the creation of the article in October 2001. It was already marked as an urban legend at the time in 2005. The German version settled on a section title "misconception in the english-speaking world" (Missverständnis im englischsprachigen Raum) by January 2007. The Kennedy Museum in Berlin picked up the story in November 2008, debunking the myth, while an English article in Spiegel International about the opening of the museum in 2006 did quote the myth as fact. A reference to the myth in the national newspaper "Die Welt" as of July 2008 shows that the knowledge about the misconception in the US was well understood by then, referencing Wikipedia in the text. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "52°29′06″N 13°20′40″E / 52.484932°N 13.344395°E / 52.484932; 13.344395 \"Ich bin ein Berliner\" (German pronunciation: [ɪç ˈbɪn ʔaɪn bɛʁˈliːnɐ]; \"I am a Berliner\") is a speech by United States President John F. Kennedy given on June 26, 1963, in West Berlin. It is one of the best-known speeches of the Cold War and among the most famous anti-communist speeches.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Twenty-two months earlier, East Germany had erected the Berlin Wall to prevent mass emigration to West Berlin. The speech was aimed as much at the Soviet Union as it was at West Berliners. Another phrase in the speech was also spoken in German, \"Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen\" (\"Let them come to Berlin\"), addressed at those who claimed \"we can work with the Communists\", a remark at which Nikita Khrushchev scoffed only days later.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The speech is considered one of Kennedy's finest, delivered at the height of the Cold War and the New Frontier.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Speaking to an audience of 120,000 on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg, Kennedy said,",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum [\"I am a Roman citizen\"]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is \"Ich bin ein Berliner!\"... All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words \"Ich bin ein Berliner!\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Kennedy used the phrase twice in his speech, including at the end, pronouncing the sentence with his Boston accent and reading from his note \"ish bin ein Bearleener\", which he had written out using English orthography to approximate the German pronunciation – his actual pronunciation though is fairly close to correct German and much better than how he is usually quoted. He also used the classical Latin pronunciation of civis romanus sum, with the c pronounced [k] and the v as [w] (i.e. \"kiwis romanus sum\").",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "For decades, competing claims about the origins of the \"Ich bin ein Berliner\" overshadowed the history of the speech. In 2008, historian Andreas Daum provided a comprehensive explanation, based on archival sources and interviews with contemporaries and witnesses. He highlighted the authorship of Kennedy himself and his 1962 speech in New Orleans as a precedent, and demonstrated that by straying from the prepared script in Berlin, Kennedy created the climax of an emotionally charged political performance, which became a hallmark of the Cold War epoch.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "There is a widespread misconception that Kennedy accidentally said that he was a Berliner, a type of German doughnut. This is an urban legend which emerged several decades after the speech, and it is not true that residents of Berlin in 1963 would have mainly understood the word \"Berliner\" to refer to a jelly doughnut or that the audience laughed at Kennedy's use of this expression – if nothing else because this type of doughnut is called \"Pfannkuchen\" (literally: Pan cake) in Berlin.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Germany's capital, Berlin, was deep within the area controlled by the Soviet Union after World War II. Initially governed in four sectors controlled by the four Allied powers (United States, United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union), tensions of the Cold War escalated until the Soviet forces implemented the Berlin Blockade of the city's western sectors, which the Western allies relieved with the dramatic airlift. Afterward, the sectors controlled by the NATO Allies became an effective exclave of West Germany, completely surrounded by East Germany. Starting in 1952, the border between East and West was closed everywhere but in Berlin. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans defected to the West via West Berlin, a labour drain that threatened East Germany with economic collapse.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1961, the East German government under Walter Ulbricht erected a barbed-wire barrier around West Berlin, officially called the antifaschistischer Schutzwall (anti-fascist protective barrier). The East German authorities argued that it was meant to prevent spies and agents of West Germany from crossing into the East. However, it was universally known as the Berlin Wall and its real purpose was to keep East German citizens from escaping to the West. Over a period of months the wall was rebuilt using concrete, and buildings were demolished to create a \"death zone\" in view of East German guards armed with machine guns. The Wall closed the biggest loophole in the Iron Curtain, and Berlin went from being one of the easiest places to cross from East Europe to West Europe to being one of the most difficult.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The West, including the U.S., was accused of failing to respond forcefully to the erection of the Wall. Officially, Berlin was under joint occupation by the four allied powers, each with primary responsibility for a certain zone. Kennedy's speech marked the first instance where the U.S. acknowledged that East Berlin was part of the Soviet bloc along with the rest of East Germany. On July 25, 1961, Kennedy insisted in a presidential address that the U.S. would defend West Berlin, asserting its Four-Power rights, while making it clear that challenging the Soviet presence in Germany was not possible.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Ich bin ein Berliner speech is in part derived from a speech Kennedy gave at a Civic Reception on May 4, 1962, in New Orleans; there also he used the phrase civis Romanus sum by saying,",
"title": "Genesis and execution of the speech"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was to say, \"I am a citizen of Rome.\" Today, I believe, in 1962 the proudest boast is to say, \"I am a citizen of the United States.\" And it is not enough to merely say it; we must live it. Anyone can say it. But Americans who serve today in West Berlin—your sons and brothers—[...] are the Americans who are bearing the great burden.",
"title": "Genesis and execution of the speech"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The phrases \"I am a Berliner\" and \"I am proud to be in Berlin\" were typed already a week before the speech on a list of expressions to be used, including a phonetic transcription of the German translation. Such transcriptions are also found in the third draft of the speech (in Kennedy's own handwriting), from June 25. The final typed version of the speech does not contain the transcriptions, which are added by hand by Kennedy himself.",
"title": "Genesis and execution of the speech"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In practice sessions before the trip, Kennedy had run through a number of sentences, even paragraphs, to recite in German; in these sessions, he was helped by Margaret Plischke, a translator working for the US State Department; by Ted Sorensen, Kennedy's counsel and habitual speechwriter; and by an interpreter, Robert Lochner, who had grown up in Berlin. It became clear quickly that the president did not have a gift for languages and was more likely to embarrass himself if he were to cite in German for any length.",
"title": "Genesis and execution of the speech"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "But there are differing accounts on the origin of the phrase Ich bin ein Berliner. Plischke wrote a 1997 account of visiting Kennedy at the White House weeks before the trip to help compose the speech and teach him the proper pronunciation; she also claims that the phrase had been translated stateside already by the translator scheduled to accompany him on the trip (\"a rather unpleasant man who complained bitterly that he had had to interrupt his vacation just to watch the President’s mannerisms\"). Additionally, Ted Sorensen claimed in his memoir Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (2008) to have had a hand in the speech, and said he had incorrectly inserted the word ein, incorrectly taking responsibility for the \"jelly doughnut misconception\", below, a claim apparently supported by Berlin mayor Willy Brandt but dismissed by later scholars since the final typed version, which does not contain the words, is the last one Sorensen could have worked on. Robert Lochner claimed in his memoirs that Kennedy had asked him for a translation of \"I am a Berliner\", and that they practiced the phrase in Brandt's office. Daum credited the origin of the phrase Ich bin ein Berliner to Kennedy and his 1962 speech in New Orleans quoted above. According to Daum, Kennedy was affected by seeing the Berlin Wall, so that he \"falls back on the most memorable passage of his New Orleans speech given the year before, changing pride in being an American in being a Berliner.\"",
"title": "Genesis and execution of the speech"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Behind the long table set up on the steps of the Rathaus Schöneberg were U.S. and German dignitaries, including Dean Rusk (Kennedy's Secretary of State), Lucius D. Clay (the former US administrator of Germany), Konrad Adenauer (the German chancellor), Willy Brandt, the Mayor of Berlin and Otto Bach (President of the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin). The crowd was estimated at 450,000 people. Bach spoke first, of the recent developments in Berlin, especially the wall. He was followed by Konrad Adenauer, who spoke briefly and introduced the president.",
"title": "Genesis and execution of the speech"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Kennedy was accompanied not by Robert Lochner, but by Heinz Weber of the Berlin mission; Weber translated the president's speech to the audience. Besides the typescript, Kennedy had a cue card on which he himself had written the phonetic spelling, and he surprised everyone by completely disregarding the speech, which had taken weeks to prepare. Instead, he improvised: \"He says more than he should, something different from what his advisers had recommended, and is more provocative than he had intended to be.\"",
"title": "Genesis and execution of the speech"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The speech culminated with the second use in the speech of the Ich bin ein Berliner phrase: \"Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner!\" The crowd was quiet while Weber translated and repeated the president's German line; Kennedy was obviously relieved at the crowd's positive response and thanked Weber for his translation. Weber translated this compliment also. According to Daum, after this first successful delivery, \"Kennedy, who fiddles a bit with his suit jacket, is grinning like a boy who has just pulled off a coup.\"",
"title": "Genesis and execution of the speech"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Kennedy's National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy thought the speech had gone \"a little too far\", and the two revised the text of a second major speech scheduled at the Freie Universität Berlin later that day for a softer stance which \"amounted to being a bit more conciliatory toward the Soviets.\"",
"title": "Genesis and execution of the speech"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "While the immediate response from the West German population was positive, the Soviet authorities were less pleased with the combative Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen. Only two weeks before, in his American University speech (formally titled \"A Strategy of Peace\"), Kennedy had spoken in a more conciliatory tone, speaking of \"improving relations with the Soviet Union\": in response to Kennedy's Berlin speech, Nikita Khrushchev, days later, remarked that \"one would think that the speeches were made by two different Presidents.\"",
"title": "Consequences and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Ronald Reagan would evoke both the sentiment and the legacy of Kennedy's speech 24 years later in his \"Tear down this wall!\" speech.",
"title": "Consequences and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "There are commemorative sites to Kennedy in Berlin, such as the German-American John F. Kennedy School and the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies of the FU Berlin. The public square in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg was renamed John-F.-Kennedy-Platz. A large plaque dedicated to Kennedy is mounted on a column at the entrance of the building and the room above the entrance and overlooking the square is dedicated to Kennedy and his visit. A video of Kennedy delivering the speech plays as part of the main exhibit at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.",
"title": "Consequences and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The original manuscript of the speech is stored with the National Archives and Records Administration.",
"title": "Consequences and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "There is a widespread false belief that Kennedy made an embarrassing mistake by saying Ich bin ein Berliner. By including the indefinite article \"ein,\" he supposedly changed the meaning of the sentence from the intended \"I am a citizen of Berlin\" to \"I am a Berliner\" (a Berliner being a type of German pastry, similar to a jam- or jelly-filled doughnut), amusing Germans throughout the city. However, this is incorrect from both a grammatical perspective and a historical perspective.",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "While the phrase \"Ich bin ein Berliner\" can be understood as having a double meaning, it is neither wrong to use it the way Kennedy did nor was it embarrassing. According to some grammar texts, the indefinite article can be omitted in German when speaking of an individual's profession or origin but is in any case used when speaking in a figurative sense. Furthermore, although the word \"Berliner\" has traditionally been used for a doughnut filled with fruit jam or jelly in the north, west, and southwest of Germany, it has never been used in Berlin itself or the surrounding region, where the usual word is \"Pfannkuchen\" (literally \"pancake\"). Therefore, no Berliner would mistake Berliner for a doughnut.",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "A further part of the misconception is that the audience to his speech laughed at his supposed error. They actually cheered and applauded both times the phrase was used. They laughed and cheered a few seconds after the first use of the phrase when Kennedy joked with the interpreter: \"I appreciate my interpreter translating my German.\"",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The misconception appears to have originated in Len Deighton's 1983 spy novel Berlin Game, which contains the following passage, spoken by Bernard Samson:",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "'Ich bin ein Berliner,' I said. It was a joke. A Berliner is a doughnut. The day after President Kennedy made his famous proclamation, Berlin cartoonists had a field day with talking doughnuts.",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In Deighton's novel, Samson is an unreliable narrator, and his words cannot be taken at face value. However, The New York Times' review of Deighton's novel appeared to treat Samson's remark as factual and added the detail that Kennedy's audience found his remark funny:",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Here is where President Kennedy announced, Ich bin ein Berliner, and thereby amused the city's populace because in the local parlance a Berliner is a doughnut.",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Four years later, it found its way into a New York Times op-ed:",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "It's worth recalling, again, President John F. Kennedy's use of a German phrase while standing before the Berlin Wall. It would be great, his wordsmiths thought, for him to declare himself a symbolic citizen of Berlin. Hence, Ich bin ein Berliner. What they did not know, but could easily have found out, was that such citizens never refer to themselves as 'Berliners.' They reserve that term for a favorite confection often munched at breakfast. So, while they understood and appreciated the sentiments behind the President's impassioned declaration, the residents tittered among themselves when he exclaimed, literally, \"I am a jelly-filled doughnut.\"",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The doughnut misconception has since been repeated by media such as the BBC (by Alistair Cooke in his Letter from America program), The Guardian, MSNBC, CNN, Time magazine, and The New York Times; mentioned in several books about Germany written by English-speaking authors, including Norman Davies and Kenneth C. Davis; and used in the manual for the Speech Synthesis Markup Language. It is also mentioned in Robert Dallek's 2003 biography of Kennedy, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963.",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Another reference to this misconception appears in David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which contains the following passage:",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Few foreigners realize that the German term Berliner is also the vulgate idiom for a common jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy's seminal 'Ich bin ein Berliner' was greeted by the Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political.",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett, special envoy Sam Vimes, tasked with ending a war between the bellicose nation of Borogravia and an alliance of its aggrieved neighbours, intended to express his support for Borogravia by saying \"I am a citizen of Borogravia\" in its native language. However, Polly Perks, the main character, corrects him, saying he called himself a cherry pancake.",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The stand up comedy tour Dress to Kill by comedian Eddie Izzard also mentioned Kennedy's speech, speculating the German audience thought it must just be American slang, for an American.",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The jelly doughnut myth was largely unknown to Germans until the social web enhanced cross-cultural exchange in the 2000s. At the death of Robert Lochner in September 2003, German media retold the story on the creation of Kennedy's phrase without mentioning the myth, while on the same occasion English language media still added the myth as fact, as for example the New York Times informed by Associated Press. The German Historical Museum in Berlin opened an exhibition in 2003 without providing a hint to the myth either. The myth entered the German Wikipedia article \"Ich bin Berliner\" in May 2005 brought over from the English version where it had been discussed since the creation of the article in October 2001. It was already marked as an urban legend at the time in 2005. The German version settled on a section title \"misconception in the english-speaking world\" (Missverständnis im englischsprachigen Raum) by January 2007. The Kennedy Museum in Berlin picked up the story in November 2008, debunking the myth, while an English article in Spiegel International about the opening of the museum in 2006 did quote the myth as fact. A reference to the myth in the national newspaper \"Die Welt\" as of July 2008 shows that the knowledge about the misconception in the US was well understood by then, referencing Wikipedia in the text.",
"title": "\"I am a doughnut\" confusion"
}
]
| "Ich bin ein Berliner" is a speech by United States President John F. Kennedy given on June 26, 1963, in West Berlin. It is one of the best-known speeches of the Cold War and among the most famous anti-communist speeches. Twenty-two months earlier, East Germany had erected the Berlin Wall to prevent mass emigration to West Berlin. The speech was aimed as much at the Soviet Union as it was at West Berliners. Another phrase in the speech was also spoken in German, "Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen", addressed at those who claimed "we can work with the Communists", a remark at which Nikita Khrushchev scoffed only days later. The speech is considered one of Kennedy's finest, delivered at the height of the Cold War and the New Frontier. Speaking to an audience of 120,000 on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg, Kennedy said, Kennedy used the phrase twice in his speech, including at the end, pronouncing the sentence with his Boston accent and reading from his note "ish bin ein Bearleener", which he had written out using English orthography to approximate the German pronunciation – his actual pronunciation though is fairly close to correct German and much better than how he is usually quoted. He also used the of civis romanus sum, with the c pronounced and the v as. For decades, competing claims about the origins of the "Ich bin ein Berliner" overshadowed the history of the speech. In 2008, historian Andreas Daum provided a comprehensive explanation, based on archival sources and interviews with contemporaries and witnesses. He highlighted the authorship of Kennedy himself and his 1962 speech in New Orleans as a precedent, and demonstrated that by straying from the prepared script in Berlin, Kennedy created the climax of an emotionally charged political performance, which became a hallmark of the Cold War epoch. There is a widespread misconception that Kennedy accidentally said that he was a Berliner, a type of German doughnut. This is an urban legend which emerged several decades after the speech, and it is not true that residents of Berlin in 1963 would have mainly understood the word "Berliner" to refer to a jelly doughnut or that the audience laughed at Kennedy's use of this expression – if nothing else because this type of doughnut is called "Pfannkuchen" in Berlin. | 2001-10-15T21:33:52Z | 2023-11-17T20:30:37Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner |
14,582 | Iqaluit | Iqaluit (/iˈkæluɪt/ ee-KAL-oo-it; Inuktitut syllabics: ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ, [iqaluit], lit. 'place of many fish'; French: [i.ka.lu.it]) is the capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, its largest community, and its only city. It was known as Frobisher Bay from 1942 to 1987, after the large bay on the coast on which the city is situated. The northernmost city in Canada, its traditional Inuktitut name was restored in 1987.
In 1999, Iqaluit was designated the capital of Nunavut after the division of the Northwest Territories into two separate territories. Before this event, Iqaluit was a small city and not well known outside the Canadian Arctic or Canada, with population and economic growth highly limited. This is due to the city's isolation and heavy dependence on expensive imported supplies, as the city, like the rest of Nunavut, has no road or rail, and only has ship connections for part of the year to the rest of Canada. The city has a polar climate, influenced by the cold deep waters of the Labrador Current just off Baffin Island—this makes the city of Iqaluit cold, although it is well south of the Arctic Circle.
As of the 2021 Canadian census, the population was 7,429 (population centre: 6,991), a decrease of 4.0 per cent from the 2016 census. Iqaluit has the lowest population of any capital city in Canada. Inhabitants of Iqaluit are called Iqalummiut (singular: Iqalummiuq).
Iqaluit has been a traditional fishing location used by Inuit and their predecessors, the Paleo-Eskimo (Dorset culture) and Thule, for thousands of years. The name, Iqaluit, comes from Inuktitut Iqaluit (ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ), which means place of many fish.
World War II resulted in an influx of non-Inuit to the area in 1942, when the United States built Frobisher Bay Air Base there, on a long-term lease from the Government of Canada, in order to provide a stop-over and refuelling site for the short-range aircraft being ferried to Europe to support the war effort. Iqaluit's first permanent resident was Nakasuk, an Inuk guide who helped United States Army Air Forces planners to choose a site with a large flat area suitable for a landing strip. The wartime airstrip was known as Crystal Two, was part of the Crimson Route and operates today as Iqaluit Airport.
It had long been used as a campsite and fishing spot by the Inuit, who called it Iqaluit – "place of many fish" in Inuktitut. The US and Canadian authorities named it Frobisher Bay, after the name of the body of water it borders.
In 1949, after the war, the Hudson's Bay Company moved its south Baffin operations to the neighbouring valley of Niaqunngut, officially called Apex, in order to use the airfield. In the mid-1950s, the population of Frobisher Bay increased rapidly during the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line (DEW line), a system of defensive radar stations—see North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
Hundreds of mostly non-Inuit construction workers, military personnel, and administrative staff moved into the community, and several hundred Inuit followed, to take advantage of the access to jobs and medical care provided by the base operations. By 1957, 489 of the town's 1,200 residents were reported to be Inuit. After 1959, the Canadian government established permanent services at Frobisher Bay, including full-time doctors, a school, and social services. The Inuit population grew rapidly in response, as the government encouraged Inuit to settle permanently in communities supported by government services.
Naval Radio Station (NRS) Frobisher Bay (HMCS Frobisher Bay), callsign CFI, was established in July 1954 as a result of the closure of NRS Chimo, Quebec. Station CFI was part of the Supplementary Radio network. Because of its remoteness and size, it was very expensive to operate. Renamed CFS Frobisher Bay in 1966, advancing technology eventually forced the closure of CFI later that year.
The American military left Iqaluit in 1963, as their development of the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) diminished the strategic value of the DEW line and Arctic airbases. Canada continued to operate an administrative and logistical centre for much of the eastern Arctic at Frobisher Bay. In 1964, the first local elections were held for a community council, and in 1979 for the first mayor. The founding of the Gordon Robertson Educational Centre, now Inuksuk High School, in the early 1970s at Iqaluit confirmed the government's commitment to the community as an administrative centre. At the time of its founding, this was the sole high school operating in what constituted more than one-seventh of Canadian territory.
On 1 January 1987, the name of the municipality was changed from "Frobisher Bay" to "Iqaluit" – aligning official usage with the name that the Inuit population had always used. (Many documents were made that referred to Iqaluit as Frobisher Bay for several years after 1987). In the non-binding 1995 Nunavut capital plebiscite, held 11 December, the residents of what would become the new territory selected Iqaluit (over Rankin Inlet) to serve as the future capital. On 19 April 2001, it was designated a city.
Canada designated Iqaluit as the host city for the 2010 meeting of the Group of Seven finance ministers, held on 5–6 February. The requirements for the international meeting strained the northern communications technology infrastructure and required supplemental investment.
Iqaluit is the northernmost city in Canada, at 63 degrees north of the Equator. Iqaluit is located in the Everett Mountains, which rise from Koojesse Inlet, an inlet of Frobisher Bay, on the southeast part of Baffin Island. It is well to the east of Nunavut's mainland, and northeast of Hudson Bay.
Iqaluit has a tundra climate (Köppen: ET) typical of the Arctic region, although it is well outside the Arctic Circle. The city features long, cold winters and brief, cool summers. Average monthly temperatures are below freezing for eight months of the year. Iqaluit averages just over 400 mm (16 in) of precipitation annually, much wetter than many other localities in the Arctic Archipelago, with the summer being the wettest season. Temperatures of the winter months are comparable to other northern communities further west on the continent such as Yellowknife and to some extent even Fairbanks, Alaska, even though Iqaluit is a few degrees colder than the latter. Summer temperatures are, however, much colder due to its easterly maritime position affected by the waters of the cold Baffin Island Current. This means that the tree line is much further south in the eastern part of Canada, being as southbound, in spite of low elevation, as northern Labrador.
Although it is north of the natural tree line, there are some short, south-facing imported black spruce (Picea mariana) specimens protected by snowdrifts in the winter, in addition to a few shrubs, which are woody plants. These include the Arctic willow (Salix arctica). The Arctic willow may be up to around 7.6 m (25 ft) horizontally, but only 150 mm (6 in) tall.
The climate of Iqaluit is also colder than Gulf Stream locations on the same latitude. For example, the Norwegian city of Trondheim has an annual mean temperature that is 15.2 °C (27.4 °F) milder.
The lowest temperature ever recorded was −45.6 °C (−50.1 °F) on 10 February 1967. The highest temperature ever recorded in Iqaluit was 26.8 °C (80.2 °F) on 21 July 2008.
Apex (Niaqunngut), officially and functionally part of the City of Iqaluit, is a small community about 5 km (3.1 mi) southeast (63°43′20″N 068°26′56″W / 63.72222°N 68.44889°W / 63.72222; -68.44889 (Apex)) from Iqaluit's centre and is known in Inuktitut as Niaqunngut. It is located on a small peninsula separating Koojesse Inlet from Tarr Inlet. There is a women's shelter, a church, a primary school (Nanook Elementary School), a design shop and a bed and breakfast in the community. Apex was where most Inuit lived when Iqaluit was a military site and off-limits to anyone not working at the base.
Much of Iqaluit's architecture is functional—designed to minimize material costs, while retaining heat and withstanding the climate. Early architecture runs from the 1950s military barracks of the original DEW line installation, through the 1970s white hyper-modernist fibreglass block of the Nakasuk School and Municipal Offices and Arena, to the lines of the steel-reinforced concrete high-rise complex on the hill above it. A number of older Hudson's Bay Company and early 1950s buildings have been retained and restored in Apex (the former nursing station has been revived as the Rannva Bed and Breakfast, the HBC buildings as an art gallery). The newer buildings are more colourful and diverse, and closer to the norms of southern architecture.
The principal exception is the Nunavut Legislative Assembly Building, which is remarkable for its colourful interior, adorned with some of the very best in Inuit art. A new legislative building is in planning to be developed and built outside the city on the Apex Road.
Another distinctive building was St. Jude's Anglican Cathedral, see of the Anglican Diocese of The Arctic, which was a white building shaped like an igloo. The altar was built by the parishioners, under the guidance of Markoosie Peter, a traditional master carpenter. It was shaped like a traditional Inuit sled, and the cross composed of two crossed narwhal tusks. An incident of arson severely affected the Cathedral structure and interior on 5 November 2005, and it was demolished on 1 June 2006. The cathedral is slowly being rebuilt (foundation 2008 superstructure 2010) and fund-raising continues locally and internationally. In December 2010, the exterior of a similarly shaped replacement cathedral was completed, and interior work was planned for 2011 with a potential opening for Christmas 2011. The current building, informally referred to as the Igloo Cathedral, was opened on 3 June 2012. The unique building, in the shape of an igloo, has traditionally been a landmark and tourist attraction in Iqaluit, besides its important spiritual role for Iqalummiut (people of Iqaluit).
On a ridge overlooking the city is the distinctive blue and white Inuksuk High School. The school is made up of four square sections joined that give a cloverleaf shape when viewed from the air.
The city is also the location of the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum, which houses a large collection of Inuit and Arctic objects. The museum is housed in a restored and extended Hudson's Bay Company building, clad in the HBC signature red and white, transported to Iqaluit from its original site on the Apex Beach.
Just west of Iqaluit is the Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park. This park is dominated by the valley of the Sylvia Grinnell River. A small visitor's centre with viewing platform is located on top of a hill overlooking scenic waterfalls, tidal flats and traditional fishing sites.
Nearby on an island near Peterhead Inlet, is the Qaummaarviit Territorial Park. It is a site with a long Inuit history and numerous artifacts have been recovered, including the remains of 11 semi-buried sod houses.
A little farther, across Frobisher Bay, are the Katannilik Territorial Park Reserve and the Soper River, a Canadian Heritage River, forming a park corridor linking Iqaluit along traditional overland travel routes with Kimmirut (formerly Lake Harbour). Frobisher Bay extends for almost 110 km (70 mi) to the east, with moderate hills, glaciers and traditional and summer camp sites, opening into the Davis Strait, which divides Nunavut from Greenland.
Iqaluit, like many Nunavut communities, has a volunteer-run annual spring festival. Called Toonik Tyme it involves a combination of traditional Inuit activities combined with more modern events, while the Alianait Music and Arts Festival is held for a week each 21 June. The festival has attracted Canadian and international artists such as Joshua Haulli, Quantum Tangle, Washboard Hank and Namgar.
In the 2021 Canadian census conducted by Statistics Canada, Iqaluit had a population of 7,429 living in 2,708 of its 3,297 total private dwellings, a change of -4% from its 2016 population of 7,740. With a land area of 51.58 km (19.92 sq mi), it had a population density of 144.0/km (373.0/sq mi) in 2021.
The median value of these dwellings is $376,639, quite a bit higher than the national median at $280,552. The average household has about 2.8 people living in it, and the average family has 1.4 children living at home with them. The median (after-tax) household income in Iqaluit is quite high, $98,921, almost double the national rate at $54,089. The median income for an individual in the city, is also high, $60,688. 5.9 per cent of people (over 15 years old) are either divorced or separated, which is quite a bit lower than the national rate at 8.6 per cent. Also, 53.3 per cent of the population is either married or living with a common law partner.
Iqaluit has quite a young population, the median age of the population is more than 10 years younger than the national rate, 30.1 years old compared to 40.6 years old.
For those over the age of 25:
The 2021 census reported that immigrants (individuals born outside Canada) comprise 750 persons or 10.3% of the total population of Iqaluit. Of the total immigrant population, the top countries of origin were Philippines (195 persons or 26.0%), Cameroon (50 persons or 6.7%), United Kingdom (40 persons or 5.3%), Nigeria (40 persons or 5.3%), Zimbabwe (40 persons or 5.3%), United States of America (35 persons or 4.7%), India (25 persons or 3.3%), Pakistan (20 persons or 2.7%), China (20 persons or 2.7%), Jamaica (20 persons or 2.7%), and Ethiopia (20 persons or 2.7%).
As of 2016, Iqaluit has the most Inuit in both numbers (3,900) and per centages (59.1 per cent), of all Canadian cities with populations greater than 5,000.
There is no "majority mother tongue" in Iqaluit, as 45.4 percent reported their mother tongue as being English, and 45.4 percent also reported their mother tongue as Inuktitut. English is spoken by 97.2 percent of Iqalummiuts, however, whereas only 53.1 percent can speak Inuktitut. French was the mother tongue of 4.8 percent of the population, which is the same figure of the population who can speak the language. As of 2012, "Pirurvik, Iqaluit's Inuktitut language training centre, has a new goal: to train instructors from Nunavut communities to teach Inuktitut in different ways and in their own dialects when they return home."
According to the 2021 census, religious groups in Iqaluit included:
The Qikiqtani School Operations based in Pond Inlet operates five schools in the area. Nanook Elementary School, located in Apex, Nakasuk School and Joamie Ilinniarvik School offer kindergarten to grade 5. Aqsarniit Ilinniarvik School offers grades 6 to 8 and Inuksuk High School offers grades 9 to 12.
The Commission scolaire francophone du Nunavut runs École des Trois-Soleils and offers kindergarten to grade 12.
At the post-secondary level there are two, Nunavut Arctic College (Nunatta Campus) and Akitsiraq Law School.
Emergency services (fire and ambulance) are provided by city from a single station on Niaqunngusiariaq.
The emergency services fleet consists of:
Iqaluit Airport Emergency Services is responsible for fire services at the airport. Following a fire at the airport in 1998, the Government of Nunavut re-opened the fire station at the airport. Their fleet consists of:
Policing in Iqaluit, as with the rest of Nunavut, is contracted to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) V Division and the city is home to the divisional headquarters.
Qikiqtani General Hospital is the primary care facility in the city. There is also a Family Practice Clinic providing primary care services by Nurse Practitioners. Two dental clinics exist in the city.
Iqaluit features two arenas, the Arctic Winter Games Arena and Arnaitok, the Iqaluit Aquaplex, a curling rink, the Timmianut Pikiuqarvik disc golf course, the Frobisher Inn Fitness Centre, in the W.G. Brown Building/Astro Hill Complex, a golf course, outdoor basketball courts, soccer nets, seasonal outdoor ice rinks, a shooting range, a skatepark, and more.
Iqaluit is the smallest Canadian capital in terms of population, and the only capital that is not connected to other settlements by a highway. Located on an island remote from the Canadian highway system, Iqaluit is generally only accessible by aircraft and, subject to ice conditions, by boat.
Iqaluit Airport is a modern facility with a runway long enough for most modern jet aircraft. A new, larger passenger terminal building north of the old terminal was completed in 2018.
Canadian North serves Iqaluit from Ottawa, Yellowknife, and several communities in Nunavut. Locally based airlines Air Nunavut, Canadian Helicopters, Nunasi Helicopters, and Unaalik Aviation provide air charters, and Air Nunavut and Keewatin Air provide MEDIVAC/air ambulance service. Air Canada Jazz provided daily service to Iqaluit from Ottawa in 2010 and 2011, but cancelled service due to rising fuel costs, which prevented the route from being profitable.
Iqaluit shared its runway with the Royal Canadian Air Force until the Canadian Forces stopped using Iqaluit as a Canadian NORAD Region Forward Operating Location. The barracks and CF-188 hangars are maintained. The airport has been a centre for cold-weather testing of new aircraft, such as the Airbus A380 in February 2006.
Rumours that Iqaluit was an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle are false.
In the middle of summer, a few ships—generally no larger than a Liberty-class vessel—transport bulk and heavy goods to the city. Cargo is currently off-loaded onto barges as the harbour is not deep enough; however, the city is currently constructing a deep-seaport that is expected to open in 2023. The deep-seaport, which will cost approximately $85 million, will provide all-tide access to ships and will have space for one ship to dock and unload, with the ability to offload a second using a barge-and-ramp method. Initial plans for the port included facilities for a vehicle ferry connection to Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, however these plans were dropped due to high cost. Experienced locals also cross the Hudson Strait from the Canadian mainland when it freezes over, either on foot or by dog sled or snowmobile, a distance of over 100 km (62 mi).
Iqaluit has a local road system only stretching from the nearby community of Apex to the Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park, 1 km (0.62 mi) west of town. Iqaluit has no public transportation, although there is citywide taxi service. Iqaluit Public Transit used to offer bus service in the city, but the service was cancelled due to low ridership. Motor cars are increasing in number, to the extent of causing occasional traffic jams known locally as "the rush minute". The cost of shipping automobiles and the wear-and-tear of the harsh Arctic climate combined with its notoriously rough roadways mean that snowmobiles remain the preferred form of personal transportation. All-terrain vehicles are also common in most of the Canadian Arctic. Snowmobiles are used to travel within the city and in the surrounding area. In winter, dog sleds are still used, but primarily for recreation. In winter, the nearby Qaummaarviit Territorial Park and the more remote Katannilik Territorial Park Reserve are only accessible by snowmobile, dog sled or foot. In the summer, both are accessible by boat. Most major roads within Iqaluit are paved with asphalt, but local and smaller roads are gravel. Roads do not have traffic signals, but use stop signs to control intersections.
Residents and businesses identify their locations mostly by building number, and occasionally by the name of a prominent structure. Residents know where in the city certain series of building numbers are located; numbers tend to be aggregated in blocks, so someone might say that they live in the 2600s. Around 2003, street names were developed, although there were delays in finalizing them and posting the signs. Street numbers have not been assigned, and building numbers continue to be used. Iqaluit is the only Canadian capital city not to have traffic signals, although some have been installed on a temporary basis.
The city's infrastructure is stressed by growth and lack of means to upgrade. Waste from the city is disposed of into an open air dump on Akilliq Drive (West 40) located south of the city.
Although the city has water treatment facilities, raw sewage from the city is often dumped untreated into nearby Frobisher Bay.
As the dump has reached capacity, the city plans to open a second dump 9 km (5.6 mi) north of the city. Iqaluit does not have a recycling program in place; all recyclable materials are sent into the waste stream.
Landline services in Iqaluit (established in 1958 by Bell Canada) and throughout northern Canada (established by Northwestel in five western Nunavut communities, and by Bell Canada elsewhere in Nunavut), are provided since 1992 by Northwestel.
Cell service is provided by Ice Wireless, Bell Mobility, and Qiniq.
Internet service is available through Northwestel, Ice Wireless, Qiniq, Xplornet and Meshnet. Meshnet Community WiFi is a free community WiFi and paid service available in most areas of the city. Free services include access to Isuma.tv, and many other resources.
Iqaluit was served by CFFB-TV channel 8, a CBC Television/CBC North repeater of CFYK-DT (Yellowknife) until 31 July 2012 when it was closed because of budget cuts at the CBC. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iqaluit (/iˈkæluɪt/ ee-KAL-oo-it; Inuktitut syllabics: ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ, [iqaluit], lit. 'place of many fish'; French: [i.ka.lu.it]) is the capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, its largest community, and its only city. It was known as Frobisher Bay from 1942 to 1987, after the large bay on the coast on which the city is situated. The northernmost city in Canada, its traditional Inuktitut name was restored in 1987.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In 1999, Iqaluit was designated the capital of Nunavut after the division of the Northwest Territories into two separate territories. Before this event, Iqaluit was a small city and not well known outside the Canadian Arctic or Canada, with population and economic growth highly limited. This is due to the city's isolation and heavy dependence on expensive imported supplies, as the city, like the rest of Nunavut, has no road or rail, and only has ship connections for part of the year to the rest of Canada. The city has a polar climate, influenced by the cold deep waters of the Labrador Current just off Baffin Island—this makes the city of Iqaluit cold, although it is well south of the Arctic Circle.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "As of the 2021 Canadian census, the population was 7,429 (population centre: 6,991), a decrease of 4.0 per cent from the 2016 census. Iqaluit has the lowest population of any capital city in Canada. Inhabitants of Iqaluit are called Iqalummiut (singular: Iqalummiuq).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Iqaluit has been a traditional fishing location used by Inuit and their predecessors, the Paleo-Eskimo (Dorset culture) and Thule, for thousands of years. The name, Iqaluit, comes from Inuktitut Iqaluit (ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ), which means place of many fish.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "World War II resulted in an influx of non-Inuit to the area in 1942, when the United States built Frobisher Bay Air Base there, on a long-term lease from the Government of Canada, in order to provide a stop-over and refuelling site for the short-range aircraft being ferried to Europe to support the war effort. Iqaluit's first permanent resident was Nakasuk, an Inuk guide who helped United States Army Air Forces planners to choose a site with a large flat area suitable for a landing strip. The wartime airstrip was known as Crystal Two, was part of the Crimson Route and operates today as Iqaluit Airport.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "It had long been used as a campsite and fishing spot by the Inuit, who called it Iqaluit – \"place of many fish\" in Inuktitut. The US and Canadian authorities named it Frobisher Bay, after the name of the body of water it borders.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1949, after the war, the Hudson's Bay Company moved its south Baffin operations to the neighbouring valley of Niaqunngut, officially called Apex, in order to use the airfield. In the mid-1950s, the population of Frobisher Bay increased rapidly during the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line (DEW line), a system of defensive radar stations—see North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Hundreds of mostly non-Inuit construction workers, military personnel, and administrative staff moved into the community, and several hundred Inuit followed, to take advantage of the access to jobs and medical care provided by the base operations. By 1957, 489 of the town's 1,200 residents were reported to be Inuit. After 1959, the Canadian government established permanent services at Frobisher Bay, including full-time doctors, a school, and social services. The Inuit population grew rapidly in response, as the government encouraged Inuit to settle permanently in communities supported by government services.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Naval Radio Station (NRS) Frobisher Bay (HMCS Frobisher Bay), callsign CFI, was established in July 1954 as a result of the closure of NRS Chimo, Quebec. Station CFI was part of the Supplementary Radio network. Because of its remoteness and size, it was very expensive to operate. Renamed CFS Frobisher Bay in 1966, advancing technology eventually forced the closure of CFI later that year.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The American military left Iqaluit in 1963, as their development of the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) diminished the strategic value of the DEW line and Arctic airbases. Canada continued to operate an administrative and logistical centre for much of the eastern Arctic at Frobisher Bay. In 1964, the first local elections were held for a community council, and in 1979 for the first mayor. The founding of the Gordon Robertson Educational Centre, now Inuksuk High School, in the early 1970s at Iqaluit confirmed the government's commitment to the community as an administrative centre. At the time of its founding, this was the sole high school operating in what constituted more than one-seventh of Canadian territory.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "On 1 January 1987, the name of the municipality was changed from \"Frobisher Bay\" to \"Iqaluit\" – aligning official usage with the name that the Inuit population had always used. (Many documents were made that referred to Iqaluit as Frobisher Bay for several years after 1987). In the non-binding 1995 Nunavut capital plebiscite, held 11 December, the residents of what would become the new territory selected Iqaluit (over Rankin Inlet) to serve as the future capital. On 19 April 2001, it was designated a city.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Canada designated Iqaluit as the host city for the 2010 meeting of the Group of Seven finance ministers, held on 5–6 February. The requirements for the international meeting strained the northern communications technology infrastructure and required supplemental investment.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Iqaluit is the northernmost city in Canada, at 63 degrees north of the Equator. Iqaluit is located in the Everett Mountains, which rise from Koojesse Inlet, an inlet of Frobisher Bay, on the southeast part of Baffin Island. It is well to the east of Nunavut's mainland, and northeast of Hudson Bay.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Iqaluit has a tundra climate (Köppen: ET) typical of the Arctic region, although it is well outside the Arctic Circle. The city features long, cold winters and brief, cool summers. Average monthly temperatures are below freezing for eight months of the year. Iqaluit averages just over 400 mm (16 in) of precipitation annually, much wetter than many other localities in the Arctic Archipelago, with the summer being the wettest season. Temperatures of the winter months are comparable to other northern communities further west on the continent such as Yellowknife and to some extent even Fairbanks, Alaska, even though Iqaluit is a few degrees colder than the latter. Summer temperatures are, however, much colder due to its easterly maritime position affected by the waters of the cold Baffin Island Current. This means that the tree line is much further south in the eastern part of Canada, being as southbound, in spite of low elevation, as northern Labrador.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Although it is north of the natural tree line, there are some short, south-facing imported black spruce (Picea mariana) specimens protected by snowdrifts in the winter, in addition to a few shrubs, which are woody plants. These include the Arctic willow (Salix arctica). The Arctic willow may be up to around 7.6 m (25 ft) horizontally, but only 150 mm (6 in) tall.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The climate of Iqaluit is also colder than Gulf Stream locations on the same latitude. For example, the Norwegian city of Trondheim has an annual mean temperature that is 15.2 °C (27.4 °F) milder.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The lowest temperature ever recorded was −45.6 °C (−50.1 °F) on 10 February 1967. The highest temperature ever recorded in Iqaluit was 26.8 °C (80.2 °F) on 21 July 2008.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Apex (Niaqunngut), officially and functionally part of the City of Iqaluit, is a small community about 5 km (3.1 mi) southeast (63°43′20″N 068°26′56″W / 63.72222°N 68.44889°W / 63.72222; -68.44889 (Apex)) from Iqaluit's centre and is known in Inuktitut as Niaqunngut. It is located on a small peninsula separating Koojesse Inlet from Tarr Inlet. There is a women's shelter, a church, a primary school (Nanook Elementary School), a design shop and a bed and breakfast in the community. Apex was where most Inuit lived when Iqaluit was a military site and off-limits to anyone not working at the base.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Much of Iqaluit's architecture is functional—designed to minimize material costs, while retaining heat and withstanding the climate. Early architecture runs from the 1950s military barracks of the original DEW line installation, through the 1970s white hyper-modernist fibreglass block of the Nakasuk School and Municipal Offices and Arena, to the lines of the steel-reinforced concrete high-rise complex on the hill above it. A number of older Hudson's Bay Company and early 1950s buildings have been retained and restored in Apex (the former nursing station has been revived as the Rannva Bed and Breakfast, the HBC buildings as an art gallery). The newer buildings are more colourful and diverse, and closer to the norms of southern architecture.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The principal exception is the Nunavut Legislative Assembly Building, which is remarkable for its colourful interior, adorned with some of the very best in Inuit art. A new legislative building is in planning to be developed and built outside the city on the Apex Road.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Another distinctive building was St. Jude's Anglican Cathedral, see of the Anglican Diocese of The Arctic, which was a white building shaped like an igloo. The altar was built by the parishioners, under the guidance of Markoosie Peter, a traditional master carpenter. It was shaped like a traditional Inuit sled, and the cross composed of two crossed narwhal tusks. An incident of arson severely affected the Cathedral structure and interior on 5 November 2005, and it was demolished on 1 June 2006. The cathedral is slowly being rebuilt (foundation 2008 superstructure 2010) and fund-raising continues locally and internationally. In December 2010, the exterior of a similarly shaped replacement cathedral was completed, and interior work was planned for 2011 with a potential opening for Christmas 2011. The current building, informally referred to as the Igloo Cathedral, was opened on 3 June 2012. The unique building, in the shape of an igloo, has traditionally been a landmark and tourist attraction in Iqaluit, besides its important spiritual role for Iqalummiut (people of Iqaluit).",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On a ridge overlooking the city is the distinctive blue and white Inuksuk High School. The school is made up of four square sections joined that give a cloverleaf shape when viewed from the air.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The city is also the location of the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum, which houses a large collection of Inuit and Arctic objects. The museum is housed in a restored and extended Hudson's Bay Company building, clad in the HBC signature red and white, transported to Iqaluit from its original site on the Apex Beach.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Just west of Iqaluit is the Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park. This park is dominated by the valley of the Sylvia Grinnell River. A small visitor's centre with viewing platform is located on top of a hill overlooking scenic waterfalls, tidal flats and traditional fishing sites.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Nearby on an island near Peterhead Inlet, is the Qaummaarviit Territorial Park. It is a site with a long Inuit history and numerous artifacts have been recovered, including the remains of 11 semi-buried sod houses.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A little farther, across Frobisher Bay, are the Katannilik Territorial Park Reserve and the Soper River, a Canadian Heritage River, forming a park corridor linking Iqaluit along traditional overland travel routes with Kimmirut (formerly Lake Harbour). Frobisher Bay extends for almost 110 km (70 mi) to the east, with moderate hills, glaciers and traditional and summer camp sites, opening into the Davis Strait, which divides Nunavut from Greenland.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Iqaluit, like many Nunavut communities, has a volunteer-run annual spring festival. Called Toonik Tyme it involves a combination of traditional Inuit activities combined with more modern events, while the Alianait Music and Arts Festival is held for a week each 21 June. The festival has attracted Canadian and international artists such as Joshua Haulli, Quantum Tangle, Washboard Hank and Namgar.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In the 2021 Canadian census conducted by Statistics Canada, Iqaluit had a population of 7,429 living in 2,708 of its 3,297 total private dwellings, a change of -4% from its 2016 population of 7,740. With a land area of 51.58 km (19.92 sq mi), it had a population density of 144.0/km (373.0/sq mi) in 2021.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The median value of these dwellings is $376,639, quite a bit higher than the national median at $280,552. The average household has about 2.8 people living in it, and the average family has 1.4 children living at home with them. The median (after-tax) household income in Iqaluit is quite high, $98,921, almost double the national rate at $54,089. The median income for an individual in the city, is also high, $60,688. 5.9 per cent of people (over 15 years old) are either divorced or separated, which is quite a bit lower than the national rate at 8.6 per cent. Also, 53.3 per cent of the population is either married or living with a common law partner.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Iqaluit has quite a young population, the median age of the population is more than 10 years younger than the national rate, 30.1 years old compared to 40.6 years old.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "For those over the age of 25:",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The 2021 census reported that immigrants (individuals born outside Canada) comprise 750 persons or 10.3% of the total population of Iqaluit. Of the total immigrant population, the top countries of origin were Philippines (195 persons or 26.0%), Cameroon (50 persons or 6.7%), United Kingdom (40 persons or 5.3%), Nigeria (40 persons or 5.3%), Zimbabwe (40 persons or 5.3%), United States of America (35 persons or 4.7%), India (25 persons or 3.3%), Pakistan (20 persons or 2.7%), China (20 persons or 2.7%), Jamaica (20 persons or 2.7%), and Ethiopia (20 persons or 2.7%).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "As of 2016, Iqaluit has the most Inuit in both numbers (3,900) and per centages (59.1 per cent), of all Canadian cities with populations greater than 5,000.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "There is no \"majority mother tongue\" in Iqaluit, as 45.4 percent reported their mother tongue as being English, and 45.4 percent also reported their mother tongue as Inuktitut. English is spoken by 97.2 percent of Iqalummiuts, however, whereas only 53.1 percent can speak Inuktitut. French was the mother tongue of 4.8 percent of the population, which is the same figure of the population who can speak the language. As of 2012, \"Pirurvik, Iqaluit's Inuktitut language training centre, has a new goal: to train instructors from Nunavut communities to teach Inuktitut in different ways and in their own dialects when they return home.\"",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "According to the 2021 census, religious groups in Iqaluit included:",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Qikiqtani School Operations based in Pond Inlet operates five schools in the area. Nanook Elementary School, located in Apex, Nakasuk School and Joamie Ilinniarvik School offer kindergarten to grade 5. Aqsarniit Ilinniarvik School offers grades 6 to 8 and Inuksuk High School offers grades 9 to 12.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Commission scolaire francophone du Nunavut runs École des Trois-Soleils and offers kindergarten to grade 12.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "At the post-secondary level there are two, Nunavut Arctic College (Nunatta Campus) and Akitsiraq Law School.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Emergency services (fire and ambulance) are provided by city from a single station on Niaqunngusiariaq.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The emergency services fleet consists of:",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Iqaluit Airport Emergency Services is responsible for fire services at the airport. Following a fire at the airport in 1998, the Government of Nunavut re-opened the fire station at the airport. Their fleet consists of:",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Policing in Iqaluit, as with the rest of Nunavut, is contracted to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) V Division and the city is home to the divisional headquarters.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Qikiqtani General Hospital is the primary care facility in the city. There is also a Family Practice Clinic providing primary care services by Nurse Practitioners. Two dental clinics exist in the city.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Iqaluit features two arenas, the Arctic Winter Games Arena and Arnaitok, the Iqaluit Aquaplex, a curling rink, the Timmianut Pikiuqarvik disc golf course, the Frobisher Inn Fitness Centre, in the W.G. Brown Building/Astro Hill Complex, a golf course, outdoor basketball courts, soccer nets, seasonal outdoor ice rinks, a shooting range, a skatepark, and more.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Iqaluit is the smallest Canadian capital in terms of population, and the only capital that is not connected to other settlements by a highway. Located on an island remote from the Canadian highway system, Iqaluit is generally only accessible by aircraft and, subject to ice conditions, by boat.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Iqaluit Airport is a modern facility with a runway long enough for most modern jet aircraft. A new, larger passenger terminal building north of the old terminal was completed in 2018.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Canadian North serves Iqaluit from Ottawa, Yellowknife, and several communities in Nunavut. Locally based airlines Air Nunavut, Canadian Helicopters, Nunasi Helicopters, and Unaalik Aviation provide air charters, and Air Nunavut and Keewatin Air provide MEDIVAC/air ambulance service. Air Canada Jazz provided daily service to Iqaluit from Ottawa in 2010 and 2011, but cancelled service due to rising fuel costs, which prevented the route from being profitable.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Iqaluit shared its runway with the Royal Canadian Air Force until the Canadian Forces stopped using Iqaluit as a Canadian NORAD Region Forward Operating Location. The barracks and CF-188 hangars are maintained. The airport has been a centre for cold-weather testing of new aircraft, such as the Airbus A380 in February 2006.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Rumours that Iqaluit was an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle are false.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In the middle of summer, a few ships—generally no larger than a Liberty-class vessel—transport bulk and heavy goods to the city. Cargo is currently off-loaded onto barges as the harbour is not deep enough; however, the city is currently constructing a deep-seaport that is expected to open in 2023. The deep-seaport, which will cost approximately $85 million, will provide all-tide access to ships and will have space for one ship to dock and unload, with the ability to offload a second using a barge-and-ramp method. Initial plans for the port included facilities for a vehicle ferry connection to Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Newfoundland and Labrador, however these plans were dropped due to high cost. Experienced locals also cross the Hudson Strait from the Canadian mainland when it freezes over, either on foot or by dog sled or snowmobile, a distance of over 100 km (62 mi).",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Iqaluit has a local road system only stretching from the nearby community of Apex to the Sylvia Grinnell Territorial Park, 1 km (0.62 mi) west of town. Iqaluit has no public transportation, although there is citywide taxi service. Iqaluit Public Transit used to offer bus service in the city, but the service was cancelled due to low ridership. Motor cars are increasing in number, to the extent of causing occasional traffic jams known locally as \"the rush minute\". The cost of shipping automobiles and the wear-and-tear of the harsh Arctic climate combined with its notoriously rough roadways mean that snowmobiles remain the preferred form of personal transportation. All-terrain vehicles are also common in most of the Canadian Arctic. Snowmobiles are used to travel within the city and in the surrounding area. In winter, dog sleds are still used, but primarily for recreation. In winter, the nearby Qaummaarviit Territorial Park and the more remote Katannilik Territorial Park Reserve are only accessible by snowmobile, dog sled or foot. In the summer, both are accessible by boat. Most major roads within Iqaluit are paved with asphalt, but local and smaller roads are gravel. Roads do not have traffic signals, but use stop signs to control intersections.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Residents and businesses identify their locations mostly by building number, and occasionally by the name of a prominent structure. Residents know where in the city certain series of building numbers are located; numbers tend to be aggregated in blocks, so someone might say that they live in the 2600s. Around 2003, street names were developed, although there were delays in finalizing them and posting the signs. Street numbers have not been assigned, and building numbers continue to be used. Iqaluit is the only Canadian capital city not to have traffic signals, although some have been installed on a temporary basis.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The city's infrastructure is stressed by growth and lack of means to upgrade. Waste from the city is disposed of into an open air dump on Akilliq Drive (West 40) located south of the city.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Although the city has water treatment facilities, raw sewage from the city is often dumped untreated into nearby Frobisher Bay.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "As the dump has reached capacity, the city plans to open a second dump 9 km (5.6 mi) north of the city. Iqaluit does not have a recycling program in place; all recyclable materials are sent into the waste stream.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Landline services in Iqaluit (established in 1958 by Bell Canada) and throughout northern Canada (established by Northwestel in five western Nunavut communities, and by Bell Canada elsewhere in Nunavut), are provided since 1992 by Northwestel.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Cell service is provided by Ice Wireless, Bell Mobility, and Qiniq.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Internet service is available through Northwestel, Ice Wireless, Qiniq, Xplornet and Meshnet. Meshnet Community WiFi is a free community WiFi and paid service available in most areas of the city. Free services include access to Isuma.tv, and many other resources.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Iqaluit was served by CFFB-TV channel 8, a CBC Television/CBC North repeater of CFYK-DT (Yellowknife) until 31 July 2012 when it was closed because of budget cuts at the CBC.",
"title": "Media"
}
]
| Iqaluit is the capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut, its largest community, and its only city. It was known as Frobisher Bay from 1942 to 1987, after the large bay on the coast on which the city is situated. The northernmost city in Canada, its traditional Inuktitut name was restored in 1987. In 1999, Iqaluit was designated the capital of Nunavut after the division of the Northwest Territories into two separate territories. Before this event, Iqaluit was a small city and not well known outside the Canadian Arctic or Canada, with population and economic growth highly limited. This is due to the city's isolation and heavy dependence on expensive imported supplies, as the city, like the rest of Nunavut, has no road or rail, and only has ship connections for part of the year to the rest of Canada. The city has a polar climate, influenced by the cold deep waters of the Labrador Current just off Baffin Island—this makes the city of Iqaluit cold, although it is well south of the Arctic Circle. As of the 2021 Canadian census, the population was 7,429, a decrease of 4.0 per cent from the 2016 census. Iqaluit has the lowest population of any capital city in Canada. Inhabitants of Iqaluit are called Iqalummiut. | 2001-11-12T20:03:54Z | 2023-12-04T19:56:11Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iqaluit |
14,587 | Island | An island or isle is a piece of subcontinental land completely surrounded by water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, skerries, cays or keys. An island in a river or a lake island may be called an eyot or ait, and a small island off the coast may be called a holm. Sedimentary islands in the Ganges Delta are called chars. A grouping of geographically or geologically related islands, such as the Philippines, is referred to as an archipelago.
There are two main types of islands in the sea: continental islands and oceanic islands. There are also artificial islands (man-made islands).
There are about 900,000 official islands in the world. This number consists of all the officially-reported islands of each country. The total number of islands in the world is unknown. There may be hundreds of thousands of tiny islands that are unknown and uncounted. The number of sea islands in the world is estimated to be more than 200,000. The total area of the world's sea islands is approx. 9,963,000 sq km, which is similar to the area of Canada and accounts for roughly 1/15 (or 6.7%) of the total land area of Earth.
The word island derives from Middle English iland, from Old English igland (from ig or ieg, similarly meaning 'island' when used independently, and -land carrying its contemporary meaning; cf. Dutch eiland ("island"), German Eiland ("small island")).The spelling of the word was modified in the 15th century because of a false etymology caused by an incorrect association with the etymologically unrelated Old French loanword isle, which itself comes from the Latin word insula. Old English ieg is actually a cognate of Swedish ö and German Aue, and more distantly related to Latin aqua (water).
There is no standard of size that distinguishes islands from continents, or from islets.
There is a widely accepted difference between islands and continents in terms of geology. Continents are often considered to be the largest landmass of a particular continental plate; this holds true for Australia, which sits on its own continental lithosphere and tectonic plate (the Australian Plate).
By contrast, islands are usually seen as being extensions of the oceanic crust (e.g. volcanic islands), or as belonging to a continental plate containing a larger landmass (continental islands); the latter is the case of Greenland, which sits on the North American Plate.
Continental islands are bodies of land that lie on the continental shelf of a continent. Examples are Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Sakhalin, Taiwan and Hainan off Asia; New Guinea, Tasmania, and Kangaroo Island off Australia; Great Britain, Ireland, and Sicily off Europe; Greenland, Newfoundland, Long Island, and Sable Island off North America; and Barbados, the Falkland Islands, and Trinidad off South America.
A special type of continental island is the microcontinental island, which is created when a continent is horizontally displaced or rifted. Examples are Madagascar and Socotra off Africa, New Caledonia, New Zealand, and some of the Seychelles.
A lake such as Wollaston Lake drains in two different directions, thus creating an island. If this island has a seashore as well as being encircled by two river systems, it becomes what might be called a subcontinental island. The one formed by Wollaston Lake is very large, about 2,000,000 km (770,000 sq mi).
Another subtype is an island or bar formed by deposition of tiny rocks where water current loses some of its carrying capacity. This includes:
Oceanic islands are typically considered to be islands that do not sit on continental shelves. Other definitions limit the term to only refer to islands with no past geological connections to a continental landmass. The vast majority are volcanic in origin, such as Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, and the archipelago of Bermuda in the North Atlantic Ocean (a limestone capped volcanic seamount).
The few oceanic islands that are not volcanic are tectonic in origin and arise where plate movements have lifted up the ocean floor above the surface. Examples are the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean and Macquarie Island in the South Pacific Ocean.
One type of volcanic oceanic island is found in a volcanic island arc. These islands arise from volcanoes where the subduction of one plate under another is occurring. Examples are the Aleutian Islands, the Mariana Islands, and most of Tonga in the Pacific Ocean. The only examples in the Atlantic Ocean are some of the Lesser Antilles and the South Sandwich Islands.
Another type of volcanic oceanic island occurs where an oceanic rift reaches the surface. There are two examples: Iceland, which is the world's second-largest volcanic island, and Jan Mayen. Both islands are in the Atlantic Ocean.
A third type of volcanic oceanic island is formed over volcanic hotspots. A hotspot is more or less stationary relative to the moving tectonic plate above it, so a chain of islands results as the plate drifts. Over long periods of time, this type of island is eventually "drowned" by isostatic adjustment and eroded, becoming a seamount. Plate movement across a hot-spot produces a line of islands oriented in the direction of the plate movement. An example is the Hawaiian Islands, from Hawaii to Kure, which continue beneath the sea surface in a more northerly direction as the Emperor Seamounts. Another chain with similar orientation is the Tuamotu Archipelago; its older, northerly trend is the Line Islands. The southernmost chain is the Austral Islands, with its northerly trending part the atolls in the nation of Tuvalu. Tristan da Cunha is an example of a hotspot volcano in the Atlantic Ocean. Another hotspot in the Atlantic is the island of Surtsey, which was formed in 1963.
An atoll is an island formed from a coral reef that has grown on an eroded and submerged volcanic island. The reef rises to the surface of the water and forms a new island. Atolls are typically ring-shaped with a central lagoon. Examples are the Line Islands in the Pacific Ocean and Maldives in the Indian Ocean.
Approximately 45,000 tropical islands with an area of at least 5 hectares (12 acres) exist. Examples formed from coral reefs include Maldives, Tonga, Samoa, Nauru, and Polynesia. Granite islands include Seychelles and Tioman.
The socio-economic diversity of tropical islands ranges from the Stone Age societies in the interior of North Sentinel, Madagascar, Borneo, and Papua New Guinea to the high-tech lifestyles of the city-islands of Singapore and Hong Kong. International tourism is a significant factor in the economy of many tropical islands including Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Réunion, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Maldives.
The process of de-islandisation is often concerning bridging, but there are other forms of linkages such as causeways: fixed transport links across narrow necks of water, some of which are only operative at low tides (e.g. that connecting Cornwall's St Michael's Mount to the peninsular mainland), while others (such as the Canso Causeway connecting Cape Breton to the Nova Scotia mainland) are usable all year round (aside from interruptions during storm surge periods).
Some places may retain "island" in their names for historical reasons after being connected to a larger landmass by a land bridge or landfill, such as Coney Island and Coronado Island, though these are, strictly speaking, tied islands. Conversely, when a piece of land is separated from the mainland by a man-made canal, for example the Peloponnese by the Corinth Canal, more or less the entirety of Fennoscandia by the White Sea Canal, or Marble Hill in northern Manhattan during the time between the building of the United States Ship Canal and the filling in of the Harlem River which surrounded the area, it is generally not considered an island.
Another type of connection is fostered by harbor walls/breakwaters that incorporate offshore islets into their structures, such as those in Sai harbor in northern Honshu, Japan, and the connection to the mainland which transformed Ilhéu do Diego from an islet. De-islanded through its fixed link to the mainland, the former islet's name, Ilhéu do Diego, became functionally redundant (and thereby archaic) and the location took the fort as its namesake. Some former island sites have retained designations as islands after the draining/subsidence of surrounding waters and their fixed linkage to land (England's Isle of Ely and Vancouver's Granville Island being respective cases in point). Their names are thereby archaic in that they reflect the islands' pasts rather than their present structures or transport logistics. Other examples include Singapore and its causeway, and the various Dutch delta islands, such as IJsselmonde.
Almost all of Earth's islands are natural and have been formed by tectonic forces or volcanic eruptions. However, artificial (man-made) islands also exist, such as the island in Osaka Bay off the Japanese island of Honshu, on which Kansai International Airport is located. Artificial islands can be built using natural materials (e.g., earth, rock, or sand) or artificial ones (e.g., concrete slabs or recycled waste).
Sometimes natural islands are artificially enlarged, such as Vasilyevsky Island in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, which had its western shore extended westward by some 0.5 km in the construction of the Passenger Port of St. Petersburg.
Artificial islands are sometimes built on pre-existing "low-tide elevation," a naturally formed area of land which is surrounded by and above water at low tide but submerged at high tide. Legally these are not islands and have no territorial sea of their own. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "An island or isle is a piece of subcontinental land completely surrounded by water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, skerries, cays or keys. An island in a river or a lake island may be called an eyot or ait, and a small island off the coast may be called a holm. Sedimentary islands in the Ganges Delta are called chars. A grouping of geographically or geologically related islands, such as the Philippines, is referred to as an archipelago.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "There are two main types of islands in the sea: continental islands and oceanic islands. There are also artificial islands (man-made islands).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "There are about 900,000 official islands in the world. This number consists of all the officially-reported islands of each country. The total number of islands in the world is unknown. There may be hundreds of thousands of tiny islands that are unknown and uncounted. The number of sea islands in the world is estimated to be more than 200,000. The total area of the world's sea islands is approx. 9,963,000 sq km, which is similar to the area of Canada and accounts for roughly 1/15 (or 6.7%) of the total land area of Earth.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The word island derives from Middle English iland, from Old English igland (from ig or ieg, similarly meaning 'island' when used independently, and -land carrying its contemporary meaning; cf. Dutch eiland (\"island\"), German Eiland (\"small island\")).The spelling of the word was modified in the 15th century because of a false etymology caused by an incorrect association with the etymologically unrelated Old French loanword isle, which itself comes from the Latin word insula. Old English ieg is actually a cognate of Swedish ö and German Aue, and more distantly related to Latin aqua (water).",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "There is no standard of size that distinguishes islands from continents, or from islets.",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "There is a widely accepted difference between islands and continents in terms of geology. Continents are often considered to be the largest landmass of a particular continental plate; this holds true for Australia, which sits on its own continental lithosphere and tectonic plate (the Australian Plate).",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "By contrast, islands are usually seen as being extensions of the oceanic crust (e.g. volcanic islands), or as belonging to a continental plate containing a larger landmass (continental islands); the latter is the case of Greenland, which sits on the North American Plate.",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Continental islands are bodies of land that lie on the continental shelf of a continent. Examples are Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Sakhalin, Taiwan and Hainan off Asia; New Guinea, Tasmania, and Kangaroo Island off Australia; Great Britain, Ireland, and Sicily off Europe; Greenland, Newfoundland, Long Island, and Sable Island off North America; and Barbados, the Falkland Islands, and Trinidad off South America.",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "A special type of continental island is the microcontinental island, which is created when a continent is horizontally displaced or rifted. Examples are Madagascar and Socotra off Africa, New Caledonia, New Zealand, and some of the Seychelles.",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "A lake such as Wollaston Lake drains in two different directions, thus creating an island. If this island has a seashore as well as being encircled by two river systems, it becomes what might be called a subcontinental island. The one formed by Wollaston Lake is very large, about 2,000,000 km (770,000 sq mi).",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Another subtype is an island or bar formed by deposition of tiny rocks where water current loses some of its carrying capacity. This includes:",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Oceanic islands are typically considered to be islands that do not sit on continental shelves. Other definitions limit the term to only refer to islands with no past geological connections to a continental landmass. The vast majority are volcanic in origin, such as Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, and the archipelago of Bermuda in the North Atlantic Ocean (a limestone capped volcanic seamount).",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The few oceanic islands that are not volcanic are tectonic in origin and arise where plate movements have lifted up the ocean floor above the surface. Examples are the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean and Macquarie Island in the South Pacific Ocean.",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "One type of volcanic oceanic island is found in a volcanic island arc. These islands arise from volcanoes where the subduction of one plate under another is occurring. Examples are the Aleutian Islands, the Mariana Islands, and most of Tonga in the Pacific Ocean. The only examples in the Atlantic Ocean are some of the Lesser Antilles and the South Sandwich Islands.",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Another type of volcanic oceanic island occurs where an oceanic rift reaches the surface. There are two examples: Iceland, which is the world's second-largest volcanic island, and Jan Mayen. Both islands are in the Atlantic Ocean.",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A third type of volcanic oceanic island is formed over volcanic hotspots. A hotspot is more or less stationary relative to the moving tectonic plate above it, so a chain of islands results as the plate drifts. Over long periods of time, this type of island is eventually \"drowned\" by isostatic adjustment and eroded, becoming a seamount. Plate movement across a hot-spot produces a line of islands oriented in the direction of the plate movement. An example is the Hawaiian Islands, from Hawaii to Kure, which continue beneath the sea surface in a more northerly direction as the Emperor Seamounts. Another chain with similar orientation is the Tuamotu Archipelago; its older, northerly trend is the Line Islands. The southernmost chain is the Austral Islands, with its northerly trending part the atolls in the nation of Tuvalu. Tristan da Cunha is an example of a hotspot volcano in the Atlantic Ocean. Another hotspot in the Atlantic is the island of Surtsey, which was formed in 1963.",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "An atoll is an island formed from a coral reef that has grown on an eroded and submerged volcanic island. The reef rises to the surface of the water and forms a new island. Atolls are typically ring-shaped with a central lagoon. Examples are the Line Islands in the Pacific Ocean and Maldives in the Indian Ocean.",
"title": "Relationships with continents"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Approximately 45,000 tropical islands with an area of at least 5 hectares (12 acres) exist. Examples formed from coral reefs include Maldives, Tonga, Samoa, Nauru, and Polynesia. Granite islands include Seychelles and Tioman.",
"title": "Tropical islands"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The socio-economic diversity of tropical islands ranges from the Stone Age societies in the interior of North Sentinel, Madagascar, Borneo, and Papua New Guinea to the high-tech lifestyles of the city-islands of Singapore and Hong Kong. International tourism is a significant factor in the economy of many tropical islands including Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Réunion, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Maldives.",
"title": "Tropical islands"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The process of de-islandisation is often concerning bridging, but there are other forms of linkages such as causeways: fixed transport links across narrow necks of water, some of which are only operative at low tides (e.g. that connecting Cornwall's St Michael's Mount to the peninsular mainland), while others (such as the Canso Causeway connecting Cape Breton to the Nova Scotia mainland) are usable all year round (aside from interruptions during storm surge periods).",
"title": "De-islanding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Some places may retain \"island\" in their names for historical reasons after being connected to a larger landmass by a land bridge or landfill, such as Coney Island and Coronado Island, though these are, strictly speaking, tied islands. Conversely, when a piece of land is separated from the mainland by a man-made canal, for example the Peloponnese by the Corinth Canal, more or less the entirety of Fennoscandia by the White Sea Canal, or Marble Hill in northern Manhattan during the time between the building of the United States Ship Canal and the filling in of the Harlem River which surrounded the area, it is generally not considered an island.",
"title": "De-islanding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Another type of connection is fostered by harbor walls/breakwaters that incorporate offshore islets into their structures, such as those in Sai harbor in northern Honshu, Japan, and the connection to the mainland which transformed Ilhéu do Diego from an islet. De-islanded through its fixed link to the mainland, the former islet's name, Ilhéu do Diego, became functionally redundant (and thereby archaic) and the location took the fort as its namesake. Some former island sites have retained designations as islands after the draining/subsidence of surrounding waters and their fixed linkage to land (England's Isle of Ely and Vancouver's Granville Island being respective cases in point). Their names are thereby archaic in that they reflect the islands' pasts rather than their present structures or transport logistics. Other examples include Singapore and its causeway, and the various Dutch delta islands, such as IJsselmonde.",
"title": "De-islanding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Almost all of Earth's islands are natural and have been formed by tectonic forces or volcanic eruptions. However, artificial (man-made) islands also exist, such as the island in Osaka Bay off the Japanese island of Honshu, on which Kansai International Airport is located. Artificial islands can be built using natural materials (e.g., earth, rock, or sand) or artificial ones (e.g., concrete slabs or recycled waste).",
"title": "Artificial islands"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Sometimes natural islands are artificially enlarged, such as Vasilyevsky Island in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, which had its western shore extended westward by some 0.5 km in the construction of the Passenger Port of St. Petersburg.",
"title": "Artificial islands"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Artificial islands are sometimes built on pre-existing \"low-tide elevation,\" a naturally formed area of land which is surrounded by and above water at low tide but submerged at high tide. Legally these are not islands and have no territorial sea of their own.",
"title": "Artificial islands"
}
]
| An island or isle is a piece of subcontinental land completely surrounded by water. Very small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, skerries, cays or keys. An island in a river or a lake island may be called an eyot or ait, and a small island off the coast may be called a holm. Sedimentary islands in the Ganges Delta are called chars. A grouping of geographically or geologically related islands, such as the Philippines, is referred to as an archipelago. There are two main types of islands in the sea: continental islands and oceanic islands. There are also artificial islands. There are about 900,000 official islands in the world. This number consists of all the officially-reported islands of each country. The total number of islands in the world is unknown. There may be hundreds of thousands of tiny islands that are unknown and uncounted. The number of sea islands in the world is estimated to be more than 200,000. The total area of the world's sea islands is approx. 9,963,000 sq km, which is similar to the area of Canada and accounts for roughly 1/15 of the total land area of Earth. | 2001-08-10T18:50:45Z | 2023-12-18T17:59:37Z | [
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14,591 | Iao Valley | ʻĪao Valley (Hawaiian: ʻĪao: "cloud supreme", pronounced similar to "EE-yow") is a lush, stream-cut valley in West Maui, Hawaii, located 3.1 miles (5 km) west of Wailuku. Because of its natural environment and history, it has become a tourist location. It was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1972.
The state park is located on 6.2 acres (2.5 ha) at the end of ʻĪao Valley Road (Highway 32). The ʻĪao Needle (Kūkaʻemoku), a landmark in the state park, is a vegetation-covered lava remnant rising 1,200 feet (370 m) from the valley floor or 2,250 feet (690 m) above sea level. The "needle" is a sharp ridge that gives the appearance of being a spire when viewed end-on. The needle is an extension of and surrounded by the cliffs of the West Maui Mountains, an extinct volcano. There is a short trail (ʻĪao Needle Lookout Trail and Ethnobotanical Loop) to a windy overlook.
ʻĪao Valley is covered in dense rainforest, most of which consists of introduced vegetation on the valley floor. The Puʻu Kukui summit area at the valley's head receives an average 386 inches (9.8 m) of rainfall per year, making it the state's second wettest location after The Big Bog, slightly wetter than Mount Waiʻaleʻale. Much of this rainfall ends up flowing into the ʻĪao Stream. Trails in the State Park run alongside ʻĪao Stream and through the forest.
Above the ʻĪao valley at the Puʻu Kukui watershed is a native cloud forest of ʻOhiʻan and Koa. This forest is home to many native species including birds like ʻIʻiwi, ʻApapane, And ʻAmakihi. This forest is also home to many native snails. Including those in the genus Auriculella. Many different native snails are unidentified. Many different rare plants live in this forest such as Hawaiian Lobelioids.
The Hawaiian god Kāne is considered to be the procreator and the provider of life. He is associated with wai (fresh water) as well as clouds, rain, streams, and springs. Kanaloa, the Hawaiian god of the underworld, is represented by the phallic stone of the ʻĪao Needle.
Kapawa, the king of Hawaiʻi prior to Pili, was buried here. Maui's ruler Kakaʻe, in the late 15th century, designated ʻĪao Valley as an aliʻi burial ground. The remains were buried in secret places. In 1790, the Battle of Kepaniwai took place there, in which Kamehameha the Great defeated Kalanikūpule and the Maui army during his campaign to unify the islands. The battle was said to be so bloody that dead bodies blocked ʻĪao Stream, and the battle site was named Kepaniwai ("the damming of the waters").
Established in 1952, the Heritage Gardens in Kepaniwai Park recognize the multicultural history of Maui. Tributes and structures celebrate the contributions of Hawaiian, American missionary, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean, and Filipino cultures. The gardens had become overgrown and were restored in 1994. The Hawaii nature center, just outside the gardens, has a museum and children's education about Hawaii and conservation. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "ʻĪao Valley (Hawaiian: ʻĪao: \"cloud supreme\", pronounced similar to \"EE-yow\") is a lush, stream-cut valley in West Maui, Hawaii, located 3.1 miles (5 km) west of Wailuku. Because of its natural environment and history, it has become a tourist location. It was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1972.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The state park is located on 6.2 acres (2.5 ha) at the end of ʻĪao Valley Road (Highway 32). The ʻĪao Needle (Kūkaʻemoku), a landmark in the state park, is a vegetation-covered lava remnant rising 1,200 feet (370 m) from the valley floor or 2,250 feet (690 m) above sea level. The \"needle\" is a sharp ridge that gives the appearance of being a spire when viewed end-on. The needle is an extension of and surrounded by the cliffs of the West Maui Mountains, an extinct volcano. There is a short trail (ʻĪao Needle Lookout Trail and Ethnobotanical Loop) to a windy overlook.",
"title": "ʻĪao Valley State Monument"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "ʻĪao Valley is covered in dense rainforest, most of which consists of introduced vegetation on the valley floor. The Puʻu Kukui summit area at the valley's head receives an average 386 inches (9.8 m) of rainfall per year, making it the state's second wettest location after The Big Bog, slightly wetter than Mount Waiʻaleʻale. Much of this rainfall ends up flowing into the ʻĪao Stream. Trails in the State Park run alongside ʻĪao Stream and through the forest.",
"title": "Rainforest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Above the ʻĪao valley at the Puʻu Kukui watershed is a native cloud forest of ʻOhiʻan and Koa. This forest is home to many native species including birds like ʻIʻiwi, ʻApapane, And ʻAmakihi. This forest is also home to many native snails. Including those in the genus Auriculella. Many different native snails are unidentified. Many different rare plants live in this forest such as Hawaiian Lobelioids.",
"title": "Rainforest"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Hawaiian god Kāne is considered to be the procreator and the provider of life. He is associated with wai (fresh water) as well as clouds, rain, streams, and springs. Kanaloa, the Hawaiian god of the underworld, is represented by the phallic stone of the ʻĪao Needle.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Kapawa, the king of Hawaiʻi prior to Pili, was buried here. Maui's ruler Kakaʻe, in the late 15th century, designated ʻĪao Valley as an aliʻi burial ground. The remains were buried in secret places. In 1790, the Battle of Kepaniwai took place there, in which Kamehameha the Great defeated Kalanikūpule and the Maui army during his campaign to unify the islands. The battle was said to be so bloody that dead bodies blocked ʻĪao Stream, and the battle site was named Kepaniwai (\"the damming of the waters\").",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Established in 1952, the Heritage Gardens in Kepaniwai Park recognize the multicultural history of Maui. Tributes and structures celebrate the contributions of Hawaiian, American missionary, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean, and Filipino cultures. The gardens had become overgrown and were restored in 1994. The Hawaii nature center, just outside the gardens, has a museum and children's education about Hawaii and conservation.",
"title": "Kepaniwai Park and Heritage Gardens"
}
]
| ʻĪao Valley is a lush, stream-cut valley in West Maui, Hawaii, located 3.1 miles (5 km) west of Wailuku. Because of its natural environment and history, it has become a tourist location. It was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1972. | 2001-03-31T23:55:14Z | 2023-12-14T17:55:17Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iao_Valley |
14,594 | Troll (slang) | In slang, a troll is a person who posts or makes inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages online (such as in social media, a newsgroup, a forum, a chat room, an online video game) or in real life, with the intent of provoking others into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception, thus acting as a bully or a provocateur. The behavior is typically for the troll's amusement, or to achieve a specific result such as disrupting a rival's online activities or purposefully causing confusion or harm to other people.
In this context, both the noun and the verb forms of "troll" are frequently associated with Internet discourse. Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment. The Courier-Mail and The Today Show have used "troll" to mean "a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families". In addition, depictions of trolling have been included in popular fictional works, such as the HBO television program The Newsroom, in which a main character encounters harassing persons online and tries to infiltrate their circles by posting negative sexual comments.
Application of the term troll is subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. More potent acts of trolling are blatant harassment or off-topic banter. However, the term Internet troll has also been applied to information warfare, hate speech, and even political activism.
The "Trollface" is an image occasionally used to indicate trolling in Internet culture.
At times, the word is incorrectly used to refer to anyone with controversial, or differing, opinions. Such usage goes against the ordinary meaning of troll in multiple ways. While psychologists have determined that psychopathological sadism, dark triad, and dark tetrad personality traits are common among Internet trolls, some observers claim that trolls do not actually believe the controversial views they claim. Farhad Manjoo criticises this view, noting that if the person really is trolling, they are more intelligent than their critics would believe.
The most common advice to deal with someone who gets enjoyment out of provoking others is to ignore them and deprive them of the pleasure of watching people react. This is typically phrased as "don't feed the trolls", however, some believe this to be bad or incomplete advice for effectively dealing with trolls.
There are competing theories of where and when "troll" was first used in Internet slang, with numerous unattested accounts of BBS and Usenet origins in the early 1980s or before.
The English noun "troll" in the standard sense of ugly dwarf or giant dates to 1610 and originates from the Old Norse word "troll" meaning giant or demon. The word evokes the trolls of Scandinavian folklore and children's tales: antisocial, quarrelsome and slow-witted creatures which make life difficult for travelers. Trolls have existed in folklore and fantasy literature for centuries, and online trolling has been around for as long as the Internet has existed.
In modern English usage, "trolling" may describe the fishing technique of slowly dragging a lure or baited hook from a moving boat, whereas trawling describes the generally commercial act of dragging a fishing net. Early non-Internet slang use of "trolling" can be found in the military: by 1972 the term "trolling for MiGs" was documented in use by US Navy pilots in Vietnam. It referred to use of "...decoys, with the mission of drawing...fire away..." The contemporary use of the term is said to have appeared on the Internet in the late 1980s, but the earliest known attestation according to the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1992.
The context of the quote cited in the Oxford English Dictionary sets the origin in Usenet in the early 1990s as in the phrase "trolling for newbies", as used in alt.folklore.urban (AFU). Commonly, what is meant is a relatively gentle inside joke by veteran users, presenting questions or topics that had been so overdone that only a new user would respond to them earnestly. For example, a veteran of the group might make a post on the common misconception that glass flows over time. Long-time readers would both recognize the poster's name and know that the topic had been discussed repeatedly, but new subscribers to the group would not realize, and would thus respond. These types of trolls served as a practice to identify group insiders. This definition of trolling, considerably narrower than the modern understanding of the term, was considered a positive contribution. One of the most notorious AFU trollers, David Mikkelson, went on to create the urban folklore website Snopes.com.
By the late 1990s, alt.folklore.urban had such heavy traffic and participation that trolling of this sort was frowned upon. Others expanded the term to include the practice of playing a seriously misinformed user, even in newsgroups where one was not a regular; these were often attempts at humor rather than provocation. The noun troll usually referred to an act of trolling – or to the resulting discussion – rather than to the author, though some posts punned on the dual meaning of troll.
The August 26, 1997 strip of webcomic Kevin and Kell used the word troll to describe those that deliberately harass or provoke other Internet users, similar to the modern sense of the word.
In Chinese, trolling is referred to as bái mù (Chinese: 白目; lit. 'white eye'), which can be straightforwardly explained as "eyes without pupils", in the sense that while the pupil of the eye is used for vision, the white section of the eye cannot see, and trolling involves blindly talking nonsense over the Internet, having total disregard to sensitivities or being oblivious to the situation at hand, akin to having eyes without pupils. An alternative term is bái làn (Chinese: 白爛; lit. 'white rot'), which describes a post completely nonsensical and full of folly made to upset others, and derives from a Taiwanese slang term for the male genitalia, where genitalia that is pale white in color represents that someone is young, and thus foolish. Both terms originate from Taiwan, and are also used in Hong Kong and mainland China. Another term, xiǎo bái (Chinese: 小白; lit. 'little white') is a derogatory term for both bái mù and bái làn that is used on anonymous posting Internet forums. Another common term for a troll used in mainland China is pēn zi (Chinese: 噴子; lit. 'sprayer', 'spurter').
In Japanese, tsuri (釣り) means "fishing" and refers to intentionally misleading posts whose only purpose is to get the readers to react, i.e. get trolled. Arashi (荒らし) means "laying waste" and can also be used to refer to simple spamming.
In Icelandic, þurs (a thurs) or tröll (a troll) may refer to trolls, the verbs þursa (to troll) or þursast (to be trolling, to troll about) may be used.
In Korean, nak-si (낚시) means "fishing" and refers to Internet trolling attempts, as well as purposely misleading post titles. A person who recognizes the troll after having responded (or, in case of a post title, nak-si, having read the actual post) would often refer to themselves as a caught fish.
In Portuguese, more commonly in its Brazilian variant, troll (pronounced [ˈtɾɔw] in most of Brazil as spelling pronunciation) is the usual term to denote Internet trolls (examples of common derivate terms are trollismo or trollagem, "trolling", and the verb trollar, "to troll", which entered popular use), but an older expression, used by those which want to avoid anglicisms or slangs, is complexo do pombo enxadrista to denote trolling behavior, and pombos enxadristas (literally, "chessplayer pigeons") or simply pombos are the terms used to name the trolls. The terms are explained by an adage or popular saying: "Arguing with fulano (i.e., John Doe) is the same as playing chess with a pigeon: it defecates on the table, drops the pieces and simply flies off, claiming victory."
In Thai, the term krian (เกรียน) has been adopted to address Internet trolls. According to the Royal Institute of Thailand, the term, which literally refers to a closely cropped hairstyle worn by schoolboys in Thailand, is from the behaviour of these schoolboys who usually gather to play online games and, during which, make annoying, disruptive, impolite, or unreasonable expressions.
Early incidents of trolling were considered to be the same as flaming, but this has changed with modern usage by the news media to refer to the creation of any content that targets another person. The Internet dictionary, NetLingo, suggests there are four grades of trolling: playtime trolling, tactical trolling, strategic trolling, and domination trolling.
The relationship between trolling and flaming was observed in open-access forums in California, on a series of modem-linked computers. CommuniTree was begun in 1978 but was closed in 1982 when accessed by high school teenagers, becoming a ground for trashing and abuse.
Some psychologists have suggested that flaming would be caused by deindividuation or decreased self-evaluation: the anonymity of online postings would lead to disinhibition amongst individuals. Others have suggested that although flaming and trolling is often unpleasant, it may be a form of normative behavior that expresses the social identity of a certain user group.
According to Tom Postmes, a professor of social and organisational psychology at the universities of Exeter, England, and Groningen, The Netherlands, and the author of Individuality and the Group, who has studied online behavior for 20 years, "Trolls aspire to violence, to the level of trouble they can cause in an environment. They want it to kick off. They want to promote antipathetic emotions of disgust and outrage, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure." Someone who brings something off topic into the conversation in order to make that person mad is trolling.
The practice of trolling has been documented by a number of academics since the 1990s. This included Steven Johnson in 1997 in the book Interface Culture, and a paper by Judith Donath in 1999. Donath's paper outlines the ambiguity of identity in a disembodied "virtual community" such as Usenet:
In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity ... The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter.
Donath provides a concise overview of identity deception games which trade on the confusion between physical and epistemic community:
Trolling is a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the consent of most of the players. The troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the group's common interests and concerns; the newsgroup's or forum's members, if they are cognizant of trolls and other identity deceptions, attempt to both distinguish real from trolling postings, and upon judging a poster a troll, make the offending poster leave the group. Their success at the former depends on how well they – and the troll – understand identity cues; their success at the latter depends on whether the troll's enjoyment is sufficiently diminished or outweighed by the costs imposed by the group.
Whitney Phillips observes in This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture that certain behaviors are consistent among different types of trolls. First, trolls of the subcultural variety self-identify as trolls. Trolls are also motivated by what is known as lulz, a type of unsympathetic, ambiguous laughter. The final behavior is the insistent need for anonymity. According to Phillips, anonymity allows trolls to engage in behaviors they would not replicate in professional or public settings, with the effectiveness of trolling often being dependent upon the target's lack of anonymity. This can include the disclosure of real-life attachments, interests, and vulnerabilities of the target.
A troll can disrupt the discussion on a newsgroup or online forum, disseminate bad advice, and damage the feeling of trust in the online community. In a group that has become sensitized to trolling – where the rate of deception is high – many honestly naïve questions may be quickly rejected as trolling. This can be quite off-putting to the new user who upon first posting is immediately bombarded with angry accusations. Even if the accusations are unfounded, being branded a troll may be damaging to one's online reputation.
Susan Herring and colleagues, in "Searching for Safety Online: Managing 'Trolling' in a Feminist Forum", point out the difficulty inherent in monitoring trolling and maintaining freedom of speech in online communities: "harassment often arises in spaces known for their freedom, lack of censure, and experimental nature". Free speech may lead to tolerance of trolling behavior, complicating the members' efforts to maintain an open, yet supportive discussion area, especially for sensitive topics such as race, gender, and sexuality.
Cyberbullying laws vary by state, as trolling is not a crime under U.S. federal law. In an effort to reduce uncivil behavior by increasing accountability, many web sites (e.g. Reuters, Facebook, and Gizmodo) now require commenters to register their names and e-mail addresses.
Trolling itself has become its own form of Internet subculture and has developed its own set of rituals, rules, specialized language, and dedicated spaces of practice. The appeal of trolling primarily comes from the thrill of how long one can keep the ruse going before getting caught, and exposed as a troll. When understood this way, Internet trolls are less like vulgar, indiscriminate bullies, and closer to countercultural respondents to a (so called) overly sensitive public.
The main elements of why people troll are interactions; trolling exists in the interactive communications between Internet users, influencing people's views both from objective and emotional standpoints. Further, trolling does not target a single individual, but rather targets multiple members of a discussion. Trolling can be easily identified by its offensive content, intended to provoke an emotional reaction from an audience.
Organizations and countries may utilize trolls to manipulate public opinion as part and parcel of an astroturfing initiative. When trolling is sponsored by the government, it is often called state-sponsored Internet propaganda or state-sponsored trolling. Teams of sponsored trolls are sometimes referred to as sockpuppet armies.
A 2016 study by Harvard political scientist Gary King reported that the Chinese government's 50 Cent Party creates 440 million pro-government social media posts per year. The report said that government employees were paid to create pro-government posts around the time of national holidays to avoid mass political protests. The Chinese Government ran an editorial in the state-funded Global Times defending censorship and 50 Cent Party trolls.
A 2016 study for the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence on hybrid warfare notes that the Russo-Ukrainian War "demonstrated how fake identities and accounts were used to disseminate narratives through social media, blogs, and web commentaries in order to manipulate, harass, or deceive opponents." The NATO report describes that a "Wikipedia troll" uses a type of message design where a troll does not add "emotional value" to reliable "essentially true" information in re-posts, but presents it "in the wrong context, intending the audience to draw false conclusions." For example, information, without context, from Wikipedia about the military history of the United States "becomes value-laden if it is posted in the comment section of an article criticizing Russia for its military actions and interests in Ukraine. The Wikipedia troll is 'tricky', because in terms of actual text, the information is true, but the way it is expressed gives it a completely different meaning to its readers."
Unlike "classic trolls", Wikipedia trolls "have no emotional input, they just supply misinformation" and are one of "the most dangerous" as well as one of "the most effective trolling message designs." Even among people who are "emotionally immune to aggressive messages" and apolitical, "training in critical thinking" is needed, according to the NATO report, because "they have relatively blind trust in Wikipedia sources and are not able to filter information that comes from platforms they consider authoritative." While Russian-language hybrid trolls use the Wikipedia troll message design to promote anti-Western sentiment in comments, they "mostly attack aggressively to maintain emotional attachment to issues covered in articles." Discussions about topics other than international sanctions during the Ukrainian crisis "attracted very aggressive trolling" and became polarized, according to the NATO report, which "suggests that in subjects in which there is little potential for re-educating audiences, emotional harm is considered more effective" for pro-Russian Latvian-language trolls.
A 2016 study on fluoridation decision-making in Israel coined the term "Uncertainty Bias" to describe the efforts of power in government, public health and media to aggressively advance agendas by misrepresentation of historical and scientific fact. The authors noted that authorities tended to overlook or to deny situations that involve uncertainty while making unscientific arguments and disparaging comments in order to undermine opposing positions.
The New York Times reported in late October 2018 that Saudi Arabia used an online army of Twitter trolls to harass the late Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and other critics of the Saudi government.
In October 2018, The Daily Telegraph reported that Facebook "banned hundreds of pages and accounts which it says were fraudulently flooding its site with partisan political content – although they came from the US instead of being associated with Russia."
While corporate networking site LinkedIn is considered a platform of good taste and professionalism, companies searching for personal information by promoting jobs that were not real and fake accounts posting political messages has caught the company off guard.
Researcher Ben Radford wrote about the phenomenon of clowns in history and the modern day in his book Bad Clowns, and found that "bad clowns" have evolved into Internet trolls. They do not dress up as traditional clowns but, for their own amusement, they tease and exploit "human foibles" in order to speak the "truth" and gain a reaction. Like clowns in make-up, Internet trolls hide behind "anonymous accounts and fake usernames". In their eyes, they are the trickster and are performing for a nameless audience via the Internet. Studies conducted in the fields of human–computer interaction and cyberpsychology by other researchers have corroborated Radford's analysis on the phenomenon of Internet trolling as a form of deception-serving entertainment and its correlations to aggressive behaviour, katagelasticism, black humor, and the Dark tetrad.
Trolling correlates positively with sadism, trait psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (see Dark triad). Trolls take pleasure from causing pain and emotional suffering. Their ability to upset or harm gives them a feeling of power. Psychological researches conducted in the fields of personality psychology and cyberpsychology report that trolling behaviour qualifies as an anti-social behaviour and is strongly correlated to sadistic personality disorder (SPD). Researches have shown that men, compared with women, are more likely to perpetrate trolling behaviour; these gender differences in online anti-social behaviour may be a reflection of gender stereotypes, where agentic characteristics such as competitiveness and dominance are encouraged in men. The results corroborated that gender (male) is a significant predictor of trolling behaviour, alongside trait psychopathy and sadism to be significant positive predictors. Moreover, these studies have shown that people who enjoy trolling online tend to also enjoy hurting other people in everyday life, therefore corroborating a longstanding and persistent pattern of psychopathological sadism.
A psychoanalytic and sexologic study on the phenomenon of Internet trolling asserts that anonymity increases the incidence of the trolling behaviour, and that "the internet is becoming a medium to invest our anxieties and not thinking about the repercussions of trolling and affecting the victims mentally and incite a sense of guilt and shame within them".
Concern trolls pretend to be sympathetic to a certain point of view which they are actually critical of. A concern troll will often declare an interest in joining or allying with a certain cause, while subtly ridiculing it. The concern troll posts in web forums devoted to their declared point of view and attempts to sway the group's actions or opinions while claiming to share their goals, but with professed "concerns". The goal is to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt within the group, sometimes by appealing to outrage culture.
For example, a person who wishes to shame obese people, but disguises this impulse as concern for the health of overweight people, could be considered a concern troll.
A verifiable example of concern trolling within politics occurred in 2006 when Tad Furtado, a member of staff for then-Congressman Charles Bass (R-N.H.), was caught posing as a "concerned" supporter of Bass's opponent, Democrat Paul Hodes, on several liberal New Hampshire blogs, using the pseudonyms "IndieNH" or "IndyNH". "IndyNH" expressed concern that Democrats might just be wasting their time or money on Hodes, because Bass was unbeatable. Hodes eventually won the election.
Although the term "concern troll" originated in discussions of online behavior, it now sees increasing use to describe similar offline behaviors. For example, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair accused a conservative New York Daily News columnist of "concern troll" behavior in his efforts to downplay the Mark Foley scandal. Wolcott links what he calls concern trolls to what Saul Alinsky calls "Do-Nothings", giving a long quote from Alinsky on the Do-Nothings' method and effects:
These Do-Nothings profess a commitment to social change for ideals of justice, equality, and opportunity, and then abstain from and discourage all effective action for change. They are known by their brand, 'I agree with your ends but not your means'.
The Hill published an op-ed piece by Markos Moulitsas of the liberal blog Daily Kos titled "Dems: Ignore 'Concern Trolls'". The concern trolls in question were not Internet participants but rather Republicans offering public advice and warnings to the Democrats that could be considered deceptive.
The online forum TOTSE, as created in 1997, is considered one of the earliest trolling communities, predating 4chan by several years. A New York Times article discussed troll activity at 4chan and at Encyclopedia Dramatica, which it described as "an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore". 4chan's /b/ board is recognized as "one of the Internet's most infamous and active trolling hotspots". This site and others are often used as a base to troll against sites that their members can not normally post on. These trolls feed off the reactions of their victims because "their agenda is to take delight in causing trouble". Places like Reddit, 4chan, and other anonymous message boards are prime real-estate for online trolls. Because there's no easy way of tracing who someone is, trolls can post very inflammatory content without repercussion.
The online French group Ligue du LOL has been accused of organized harassment and described as a troll group.
Mainstream media outlets have focused their attention on the willingness of some Internet users to go to extreme lengths to participate in organized psychological harassment.
In February 2010, the Australian government became involved after users defaced the Facebook tribute pages of murdered children Trinity Bates and Elliott Fletcher. Australian communications minister Stephen Conroy decried the attacks, committed mainly by 4chan users, as evidence of the need for greater Internet regulation, stating, "This argument that the Internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to, that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west." Facebook responded by strongly urging administrators to be aware of ways to ban users and remove inappropriate content from Facebook pages. In 2012, the Daily Telegraph started a campaign to take action against "Twitter trolls", who abuse and threaten users. Several high-profile Australians including Charlotte Dawson, Robbie Farah, Laura Dundovic, and Ray Hadley have been victims of this phenomenon.
According to journalist Swati Chaturvedi and others, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) runs networks of social media trolls tasked with intimidating political opponents.
Bollywood celebrities can face strong social media backlash for their political comments. When actor Shah Rukh Khan criticized the country's intolerance and called for secularism, many promoted a boycott of his upcoming movie, including several right-wing politicians, one of whom compared Khan to a terrorist. In 2015, when the Maharashtra state government banned the sale and consumption of cattle meat (reflecting Hindu beliefs), online trolls attacked stars who criticized the law; actor Rishi Kapoor received insults and had his Hindu faith questioned. Though the death sentence of convicted terrorist Yakub Memon was criticized by "many", including human rights activists and a former Supreme Court chief justice, Bollywood star Salman Khan received "overwhelming" online anger for expressing the same views; the trolling spilled over into real life, with some protestors burning his effigy.
Newslaundry covered the phenomenon of "Twitter trolling" in its "Criticles", also characterizing Twitter trolls in its weekly podcasts.
The Kerala troll community has founded to new malayalam troll slangs in Kerala, some troll events have gone viral and then its use of new words has given rise to new words. The main words is, Kummanadi, OMKV and Kiduve (Kidu)
In July 2022, Japanese law banned "online insults", punishable by up to one year of imprisonment. Under this law, an "insult" is defined as "publicly demeaning someone's social standing without referring to specific facts about them or a specific action."
In the United Kingdom, contributions made to the Internet are covered by the Malicious Communications Act 1988 as well as Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, under which jail sentences were, until 2015, limited to a maximum of six months. In October 2014, the UK's Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, said that "Internet trolls" would face up to two years in jail, under measures in the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill that extend the maximum sentence and time limits for bringing prosecutions. The House of Lords Select Committee on Communications had earlier recommended against creating a specific offence of trolling. Sending messages which are "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character" is an offence whether they are received by the intended recipient or not. Several people have been imprisoned in the UK for online harassment.
Trolls of the testimonial page of Georgia Varley faced no prosecution due to misunderstandings of the legal system in the wake of the term trolling being popularized. In October 2012, a twenty-year-old man was jailed for twelve weeks for posting offensive jokes to a support group for friends and family of April Jones.
On 31 March 2010, NBC's Today ran a segment detailing the deaths of three separate adolescent girls and trolls' subsequent reactions to their deaths. Shortly after the suicide of high school student Alexis Pilkington, anonymous posters began performing organized psychological harassment across various message boards, referring to Pilkington as a "suicidal slut", and posting graphic images on her Facebook memorial page. The segment also included an exposé of a 2006 accident, in which an eighteen-year-old fatally crashed her father's car into a highway pylon; trolls emailed her grieving family the leaked pictures of her mutilated corpse (see Nikki Catsouras photographs controversy).
In 2007, the media was fooled by trollers into believing that students were consuming a drug called Jenkem, purportedly made of human waste. A user named Pickwick on TOTSE posted pictures implying that he was inhaling this drug. Major news corporations such as Fox News Channel reported the story and urged parents to warn their children about this drug. Pickwick's pictures of Jenkem were fake and the pictures did not actually feature human waste.
In August 2012, the subject of trolling was featured on the HBO television series The Newsroom. The character Neal Sampat encounters harassing individuals online, particularly looking at 4chan, and he ends up choosing to post negative comments himself on an economics-related forum. The attempt by the character to infiltrate trolls' inner circles attracted debate from media reviewers critiquing the series.
In 2019, it was alleged that progressive Democrats had created a fake Facebook page which mis-represented the political stance of Roy Moore, a Republican candidate, in the attempt to alienate him from pro-business Republicans. It was also alleged that a "false flag" experiment attempted to link Moore to the use of Russian Twitter bots. The New York Times, when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of its fabrications: "We orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.'"
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has faced criticism for the behavior of some of his supporters online, but has deflected such criticism, suggesting that "Russians" were impersonating people claiming to be "Bernie Bro" supporters. Twitter rejected Sanders' suggestion that Russia could be responsible for the bad reputation of his supporters. A Twitter spokesperson told CNBC: "Using technology and human review in concert, we proactively monitor Twitter to identify attempts at platform manipulation and mitigate them. As is standard, if we have reasonable evidence of state-backed information operations, we'll disclose them following our thorough investigation to our public archive — the largest of its kind in the industry." Twitter had suspended 70 troll accounts that posted content in support of Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign.
The 45th American president, Donald J. Trump, infamously used Twitter to denigrate his political opponents and spread misinformation for which he earned the moniker Troll-In-Chief.
So-called Gold Membership trolling originated in 2007 on 4chan boards, when users posted fake images claiming to offer upgraded 4chan account privileges; without a "Gold" account, one could not view certain content. This turned out to be a hoax designed to fool board members, especially newcomers. It was copied and became an Internet meme. In some cases, this type of troll has been used as a scam, most notably on Facebook, where fake Facebook Gold Account upgrade ads have proliferated in order to link users to dubious websites and other content.
The case of Zeran v. America Online, Inc. resulted primarily from trolling. Six days after the Oklahoma City bombing, anonymous users posted advertisements for shirts celebrating the bombing on AOL message boards, claiming that the shirts could be obtained by contacting Mr. Kenneth Zeran. The posts listed Zeran's address and home phone number. Zeran was subsequently harassed.
Anti-scientology protests by Anonymous, commonly known as Project Chanology, are sometimes labeled as "trolling" by media such as Wired, and the participants sometimes explicitly self-identify as "trolls".
Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer orchestrates what it calls a "Troll Army", and has encouraged trolling of Jewish MP Luciana Berger and Muslim activist Mariam Veiszadeh.
In 2012, after feminist Anita Sarkeesian started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of YouTube videos chronicling misogyny in video games, she received bomb threats at speaking engagements, doxxing threats, rape threats and an unwanted starring role in a video game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian.
In 2018, the Russian government was accused of using sockpuppet armies consisting of 13 Russians and about three Russian companies including Concord Management to alter the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. With the aim of ensuring Republican Candidate, Donald Trump emerges victorious, the sockpuppets allegedly pushed various criminal conspiracies, political rallies, and disparaging comments about Trump major opponent, Hillary Clinton on social media. Initially, only Twitter and Facebook detected the campaign but other reports suggest that YouTube, Tumblr, Google+, PayPal, and Instagram were used. Donald Trump denied plotting with the Russian government to run the propaganda and the Russian Government vehemently denied ties to the companies indicted.
In 2020, the official Discord server and Twitch channel for the U.S. Army Esports team became a target of trolling, as people sent anti-U.S. Army messages, memes, and references to war crimes committed by the United States to both. When the team started banning users from their Twitch channel for trolling, they were accused of violating the First Amendment to the United States Constitution by the ACLU and Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The team has since denied these allegations.
In 2021, the Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte, author of Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself (2018), described the American far-right exclusively male organization Proud Boys, the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, and podcast host Joe Rogan as political commentators who have mastered "the art of trolling as a far-right recruitment strategy" by preying upon the American male insecurities, mediocrity, and fragility. In particular, regarding their respective discriminatory comments about transgender people, she remarks "how crucial gender anxiety is to far-right recruitment". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In slang, a troll is a person who posts or makes inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages online (such as in social media, a newsgroup, a forum, a chat room, an online video game) or in real life, with the intent of provoking others into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception, thus acting as a bully or a provocateur. The behavior is typically for the troll's amusement, or to achieve a specific result such as disrupting a rival's online activities or purposefully causing confusion or harm to other people.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In this context, both the noun and the verb forms of \"troll\" are frequently associated with Internet discourse. Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment. The Courier-Mail and The Today Show have used \"troll\" to mean \"a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families\". In addition, depictions of trolling have been included in popular fictional works, such as the HBO television program The Newsroom, in which a main character encounters harassing persons online and tries to infiltrate their circles by posting negative sexual comments.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Application of the term troll is subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. More potent acts of trolling are blatant harassment or off-topic banter. However, the term Internet troll has also been applied to information warfare, hate speech, and even political activism.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The \"Trollface\" is an image occasionally used to indicate trolling in Internet culture.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "At times, the word is incorrectly used to refer to anyone with controversial, or differing, opinions. Such usage goes against the ordinary meaning of troll in multiple ways. While psychologists have determined that psychopathological sadism, dark triad, and dark tetrad personality traits are common among Internet trolls, some observers claim that trolls do not actually believe the controversial views they claim. Farhad Manjoo criticises this view, noting that if the person really is trolling, they are more intelligent than their critics would believe.",
"title": "Usage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The most common advice to deal with someone who gets enjoyment out of provoking others is to ignore them and deprive them of the pleasure of watching people react. This is typically phrased as \"don't feed the trolls\", however, some believe this to be bad or incomplete advice for effectively dealing with trolls.",
"title": "Responses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "There are competing theories of where and when \"troll\" was first used in Internet slang, with numerous unattested accounts of BBS and Usenet origins in the early 1980s or before.",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The English noun \"troll\" in the standard sense of ugly dwarf or giant dates to 1610 and originates from the Old Norse word \"troll\" meaning giant or demon. The word evokes the trolls of Scandinavian folklore and children's tales: antisocial, quarrelsome and slow-witted creatures which make life difficult for travelers. Trolls have existed in folklore and fantasy literature for centuries, and online trolling has been around for as long as the Internet has existed.",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In modern English usage, \"trolling\" may describe the fishing technique of slowly dragging a lure or baited hook from a moving boat, whereas trawling describes the generally commercial act of dragging a fishing net. Early non-Internet slang use of \"trolling\" can be found in the military: by 1972 the term \"trolling for MiGs\" was documented in use by US Navy pilots in Vietnam. It referred to use of \"...decoys, with the mission of drawing...fire away...\" The contemporary use of the term is said to have appeared on the Internet in the late 1980s, but the earliest known attestation according to the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1992.",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The context of the quote cited in the Oxford English Dictionary sets the origin in Usenet in the early 1990s as in the phrase \"trolling for newbies\", as used in alt.folklore.urban (AFU). Commonly, what is meant is a relatively gentle inside joke by veteran users, presenting questions or topics that had been so overdone that only a new user would respond to them earnestly. For example, a veteran of the group might make a post on the common misconception that glass flows over time. Long-time readers would both recognize the poster's name and know that the topic had been discussed repeatedly, but new subscribers to the group would not realize, and would thus respond. These types of trolls served as a practice to identify group insiders. This definition of trolling, considerably narrower than the modern understanding of the term, was considered a positive contribution. One of the most notorious AFU trollers, David Mikkelson, went on to create the urban folklore website Snopes.com.",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "By the late 1990s, alt.folklore.urban had such heavy traffic and participation that trolling of this sort was frowned upon. Others expanded the term to include the practice of playing a seriously misinformed user, even in newsgroups where one was not a regular; these were often attempts at humor rather than provocation. The noun troll usually referred to an act of trolling – or to the resulting discussion – rather than to the author, though some posts punned on the dual meaning of troll.",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The August 26, 1997 strip of webcomic Kevin and Kell used the word troll to describe those that deliberately harass or provoke other Internet users, similar to the modern sense of the word.",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In Chinese, trolling is referred to as bái mù (Chinese: 白目; lit. 'white eye'), which can be straightforwardly explained as \"eyes without pupils\", in the sense that while the pupil of the eye is used for vision, the white section of the eye cannot see, and trolling involves blindly talking nonsense over the Internet, having total disregard to sensitivities or being oblivious to the situation at hand, akin to having eyes without pupils. An alternative term is bái làn (Chinese: 白爛; lit. 'white rot'), which describes a post completely nonsensical and full of folly made to upset others, and derives from a Taiwanese slang term for the male genitalia, where genitalia that is pale white in color represents that someone is young, and thus foolish. Both terms originate from Taiwan, and are also used in Hong Kong and mainland China. Another term, xiǎo bái (Chinese: 小白; lit. 'little white') is a derogatory term for both bái mù and bái làn that is used on anonymous posting Internet forums. Another common term for a troll used in mainland China is pēn zi (Chinese: 噴子; lit. 'sprayer', 'spurter').",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In Japanese, tsuri (釣り) means \"fishing\" and refers to intentionally misleading posts whose only purpose is to get the readers to react, i.e. get trolled. Arashi (荒らし) means \"laying waste\" and can also be used to refer to simple spamming.",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In Icelandic, þurs (a thurs) or tröll (a troll) may refer to trolls, the verbs þursa (to troll) or þursast (to be trolling, to troll about) may be used.",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In Korean, nak-si (낚시) means \"fishing\" and refers to Internet trolling attempts, as well as purposely misleading post titles. A person who recognizes the troll after having responded (or, in case of a post title, nak-si, having read the actual post) would often refer to themselves as a caught fish.",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In Portuguese, more commonly in its Brazilian variant, troll (pronounced [ˈtɾɔw] in most of Brazil as spelling pronunciation) is the usual term to denote Internet trolls (examples of common derivate terms are trollismo or trollagem, \"trolling\", and the verb trollar, \"to troll\", which entered popular use), but an older expression, used by those which want to avoid anglicisms or slangs, is complexo do pombo enxadrista to denote trolling behavior, and pombos enxadristas (literally, \"chessplayer pigeons\") or simply pombos are the terms used to name the trolls. The terms are explained by an adage or popular saying: \"Arguing with fulano (i.e., John Doe) is the same as playing chess with a pigeon: it defecates on the table, drops the pieces and simply flies off, claiming victory.\"",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In Thai, the term krian (เกรียน) has been adopted to address Internet trolls. According to the Royal Institute of Thailand, the term, which literally refers to a closely cropped hairstyle worn by schoolboys in Thailand, is from the behaviour of these schoolboys who usually gather to play online games and, during which, make annoying, disruptive, impolite, or unreasonable expressions.",
"title": "Origin and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Early incidents of trolling were considered to be the same as flaming, but this has changed with modern usage by the news media to refer to the creation of any content that targets another person. The Internet dictionary, NetLingo, suggests there are four grades of trolling: playtime trolling, tactical trolling, strategic trolling, and domination trolling.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The relationship between trolling and flaming was observed in open-access forums in California, on a series of modem-linked computers. CommuniTree was begun in 1978 but was closed in 1982 when accessed by high school teenagers, becoming a ground for trashing and abuse.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Some psychologists have suggested that flaming would be caused by deindividuation or decreased self-evaluation: the anonymity of online postings would lead to disinhibition amongst individuals. Others have suggested that although flaming and trolling is often unpleasant, it may be a form of normative behavior that expresses the social identity of a certain user group.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "According to Tom Postmes, a professor of social and organisational psychology at the universities of Exeter, England, and Groningen, The Netherlands, and the author of Individuality and the Group, who has studied online behavior for 20 years, \"Trolls aspire to violence, to the level of trouble they can cause in an environment. They want it to kick off. They want to promote antipathetic emotions of disgust and outrage, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure.\" Someone who brings something off topic into the conversation in order to make that person mad is trolling.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The practice of trolling has been documented by a number of academics since the 1990s. This included Steven Johnson in 1997 in the book Interface Culture, and a paper by Judith Donath in 1999. Donath's paper outlines the ambiguity of identity in a disembodied \"virtual community\" such as Usenet:",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In the physical world there is an inherent unity to the self, for the body provides a compelling and convenient definition of identity. The norm is: one body, one identity ... The virtual world is different. It is composed of information rather than matter.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Donath provides a concise overview of identity deception games which trade on the confusion between physical and epistemic community:",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Trolling is a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the consent of most of the players. The troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the group's common interests and concerns; the newsgroup's or forum's members, if they are cognizant of trolls and other identity deceptions, attempt to both distinguish real from trolling postings, and upon judging a poster a troll, make the offending poster leave the group. Their success at the former depends on how well they – and the troll – understand identity cues; their success at the latter depends on whether the troll's enjoyment is sufficiently diminished or outweighed by the costs imposed by the group.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Whitney Phillips observes in This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture that certain behaviors are consistent among different types of trolls. First, trolls of the subcultural variety self-identify as trolls. Trolls are also motivated by what is known as lulz, a type of unsympathetic, ambiguous laughter. The final behavior is the insistent need for anonymity. According to Phillips, anonymity allows trolls to engage in behaviors they would not replicate in professional or public settings, with the effectiveness of trolling often being dependent upon the target's lack of anonymity. This can include the disclosure of real-life attachments, interests, and vulnerabilities of the target.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "A troll can disrupt the discussion on a newsgroup or online forum, disseminate bad advice, and damage the feeling of trust in the online community. In a group that has become sensitized to trolling – where the rate of deception is high – many honestly naïve questions may be quickly rejected as trolling. This can be quite off-putting to the new user who upon first posting is immediately bombarded with angry accusations. Even if the accusations are unfounded, being branded a troll may be damaging to one's online reputation.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Susan Herring and colleagues, in \"Searching for Safety Online: Managing 'Trolling' in a Feminist Forum\", point out the difficulty inherent in monitoring trolling and maintaining freedom of speech in online communities: \"harassment often arises in spaces known for their freedom, lack of censure, and experimental nature\". Free speech may lead to tolerance of trolling behavior, complicating the members' efforts to maintain an open, yet supportive discussion area, especially for sensitive topics such as race, gender, and sexuality.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Cyberbullying laws vary by state, as trolling is not a crime under U.S. federal law. In an effort to reduce uncivil behavior by increasing accountability, many web sites (e.g. Reuters, Facebook, and Gizmodo) now require commenters to register their names and e-mail addresses.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Trolling itself has become its own form of Internet subculture and has developed its own set of rituals, rules, specialized language, and dedicated spaces of practice. The appeal of trolling primarily comes from the thrill of how long one can keep the ruse going before getting caught, and exposed as a troll. When understood this way, Internet trolls are less like vulgar, indiscriminate bullies, and closer to countercultural respondents to a (so called) overly sensitive public.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The main elements of why people troll are interactions; trolling exists in the interactive communications between Internet users, influencing people's views both from objective and emotional standpoints. Further, trolling does not target a single individual, but rather targets multiple members of a discussion. Trolling can be easily identified by its offensive content, intended to provoke an emotional reaction from an audience.",
"title": "Trolling, identity, and anonymity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Organizations and countries may utilize trolls to manipulate public opinion as part and parcel of an astroturfing initiative. When trolling is sponsored by the government, it is often called state-sponsored Internet propaganda or state-sponsored trolling. Teams of sponsored trolls are sometimes referred to as sockpuppet armies.",
"title": "Corporate, political, and special-interest sponsored trolls"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "A 2016 study by Harvard political scientist Gary King reported that the Chinese government's 50 Cent Party creates 440 million pro-government social media posts per year. The report said that government employees were paid to create pro-government posts around the time of national holidays to avoid mass political protests. The Chinese Government ran an editorial in the state-funded Global Times defending censorship and 50 Cent Party trolls.",
"title": "Corporate, political, and special-interest sponsored trolls"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "A 2016 study for the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence on hybrid warfare notes that the Russo-Ukrainian War \"demonstrated how fake identities and accounts were used to disseminate narratives through social media, blogs, and web commentaries in order to manipulate, harass, or deceive opponents.\" The NATO report describes that a \"Wikipedia troll\" uses a type of message design where a troll does not add \"emotional value\" to reliable \"essentially true\" information in re-posts, but presents it \"in the wrong context, intending the audience to draw false conclusions.\" For example, information, without context, from Wikipedia about the military history of the United States \"becomes value-laden if it is posted in the comment section of an article criticizing Russia for its military actions and interests in Ukraine. The Wikipedia troll is 'tricky', because in terms of actual text, the information is true, but the way it is expressed gives it a completely different meaning to its readers.\"",
"title": "Corporate, political, and special-interest sponsored trolls"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Unlike \"classic trolls\", Wikipedia trolls \"have no emotional input, they just supply misinformation\" and are one of \"the most dangerous\" as well as one of \"the most effective trolling message designs.\" Even among people who are \"emotionally immune to aggressive messages\" and apolitical, \"training in critical thinking\" is needed, according to the NATO report, because \"they have relatively blind trust in Wikipedia sources and are not able to filter information that comes from platforms they consider authoritative.\" While Russian-language hybrid trolls use the Wikipedia troll message design to promote anti-Western sentiment in comments, they \"mostly attack aggressively to maintain emotional attachment to issues covered in articles.\" Discussions about topics other than international sanctions during the Ukrainian crisis \"attracted very aggressive trolling\" and became polarized, according to the NATO report, which \"suggests that in subjects in which there is little potential for re-educating audiences, emotional harm is considered more effective\" for pro-Russian Latvian-language trolls.",
"title": "Corporate, political, and special-interest sponsored trolls"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "A 2016 study on fluoridation decision-making in Israel coined the term \"Uncertainty Bias\" to describe the efforts of power in government, public health and media to aggressively advance agendas by misrepresentation of historical and scientific fact. The authors noted that authorities tended to overlook or to deny situations that involve uncertainty while making unscientific arguments and disparaging comments in order to undermine opposing positions.",
"title": "Corporate, political, and special-interest sponsored trolls"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The New York Times reported in late October 2018 that Saudi Arabia used an online army of Twitter trolls to harass the late Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and other critics of the Saudi government.",
"title": "Corporate, political, and special-interest sponsored trolls"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In October 2018, The Daily Telegraph reported that Facebook \"banned hundreds of pages and accounts which it says were fraudulently flooding its site with partisan political content – although they came from the US instead of being associated with Russia.\"",
"title": "Corporate, political, and special-interest sponsored trolls"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "While corporate networking site LinkedIn is considered a platform of good taste and professionalism, companies searching for personal information by promoting jobs that were not real and fake accounts posting political messages has caught the company off guard.",
"title": "Corporate, political, and special-interest sponsored trolls"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Researcher Ben Radford wrote about the phenomenon of clowns in history and the modern day in his book Bad Clowns, and found that \"bad clowns\" have evolved into Internet trolls. They do not dress up as traditional clowns but, for their own amusement, they tease and exploit \"human foibles\" in order to speak the \"truth\" and gain a reaction. Like clowns in make-up, Internet trolls hide behind \"anonymous accounts and fake usernames\". In their eyes, they are the trickster and are performing for a nameless audience via the Internet. Studies conducted in the fields of human–computer interaction and cyberpsychology by other researchers have corroborated Radford's analysis on the phenomenon of Internet trolling as a form of deception-serving entertainment and its correlations to aggressive behaviour, katagelasticism, black humor, and the Dark tetrad.",
"title": "Psychological characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Trolling correlates positively with sadism, trait psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (see Dark triad). Trolls take pleasure from causing pain and emotional suffering. Their ability to upset or harm gives them a feeling of power. Psychological researches conducted in the fields of personality psychology and cyberpsychology report that trolling behaviour qualifies as an anti-social behaviour and is strongly correlated to sadistic personality disorder (SPD). Researches have shown that men, compared with women, are more likely to perpetrate trolling behaviour; these gender differences in online anti-social behaviour may be a reflection of gender stereotypes, where agentic characteristics such as competitiveness and dominance are encouraged in men. The results corroborated that gender (male) is a significant predictor of trolling behaviour, alongside trait psychopathy and sadism to be significant positive predictors. Moreover, these studies have shown that people who enjoy trolling online tend to also enjoy hurting other people in everyday life, therefore corroborating a longstanding and persistent pattern of psychopathological sadism.",
"title": "Psychological characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "A psychoanalytic and sexologic study on the phenomenon of Internet trolling asserts that anonymity increases the incidence of the trolling behaviour, and that \"the internet is becoming a medium to invest our anxieties and not thinking about the repercussions of trolling and affecting the victims mentally and incite a sense of guilt and shame within them\".",
"title": "Psychological characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Concern trolls pretend to be sympathetic to a certain point of view which they are actually critical of. A concern troll will often declare an interest in joining or allying with a certain cause, while subtly ridiculing it. The concern troll posts in web forums devoted to their declared point of view and attempts to sway the group's actions or opinions while claiming to share their goals, but with professed \"concerns\". The goal is to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt within the group, sometimes by appealing to outrage culture.",
"title": "Concern troll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "For example, a person who wishes to shame obese people, but disguises this impulse as concern for the health of overweight people, could be considered a concern troll.",
"title": "Concern troll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "A verifiable example of concern trolling within politics occurred in 2006 when Tad Furtado, a member of staff for then-Congressman Charles Bass (R-N.H.), was caught posing as a \"concerned\" supporter of Bass's opponent, Democrat Paul Hodes, on several liberal New Hampshire blogs, using the pseudonyms \"IndieNH\" or \"IndyNH\". \"IndyNH\" expressed concern that Democrats might just be wasting their time or money on Hodes, because Bass was unbeatable. Hodes eventually won the election.",
"title": "Concern troll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Although the term \"concern troll\" originated in discussions of online behavior, it now sees increasing use to describe similar offline behaviors. For example, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair accused a conservative New York Daily News columnist of \"concern troll\" behavior in his efforts to downplay the Mark Foley scandal. Wolcott links what he calls concern trolls to what Saul Alinsky calls \"Do-Nothings\", giving a long quote from Alinsky on the Do-Nothings' method and effects:",
"title": "Concern troll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "These Do-Nothings profess a commitment to social change for ideals of justice, equality, and opportunity, and then abstain from and discourage all effective action for change. They are known by their brand, 'I agree with your ends but not your means'.",
"title": "Concern troll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Hill published an op-ed piece by Markos Moulitsas of the liberal blog Daily Kos titled \"Dems: Ignore 'Concern Trolls'\". The concern trolls in question were not Internet participants but rather Republicans offering public advice and warnings to the Democrats that could be considered deceptive.",
"title": "Concern troll"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The online forum TOTSE, as created in 1997, is considered one of the earliest trolling communities, predating 4chan by several years. A New York Times article discussed troll activity at 4chan and at Encyclopedia Dramatica, which it described as \"an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore\". 4chan's /b/ board is recognized as \"one of the Internet's most infamous and active trolling hotspots\". This site and others are often used as a base to troll against sites that their members can not normally post on. These trolls feed off the reactions of their victims because \"their agenda is to take delight in causing trouble\". Places like Reddit, 4chan, and other anonymous message boards are prime real-estate for online trolls. Because there's no easy way of tracing who someone is, trolls can post very inflammatory content without repercussion.",
"title": "Troll sites"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The online French group Ligue du LOL has been accused of organized harassment and described as a troll group.",
"title": "Troll sites"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Mainstream media outlets have focused their attention on the willingness of some Internet users to go to extreme lengths to participate in organized psychological harassment.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In February 2010, the Australian government became involved after users defaced the Facebook tribute pages of murdered children Trinity Bates and Elliott Fletcher. Australian communications minister Stephen Conroy decried the attacks, committed mainly by 4chan users, as evidence of the need for greater Internet regulation, stating, \"This argument that the Internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to, that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west.\" Facebook responded by strongly urging administrators to be aware of ways to ban users and remove inappropriate content from Facebook pages. In 2012, the Daily Telegraph started a campaign to take action against \"Twitter trolls\", who abuse and threaten users. Several high-profile Australians including Charlotte Dawson, Robbie Farah, Laura Dundovic, and Ray Hadley have been victims of this phenomenon.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "According to journalist Swati Chaturvedi and others, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) runs networks of social media trolls tasked with intimidating political opponents.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Bollywood celebrities can face strong social media backlash for their political comments. When actor Shah Rukh Khan criticized the country's intolerance and called for secularism, many promoted a boycott of his upcoming movie, including several right-wing politicians, one of whom compared Khan to a terrorist. In 2015, when the Maharashtra state government banned the sale and consumption of cattle meat (reflecting Hindu beliefs), online trolls attacked stars who criticized the law; actor Rishi Kapoor received insults and had his Hindu faith questioned. Though the death sentence of convicted terrorist Yakub Memon was criticized by \"many\", including human rights activists and a former Supreme Court chief justice, Bollywood star Salman Khan received \"overwhelming\" online anger for expressing the same views; the trolling spilled over into real life, with some protestors burning his effigy.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Newslaundry covered the phenomenon of \"Twitter trolling\" in its \"Criticles\", also characterizing Twitter trolls in its weekly podcasts.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Kerala troll community has founded to new malayalam troll slangs in Kerala, some troll events have gone viral and then its use of new words has given rise to new words. The main words is, Kummanadi, OMKV and Kiduve (Kidu)",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In July 2022, Japanese law banned \"online insults\", punishable by up to one year of imprisonment. Under this law, an \"insult\" is defined as \"publicly demeaning someone's social standing without referring to specific facts about them or a specific action.\"",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In the United Kingdom, contributions made to the Internet are covered by the Malicious Communications Act 1988 as well as Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, under which jail sentences were, until 2015, limited to a maximum of six months. In October 2014, the UK's Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, said that \"Internet trolls\" would face up to two years in jail, under measures in the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill that extend the maximum sentence and time limits for bringing prosecutions. The House of Lords Select Committee on Communications had earlier recommended against creating a specific offence of trolling. Sending messages which are \"grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character\" is an offence whether they are received by the intended recipient or not. Several people have been imprisoned in the UK for online harassment.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Trolls of the testimonial page of Georgia Varley faced no prosecution due to misunderstandings of the legal system in the wake of the term trolling being popularized. In October 2012, a twenty-year-old man was jailed for twelve weeks for posting offensive jokes to a support group for friends and family of April Jones.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "On 31 March 2010, NBC's Today ran a segment detailing the deaths of three separate adolescent girls and trolls' subsequent reactions to their deaths. Shortly after the suicide of high school student Alexis Pilkington, anonymous posters began performing organized psychological harassment across various message boards, referring to Pilkington as a \"suicidal slut\", and posting graphic images on her Facebook memorial page. The segment also included an exposé of a 2006 accident, in which an eighteen-year-old fatally crashed her father's car into a highway pylon; trolls emailed her grieving family the leaked pictures of her mutilated corpse (see Nikki Catsouras photographs controversy).",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In 2007, the media was fooled by trollers into believing that students were consuming a drug called Jenkem, purportedly made of human waste. A user named Pickwick on TOTSE posted pictures implying that he was inhaling this drug. Major news corporations such as Fox News Channel reported the story and urged parents to warn their children about this drug. Pickwick's pictures of Jenkem were fake and the pictures did not actually feature human waste.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In August 2012, the subject of trolling was featured on the HBO television series The Newsroom. The character Neal Sampat encounters harassing individuals online, particularly looking at 4chan, and he ends up choosing to post negative comments himself on an economics-related forum. The attempt by the character to infiltrate trolls' inner circles attracted debate from media reviewers critiquing the series.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In 2019, it was alleged that progressive Democrats had created a fake Facebook page which mis-represented the political stance of Roy Moore, a Republican candidate, in the attempt to alienate him from pro-business Republicans. It was also alleged that a \"false flag\" experiment attempted to link Moore to the use of Russian Twitter bots. The New York Times, when exposing the scam, quoted a New Knowledge report that boasted of its fabrications: \"We orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the [Roy] Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.'\"",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has faced criticism for the behavior of some of his supporters online, but has deflected such criticism, suggesting that \"Russians\" were impersonating people claiming to be \"Bernie Bro\" supporters. Twitter rejected Sanders' suggestion that Russia could be responsible for the bad reputation of his supporters. A Twitter spokesperson told CNBC: \"Using technology and human review in concert, we proactively monitor Twitter to identify attempts at platform manipulation and mitigate them. As is standard, if we have reasonable evidence of state-backed information operations, we'll disclose them following our thorough investigation to our public archive — the largest of its kind in the industry.\" Twitter had suspended 70 troll accounts that posted content in support of Michael Bloomberg's presidential campaign.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The 45th American president, Donald J. Trump, infamously used Twitter to denigrate his political opponents and spread misinformation for which he earned the moniker Troll-In-Chief.",
"title": "Media coverage and controversy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "So-called Gold Membership trolling originated in 2007 on 4chan boards, when users posted fake images claiming to offer upgraded 4chan account privileges; without a \"Gold\" account, one could not view certain content. This turned out to be a hoax designed to fool board members, especially newcomers. It was copied and became an Internet meme. In some cases, this type of troll has been used as a scam, most notably on Facebook, where fake Facebook Gold Account upgrade ads have proliferated in order to link users to dubious websites and other content.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The case of Zeran v. America Online, Inc. resulted primarily from trolling. Six days after the Oklahoma City bombing, anonymous users posted advertisements for shirts celebrating the bombing on AOL message boards, claiming that the shirts could be obtained by contacting Mr. Kenneth Zeran. The posts listed Zeran's address and home phone number. Zeran was subsequently harassed.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Anti-scientology protests by Anonymous, commonly known as Project Chanology, are sometimes labeled as \"trolling\" by media such as Wired, and the participants sometimes explicitly self-identify as \"trolls\".",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer orchestrates what it calls a \"Troll Army\", and has encouraged trolling of Jewish MP Luciana Berger and Muslim activist Mariam Veiszadeh.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In 2012, after feminist Anita Sarkeesian started a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of YouTube videos chronicling misogyny in video games, she received bomb threats at speaking engagements, doxxing threats, rape threats and an unwanted starring role in a video game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In 2018, the Russian government was accused of using sockpuppet armies consisting of 13 Russians and about three Russian companies including Concord Management to alter the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election. With the aim of ensuring Republican Candidate, Donald Trump emerges victorious, the sockpuppets allegedly pushed various criminal conspiracies, political rallies, and disparaging comments about Trump major opponent, Hillary Clinton on social media. Initially, only Twitter and Facebook detected the campaign but other reports suggest that YouTube, Tumblr, Google+, PayPal, and Instagram were used. Donald Trump denied plotting with the Russian government to run the propaganda and the Russian Government vehemently denied ties to the companies indicted.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 2020, the official Discord server and Twitch channel for the U.S. Army Esports team became a target of trolling, as people sent anti-U.S. Army messages, memes, and references to war crimes committed by the United States to both. When the team started banning users from their Twitch channel for trolling, they were accused of violating the First Amendment to the United States Constitution by the ACLU and Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. The team has since denied these allegations.",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In 2021, the Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte, author of Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself (2018), described the American far-right exclusively male organization Proud Boys, the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, and podcast host Joe Rogan as political commentators who have mastered \"the art of trolling as a far-right recruitment strategy\" by preying upon the American male insecurities, mediocrity, and fragility. In particular, regarding their respective discriminatory comments about transgender people, she remarks \"how crucial gender anxiety is to far-right recruitment\".",
"title": "Examples"
}
]
| In slang, a troll is a person who posts or makes inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages online or in real life, with the intent of provoking others into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception, thus acting as a bully or a provocateur. The behavior is typically for the troll's amusement, or to achieve a specific result such as disrupting a rival's online activities or purposefully causing confusion or harm to other people. In this context, both the noun and the verb forms of "troll" are frequently associated with Internet discourse. Media attention in recent years has equated trolling with online harassment. The Courier-Mail and The Today Show have used "troll" to mean "a person who defaces Internet tribute sites with the aim of causing grief to families". In addition, depictions of trolling have been included in popular fictional works, such as the HBO television program The Newsroom, in which a main character encounters harassing persons online and tries to infiltrate their circles by posting negative sexual comments. | 2001-10-01T08:38:36Z | 2023-12-15T18:51:06Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang) |
14,597 | Geography of India | India is situated north of the equator between 8°4' north (the mainland) to 37°6' north latitude and 68°7' east to 97°25' east longitude. It is the seventh-largest country in the world, with a total area of 3,287,263 square kilometres (1,269,219 sq mi). India measures 3,214 km (1,997 mi) from north to south and 2,933 km (1,822 mi) from east to west. It has a land frontier of 15,200 km (9,445 mi) and a coastline of 7,516.6 km (4,671 mi).
On the south, India projects into and is bounded by the Indian Ocean—in particular, by the Arabian Sea on the west, the Lakshadweep Sea to the southwest, the Bay of Bengal on the east, and the Indian Ocean proper to the south. The Palk Strait and Gulf of Mannar separate India from Sri Lanka to its immediate southeast, and the Maldives are some 125 kilometres (78 mi) to the south of India's Lakshadweep Islands across the Eight Degree Channel. India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, some 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) southeast of the mainland, share maritime borders with Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia. The southernmost tip of the Indian mainland (8°4′38″N, 77°31′56″E) is just south of Kanyakumari, while the southernmost point in India is Indira Point on Great Nicobar Island. The northernmost point which is under Indian administration is Indira Col, Siachen Glacier. India's territorial waters extend into the sea to a distance of 12 nautical miles (13.8 mi; 22.2 km) from the coast baseline. India has the 18th largest Exclusive Economic Zone of 2,305,143 km (890,021 sq mi).
The northern frontiers of India are defined largely by the Himalayan mountain range, where the country borders China, Bhutan, and Nepal. Its western border with Pakistan lies in the Karakoram and Western Himalayan ranges, Punjab Plains, the Thar Desert and the Rann of Kutch salt marshes. In the far northeast, the Chin Hills and Kachin Hills, deeply forested mountainous regions, separate India from Burma. On the east, its border with Bangladesh is largely defined by the Khasi Hills and Mizo Hills, and the watershed region of the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
The Ganges is the longest river originating in India. The Ganges–Brahmaputra system occupies most of northern, central, and eastern India, while the Deccan Plateau occupies most of southern India. Kangchenjunga, in the Indian state of Sikkim, is the highest point in India at 8,586 m (28,169 ft) and the world's third highest peak. The climate across India ranges from equatorial in the far south, to alpine and tundra in the upper regions of the Himalayas. Geologically, India lies on the Indian Plate, the northern part of the Indo-Australian Plate.
India is situated entirely on the Indian Plate, a major tectonic plate that was formed when it split off from the ancient continent Gondwanaland (ancient landmass, consisting of the southern part of the supercontinent of Pangea). The Indo-Australian plate is subdivided into the Indian and Australian plates. About 90 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous Period, the Indian Plate began moving north at about 15 cm/year (6 in/yr). About 50 to 55 million years ago, in the Eocene Epoch of the Cenozoic Era, the plate collided with Asia after covering a distance of 2,000 to 3,000 km (1,243 to 1,864 mi), having moved faster than any other known plate. In 2007, German geologists determined that the Indian Plate was able to move so quickly because it is only half as thick as the other plates which formerly constituted Gondwanaland. The collision with the Eurasian Plate along the modern border between India and Nepal formed the orogenic belt that created the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas. As of 2009, the Indian Plate is moving northeast at 5 cm/yr (2 in/yr), while the Eurasian Plate is moving north at only 2 cm/yr (0.8 in/yr). India is thus referred to as the "fastest continent". This is causing the Eurasian Plate to deform, and the Indian Plate to compress at a rate of 4 cm/yr (1.6 in/yr).
India is divided into 28 States (further subdivided into districts) and 8 union territories including the National capital territory (i.e., Delhi). India's borders run a total length of 15,200 km (9,400 mi).
Its borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh were delineated according to the Radcliffe Line, which was created in 1947 during Partition of India. Its western border with Pakistan extends up to 3,323 km (2,065 mi), dividing the Punjab region and running along the boundaries of the Thar Desert and the Rann of Kutch. This border runs along the Indian states and union territories of Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. Both nations delineated a Line of Control (LoC) to serve as the informal boundary between the Indian and Pakistan-administered areas of the Kashmir region. India claims the whole of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which includes areas now administered by Pakistan and China, which according to India are illegally occupied areas.
India's border with Bangladesh runs 4,096.70 km (2,545.57 mi). West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram are the states which share the border with Bangladesh. Before 2015, there were 92 enclaves of Bangladesh on Indian soil and 106 enclaves of India were on Bangladeshi soil. These enclaves were eventually exchanged in order to simplify the border. After the exchange, India lost roughly 40 km (10,000 acres) to Bangladesh.
The Line of Actual Control (LAC) is the effective border between India and the People's Republic of China. It traverses 4,057 km along the Indian states and union territories of Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. The border with Burma (Myanmar) extends up to 1,643 km (1,021 mi) along the eastern borders of India's northeastern states viz. Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram. Located amidst the Himalayan range, India's border with Bhutan runs 699 km (434 mi). Sikkim, West Bengal, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh are the states which share the border with Bhutan. The border with Nepal runs 1,751 km (1,088 mi) along the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India. Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim are the states which share the border with Nepal. The Siliguri Corridor, narrowed sharply by the borders of Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh, connects peninsular India with the northeastern states.
Cratons are a specific kind of continental crust made up of a top layer called platform and an older layer called basement. A shield is the part of a craton where basement rock crops out of the ground, and it is relatively the older and more stable section, unaffected by plate tectonics.
The Indian Craton can be divided into five major cratons as such:
India can be divided into six physiographic regions. They are:
An arc of mountains consisting of the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, and Patkai ranges define the northern frontiers of the Indian subcontinent. These were formed by the ongoing tectonic plates collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates. The mountains in these ranges include some of the world's tallest mountains which act as a barrier to cold polar winds. They also facilitate the monsoon winds which in turn influence the climate in India. Rivers originating in these mountains flow through the fertile Indo–Gangetic plains. These mountains form the boundary between two biogeographic realms: the temperate Palearctic realm that covers most of Eurasia, and the tropical and subtropical Indomalayan realm which includes South Asia, Southeast Asia and Indonesia.
The Himalayas in India extend from Ladakh in the north to the state of Arunachal Pradesh in the east. Several Himalayan peaks in India rise above 7,000 m (23,000 ft), including Kanchenjunga (8,598 m (28,209 ft)) on the Sikkim–Nepal border, and Nanda Devi (7,816 m (25,643 ft)) in the Garhwal Himalayas of Uttarakhand. The snow line ranges between 6,000 m (20,000 ft) in Sikkim to around 3,000 m (9,800 ft) in Ladakh. The Himalayas act as a barrier to the frigid katabatic winds flowing down from Central Asia. Thus, northern India is kept warm or only mildly cooled during winter; in summer, the same phenomenon makes India relatively hot.
The main features of Indian Craton are:
The Indo-Gangetic plains, also known as the Great Plains are large alluvial plains dominated by three main rivers, the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra. They run parallel to the Himalayas, from Jammu and Kashmir in the west to Assam in the east, and drain most of northern and eastern India. The plains encompass an area of 700,000 km (270,000 sq mi). The major rivers in this region are the Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra along with their main tributaries—Yamuna, Chambal, Gomti, Ghaghara, Kosi, Sutlej, Ravi, Beas, Chenab, and Tista—as well as the rivers of the Ganges Delta, such as the Meghna.
The great plains are sometimes classified into four divisions:
The Indo-Gangetic belt is the world's most extensive expanse of uninterrupted alluvium formed by the deposition of silt by the numerous rivers. The plains are flat making it conducive for irrigation through canals. The area is also rich in ground water sources. The plains are one of the world's most intensely farmed areas. The main crops grown are rice and wheat, which are grown in rotation. Other important crops grown in the region include maize, sugarcane and cotton. The Indo-Gangetic plains rank among the world's most densely populated areas.
The Thar Desert (also known as the deserts) is by some calculations the world's seventh largest desert, by some others the tenth. It forms a significant portion of western India and covers an area of 200,000 to 238,700 km (77,200 to 92,200 sq mi). The desert continues into Pakistan as the Cholistan Desert. Most of the Thar Desert is situated in Rajasthan, covering 61% of its geographic area.
About 10 percent of this region consists of sand dunes, and the remaining 90 percent consist of craggy rock forms, compacted salt-lake bottoms, and interdunal and fixed dune areas. Annual temperatures can range from 0 °C (32 °F) in the winter to over 50 °C (122 °F) during the summer. Most of the rainfall received in this region is associated with the short July–September southwest monsoon that brings 100 to 500 mm (3.9 to 19.7 in) of precipitation. Water is scarce and occurs at great depths, ranging from 30 to 120 metres (98 to 394 ft) below the ground level. Rainfall is precarious and erratic, ranging from below 120 mm (4.7 in) in the extreme west to 375 mm (14.8 in) eastward. The only river in this region is Luni. The soils of the arid region are generally sandy to sandy-loam in texture. The consistency and depth vary as per the topographical features. The low-lying loams are heavier may have a hard pan of clay, calcium carbonate or gypsum.
In western India, the Kutch region in Gujarat and Koyna in Maharashtra are classified as a Zone IV region (high risk) for earthquakes. The Kutch city of Bhuj was the epicentre of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, which claimed the lives of more than 1,337 people and injured 166,836 while destroying or damaging near a million homes. The 1993 Latur earthquake in Maharashtra killed 7,928 people and injured 30,000. Other areas have a moderate to low risk of an earthquake occurring.
The Eastern Coastal Plain is a wide stretch of land lying between the Eastern Ghats and the oceanic boundary of India. It stretches from Tamil Nadu in the south to West Bengal in the east. The Mahanadi, Godavari, Kaveri, and Krishna rivers drain these plains. The temperature in the coastal regions often exceeds 30 °C (86 °F), and is coupled with high levels of humidity. The region receives both the northeast monsoon and southwest monsoon rains. The southwest monsoon splits into two branches, the Bay of Bengal branch and the Arabian Sea branch. The Bay of Bengal branch moves northwards crossing northeast India in early June. The Arabian Sea branch moves northwards and discharges much of its rain on the windward side of Western Ghats. Annual rainfall in this region averages between 1,000 and 3,000 mm (39 and 118 in). The width of the plains varies between 100 and 130 km (62 and 81 mi). The plains are divided into six regions—the Mahanadi delta, the southern Andhra Pradesh plain, the Krishna-Godavari deltas, the Kanyakumari coast, the Coromandel Coast, and sandy coastal.
The Western Coastal Plain is a narrow strip of land sandwiched between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, ranging from 50 to 100 km (31 to 62 mi) in width. It extends from Gujarat in the north and extends through Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, and Kerala. Numerous rivers and backwaters inundate the region. Mostly originating in the Western Ghats, the rivers are fast-flowing, usually perennial, and empty into estuaries. Major rivers flowing into the sea are the Tapti, Narmada, Mandovi and Zuari. Vegetation is mostly deciduous, but the Malabar Coast moist forests constitute a unique ecoregion. The Western Coastal Plain can be divided into two parts, the Konkan and the Malabar Coast.
The word ghati (Hindi: घाटी) means valley. In Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Kannada, ghat is a term used to identify a difficult passage over a mountain. One such passage is the Bhor Ghat that connects the towns Khopoli and Khandala, on NH 4 about 80 kilometres (50 mi) north of Mumbai. Charmadi Ghat of Karnataka is also notable. In many cases, the term is used to refer to a mountain range itself, as in the Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats. 'Ghattam' in Malayalam also refers to mountain ranges when used with the name of the ranges being addressed (e.g., paschima ghattam for Western Ghats), while the passage road would be called a 'churam'. Eastern Ghats on the east coast of India and Western Ghats on the west coast of India are the largest ghats in pensular India.
Western Ghats, also known as Sahyadri (Benevolent Mountains), is a mountain range covers an area of 140,000 km in a stretch of 1,600 km parallel to the western coast of the Indian peninsula, traverse the States of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the eight "hottest hot-spots" of biological diversity in the world. It is sometimes called the Great Escarpment of India. It is a biodiversity hotspot that contains a large proportion of the country's flora and fauna; many of which are only found here and nowhere else in the world. According to UNESCO, Western Ghats are older than Himalayan mountains. It also influences Indian monsoon weather patterns by intercepting the rain-laden monsoon winds that sweep in from the south-west during late summer. The range runs north to south along the western edge of the Deccan Plateau, and separates the plateau from a narrow coastal plain, called Konkan, along the Arabian Sea. A total of thirty-nine properties including national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and reserve forests were designated as world heritage sites - twenty in Kerala, ten in Karnataka, five in Tamil Nadu and four in Maharashtra. Ghati people, literally means the people of hills or ghats (valleys), is an exonym used for the marathi people specially those from the villages in Western Ghats, often in pejorative terms.
The Eastern Ghats are a discontinuous range of mountains along India's eastern coast. The Eastern Ghats run from the northern Odisha through Andhra Pradesh to Tamil Nadu in the south passing some parts of Karnataka and in the Wayanad region of Kerala. They are eroded and cut through by four major rivers of peninsular India, viz. Godavari, Mahanadi, Krishna, and Kaveri. The mountain ranges run parallel to the Bay of Bengal. The Deccan Plateau lies to the west of the range, between the Eastern Ghats and the Western Ghats. The coastal plains, including the Coromandel Coast region, lie between the Eastern Ghats and the Bay of Bengal. The Eastern Ghats are not as high as the Western Ghats. The Eastern Ghats are older than the Western Ghats, and have a complex geologic history related to the assembly and breakup of the ancient supercontinent of Rodinia and the assembly of the Gondwana supercontinent. The Eastern Ghats are made up of charnockites, granite gneiss, khondalites, metamorphic gneisses and quartzite rock formations. The structure of the Eastern Ghats includes thrusts and strike-slip faults all along its range. Limestone, bauxite and iron ore are found in the Eastern Ghats hill ranges.
The Lakshadweep and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are India's two major island formations and are classified as union territories.
The Lakshadweep Islands lie 200 to 440 km (120 to 270 mi) off the coast of Kerala in the Arabian sea with an area of 32 km (12 sq mi). They consist of twelve atolls, three reefs, and five submerged banks, with a total of about 35 islands and islets.
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are located between 6° and 14° north latitude and 92° and 94° east longitude. They consist of 572 islands, lying in the Bay of Bengal near the Myanmar coast running in a north–south axis for approximately 910 km. They are located 1,255 km (780 mi) from Kolkata (Calcutta) and 193 km (120 mi) from Cape Negrais in Burma. The territory consists of two island groups, the Andaman Islands and the Nicobar Islands. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands consist of 572 islands which run in a north–south axis for around 910 km. The Andaman group has 325 islands which cover an area of 6,170 km (2,382 sq mi) while the Nicobar group has only 247 islands with an area of 1,765 km2 (681 sq mi). India's only active volcano, Barren Island is situated here. It last erupted in 2017. The Narcondum is a dormant volcano and there is a mud volcano at Baratang. Indira Point, India's southernmost land point, is situated in the Nicobar islands at 6°45’10″N and 93°49’36″E, and lies just 189 km (117 mi) from the Indonesian island of Sumatra, to the southeast. The highest point is Mount Thullier at 642 m (2,106 ft).
Other significant islands in India include Diu, a former Portuguese colony; Majuli, a river island of the Brahmaputra; Elephanta in Bombay Harbour; and Sriharikota, a barrier island in Andhra Pradesh. Salsette Island is India's most populous island on which the city of Mumbai (Bombay) is located. Forty-two islands in the Gulf of Kutch constitute the Marine National Park.
India has around 14,500 km of inland navigable waterways. There are twelve rivers which are classified as major rivers, with the total catchment area exceeding 2,528,000 km (976,000 sq mi). All major rivers of India originate from one of the three main watersheds:
The Himalayan river networks are snow-fed and have a perennial supply throughout the year. The other two river systems are dependent on the monsoons and shrink into rivulets during the dry season. The Himalayan rivers that flow westward into Punjab are the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej.
The Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghana system has the largest catchment area of about 1,600,000 km (620,000 sq mi). The Ganges Basin alone has a catchment of about 1,100,000 km (420,000 sq mi). The Ganges originates from the Gangotri Glacier in Uttarakhand. It flows southeast, draining into the Bay of Bengal. (The Yamuna and Gomti rivers also arise in the western Himalayas and join the Ganges in the plains. The Brahmaputra originates in Tibet, China, where it is known as the Yarlung Tsangpo River) (or "Tsangpo"). It enters India in the far-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, then flows west through Assam. The Brahmaputra merges with the Ganges in Bangladesh, where it is known as the Jamuna River.
The Chambal, another tributary of the Ganges, via the Yamuna, originates from the Vindhya-Satpura watershed. The river flows eastward. Westward-flowing rivers from this watershed are the Narmada and Tapi, which drain into the Arabian Sea in Gujarat. The river network that flows from east to west constitutes 10% of the total outflow.
(The Western Ghats are the source of all Deccan rivers, which include the through Godavari River, Krishna River and Kaveri River, all draining into the Bay of Bengal. These rivers constitute 20% of India's total outflow).
The heavy southwest monsoon rains cause the Brahmaputra and other rivers to distend their banks, often flooding surrounding areas. Though they provide rice paddy farmers with a largely dependable source of natural irrigation and fertilisation, such floods have killed thousands of people and tend to cause displacements of people in such areas.
Major gulfs include the Gulf of Cambay, Gulf of Kutch, and the Gulf of Mannar. Straits include the Palk Strait, which separates India from Sri Lanka; the Ten Degree Channel, which separates the Andamans from the Nicobar Islands; and the Eight Degree Channel, which separates the Laccadive and Amindivi Islands from the Minicoy Island to the south. Important capes include the Kanyakumari (formerly called Cape Comorin), the southern tip of mainland India; Indira Point, the southernmost point in India (on Great Nicobar Island); Rama's Bridge, and Point Calimere. The Arabian Sea lies to the west of India, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean lie to the east and south, respectively. Smaller seas include the Laccadive Sea and the Andaman Sea. There are four coral reefs in India, located in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Gulf of Mannar, Lakshadweep, and the Gulf of Kutch. Important lakes include Sambhar Lake, the country's largest saltwater lake in Rajasthan, Vembanad Lake in Kerala, Kolleru Lake in Andhra Pradesh, Loktak Lake in Manipur, Dal Lake in Kashmir, Chilka Lake (lagoon lake) in Odisha, and Sasthamkotta Lake in Kerala.
India's wetland ecosystem is widely distributed from the cold and arid located in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, and those with the wet and humid climate of peninsular India. Most of the wetlands are directly or indirectly linked to river networks. The Indian government has identified a total of 71 wetlands for conservation and are part of sanctuaries and national parks. Mangrove forests are present all along the Indian coastline in sheltered estuaries, creeks, backwaters, salt marshes and mudflats. The mangrove area covers a total of 4,461 km (1,722 sq mi), which comprises 7% of the world's total mangrove cover. Prominent mangrove covers are located in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Sundarbans delta, the Gulf of Kutch and the deltas of the Mahanadi, Godavari and Krishna rivers. Parts of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala also have large mangrove covers.
The Sundarbans delta is home to the largest mangrove forest in the world. It lies at the mouth of the Ganges and spreads across areas of Bangladesh and West Bengal. The Sundarbans is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but is identified separately as the Sundarbans (Bangladesh) and the Sundarbans National Park (India). The Sundarbans are intersected by a complex network of tidal waterways, mudflats and small islands of salt-tolerant mangrove forests. The area is known for its diverse fauna, being home to a large variety of species of birds, spotted deer, crocodiles and snakes. Its most famous inhabitant is the Bengal tiger. It is estimated that there are now 400 Bengal tigers and about 30,000 spotted deer in the area.
The Rann of Kutch is a marshy region located in northwestern Gujarat and the bordering Sindh province of Pakistan. It occupies a total area of 27,900 km (10,800 sq mi). The region was originally a part of the Arabian Sea. Geologic forces such as earthquakes resulted in the damming up of the region, turning it into a large saltwater lagoon. This area gradually filled with silt thus turning it into a seasonal salt marsh. During the monsoons, the area turn into a shallow marsh, often flooding to knee-depth. After the monsoons, the region turns dry and becomes parched.
India's total renewable water resources are estimated at 1,907.8 km a year. Its annual supply of usable and replenshable groundwater amounts to 350 billion cubic metres. Only 35% of groundwater resources are being utilised. About 44 million tonnes of cargo is moved annually through the country's major rivers and waterways. Groundwater supplies 40% of water in India's irrigation canals. 56% of the land is arable and used for agriculture. Black soils are moisture-retentive and are preferred for dry farming and growing cotton, linseed, etc. Forest soils are used for tea and coffee plantations. Red soils have a wide diffusion of iron content.
Most of India's estimated 5.4 billion barrels (860,000,000 m) in oil reserves are located in the Mumbai High, upper Assam, Cambay, the Krishna-Godavari and Cauvery basins. India possesses about seventeen trillion cubic feet of natural gas in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Odisha. Uranium is mined in Andhra Pradesh. India has 400 medium-to-high enthalpy thermal springs for producing geothermal energy in seven "provinces"—the Himalayas, Sohana, Cambay, the Narmada-Tapti delta, the Godavari delta and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (specifically the volcanic Barren Island.)
India is the world's biggest producer of mica blocks and mica splittings. India ranks second amongst the world's largest producers of barite and chromite. The Pleistocene system is rich in minerals. India is the third-largest coal producer in the world and ranks fourth in the production of iron ore. It is the fifth-largest producer of bauxite, second largest of crude steel as of February 2018 replacing Japan, the seventh-largest of manganese ore and the eighth-largest of aluminium. India has significant sources of titanium ore, diamonds and limestone. India possesses 24% of the world's known and economically viable thorium, which is mined along shores of Kerala. Gold had been mined in the now-defunct Kolar Gold Fields in Karnataka.
Based on the Köppen system, India hosts six major climatic subtypes, ranging from arid desert in the west, alpine tundra and glaciers in the north, and humid tropical regions supporting rainforests in the southwest and the island territories. The nation has four seasons: winter (January–February), summer (March–May), a monsoon (rainy) season (June–September) and a post-monsoon period (October–December).
The Himalayas act as a barrier to the frigid katabatic winds flowing down from Central Asia. Thus, northern India is kept warm or only mildly cooled during winter; in summer, the same phenomenon makes India relatively hot. Although the Tropic of Cancer—the boundary between the tropics and subtropics—passes through the middle of India, the whole country is considered to be tropical.
Summer lasts between March and June in most parts of India. Temperatures can exceed 40 °C (104 °F) during the day. The coastal regions exceed 30 °C (86 °F) coupled with high levels of humidity. In the Thar desert area temperatures can exceed 45 °C (113 °F). The rain-bearing monsoon clouds are attracted to the low-pressure system created by the Thar Desert. The southwest monsoon splits into two arms, the Bay of Bengal arm and the Arabian Sea arm. The Bay of Bengal arm moves northwards crossing northeast India in early June. The Arabian Sea arm moves northwards and deposits much of its rain on the windward side of Western Ghats. Winters in peninsula India see mild to warm days and cool nights. Further north the temperature is cooler. Temperatures in some parts of the Indian plains sometimes fall below freezing. Most of northern India is plagued by fog during this season. The highest temperature recorded in India was 51 °C (124 °F) in Phalodi, Rajasthan. . And the lowest was −60 °C (−76 °F) in Dras, Jammu and Kashmir.
India's geological features are classified based on their era of formation. The Precambrian formations of Cudappah and Vindhyan systems are spread out over the eastern and southern states. A small part of this period is spread over western and central India. The Paleozoic formations from the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian system are found in the Western Himalaya region in Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. The Mesozoic Deccan Traps formation is seen over most of the northern Deccan; they are believed to be the result of sub-aerial volcanic activity. The Trap soil is black in colour and conducive to agriculture. The Carboniferous system, Permian System and Triassic systems are seen in the western Himalayas. The Jurassic system is seen in the western Himalayas and Rajasthan.
Tertiary imprints are seen in parts of Manipur, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and along the Himalayan belt. The Cretaceous system is seen in central India in the Vindhyas and part of the Indo-Gangetic plains. The Gondwana system is seen in the Narmada River area in the Vindhyas and Satpuras. The Eocene system is seen in the western Himalayas and Assam. Oligocene formations are seen in Kutch and Assam. The Pleistocene system is found over central India. The Andaman and Nicobar Island are thought to have been formed in this era by volcanoes. The Himalayas were formed by the convergence and deformation of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian Plates. Their continued convergence raises the height of the Himalayas by one centimetre each year.
Soils in India can be classified into eight categories: alluvial, black, red, laterite, forest, arid and desert, saline and alkaline and peaty and organic soils. Alluvial soil constitute the largest soil group in India, constituting 80% of the total land surface. It is derived from the deposition of silt carried by rivers and are found in the Great Northern plains from Punjab to the Assam valley. Alluvial soil are generally fertile but they lack nitrogen and tend to be phosphoric. National Disaster Management Authority says that 60% of Indian landmass is prone to earthquakes and 8% susceptible to cyclone risks.
Black soil are well developed in the Deccan lava region of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh. These contain high percentage of clay and are moisture retentive. Red soils are found in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka plateau, Andhra plateau, Chota Nagpur plateau and the Aravallis. These are deficient in nitrogen, phosphorus and humus. Laterite soils are formed in tropical regions with heavy rainfall. Heavy rainfall results in leaching out all soluble material of top layer of soil. These are generally found in Western ghats, Eastern ghats and hilly areas of northeastern states that receive heavy rainfall. Forest soils occur on the slopes of mountains and hills in Himalayas, Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats. These generally consist of large amounts of dead leaves and other organic matter called humus. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "India is situated north of the equator between 8°4' north (the mainland) to 37°6' north latitude and 68°7' east to 97°25' east longitude. It is the seventh-largest country in the world, with a total area of 3,287,263 square kilometres (1,269,219 sq mi). India measures 3,214 km (1,997 mi) from north to south and 2,933 km (1,822 mi) from east to west. It has a land frontier of 15,200 km (9,445 mi) and a coastline of 7,516.6 km (4,671 mi).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "On the south, India projects into and is bounded by the Indian Ocean—in particular, by the Arabian Sea on the west, the Lakshadweep Sea to the southwest, the Bay of Bengal on the east, and the Indian Ocean proper to the south. The Palk Strait and Gulf of Mannar separate India from Sri Lanka to its immediate southeast, and the Maldives are some 125 kilometres (78 mi) to the south of India's Lakshadweep Islands across the Eight Degree Channel. India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, some 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) southeast of the mainland, share maritime borders with Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia. The southernmost tip of the Indian mainland (8°4′38″N, 77°31′56″E) is just south of Kanyakumari, while the southernmost point in India is Indira Point on Great Nicobar Island. The northernmost point which is under Indian administration is Indira Col, Siachen Glacier. India's territorial waters extend into the sea to a distance of 12 nautical miles (13.8 mi; 22.2 km) from the coast baseline. India has the 18th largest Exclusive Economic Zone of 2,305,143 km (890,021 sq mi).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The northern frontiers of India are defined largely by the Himalayan mountain range, where the country borders China, Bhutan, and Nepal. Its western border with Pakistan lies in the Karakoram and Western Himalayan ranges, Punjab Plains, the Thar Desert and the Rann of Kutch salt marshes. In the far northeast, the Chin Hills and Kachin Hills, deeply forested mountainous regions, separate India from Burma. On the east, its border with Bangladesh is largely defined by the Khasi Hills and Mizo Hills, and the watershed region of the Indo-Gangetic Plain.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Ganges is the longest river originating in India. The Ganges–Brahmaputra system occupies most of northern, central, and eastern India, while the Deccan Plateau occupies most of southern India. Kangchenjunga, in the Indian state of Sikkim, is the highest point in India at 8,586 m (28,169 ft) and the world's third highest peak. The climate across India ranges from equatorial in the far south, to alpine and tundra in the upper regions of the Himalayas. Geologically, India lies on the Indian Plate, the northern part of the Indo-Australian Plate.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "India is situated entirely on the Indian Plate, a major tectonic plate that was formed when it split off from the ancient continent Gondwanaland (ancient landmass, consisting of the southern part of the supercontinent of Pangea). The Indo-Australian plate is subdivided into the Indian and Australian plates. About 90 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous Period, the Indian Plate began moving north at about 15 cm/year (6 in/yr). About 50 to 55 million years ago, in the Eocene Epoch of the Cenozoic Era, the plate collided with Asia after covering a distance of 2,000 to 3,000 km (1,243 to 1,864 mi), having moved faster than any other known plate. In 2007, German geologists determined that the Indian Plate was able to move so quickly because it is only half as thick as the other plates which formerly constituted Gondwanaland. The collision with the Eurasian Plate along the modern border between India and Nepal formed the orogenic belt that created the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas. As of 2009, the Indian Plate is moving northeast at 5 cm/yr (2 in/yr), while the Eurasian Plate is moving north at only 2 cm/yr (0.8 in/yr). India is thus referred to as the \"fastest continent\". This is causing the Eurasian Plate to deform, and the Indian Plate to compress at a rate of 4 cm/yr (1.6 in/yr).",
"title": "Geological development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "India is divided into 28 States (further subdivided into districts) and 8 union territories including the National capital territory (i.e., Delhi). India's borders run a total length of 15,200 km (9,400 mi).",
"title": "Political geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Its borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh were delineated according to the Radcliffe Line, which was created in 1947 during Partition of India. Its western border with Pakistan extends up to 3,323 km (2,065 mi), dividing the Punjab region and running along the boundaries of the Thar Desert and the Rann of Kutch. This border runs along the Indian states and union territories of Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. Both nations delineated a Line of Control (LoC) to serve as the informal boundary between the Indian and Pakistan-administered areas of the Kashmir region. India claims the whole of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which includes areas now administered by Pakistan and China, which according to India are illegally occupied areas.",
"title": "Political geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "India's border with Bangladesh runs 4,096.70 km (2,545.57 mi). West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram are the states which share the border with Bangladesh. Before 2015, there were 92 enclaves of Bangladesh on Indian soil and 106 enclaves of India were on Bangladeshi soil. These enclaves were eventually exchanged in order to simplify the border. After the exchange, India lost roughly 40 km (10,000 acres) to Bangladesh.",
"title": "Political geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Line of Actual Control (LAC) is the effective border between India and the People's Republic of China. It traverses 4,057 km along the Indian states and union territories of Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. The border with Burma (Myanmar) extends up to 1,643 km (1,021 mi) along the eastern borders of India's northeastern states viz. Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram. Located amidst the Himalayan range, India's border with Bhutan runs 699 km (434 mi). Sikkim, West Bengal, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh are the states which share the border with Bhutan. The border with Nepal runs 1,751 km (1,088 mi) along the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India. Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim are the states which share the border with Nepal. The Siliguri Corridor, narrowed sharply by the borders of Bhutan, Nepal and Bangladesh, connects peninsular India with the northeastern states.",
"title": "Political geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Cratons are a specific kind of continental crust made up of a top layer called platform and an older layer called basement. A shield is the part of a craton where basement rock crops out of the ground, and it is relatively the older and more stable section, unaffected by plate tectonics.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Indian Craton can be divided into five major cratons as such:",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "India can be divided into six physiographic regions. They are:",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "An arc of mountains consisting of the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, and Patkai ranges define the northern frontiers of the Indian subcontinent. These were formed by the ongoing tectonic plates collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates. The mountains in these ranges include some of the world's tallest mountains which act as a barrier to cold polar winds. They also facilitate the monsoon winds which in turn influence the climate in India. Rivers originating in these mountains flow through the fertile Indo–Gangetic plains. These mountains form the boundary between two biogeographic realms: the temperate Palearctic realm that covers most of Eurasia, and the tropical and subtropical Indomalayan realm which includes South Asia, Southeast Asia and Indonesia.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Himalayas in India extend from Ladakh in the north to the state of Arunachal Pradesh in the east. Several Himalayan peaks in India rise above 7,000 m (23,000 ft), including Kanchenjunga (8,598 m (28,209 ft)) on the Sikkim–Nepal border, and Nanda Devi (7,816 m (25,643 ft)) in the Garhwal Himalayas of Uttarakhand. The snow line ranges between 6,000 m (20,000 ft) in Sikkim to around 3,000 m (9,800 ft) in Ladakh. The Himalayas act as a barrier to the frigid katabatic winds flowing down from Central Asia. Thus, northern India is kept warm or only mildly cooled during winter; in summer, the same phenomenon makes India relatively hot.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The main features of Indian Craton are:",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Indo-Gangetic plains, also known as the Great Plains are large alluvial plains dominated by three main rivers, the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra. They run parallel to the Himalayas, from Jammu and Kashmir in the west to Assam in the east, and drain most of northern and eastern India. The plains encompass an area of 700,000 km (270,000 sq mi). The major rivers in this region are the Ganges, Indus, and Brahmaputra along with their main tributaries—Yamuna, Chambal, Gomti, Ghaghara, Kosi, Sutlej, Ravi, Beas, Chenab, and Tista—as well as the rivers of the Ganges Delta, such as the Meghna.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The great plains are sometimes classified into four divisions:",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Indo-Gangetic belt is the world's most extensive expanse of uninterrupted alluvium formed by the deposition of silt by the numerous rivers. The plains are flat making it conducive for irrigation through canals. The area is also rich in ground water sources. The plains are one of the world's most intensely farmed areas. The main crops grown are rice and wheat, which are grown in rotation. Other important crops grown in the region include maize, sugarcane and cotton. The Indo-Gangetic plains rank among the world's most densely populated areas.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Thar Desert (also known as the deserts) is by some calculations the world's seventh largest desert, by some others the tenth. It forms a significant portion of western India and covers an area of 200,000 to 238,700 km (77,200 to 92,200 sq mi). The desert continues into Pakistan as the Cholistan Desert. Most of the Thar Desert is situated in Rajasthan, covering 61% of its geographic area.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "About 10 percent of this region consists of sand dunes, and the remaining 90 percent consist of craggy rock forms, compacted salt-lake bottoms, and interdunal and fixed dune areas. Annual temperatures can range from 0 °C (32 °F) in the winter to over 50 °C (122 °F) during the summer. Most of the rainfall received in this region is associated with the short July–September southwest monsoon that brings 100 to 500 mm (3.9 to 19.7 in) of precipitation. Water is scarce and occurs at great depths, ranging from 30 to 120 metres (98 to 394 ft) below the ground level. Rainfall is precarious and erratic, ranging from below 120 mm (4.7 in) in the extreme west to 375 mm (14.8 in) eastward. The only river in this region is Luni. The soils of the arid region are generally sandy to sandy-loam in texture. The consistency and depth vary as per the topographical features. The low-lying loams are heavier may have a hard pan of clay, calcium carbonate or gypsum.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In western India, the Kutch region in Gujarat and Koyna in Maharashtra are classified as a Zone IV region (high risk) for earthquakes. The Kutch city of Bhuj was the epicentre of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, which claimed the lives of more than 1,337 people and injured 166,836 while destroying or damaging near a million homes. The 1993 Latur earthquake in Maharashtra killed 7,928 people and injured 30,000. Other areas have a moderate to low risk of an earthquake occurring.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Eastern Coastal Plain is a wide stretch of land lying between the Eastern Ghats and the oceanic boundary of India. It stretches from Tamil Nadu in the south to West Bengal in the east. The Mahanadi, Godavari, Kaveri, and Krishna rivers drain these plains. The temperature in the coastal regions often exceeds 30 °C (86 °F), and is coupled with high levels of humidity. The region receives both the northeast monsoon and southwest monsoon rains. The southwest monsoon splits into two branches, the Bay of Bengal branch and the Arabian Sea branch. The Bay of Bengal branch moves northwards crossing northeast India in early June. The Arabian Sea branch moves northwards and discharges much of its rain on the windward side of Western Ghats. Annual rainfall in this region averages between 1,000 and 3,000 mm (39 and 118 in). The width of the plains varies between 100 and 130 km (62 and 81 mi). The plains are divided into six regions—the Mahanadi delta, the southern Andhra Pradesh plain, the Krishna-Godavari deltas, the Kanyakumari coast, the Coromandel Coast, and sandy coastal.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Western Coastal Plain is a narrow strip of land sandwiched between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, ranging from 50 to 100 km (31 to 62 mi) in width. It extends from Gujarat in the north and extends through Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, and Kerala. Numerous rivers and backwaters inundate the region. Mostly originating in the Western Ghats, the rivers are fast-flowing, usually perennial, and empty into estuaries. Major rivers flowing into the sea are the Tapti, Narmada, Mandovi and Zuari. Vegetation is mostly deciduous, but the Malabar Coast moist forests constitute a unique ecoregion. The Western Coastal Plain can be divided into two parts, the Konkan and the Malabar Coast.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The word ghati (Hindi: घाटी) means valley. In Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Kannada, ghat is a term used to identify a difficult passage over a mountain. One such passage is the Bhor Ghat that connects the towns Khopoli and Khandala, on NH 4 about 80 kilometres (50 mi) north of Mumbai. Charmadi Ghat of Karnataka is also notable. In many cases, the term is used to refer to a mountain range itself, as in the Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats. 'Ghattam' in Malayalam also refers to mountain ranges when used with the name of the ranges being addressed (e.g., paschima ghattam for Western Ghats), while the passage road would be called a 'churam'. Eastern Ghats on the east coast of India and Western Ghats on the west coast of India are the largest ghats in pensular India.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Western Ghats, also known as Sahyadri (Benevolent Mountains), is a mountain range covers an area of 140,000 km in a stretch of 1,600 km parallel to the western coast of the Indian peninsula, traverse the States of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the eight \"hottest hot-spots\" of biological diversity in the world. It is sometimes called the Great Escarpment of India. It is a biodiversity hotspot that contains a large proportion of the country's flora and fauna; many of which are only found here and nowhere else in the world. According to UNESCO, Western Ghats are older than Himalayan mountains. It also influences Indian monsoon weather patterns by intercepting the rain-laden monsoon winds that sweep in from the south-west during late summer. The range runs north to south along the western edge of the Deccan Plateau, and separates the plateau from a narrow coastal plain, called Konkan, along the Arabian Sea. A total of thirty-nine properties including national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and reserve forests were designated as world heritage sites - twenty in Kerala, ten in Karnataka, five in Tamil Nadu and four in Maharashtra. Ghati people, literally means the people of hills or ghats (valleys), is an exonym used for the marathi people specially those from the villages in Western Ghats, often in pejorative terms.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Eastern Ghats are a discontinuous range of mountains along India's eastern coast. The Eastern Ghats run from the northern Odisha through Andhra Pradesh to Tamil Nadu in the south passing some parts of Karnataka and in the Wayanad region of Kerala. They are eroded and cut through by four major rivers of peninsular India, viz. Godavari, Mahanadi, Krishna, and Kaveri. The mountain ranges run parallel to the Bay of Bengal. The Deccan Plateau lies to the west of the range, between the Eastern Ghats and the Western Ghats. The coastal plains, including the Coromandel Coast region, lie between the Eastern Ghats and the Bay of Bengal. The Eastern Ghats are not as high as the Western Ghats. The Eastern Ghats are older than the Western Ghats, and have a complex geologic history related to the assembly and breakup of the ancient supercontinent of Rodinia and the assembly of the Gondwana supercontinent. The Eastern Ghats are made up of charnockites, granite gneiss, khondalites, metamorphic gneisses and quartzite rock formations. The structure of the Eastern Ghats includes thrusts and strike-slip faults all along its range. Limestone, bauxite and iron ore are found in the Eastern Ghats hill ranges.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Lakshadweep and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are India's two major island formations and are classified as union territories.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Lakshadweep Islands lie 200 to 440 km (120 to 270 mi) off the coast of Kerala in the Arabian sea with an area of 32 km (12 sq mi). They consist of twelve atolls, three reefs, and five submerged banks, with a total of about 35 islands and islets.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are located between 6° and 14° north latitude and 92° and 94° east longitude. They consist of 572 islands, lying in the Bay of Bengal near the Myanmar coast running in a north–south axis for approximately 910 km. They are located 1,255 km (780 mi) from Kolkata (Calcutta) and 193 km (120 mi) from Cape Negrais in Burma. The territory consists of two island groups, the Andaman Islands and the Nicobar Islands. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands consist of 572 islands which run in a north–south axis for around 910 km. The Andaman group has 325 islands which cover an area of 6,170 km (2,382 sq mi) while the Nicobar group has only 247 islands with an area of 1,765 km2 (681 sq mi). India's only active volcano, Barren Island is situated here. It last erupted in 2017. The Narcondum is a dormant volcano and there is a mud volcano at Baratang. Indira Point, India's southernmost land point, is situated in the Nicobar islands at 6°45’10″N and 93°49’36″E, and lies just 189 km (117 mi) from the Indonesian island of Sumatra, to the southeast. The highest point is Mount Thullier at 642 m (2,106 ft).",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Other significant islands in India include Diu, a former Portuguese colony; Majuli, a river island of the Brahmaputra; Elephanta in Bombay Harbour; and Sriharikota, a barrier island in Andhra Pradesh. Salsette Island is India's most populous island on which the city of Mumbai (Bombay) is located. Forty-two islands in the Gulf of Kutch constitute the Marine National Park.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "India has around 14,500 km of inland navigable waterways. There are twelve rivers which are classified as major rivers, with the total catchment area exceeding 2,528,000 km (976,000 sq mi). All major rivers of India originate from one of the three main watersheds:",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The Himalayan river networks are snow-fed and have a perennial supply throughout the year. The other two river systems are dependent on the monsoons and shrink into rivulets during the dry season. The Himalayan rivers that flow westward into Punjab are the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghana system has the largest catchment area of about 1,600,000 km (620,000 sq mi). The Ganges Basin alone has a catchment of about 1,100,000 km (420,000 sq mi). The Ganges originates from the Gangotri Glacier in Uttarakhand. It flows southeast, draining into the Bay of Bengal. (The Yamuna and Gomti rivers also arise in the western Himalayas and join the Ganges in the plains. The Brahmaputra originates in Tibet, China, where it is known as the Yarlung Tsangpo River) (or \"Tsangpo\"). It enters India in the far-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, then flows west through Assam. The Brahmaputra merges with the Ganges in Bangladesh, where it is known as the Jamuna River.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Chambal, another tributary of the Ganges, via the Yamuna, originates from the Vindhya-Satpura watershed. The river flows eastward. Westward-flowing rivers from this watershed are the Narmada and Tapi, which drain into the Arabian Sea in Gujarat. The river network that flows from east to west constitutes 10% of the total outflow.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "(The Western Ghats are the source of all Deccan rivers, which include the through Godavari River, Krishna River and Kaveri River, all draining into the Bay of Bengal. These rivers constitute 20% of India's total outflow).",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The heavy southwest monsoon rains cause the Brahmaputra and other rivers to distend their banks, often flooding surrounding areas. Though they provide rice paddy farmers with a largely dependable source of natural irrigation and fertilisation, such floods have killed thousands of people and tend to cause displacements of people in such areas.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Major gulfs include the Gulf of Cambay, Gulf of Kutch, and the Gulf of Mannar. Straits include the Palk Strait, which separates India from Sri Lanka; the Ten Degree Channel, which separates the Andamans from the Nicobar Islands; and the Eight Degree Channel, which separates the Laccadive and Amindivi Islands from the Minicoy Island to the south. Important capes include the Kanyakumari (formerly called Cape Comorin), the southern tip of mainland India; Indira Point, the southernmost point in India (on Great Nicobar Island); Rama's Bridge, and Point Calimere. The Arabian Sea lies to the west of India, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean lie to the east and south, respectively. Smaller seas include the Laccadive Sea and the Andaman Sea. There are four coral reefs in India, located in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Gulf of Mannar, Lakshadweep, and the Gulf of Kutch. Important lakes include Sambhar Lake, the country's largest saltwater lake in Rajasthan, Vembanad Lake in Kerala, Kolleru Lake in Andhra Pradesh, Loktak Lake in Manipur, Dal Lake in Kashmir, Chilka Lake (lagoon lake) in Odisha, and Sasthamkotta Lake in Kerala.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "India's wetland ecosystem is widely distributed from the cold and arid located in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, and those with the wet and humid climate of peninsular India. Most of the wetlands are directly or indirectly linked to river networks. The Indian government has identified a total of 71 wetlands for conservation and are part of sanctuaries and national parks. Mangrove forests are present all along the Indian coastline in sheltered estuaries, creeks, backwaters, salt marshes and mudflats. The mangrove area covers a total of 4,461 km (1,722 sq mi), which comprises 7% of the world's total mangrove cover. Prominent mangrove covers are located in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Sundarbans delta, the Gulf of Kutch and the deltas of the Mahanadi, Godavari and Krishna rivers. Parts of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala also have large mangrove covers.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The Sundarbans delta is home to the largest mangrove forest in the world. It lies at the mouth of the Ganges and spreads across areas of Bangladesh and West Bengal. The Sundarbans is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but is identified separately as the Sundarbans (Bangladesh) and the Sundarbans National Park (India). The Sundarbans are intersected by a complex network of tidal waterways, mudflats and small islands of salt-tolerant mangrove forests. The area is known for its diverse fauna, being home to a large variety of species of birds, spotted deer, crocodiles and snakes. Its most famous inhabitant is the Bengal tiger. It is estimated that there are now 400 Bengal tigers and about 30,000 spotted deer in the area.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The Rann of Kutch is a marshy region located in northwestern Gujarat and the bordering Sindh province of Pakistan. It occupies a total area of 27,900 km (10,800 sq mi). The region was originally a part of the Arabian Sea. Geologic forces such as earthquakes resulted in the damming up of the region, turning it into a large saltwater lagoon. This area gradually filled with silt thus turning it into a seasonal salt marsh. During the monsoons, the area turn into a shallow marsh, often flooding to knee-depth. After the monsoons, the region turns dry and becomes parched.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "India's total renewable water resources are estimated at 1,907.8 km a year. Its annual supply of usable and replenshable groundwater amounts to 350 billion cubic metres. Only 35% of groundwater resources are being utilised. About 44 million tonnes of cargo is moved annually through the country's major rivers and waterways. Groundwater supplies 40% of water in India's irrigation canals. 56% of the land is arable and used for agriculture. Black soils are moisture-retentive and are preferred for dry farming and growing cotton, linseed, etc. Forest soils are used for tea and coffee plantations. Red soils have a wide diffusion of iron content.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Most of India's estimated 5.4 billion barrels (860,000,000 m) in oil reserves are located in the Mumbai High, upper Assam, Cambay, the Krishna-Godavari and Cauvery basins. India possesses about seventeen trillion cubic feet of natural gas in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Odisha. Uranium is mined in Andhra Pradesh. India has 400 medium-to-high enthalpy thermal springs for producing geothermal energy in seven \"provinces\"—the Himalayas, Sohana, Cambay, the Narmada-Tapti delta, the Godavari delta and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (specifically the volcanic Barren Island.)",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "India is the world's biggest producer of mica blocks and mica splittings. India ranks second amongst the world's largest producers of barite and chromite. The Pleistocene system is rich in minerals. India is the third-largest coal producer in the world and ranks fourth in the production of iron ore. It is the fifth-largest producer of bauxite, second largest of crude steel as of February 2018 replacing Japan, the seventh-largest of manganese ore and the eighth-largest of aluminium. India has significant sources of titanium ore, diamonds and limestone. India possesses 24% of the world's known and economically viable thorium, which is mined along shores of Kerala. Gold had been mined in the now-defunct Kolar Gold Fields in Karnataka.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Based on the Köppen system, India hosts six major climatic subtypes, ranging from arid desert in the west, alpine tundra and glaciers in the north, and humid tropical regions supporting rainforests in the southwest and the island territories. The nation has four seasons: winter (January–February), summer (March–May), a monsoon (rainy) season (June–September) and a post-monsoon period (October–December).",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Himalayas act as a barrier to the frigid katabatic winds flowing down from Central Asia. Thus, northern India is kept warm or only mildly cooled during winter; in summer, the same phenomenon makes India relatively hot. Although the Tropic of Cancer—the boundary between the tropics and subtropics—passes through the middle of India, the whole country is considered to be tropical.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Summer lasts between March and June in most parts of India. Temperatures can exceed 40 °C (104 °F) during the day. The coastal regions exceed 30 °C (86 °F) coupled with high levels of humidity. In the Thar desert area temperatures can exceed 45 °C (113 °F). The rain-bearing monsoon clouds are attracted to the low-pressure system created by the Thar Desert. The southwest monsoon splits into two arms, the Bay of Bengal arm and the Arabian Sea arm. The Bay of Bengal arm moves northwards crossing northeast India in early June. The Arabian Sea arm moves northwards and deposits much of its rain on the windward side of Western Ghats. Winters in peninsula India see mild to warm days and cool nights. Further north the temperature is cooler. Temperatures in some parts of the Indian plains sometimes fall below freezing. Most of northern India is plagued by fog during this season. The highest temperature recorded in India was 51 °C (124 °F) in Phalodi, Rajasthan. . And the lowest was −60 °C (−76 °F) in Dras, Jammu and Kashmir.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "India's geological features are classified based on their era of formation. The Precambrian formations of Cudappah and Vindhyan systems are spread out over the eastern and southern states. A small part of this period is spread over western and central India. The Paleozoic formations from the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian system are found in the Western Himalaya region in Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh. The Mesozoic Deccan Traps formation is seen over most of the northern Deccan; they are believed to be the result of sub-aerial volcanic activity. The Trap soil is black in colour and conducive to agriculture. The Carboniferous system, Permian System and Triassic systems are seen in the western Himalayas. The Jurassic system is seen in the western Himalayas and Rajasthan.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Tertiary imprints are seen in parts of Manipur, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and along the Himalayan belt. The Cretaceous system is seen in central India in the Vindhyas and part of the Indo-Gangetic plains. The Gondwana system is seen in the Narmada River area in the Vindhyas and Satpuras. The Eocene system is seen in the western Himalayas and Assam. Oligocene formations are seen in Kutch and Assam. The Pleistocene system is found over central India. The Andaman and Nicobar Island are thought to have been formed in this era by volcanoes. The Himalayas were formed by the convergence and deformation of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian Plates. Their continued convergence raises the height of the Himalayas by one centimetre each year.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Soils in India can be classified into eight categories: alluvial, black, red, laterite, forest, arid and desert, saline and alkaline and peaty and organic soils. Alluvial soil constitute the largest soil group in India, constituting 80% of the total land surface. It is derived from the deposition of silt carried by rivers and are found in the Great Northern plains from Punjab to the Assam valley. Alluvial soil are generally fertile but they lack nitrogen and tend to be phosphoric. National Disaster Management Authority says that 60% of Indian landmass is prone to earthquakes and 8% susceptible to cyclone risks.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Black soil are well developed in the Deccan lava region of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh. These contain high percentage of clay and are moisture retentive. Red soils are found in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka plateau, Andhra plateau, Chota Nagpur plateau and the Aravallis. These are deficient in nitrogen, phosphorus and humus. Laterite soils are formed in tropical regions with heavy rainfall. Heavy rainfall results in leaching out all soluble material of top layer of soil. These are generally found in Western ghats, Eastern ghats and hilly areas of northeastern states that receive heavy rainfall. Forest soils occur on the slopes of mountains and hills in Himalayas, Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats. These generally consist of large amounts of dead leaves and other organic matter called humus.",
"title": "Geology"
}
]
| India is situated north of the equator between 8°4' north to 37°6' north latitude and 68°7' east to 97°25' east longitude. It is the seventh-largest country in the world, with a total area of 3,287,263 square kilometres (1,269,219 sq mi). India measures 3,214 km (1,997 mi) from north to south and 2,933 km (1,822 mi) from east to west. It has a land frontier of 15,200 km (9,445 mi) and a coastline of 7,516.6 km (4,671 mi). On the south, India projects into and is bounded by the Indian Ocean—in particular, by the Arabian Sea on the west, the Lakshadweep Sea to the southwest, the Bay of Bengal on the east, and the Indian Ocean proper to the south. The Palk Strait and Gulf of Mannar separate India from Sri Lanka to its immediate southeast, and the Maldives are some 125 kilometres (78 mi) to the south of India's Lakshadweep Islands across the Eight Degree Channel. India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, some 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) southeast of the mainland, share maritime borders with Myanmar, Thailand and Indonesia. The southernmost tip of the Indian mainland is just south of Kanyakumari, while the southernmost point in India is Indira Point on Great Nicobar Island. The northernmost point which is under Indian administration is Indira Col, Siachen Glacier. India's territorial waters extend into the sea to a distance of 12 nautical miles from the coast baseline. India has the 18th largest Exclusive Economic Zone of 2,305,143 km2 (890,021 sq mi). The northern frontiers of India are defined largely by the Himalayan mountain range, where the country borders China, Bhutan, and Nepal. Its western border with Pakistan lies in the Karakoram and Western Himalayan ranges, Punjab Plains, the Thar Desert and the Rann of Kutch salt marshes. In the far northeast, the Chin Hills and Kachin Hills, deeply forested mountainous regions, separate India from Burma. On the east, its border with Bangladesh is largely defined by the Khasi Hills and Mizo Hills, and the watershed region of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The Ganges is the longest river originating in India. The Ganges–Brahmaputra system occupies most of northern, central, and eastern India, while the Deccan Plateau occupies most of southern India. Kangchenjunga, in the Indian state of Sikkim, is the highest point in India at 8,586 m (28,169 ft) and the world's third highest peak. The climate across India ranges from equatorial in the far south, to alpine and tundra in the upper regions of the Himalayas. Geologically, India lies on the Indian Plate, the northern part of the Indo-Australian Plate. | 2001-05-04T23:18:46Z | 2023-12-29T11:41:14Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_India |
14,598 | Demographics of India | India is the most populous country in the world with one-sixth of the world's population. According to UN estimates, India overtook China in having the largest population in the world with a population of 1,425,775,850 at the end of April 2023.
Between 1975 and 2010, the population doubled to 1.2 billion, reaching the billion mark in 2000. India overtook China to become the most populous country at the end of April 2023. As of the UN data released in April 2023, India has surpassed China to become the world's most populous nation. According to the UN's World Population dashboard, India's population now stands at slightly over 1.428 billion, edging past China's population of 1.425 billion people, as reported by the news agency Bloomberg. its population is set to reach 1.7 billion by 2050. In 2017 its population growth rate was 0.98%, ranking 112th in the world; in contrast, from 1972 to 1983, India's population grew by an annual rate of 2.3%.
In 2022, the median age of an Indian was 28.7 years, compared to 38.4 for China and 48.6 for Japan; and, by 2030; India's dependency ratio will be just over 0.4. However, the number of children in India peaked more than a decade ago and is now falling. The number of children under the age of five peaked in 2007, and since then the number has been falling. The number of Indians under 15 years old peaked slightly later (in 2011) and is now also declining.
India has more than two thousand ethnic groups, and every major religion is represented, as are four major families of languages (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan languages) as well as two language isolates: the Nihali language, spoken in parts of Maharashtra, and the Burushaski language, spoken in parts of Jammu and Kashmir. 1,000,000 people in India are Anglo-Indians and 700,000 United States citizens are living in India. They represent over 0.1% of the total population of India. Overall, only the continent of Africa exceeds the linguistic, genetic and cultural diversity of the nation of India.
The sex ratio was 944 females for 1000 males in 2016, and 940 per 1000 in 2011. This ratio has been showing an upwards trend for the last two decades after a continuous decline in the 20th century.
The following table lists estimates for the population of India (including what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh) from prehistory up until 1820. It includes estimates and growth rates according to five economic historians, along with interpolated estimates and overall aggregate averages derived from their estimates.
The population grew from the South Asian Stone Age in 10,000 BC to the Maurya Empire in 200 BC at a steadily increasing growth rate, before population growth slowed down in the classical era up to 500 AD, and then became largely stagnant during the early medieval era era up to 1000 AD. The population growth rate then increased in the late medieval era (during the Delhi Sultanate) from 1000 to 1500.
Under the Mughal Empire, India experienced a high economic and demographic upsurge, due to Mughal agrarian reforms that intensified agricultural production. 15% of the population lived in urban centres, higher than the percentage of the population in 19th-century British India and contemporary Europe up until the 19th century. These estimates by Abraham Eraly and Paolo Malanima have been criticised by Tim Dyson, who considers them exaggerations and estimates urbanisation of the Mughal Empire to be less than 9% of the population.
Under the reign of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605) in 1600, the Mughal Empire's urban population was up to 17 million people, larger than the urban population in Europe. By 1700, Mughal India had an urban population of 23 million people, larger than British India's urban population of 22.3 million in 1871. Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1621) reported that, under Akbar's reign, Mughal India had 120 large cities and 3,200 townships. A number of cities in India had a population between a quarter-million and half-million people, with larger cities including Agra (in Agra Subah) with up to 800,000 people and Dhaka (in Bengal Subah) with over 1 million people. Mughal India also had a large number of villages, with 455,698 villages by the time of Aurangzeb (reigned 1658–1707).
The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman. It is based on fairly good data for the entire years. Sources: Our World in Data and Gapminder Foundation.
Life expectancy from 1881 to 1950
The population of India under the British Raj (including what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh) according to censuses:
Studies of India's population since 1881 have focused on such topics as total population, birth and death rates, geographic distribution, literacy, the rural and urban divide, cities of a million, and the three cities with populations over eight million: Delhi, Greater Mumbai (Bombay), and Kolkata (Calcutta).
Mortality rates fell in the period 1920–45, primarily due to biological immunisation. Suggestions that it was the benefits of colonialism are refuted by academic thinking: "There can be no serious, informed belief… that… late colonial era mortality diminished and population grew rapidly because of improvements in income, living standards, nutrition, environmental standards, sanitation or health policies, nor was there a cultural transformation…".
India occupies 2.41% of the world's land area but supports over 18% of the world's population. At the 2001 census 72.2% of the population lived in about 638,000 villages and the remaining 27.8% lived in more than 5,100 towns and over 380 urban agglomerations.
India's population exceeded that of the entire continent of Africa by 200 million people in 2010. However, because Africa's population growth is nearly double that of India, it is expected to surpass both China and India by 2025.
The table below summarises India's demographics (excluding the Mao-Maram, Paomata and Purul subdivisions of Senapati district of Manipur state due to cancellation of census results) according to religion at the 2011 census in per cent. The data are "unadjusted" (without excluding Assam and Jammu and Kashmir); the 1981 census was not conducted in Assam and the 1991 census was not conducted in Jammu and Kashmir. Missing citing/reference for "Changes in religious demagraphics over time" table below.
The table below represents the infant mortality rate trends in India, based on sex, over the last 15 years. In the urban areas of India, average male infant mortality rates are slightly higher than average female infant mortality rates.
Some activists believe India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven – activists posit that eight million female fetuses may have been aborted between 2001 and 2011. These claims are controversial. Scientists who study human sex ratios and demographic trends suggest that a birth sex ratio between 1.08 and 1.12 can be due to natural factors, such as the age of mother at the baby's birth, the age of father at conception, number of babies per couple, economic stress, endocrinological factors, and others. The 2011 census birth sex ratio in India, of 917 girls to 1000 boys, is similar to birth sex ratios (870–930 girls to 1000 boys) observed in Japanese, Chinese, Cuban, Filipino and Hawaiian ethnic groups in the United States between 1940 and 2005. They are also similar to birth sex ratios (below 900 girls to 1000 boys) observed in mothers of different age groups and gestation periods in the United States.
Mother tongue languages of India (2011)
According to the 2001 census, 41.03% of the Indians spoke Hindi natively, while the rest spoke Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Maithili, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and a variety of other languages. There are a total of 122 languages and 234 mother tongues spoken in India. Of these, 22 languages are specified in the Eighth Schedule of Indian Constitution, while 100 are non-specified.
The table below excludes Mao-Maram, Paomata and Purul subdivisions of Senapati District of Manipur state due to cancellation of census results.
Source: UN World Population Prospects
Structure of the population (Census 9.II.2011)
Population Estimates by Sex and Age Group (03.III.2016) (Data are projections based on the 2011 Population Census.):
Population Estimates by Sex and Age Group (01.III.2021) (Includes data for the Indian-held part of Jammu and Kashmir, the final status of which has not yet been determined. Data are projections based on the 2011 Population Census.):
From the Demographic Health Survey:
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.
1,166,079,217 (July 2009 est. CIA), 1,210 million (2011 census), 1,389,637,446 (May 2022 est.)
62.2%; male: 381,668,992, female: 360,948,755
0–14 years: 27.34% (male 186,087,665/female 164,398,204) 15–24 years: 17.9% (male 121,879,786/female 107,583,437) 25–54 years: 41.08% (male 271,744,709/female 254,834,569) 55–64 years: 7.45% (male 47,846,122/female 47,632,532) 65+ years: 6.24% (male 37,837,801/female 42,091,086) (2017 est.)
Total: 28.7 years
Male: 28 years
female: 29.5 years (2020 est.)
0.67% (2022 est)
74% (age 7 and above, in 2011) 81.4% (total population, age 15–25, in 2006)
22% (2006 est.)
7.8%
0.00 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2020 est.)
At birth: 1.12 male(s)/female Under 10 years: 1.13 male(s)/female 15–24 years: 1.13 male(s)/female 24–64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female 65 years and over: 0.9 male(s)/female Total population: 1.08 male(s)/female (2017 est.)
Total population: 69.7 years Male: 68.4 years Female: 71.2 years (2020 est.)
2.35 (2020 est.)
The TFR (total number of children born per women) by religion in 2005–2006 was: Hindus, 2.7; Muslims, 3.1; Christians, 2.4; and Sikhs, 2.0.
Hindus 79.5%, Muslims 15%, Christian 2.3%, Sikh 1.7%, other and unspecified 2% (2011 est.)
Scheduled castes: 16.6% (2011 census); scheduled tribes: 8.6% (2011 census)
See Languages of India and List of languages by number of native speakers in India. There are 216 languages with more than 10,000 native speakers in India. The largest of these is Hindi with some 337 million, and the second largest is Bengali with 238 million. 22 languages are recognised as official languages. In India, there are 1,652 languages and dialects in total.
Caste and community statistics as recorded from "Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission" (SEBC) or Mandal Commission of 1979. This was completed in 1983.
India has chosen not to officially count caste population since then.
The following data are from the Mandal report:
The national Census of India does not recognise racial or ethnic groups within India, but recognises many of the tribal groups as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (see list of Scheduled Tribes in India).
According to a 2009 study published by Reich et al.., the modern Indian population is composed of two genetically divergent and heterogeneous populations which mixed in ancient times (about 1,200–3,500 BP), known as Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI). ASI corresponds to the Dravidian-speaking population of southern India, whereas ANI corresponds to the Indo-Aryan-speaking population of northern India. 700,000 people from the United States of any race live in India. Between 300,000 and 1 million Anglo-Indians live in India.
For a list of ethnic groups in the Republic of India (as well as neighbouring countries) see South Asian ethnic groups.
Linguistic groups in India chart
Y-Chromosome DNA Y-DNA represents the male lineage, The Indian Y-chromosome pool may be summarised as follows where haplogroups R-M420, H, R2, L and NOP comprise generally more than 80% of the total chromosomes.
Mitochondrial DNA mtDNA represents the female lineage. The Indian mitochondrial DNA is primarily made up of Haplogroup M
Numerous genomic studies have been conducted in the last 15 years to seek insights into India's demographic and cultural diversity. These studies paint a complex and conflicting picture. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "India is the most populous country in the world with one-sixth of the world's population. According to UN estimates, India overtook China in having the largest population in the world with a population of 1,425,775,850 at the end of April 2023.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Between 1975 and 2010, the population doubled to 1.2 billion, reaching the billion mark in 2000. India overtook China to become the most populous country at the end of April 2023. As of the UN data released in April 2023, India has surpassed China to become the world's most populous nation. According to the UN's World Population dashboard, India's population now stands at slightly over 1.428 billion, edging past China's population of 1.425 billion people, as reported by the news agency Bloomberg. its population is set to reach 1.7 billion by 2050. In 2017 its population growth rate was 0.98%, ranking 112th in the world; in contrast, from 1972 to 1983, India's population grew by an annual rate of 2.3%.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 2022, the median age of an Indian was 28.7 years, compared to 38.4 for China and 48.6 for Japan; and, by 2030; India's dependency ratio will be just over 0.4. However, the number of children in India peaked more than a decade ago and is now falling. The number of children under the age of five peaked in 2007, and since then the number has been falling. The number of Indians under 15 years old peaked slightly later (in 2011) and is now also declining.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "India has more than two thousand ethnic groups, and every major religion is represented, as are four major families of languages (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan languages) as well as two language isolates: the Nihali language, spoken in parts of Maharashtra, and the Burushaski language, spoken in parts of Jammu and Kashmir. 1,000,000 people in India are Anglo-Indians and 700,000 United States citizens are living in India. They represent over 0.1% of the total population of India. Overall, only the continent of Africa exceeds the linguistic, genetic and cultural diversity of the nation of India.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The sex ratio was 944 females for 1000 males in 2016, and 940 per 1000 in 2011. This ratio has been showing an upwards trend for the last two decades after a continuous decline in the 20th century.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The following table lists estimates for the population of India (including what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh) from prehistory up until 1820. It includes estimates and growth rates according to five economic historians, along with interpolated estimates and overall aggregate averages derived from their estimates.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The population grew from the South Asian Stone Age in 10,000 BC to the Maurya Empire in 200 BC at a steadily increasing growth rate, before population growth slowed down in the classical era up to 500 AD, and then became largely stagnant during the early medieval era era up to 1000 AD. The population growth rate then increased in the late medieval era (during the Delhi Sultanate) from 1000 to 1500.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Under the Mughal Empire, India experienced a high economic and demographic upsurge, due to Mughal agrarian reforms that intensified agricultural production. 15% of the population lived in urban centres, higher than the percentage of the population in 19th-century British India and contemporary Europe up until the 19th century. These estimates by Abraham Eraly and Paolo Malanima have been criticised by Tim Dyson, who considers them exaggerations and estimates urbanisation of the Mughal Empire to be less than 9% of the population.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Under the reign of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605) in 1600, the Mughal Empire's urban population was up to 17 million people, larger than the urban population in Europe. By 1700, Mughal India had an urban population of 23 million people, larger than British India's urban population of 22.3 million in 1871. Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1621) reported that, under Akbar's reign, Mughal India had 120 large cities and 3,200 townships. A number of cities in India had a population between a quarter-million and half-million people, with larger cities including Agra (in Agra Subah) with up to 800,000 people and Dhaka (in Bengal Subah) with over 1 million people. Mughal India also had a large number of villages, with 455,698 villages by the time of Aurangzeb (reigned 1658–1707).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman. It is based on fairly good data for the entire years. Sources: Our World in Data and Gapminder Foundation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Life expectancy from 1881 to 1950",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The population of India under the British Raj (including what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh) according to censuses:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Studies of India's population since 1881 have focused on such topics as total population, birth and death rates, geographic distribution, literacy, the rural and urban divide, cities of a million, and the three cities with populations over eight million: Delhi, Greater Mumbai (Bombay), and Kolkata (Calcutta).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Mortality rates fell in the period 1920–45, primarily due to biological immunisation. Suggestions that it was the benefits of colonialism are refuted by academic thinking: \"There can be no serious, informed belief… that… late colonial era mortality diminished and population grew rapidly because of improvements in income, living standards, nutrition, environmental standards, sanitation or health policies, nor was there a cultural transformation…\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "India occupies 2.41% of the world's land area but supports over 18% of the world's population. At the 2001 census 72.2% of the population lived in about 638,000 villages and the remaining 27.8% lived in more than 5,100 towns and over 380 urban agglomerations.",
"title": "Salient features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "India's population exceeded that of the entire continent of Africa by 200 million people in 2010. However, because Africa's population growth is nearly double that of India, it is expected to surpass both China and India by 2025.",
"title": "Salient features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The table below summarises India's demographics (excluding the Mao-Maram, Paomata and Purul subdivisions of Senapati district of Manipur state due to cancellation of census results) according to religion at the 2011 census in per cent. The data are \"unadjusted\" (without excluding Assam and Jammu and Kashmir); the 1981 census was not conducted in Assam and the 1991 census was not conducted in Jammu and Kashmir. Missing citing/reference for \"Changes in religious demagraphics over time\" table below.",
"title": "Salient features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The table below represents the infant mortality rate trends in India, based on sex, over the last 15 years. In the urban areas of India, average male infant mortality rates are slightly higher than average female infant mortality rates.",
"title": "Salient features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Some activists believe India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven – activists posit that eight million female fetuses may have been aborted between 2001 and 2011. These claims are controversial. Scientists who study human sex ratios and demographic trends suggest that a birth sex ratio between 1.08 and 1.12 can be due to natural factors, such as the age of mother at the baby's birth, the age of father at conception, number of babies per couple, economic stress, endocrinological factors, and others. The 2011 census birth sex ratio in India, of 917 girls to 1000 boys, is similar to birth sex ratios (870–930 girls to 1000 boys) observed in Japanese, Chinese, Cuban, Filipino and Hawaiian ethnic groups in the United States between 1940 and 2005. They are also similar to birth sex ratios (below 900 girls to 1000 boys) observed in mothers of different age groups and gestation periods in the United States.",
"title": "Salient features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Mother tongue languages of India (2011)",
"title": "Salient features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "According to the 2001 census, 41.03% of the Indians spoke Hindi natively, while the rest spoke Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Maithili, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and a variety of other languages. There are a total of 122 languages and 234 mother tongues spoken in India. Of these, 22 languages are specified in the Eighth Schedule of Indian Constitution, while 100 are non-specified.",
"title": "Salient features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The table below excludes Mao-Maram, Paomata and Purul subdivisions of Senapati District of Manipur state due to cancellation of census results.",
"title": "Salient features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Source: UN World Population Prospects",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Structure of the population (Census 9.II.2011)",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Population Estimates by Sex and Age Group (03.III.2016) (Data are projections based on the 2011 Population Census.):",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Population Estimates by Sex and Age Group (01.III.2021) (Includes data for the Indian-held part of Jammu and Kashmir, the final status of which has not yet been determined. Data are projections based on the 2011 Population Census.):",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "From the Demographic Health Survey:",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "1,166,079,217 (July 2009 est. CIA), 1,210 million (2011 census), 1,389,637,446 (May 2022 est.)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "62.2%; male: 381,668,992, female: 360,948,755",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "0–14 years: 27.34% (male 186,087,665/female 164,398,204) 15–24 years: 17.9% (male 121,879,786/female 107,583,437) 25–54 years: 41.08% (male 271,744,709/female 254,834,569) 55–64 years: 7.45% (male 47,846,122/female 47,632,532) 65+ years: 6.24% (male 37,837,801/female 42,091,086) (2017 est.)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Total: 28.7 years",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Male: 28 years",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "female: 29.5 years (2020 est.)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "0.67% (2022 est)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "74% (age 7 and above, in 2011) 81.4% (total population, age 15–25, in 2006)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "22% (2006 est.)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "7.8%",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "0.00 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2020 est.)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "At birth: 1.12 male(s)/female Under 10 years: 1.13 male(s)/female 15–24 years: 1.13 male(s)/female 24–64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female 65 years and over: 0.9 male(s)/female Total population: 1.08 male(s)/female (2017 est.)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Total population: 69.7 years Male: 68.4 years Female: 71.2 years (2020 est.)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "2.35 (2020 est.)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The TFR (total number of children born per women) by religion in 2005–2006 was: Hindus, 2.7; Muslims, 3.1; Christians, 2.4; and Sikhs, 2.0.",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Hindus 79.5%, Muslims 15%, Christian 2.3%, Sikh 1.7%, other and unspecified 2% (2011 est.)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Scheduled castes: 16.6% (2011 census); scheduled tribes: 8.6% (2011 census)",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "See Languages of India and List of languages by number of native speakers in India. There are 216 languages with more than 10,000 native speakers in India. The largest of these is Hindi with some 337 million, and the second largest is Bengali with 238 million. 22 languages are recognised as official languages. In India, there are 1,652 languages and dialects in total.",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Caste and community statistics as recorded from \"Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission\" (SEBC) or Mandal Commission of 1979. This was completed in 1983.",
"title": "Caste/Tribe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "India has chosen not to officially count caste population since then.",
"title": "Caste/Tribe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The following data are from the Mandal report:",
"title": "Caste/Tribe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The national Census of India does not recognise racial or ethnic groups within India, but recognises many of the tribal groups as Scheduled Castes and Tribes (see list of Scheduled Tribes in India).",
"title": "Ethnic groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "According to a 2009 study published by Reich et al.., the modern Indian population is composed of two genetically divergent and heterogeneous populations which mixed in ancient times (about 1,200–3,500 BP), known as Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI). ASI corresponds to the Dravidian-speaking population of southern India, whereas ANI corresponds to the Indo-Aryan-speaking population of northern India. 700,000 people from the United States of any race live in India. Between 300,000 and 1 million Anglo-Indians live in India.",
"title": "Ethnic groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "For a list of ethnic groups in the Republic of India (as well as neighbouring countries) see South Asian ethnic groups.",
"title": "Ethnic groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Linguistic groups in India chart",
"title": "Ethnic groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "",
"title": "Genetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Y-Chromosome DNA Y-DNA represents the male lineage, The Indian Y-chromosome pool may be summarised as follows where haplogroups R-M420, H, R2, L and NOP comprise generally more than 80% of the total chromosomes.",
"title": "Genetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "",
"title": "Genetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Mitochondrial DNA mtDNA represents the female lineage. The Indian mitochondrial DNA is primarily made up of Haplogroup M",
"title": "Genetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Numerous genomic studies have been conducted in the last 15 years to seek insights into India's demographic and cultural diversity. These studies paint a complex and conflicting picture.",
"title": "Genetics"
}
]
| India is the most populous country in the world with one-sixth of the world's population. According to UN estimates, India overtook China in having the largest population in the world with a population of 1,425,775,850 at the end of April 2023. Between 1975 and 2010, the population doubled to 1.2 billion, reaching the billion mark in 2000. India overtook China to become the most populous country at the end of April 2023. As of the UN data released in April 2023, India has surpassed China to become the world's most populous nation. According to the UN's World Population dashboard, India's population now stands at slightly over 1.428 billion, edging past China's population of 1.425 billion people, as reported by the news agency Bloomberg. its population is set to reach 1.7 billion by 2050. In 2017 its population growth rate was 0.98%, ranking 112th in the world; in contrast, from 1972 to 1983, India's population grew by an annual rate of 2.3%. In 2022, the median age of an Indian was 28.7 years, compared to 38.4 for China and 48.6 for Japan; and, by 2030; India's dependency ratio will be just over 0.4. However, the number of children in India peaked more than a decade ago and is now falling. The number of children under the age of five peaked in 2007, and since then the number has been falling. The number of Indians under 15 years old peaked slightly later and is now also declining. India has more than two thousand ethnic groups, and every major religion is represented, as are four major families of languages as well as two language isolates: the Nihali language, spoken in parts of Maharashtra, and the Burushaski language, spoken in parts of Jammu and Kashmir. 1,000,000 people in India are Anglo-Indians and 700,000 United States citizens are living in India. They represent over 0.1% of the total population of India. Overall, only the continent of Africa exceeds the linguistic, genetic and cultural diversity of the nation of India. The sex ratio was 944 females for 1000 males in 2016, and 940 per 1000 in 2011. This ratio has been showing an upwards trend for the last two decades after a continuous decline in the 20th century. | 2001-05-04T23:19:39Z | 2023-12-31T12:12:51Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India |
14,599 | Politics of India | Politics of India works within the framework of the country's Constitution. India is a parliamentary secular democratic republic in which the president of India is the head of state & first citizen of India and the Prime Minister of India is the head of government. It is based on the federal structure of government, although the word is not used in the Constitution itself. India follows the dual polity system, i.e. federal in nature, that consists of the central authority at the centre and states at the periphery. The Constitution defines the organizational powers and limitations of both central and state governments; it is well recognised, fluid (Preamble of the Constitution being rigid and to dictate further amendments to the Constitution) and considered supreme, i.e. the laws of the nation must conform to it.
There is a provision for a bicameral legislature consisting of an upper house, the Rajya Sabha (Council of States), which represents the states of the Indian federation, and a lower house, the Lok Sabha (House of the People), which represents the people of India as a whole. The Constitution provides for an independent judiciary, which is headed by the Supreme Court. The court's mandate is to protect the Constitution, to settle disputes between the central government and the states, to settle inter-state disputes, to nullify any central or state laws that go against the Constitution and to protect the fundamental rights of citizens, issuing writs for their enforcement in cases of violation.
There are 543 members in the Lok Sabha, who are elected using plurality voting (first past the post) system from 543 Single-member district. There are 245 members in the Rajya Sabha, out of which 233 are elected through indirect elections by single transferable vote by the members of the state legislative assemblies; 12 other members are elected/nominated by the President of India. Governments are formed through elections held every five years (unless otherwise specified), by parties that secure a majority of members in their respective lower houses (Lok Sabha in the central government and Vidhan Sabha in states). India had its first general election in 1951, which was won by the Indian National Congress, a political party that went on to dominate subsequent elections until 1977, when a non-Congress government was formed for the first time in independent India. The 1990s saw the end of single-party domination and the rise of coalition governments. The latest 17th Lok Sabha elections was conducted in seven phases from 11 April 2019 to 19 May 2019 by the Election commission of India. That elections once again brought back single-party rule in the country, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being able to claim a majority in the Lok Sabha.
In recent decades, Indian politics has become a dynastic affair. Possible reasons for this could be the party stability, absence of party organisations, independent civil society associations that mobilise support for the parties and centralised financing of elections.
When compared to other democracies, India has had a large number of political parties during its history under democratic governance. It has been estimated that over 200 parties were formed after India became independent in 1947. And as per the current publication report dated 23 September 2021 from the Election Commission of the India, the total number of parties registered was 2858, with 9 national parties and 54 state parties, and 2796 unrecognized parties working in country.
Every political party in India, whether a national or regional/state party, must have a symbol and must be registered with the Election Commission of India. Symbols are used in the Indian political system to identify political parties in part so that illiterate people can vote by recognizing the party symbols.
In the current amendment to the Symbols Order, the commission has asserted the following five principles:
A political party shall be eligible to be recognized as a national party if:
Likewise, a political party shall be entitled to be recognized as a state party, if:
Although a strict anti-defection law had been passed in 1984, there has been a continued tendency amongst politicians to float their own parties rather than join a broad based party such as the Congress or the BJP. Between the 1984 and 1989 elections, the number of parties contesting elections increased from 33 to 113. In the decades since, this fragmentation has continued.
India has seen political corruption for decades. Democratic institutions soon became federally owned, dissent was eliminated and a majority of citizens paid the price. India has consistently scored poorly on the Corruption Perceptions Index, with more than 39% of people paying bribes for public services. The political corruption in India is weakening its democracy and has led to the erosion of trust by the general public in the political system, as 89% of people in India recognize the widespread problem.
Indian political parties have low level of internal party democracy and therefore, in Indian elections, both at the state or national level, party candidates are typically selected by the party elites, more commonly called the party high command. The party elites use a number of criteria for selecting candidates. These include the ability of the candidates to finance their own election, their educational attainment, and the level of organization the candidates have in their respective constituencies. Quite often the last criterion is associated with candidate criminality.
Panchayati Raj Institutions or Local self-government bodies play a crucial role in Indian politics, as it focuses on grassroot-level administration in India.
On 24 April 1993, the Constitutional (73rd Amendment) Act, 1992 came into force to provide constitutional status to the Panchayati Raj institutions. This Act was extended to Panchayats in the tribal areas of eight states, namely Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Rajasthan from 24 December 1996.
The Act aims to provide a three-tier system of Panchayati Raj for all States having a population of over 2 million, to hold Panchayat elections regularly every five years, to provide reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Women, to appoint State Finance Commission to make recommendations as regards the financial powers of the Panchayats and to constitute District Planning Committee to prepare a draft development plan for the district.
On 22 May 2004, Manmohan Singh was appointed the Prime Minister of India following the victory of the INC and the left front in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. The UPA ruled India without the support of the left front. Previously, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had taken office in October 1999 after a general election in which a BJP-led coalition of 13 parties called the National Democratic Alliance emerged with a majority. In May 2014, Narendra Modi of BJP was elected as the Prime Minister. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Modi once again emerged as a dominant force, leading the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to an extraordinary victory.
Terrorism, Naxalism, religious violence and caste-related violence are important issues that affect the political environment of the Indian nation. Stringent anti-terror legislation such as TADA, POTA and MCOCA have received much political attention, both in favour and against, and some of these laws were disbanded eventually due to human rights violations. However, UAPA was amended in 2019 to negative effect vis-á-vis human rights.
Terrorism has affected politics in India since its conception, be it the terrorism supported from Pakistan or the internal guerrilla groups such as Naxalites. In 1991 the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated during an election campaign. The suicide bomber was later linked to the Sri Lankan terrorist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, as it was later revealed the killing was an act of vengeance for Rajiv Gandhi sending troops in Sri Lanka against them in 1987.
The Godhra train killings and the Babri Masjid demolition on 6 December 1992 resulted in nationwide communal riots in two months, with the worst occurring in Mumbai with at least 900 dead. The riots were followed by 1993 Bombay bombings, which resulted in more deaths.
Law and order issues, such as action against organised crime are issues which do not affect the outcomes of elections. On the other hand, there is a criminal–politician nexus. Many elected legislators have criminal cases against them. In July 2008, the The Washington Post reported that nearly a fourth of the 540 Indian Parliament members faced criminal charges, "including human trafficking, child prostitution, immigration rackets, embezzlement, rape and even murder".
From 2006 to 2022 the situation of Indian democracy worsened. Indians lost state identity caused by the naxalite rebellion, little state presence in tribal areas and tensions between Hindus and minorities. The rebellions are a sign of the governments loss of power. Tendencies abusing Hindu overweight in politics are observed causing a loss of secular structures in the government. Interreligious riots where observed. Political freedoms are limited since funding of NGOs, such as amnesty international, got more difficult due to the "Foreign Contribution Regulatory Act", though the constitution guarantees freedom of association. Hindu-nationalist groups created a climate of intimidation over the country. Freedom of press is through the intimidation of journalists by police, criminals and politicians.
In 2023, according to the Freedom in the World report by Freedom House, India was classified as a "partly free" country for the third consecutive year. The V-Dem Democracy Indices by V-Dem Institute classify India as an 'electoral autocracy'. In 2023, it referred to India as "one of the worst autocratisers in the last 10 years". According to the Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit, India is a Defective democracy.
On 25 July 2022, Droupadi Murmu was sworn in as India's new president, becoming India's first tribal president. Although it is largely a ceremonial post, Murmu's election as tribal woman was historic.
Like the president, the role of the vice-president is also ceremonial, with no real authority vested in him/her. The vice-president fills in a vacancy in the office of president (till the election of a new president). The only regular function is that the vice-president functions as the ex officio Chairman of the Rajya Sabha. No other duties/powers are vested in the office. The current vice-president is Jagdeep Dhankhar.
India has a federal form of government, and hence each state also has its own government. The executive of each state is the governor (equivalent to the president of India), whose role is ceremonial. The real power resides with the chief minister (equivalent to the prime minister) and the State Council of Ministers. States may either have a unicameral or bicameral legislature, varying from state to state. The chief minister and other state ministers are also members of the legislature.
Since the 1980s, Indian politics has become dynastic, possibly due to the absence of a party organization, independent civil society associations that mobilize support for the party, and centralized financing of elections. One example of dynastic politics has been the Nehru–Gandhi family which produced three Indian prime ministers. Family members have also led the Congress party for most of the period since 1978 when Indira Gandhi floated the then Congress(I) faction of the party. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party also features several senior leaders who are dynasts. Dynastic politics is prevalent also in a number of political parties with regional presence such as All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), All India Trinamool Congress (AITC), Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), Jammu & Kashmir National Conference (JKNC), Jammu and Kashmir People's Democratic Party (JKPDP), Janata Dal (Secular) (JD(S)), Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), National People's Party (NPP), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), Samajwadi Party (SP), Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), Shiv Sena (SS), Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and YSR Congress Party (YSRCP). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Politics of India works within the framework of the country's Constitution. India is a parliamentary secular democratic republic in which the president of India is the head of state & first citizen of India and the Prime Minister of India is the head of government. It is based on the federal structure of government, although the word is not used in the Constitution itself. India follows the dual polity system, i.e. federal in nature, that consists of the central authority at the centre and states at the periphery. The Constitution defines the organizational powers and limitations of both central and state governments; it is well recognised, fluid (Preamble of the Constitution being rigid and to dictate further amendments to the Constitution) and considered supreme, i.e. the laws of the nation must conform to it.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "There is a provision for a bicameral legislature consisting of an upper house, the Rajya Sabha (Council of States), which represents the states of the Indian federation, and a lower house, the Lok Sabha (House of the People), which represents the people of India as a whole. The Constitution provides for an independent judiciary, which is headed by the Supreme Court. The court's mandate is to protect the Constitution, to settle disputes between the central government and the states, to settle inter-state disputes, to nullify any central or state laws that go against the Constitution and to protect the fundamental rights of citizens, issuing writs for their enforcement in cases of violation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "There are 543 members in the Lok Sabha, who are elected using plurality voting (first past the post) system from 543 Single-member district. There are 245 members in the Rajya Sabha, out of which 233 are elected through indirect elections by single transferable vote by the members of the state legislative assemblies; 12 other members are elected/nominated by the President of India. Governments are formed through elections held every five years (unless otherwise specified), by parties that secure a majority of members in their respective lower houses (Lok Sabha in the central government and Vidhan Sabha in states). India had its first general election in 1951, which was won by the Indian National Congress, a political party that went on to dominate subsequent elections until 1977, when a non-Congress government was formed for the first time in independent India. The 1990s saw the end of single-party domination and the rise of coalition governments. The latest 17th Lok Sabha elections was conducted in seven phases from 11 April 2019 to 19 May 2019 by the Election commission of India. That elections once again brought back single-party rule in the country, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being able to claim a majority in the Lok Sabha.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In recent decades, Indian politics has become a dynastic affair. Possible reasons for this could be the party stability, absence of party organisations, independent civil society associations that mobilise support for the parties and centralised financing of elections.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "When compared to other democracies, India has had a large number of political parties during its history under democratic governance. It has been estimated that over 200 parties were formed after India became independent in 1947. And as per the current publication report dated 23 September 2021 from the Election Commission of the India, the total number of parties registered was 2858, with 9 national parties and 54 state parties, and 2796 unrecognized parties working in country.",
"title": "Political parties and alliances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Every political party in India, whether a national or regional/state party, must have a symbol and must be registered with the Election Commission of India. Symbols are used in the Indian political system to identify political parties in part so that illiterate people can vote by recognizing the party symbols.",
"title": "Political parties and alliances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the current amendment to the Symbols Order, the commission has asserted the following five principles:",
"title": "Political parties and alliances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A political party shall be eligible to be recognized as a national party if:",
"title": "Political parties and alliances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Likewise, a political party shall be entitled to be recognized as a state party, if:",
"title": "Political parties and alliances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Although a strict anti-defection law had been passed in 1984, there has been a continued tendency amongst politicians to float their own parties rather than join a broad based party such as the Congress or the BJP. Between the 1984 and 1989 elections, the number of parties contesting elections increased from 33 to 113. In the decades since, this fragmentation has continued.",
"title": "Political parties and alliances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "India has seen political corruption for decades. Democratic institutions soon became federally owned, dissent was eliminated and a majority of citizens paid the price. India has consistently scored poorly on the Corruption Perceptions Index, with more than 39% of people paying bribes for public services. The political corruption in India is weakening its democracy and has led to the erosion of trust by the general public in the political system, as 89% of people in India recognize the widespread problem.",
"title": "Political parties and alliances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Indian political parties have low level of internal party democracy and therefore, in Indian elections, both at the state or national level, party candidates are typically selected by the party elites, more commonly called the party high command. The party elites use a number of criteria for selecting candidates. These include the ability of the candidates to finance their own election, their educational attainment, and the level of organization the candidates have in their respective constituencies. Quite often the last criterion is associated with candidate criminality.",
"title": "Political parties and alliances"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Panchayati Raj Institutions or Local self-government bodies play a crucial role in Indian politics, as it focuses on grassroot-level administration in India.",
"title": "Local governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "On 24 April 1993, the Constitutional (73rd Amendment) Act, 1992 came into force to provide constitutional status to the Panchayati Raj institutions. This Act was extended to Panchayats in the tribal areas of eight states, namely Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Rajasthan from 24 December 1996.",
"title": "Local governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Act aims to provide a three-tier system of Panchayati Raj for all States having a population of over 2 million, to hold Panchayat elections regularly every five years, to provide reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Women, to appoint State Finance Commission to make recommendations as regards the financial powers of the Panchayats and to constitute District Planning Committee to prepare a draft development plan for the district.",
"title": "Local governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "On 22 May 2004, Manmohan Singh was appointed the Prime Minister of India following the victory of the INC and the left front in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. The UPA ruled India without the support of the left front. Previously, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had taken office in October 1999 after a general election in which a BJP-led coalition of 13 parties called the National Democratic Alliance emerged with a majority. In May 2014, Narendra Modi of BJP was elected as the Prime Minister. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Modi once again emerged as a dominant force, leading the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to an extraordinary victory.",
"title": "Role of political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Terrorism, Naxalism, religious violence and caste-related violence are important issues that affect the political environment of the Indian nation. Stringent anti-terror legislation such as TADA, POTA and MCOCA have received much political attention, both in favour and against, and some of these laws were disbanded eventually due to human rights violations. However, UAPA was amended in 2019 to negative effect vis-á-vis human rights.",
"title": "Political issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Terrorism has affected politics in India since its conception, be it the terrorism supported from Pakistan or the internal guerrilla groups such as Naxalites. In 1991 the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated during an election campaign. The suicide bomber was later linked to the Sri Lankan terrorist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, as it was later revealed the killing was an act of vengeance for Rajiv Gandhi sending troops in Sri Lanka against them in 1987.",
"title": "Political issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Godhra train killings and the Babri Masjid demolition on 6 December 1992 resulted in nationwide communal riots in two months, with the worst occurring in Mumbai with at least 900 dead. The riots were followed by 1993 Bombay bombings, which resulted in more deaths.",
"title": "Political issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Law and order issues, such as action against organised crime are issues which do not affect the outcomes of elections. On the other hand, there is a criminal–politician nexus. Many elected legislators have criminal cases against them. In July 2008, the The Washington Post reported that nearly a fourth of the 540 Indian Parliament members faced criminal charges, \"including human trafficking, child prostitution, immigration rackets, embezzlement, rape and even murder\".",
"title": "Political issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "From 2006 to 2022 the situation of Indian democracy worsened. Indians lost state identity caused by the naxalite rebellion, little state presence in tribal areas and tensions between Hindus and minorities. The rebellions are a sign of the governments loss of power. Tendencies abusing Hindu overweight in politics are observed causing a loss of secular structures in the government. Interreligious riots where observed. Political freedoms are limited since funding of NGOs, such as amnesty international, got more difficult due to the \"Foreign Contribution Regulatory Act\", though the constitution guarantees freedom of association. Hindu-nationalist groups created a climate of intimidation over the country. Freedom of press is through the intimidation of journalists by police, criminals and politicians.",
"title": "Political issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2023, according to the Freedom in the World report by Freedom House, India was classified as a \"partly free\" country for the third consecutive year. The V-Dem Democracy Indices by V-Dem Institute classify India as an 'electoral autocracy'. In 2023, it referred to India as \"one of the worst autocratisers in the last 10 years\". According to the Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit, India is a Defective democracy.",
"title": "Political issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "On 25 July 2022, Droupadi Murmu was sworn in as India's new president, becoming India's first tribal president. Although it is largely a ceremonial post, Murmu's election as tribal woman was historic.",
"title": "High political offices in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Like the president, the role of the vice-president is also ceremonial, with no real authority vested in him/her. The vice-president fills in a vacancy in the office of president (till the election of a new president). The only regular function is that the vice-president functions as the ex officio Chairman of the Rajya Sabha. No other duties/powers are vested in the office. The current vice-president is Jagdeep Dhankhar.",
"title": "High political offices in India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "India has a federal form of government, and hence each state also has its own government. The executive of each state is the governor (equivalent to the president of India), whose role is ceremonial. The real power resides with the chief minister (equivalent to the prime minister) and the State Council of Ministers. States may either have a unicameral or bicameral legislature, varying from state to state. The chief minister and other state ministers are also members of the legislature.",
"title": "State governments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Since the 1980s, Indian politics has become dynastic, possibly due to the absence of a party organization, independent civil society associations that mobilize support for the party, and centralized financing of elections. One example of dynastic politics has been the Nehru–Gandhi family which produced three Indian prime ministers. Family members have also led the Congress party for most of the period since 1978 when Indira Gandhi floated the then Congress(I) faction of the party. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party also features several senior leaders who are dynasts. Dynastic politics is prevalent also in a number of political parties with regional presence such as All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), All India Trinamool Congress (AITC), Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Indian National Lok Dal (INLD), Jammu & Kashmir National Conference (JKNC), Jammu and Kashmir People's Democratic Party (JKPDP), Janata Dal (Secular) (JD(S)), Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), National People's Party (NPP), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), Samajwadi Party (SP), Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), Shiv Sena (SS), Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and YSR Congress Party (YSRCP).",
"title": "Political families"
}
]
| Politics of India works within the framework of the country's Constitution. India is a parliamentary secular democratic republic in which the president of India is the head of state & first citizen of India and the Prime Minister of India is the head of government. It is based on the federal structure of government, although the word is not used in the Constitution itself. India follows the dual polity system, i.e. federal in nature, that consists of the central authority at the centre and states at the periphery. The Constitution defines the organizational powers and limitations of both central and state governments; it is well recognised, fluid and considered supreme, i.e. the laws of the nation must conform to it. There is a provision for a bicameral legislature consisting of an upper house, the Rajya Sabha, which represents the states of the Indian federation, and a lower house, the Lok Sabha, which represents the people of India as a whole. The Constitution provides for an independent judiciary, which is headed by the Supreme Court. The court's mandate is to protect the Constitution, to settle disputes between the central government and the states, to settle inter-state disputes, to nullify any central or state laws that go against the Constitution and to protect the fundamental rights of citizens, issuing writs for their enforcement in cases of violation. There are 543 members in the Lok Sabha, who are elected using plurality voting system from 543 Single-member district. There are 245 members in the Rajya Sabha, out of which 233 are elected through indirect elections by single transferable vote by the members of the state legislative assemblies; 12 other members are elected/nominated by the President of India. Governments are formed through elections held every five years, by parties that secure a majority of members in their respective lower houses. India had its first general election in 1951, which was won by the Indian National Congress, a political party that went on to dominate subsequent elections until 1977, when a non-Congress government was formed for the first time in independent India. The 1990s saw the end of single-party domination and the rise of coalition governments. The latest 17th Lok Sabha elections was conducted in seven phases from 11 April 2019 to 19 May 2019 by the Election commission of India. That elections once again brought back single-party rule in the country, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) being able to claim a majority in the Lok Sabha. In recent decades, Indian politics has become a dynastic affair. Possible reasons for this could be the party stability, absence of party organisations, independent civil society associations that mobilise support for the parties and centralised financing of elections. | 2001-09-15T04:03:43Z | 2023-12-23T11:15:13Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_India |
14,601 | Telecommunications in India | India's telecommunication network is the second largest in the world by number of telephone users (both fixed and mobile phones) with 1179.49 million subscribers as on 31 January 2021. It has one of the lowest call tariffs in the world enabled by mega telecom operators and hyper-competition among them. India has the world's second-largest Internet user-base with 747.41 million broadband internet subscribers.
Major sectors of the Indian telecommunication industry are telephone, internet and television broadcast industry in the country which is in an ongoing process of transforming into a Next-generation network, employs an extensive system of modern network elements such as digital telephone exchanges, Network switching subsystem, media gateways and Signaling gateway at the core, interconnected by a wide variety of transmission systems using Optical fiber or Microwave radio relay networks. The access network, which connects the subscriber to the core, is highly diversified with different copper-pair, Optical fiber and wireless technologies. Satellite television, a relatively new broadcasting technology has attained significant popularity in the Television segment. The introduction of private FM has boosted radio broadcasting in India. Telecommunication in India has greatly been supported by the Indian National Satellite System system of the country, one of the largest domestic satellite systems in the world. India possesses a diversified communications system, which links all parts of the country by telephone, Internet, radio, television and satellite.
Indian telecom industry underwent a high pace of market liberalisation and growth since the 1990s and now has become the world's most competitive and one of the fastest growing telecom markets.
Telecommunication has supported the socioeconomic development of India and has played a significant role in narrowing down the rural-urban digital divide to some extent. It also has helped to increase the transparency of governance with the introduction of e-governance in India. The government has pragmatically used modern telecommunication facilities to deliver mass education programmes for the rural folk of India.
According to the London-based telecom trade body GSMA, the telecom sector accounted for 6.5% of India's GDP in 2015, or about ₹9 lakh crore (US$110 billion), and supported direct employment for 2.2 million people in the country. GSMA estimates that the Indian telecom sector will contribute ₹14.5 lakh crore (US$180 billion) to the economy and support 3 million direct jobs and 2 million indirect jobs by 2020.
In today's period of progress and wealth, technological modernization is increasingly seen as a foreseen necessity for every country. With better technology and more competition from established businesses, telecommunications has entered a new era of development. The continuous rise of the mobile industry is linked to technological advancements in the telecommunications sector. The service providers' primary goal is to build a loyal customer base by measuring their performance and maintaining existing consumers in order to profit from their loyalty. The purpose of the paper is to address these concerns.
Telecommunications in India began with the introduction of the Telegraphy. The Indian postal and telecom sectors are one of the world's oldest. In 1850, the first experimental electric telegraph line was started between Kolkata and Diamond Harbour. In 1851, it was opened for the use of the East India Company. The Posts and Telegraphs department occupied a small corner of the Public Works Department at that time.
The construction of 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of telegraph lines was started in November 1853. These connected Kolkata (then Calcutta) and Peshawar in the north; Agra, Mumbai (then Bombay) through Sindwa Ghats, and Chennai (then Madras) in the south; Ooty and Bangalore. William O'Shaughnessy, who pioneered the Telegraphy and telephone in India, belonged to the Public Works Department, and worked towards the development of telecom throughout this period. A separate department was opened in 1854 when telegraph facilities were opened to the public.
In 1880, two Telephone company namely The Oriental Telephone Company Ltd. and The Anglo-Indian Telephone Company Ltd. approached the Government of India to establish Telephone exchange in India. The permission was refused on the grounds that the establishment of telephones was a Government monopoly and that the Government itself would undertake the work. In 1881, the Government later reversed its earlier decision and a licence was granted to the Oriental Telephone Company Limited of England for opening telephone exchanges at Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and Ahmedabad and the first formal telephone service was established in the country. On 28 January 1882, Major E. Baring, Member of the Governor General of India's Council declared open the Telephone Exchanges in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The exchange in Calcutta named the "Central Exchange" had a total of 93 subscribers in its early stage. Later that year, Bombay also witnessed the opening of a telephone exchange.
Development of Broadcasting: Radio broadcasting was initiated in 1927 but became state responsibility only in 1930. In 1937 it was given the name All India Radio and since 1957 it has been called Akashvani. Limited duration of television programming began in 1959, and complete broadcasting followed in 1965. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting owned and maintained the audio-visual apparatus—including the television channel Doordarshan—in the country prior to the economic reforms of 1991. In 1997, an autonomous body was established in the name of Prasar Bharti to take care of the public service broadcasting under the Prasar Bharti Act. All India Radio and Doordarshan, which earlier were working as media units under the Ministry of I&B became constituents of the body.
Pre-liberalisation statistics: While all the major cities and towns in the country were linked with telephones during the British period, the total number of telephones in 1948 numbered only around 80,000. Post-independence, growth remained slow because the telephone was seen more as a status symbol rather than being an instrument of utility. The number of telephones grew leisurely to 980,000 in 1971, 2.15 million in 1981 and 5.07 million in 1991, the year economic reforms were initiated in the country.
Liberalisation of Indian telecommunication in industry started in 1981 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi signed contracts with Alcatel CIT of France to merge with the state owned Telecom Company (ITI), in an effort to set up 5,000,000 lines per year. But soon the policy was let down because of political opposition. Attempts to liberalise the telecommunication industry were continued by the following government under the prime-minister-ship of Rajiv Gandhi. He invited Sam Pitroda, a US-based Non-resident Indian NRI and a former Rockwell International executive to set up a Centre for Development of Telematics(C-DOT) which manufactured electronic telephone exchanges in India for the first time. Sam Pitroda had a significant role as a consultant and adviser in the development of telecommunication in India.
In 1985, the Department of Telecom(DoT) was separated from Indian Post & Telecommunication Department. DoT was responsible for telecom services in entire country until 1986 when Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) and Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) were carved out of DoT to run the telecom services of metro cities (Delhi and Mumbai) and international long-distance operations respectively.
The demand for telephones was ever increasing and in the 1990s Indian government was under increasing pressure to open up the telecom sector for private investment as a part of Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation policies that the government had to accept to overcome the severe fiscal crisis and resultant balance of payments issue in 1991. Consequently, private investment in the sector of Value Added Services (VAS) was allowed and cellular telecom sector were opened up for competition from private investments. It was during this period that the Narsimha Rao-led government introduced the National Telecommunications policy (NTP) in 1994 which brought changes in the following areas: ownership, service and regulation of telecommunications infrastructure. The policy introduced the concept of telecommunication for all and its vision was to expand the telecommunication facilities to all the villages in India. Liberalisation in the basic telecom sector was also envisaged in this policy. They were also successful in establishing joint ventures between state owned telecom companies and international players. Foreign firms were eligible to 49% of the total stake. The multi-nationals were just involved in technology transfer, and not policy making.
During this period, the World Bank and ITU had advised the Indian Government to liberalise long-distance services to release the monopoly of the state-owned DoT and VSNL and to enable competition in the long-distance carrier business which would help reduce tariff's and better the economy of the country. The Rao run government instead liberalised the local services, taking the opposite political parties into confidence and assuring foreign involvement in the long-distance business after 5 years. The country was divided into 20 telecommunication circles for basic telephony and 18 circles for mobile services. These circles were divided into category A, B and C depending on the value of the revenue in each circle. The government threw open the bids to one private company per circle along with government-owned DoT per circle. For cellular service two service providers were allowed per circle and a 15 years licence was given to each provider. During all these improvements, the government did face oppositions from ITI, DoT, MTNL, VSNL and other labour unions, but they managed to keep away from all the hurdles.
In 1997, the government set up TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) which reduced the interference of Government in deciding tariffs and policymaking. The political powers changed in 1999 and the new government under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee was more pro-reforms and introduced better liberalisation policies. In 2000, the Vajpayee government constituted the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) through an amendment of the TRAI Act, 1997. The primary objective of TDSAT's establishment was to release TRAI from adjudicatory and dispute settlement functions in order to strengthen the regulatory framework. Any dispute involving parties like licensor, licensee, service provider and consumers are resolved by TDSAT. Moreover, any direction, order or decision of TRAI can be challenged by appealing in TDSAT. The government corporatised the operations wing of DoT on 1 October 2000 and named it as Department of Telecommunication Services (DTS) which was later named as Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). The proposal of raising the stake of foreign investors from 49% to 74% was rejected by the opposite political parties and leftist thinkers. Domestic business groups wanted the government to privatise VSNL. Finally in April 2002, the government decided to cut its stake of 53% to 26% in VSNL and to throw it open for sale to private enterprises. TATA finally took 25% stake in VSNL.
This was a gateway to many foreign investors to get entry into the Indian telecom markets. After March 2000, the government became more liberal in making policies and issuing licences to private operators. The government further reduced licence fees for [cellular service providers and increased the allowable stake to 74% for foreign companies. Because of all these factors, the service fees finally reduced and the call costs were cut greatly enabling every common middle-class family in India to afford a cell phone. Nearly 32 million handsets were sold in India. The data reveals the real potential for growth of the Indian mobile market. Many private operators, such as Reliance Communications, Jio, Tata Indicom, Vodafone, Loop Mobile, Airtel, Idea etc., successfully entered the high potential Indian telecom market. In the initial 5–6 years the average monthly subscribers additions were around 0.05 to 0.1 million only and the total mobile subscribers base in December 2002 stood at 10.5 million. However, after a number of proactive initiatives taken by regulators and licensors, the total number of mobile subscribers has increased rapidly to over 929 million subscribers as of May 2012.
In March 2008, the total GSM and CDMA mobile subscriber base in the country was 375 million, which represented a nearly 50% growth when compared with previous year. As the unbranded Chinese cell phones which do not have International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers pose a serious security risk to the country, Mobile network operators therefore suspended the usage of around 30 million mobile phones (about 8% of all mobiles in the country) by 30 April 2009. Phones without valid IMEI cannot be connected to cellular operators.
India has opted for the use of both the GSM (global system for mobile communications) and CDMA (code-division multiple access) technologies in the mobile sector. In addition to landline and mobile phones, some of the companies also provide the WLL service. The mobile tariffs in India have also become the lowest in the world. A new mobile connection can be activated with a monthly commitment of US$0.15 only.
On 2 February 2012 the Supreme Court ruled on petitions filed by Subramanian Swamy and the Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL) represented by Prashant Bhushan, challenging the 2008 allotment of 2G licenses, cancelling all 122 spectrum licences granted during A. Raja (Minister of Communications & IT from 2007 to 2009), the primary official accused's term as communications minister. and described the allocation of 2G spectrum as "unconstitutional and arbitrary". The bench of GS Singhvi and Asok Kumar Ganguly imposed a fine of ₹50 million (US$630,000) on Unitech Wireless, Swan Telecom and Tata Teleservices and a ₹5 million (US$63,000) fine on Loop Telecom, S Tel, Allianz Infratech and Sistema Shyam Tele Services. According to the ruling the then granted licences would remain in place for four months, after which time the government would reissue the licences.
Post starting of the commercial operation of Reliance Jio in September 2016, the telecom market saw a huge change in terms of falling tariff rates and reduction of data charges, which changed the economics for some of the telecom players. This resulted in exit of many smaller players from the market. Players like Videocon and Systema sold their spectrum under spectrum trading agreements to Airtel and RCOM respectively in Q4 2016.
On 23 February 2017, Telenor India announced that Bharti Airtel will take over all its business and assets in India and deal will be completed in 12 months timeframe. On 14 May 2018, Department of Telecom approved the merger of Telenor India with Bharti Airtel paving the way for final commercial closing of the merger between the two companies. Telenor India has been acquired by Airtel almost without any cost.
On 12 October 2017, Bharti Airtel announced that it would acquire the consumer mobile businesses of Tata Teleservices Ltd (TTSL) and Tata Teleservices Maharastra Ltd (TTML) in a debt-free cash-free deal. The deal was essentially free for Airtel which incurred TTSL's unpaid spectrum payment liability. TTSL will continue to operate its enterprise, fixed line and broadband businesses and its stake in tower company Viom Networks. The consumer mobile businesses of Tata Docomo, Tata Teleservices (TTSL) and Tata Teleservices Maharashtra Limited (TTML) have been merged into Bharti Airtel from 1 July 2019
Reliance Communications had to shut down its 2G and 3G services including all voice services and only offer 4G data services from 29 December 2017, as a result of debt and a failed merger with Aircel. Surprisingly, the shut down was shortly after completion of acquisition of MTS India on 31 October 2017. In February 2019, the company filed for bankruptcy as it was unable to sell assets to repay its debt. It has an estimated debt of ₹ 57,383 crore against assets worth ₹18,000 crore.
Aircel shut down its operations in unprofitable circles including, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh (West) from 30 January 2018. Aircel along with its units - Aircel Cellular and Dishnet Wireless - on 1 March 2018, filed for bankruptcy in the National Companies Law Tribunal (NCLT) in Mumbai due to huge competition and high levels of debt.
Vodafone and Idea Cellular completed their merger on 31 August 2018, and the merged entity is renamed to Vi. The merger created the largest telecom company in India by subscribers and by revenue, and the second largest mobile network in terms of number of subscribers in the world. Under the terms of the deal, the Vodafone Group holds a 45.1% stake in the combined entity, the Aditya Birla Group holds 26% and the remaining shares will be held by the public. However, even after the merger both the brands have been continued to carry their own independent brands.
With all this consolidation, the Indian mobile market has turned into a four-player market, with Jio as the number-one player, with revenue market share of 34%, Airtel India in second position, with revenue market share of 28% and Vi, with revenue market share of 27%. The government operator BSNL/MTNL is in the distant 4th position, with an approximate market share of 11%
Market share of mobile telecom operators in India as of 31 August 2021 according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI):
Market share of FixedLine telecom operators in India as of 31 August 2021 according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI):
Private-sector and two state-run businesses dominate the telephony segment. Most companies were formed by a recent revolution and restructuring launched within a decade, directed by Ministry of Communications and IT, Department of Telecommunications and Minister of Finance. Since then, most companies gained 2G, 3G and 4G licences and engaged fixed-line, mobile and internet business in India. On landlines, intra-circle calls are considered local calls while inter-circle are considered long-distance calls. Foreign Direct Investment policy which increased the foreign ownership cap from 49% to 100%. The Government is working to integrate the whole country in one telecom circle. For long-distance calls, the area code prefixed with a zero is dialled first which is then followed by the number (i.e., to call Delhi, 011 would be dialled first followed by the phone number). For international calls, "00" must be dialled first followed by the country code, TNP and local Telephone number. The country code for India is 91. Several international fibre-optic links include those to Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Russia, and Germany. Some major telecom operators in India include the privately owned companies like Vi, Airtel, and Reliance Jio and the state-owned companies - BSNL and MTNL.
Before the New Telecom Policy was announced in 1999, only the Government-owned BSNL and MTNL were allowed to provide land-line phone services through Copper conductor in India with MTNL operating in Delhi and Mumbai and BSNL servicing all other areas of the country. Due to the rapid growth of the cellular phone industry in India, landlines are facing stiff competition from cellular operators, with the number of wireline subscribers fell from 37.90 million in December 2008 to 20 million in October 2020. This has forced land-line service providers to become more efficient and improve their quality of service. As of October 2020, India has 20 million wireline customers.
On July 21, 1995, then Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu made the first mobile phone call in India using Nokia handset, inaugurating Modi Telstra's MobileNet service from Writers' Building to then Union Telecom Minister Sukhram at Sanchar Bhaban of New Delhi. Sixteen years later 4G services were launched in Kolkata in 2012.
With a subscriber base of more than 1151.8 million (31 Oct 2020), the mobile telecommunications system in India is the second-largest in the world and it was thrown open to private players in the 1990s. GSM was comfortably maintaining its position as the dominant mobile technology with 80% of the mobile subscriber market, but CDMA seemed to have stabilised its market share at 20% for the time being.
The country is divided into multiple zones, called circles (roughly along state boundaries). Government and several private players run local and long-distance telephone services. Competition, especially after entry of Reliance Jio, has caused prices to drop across India, which are already one of the cheapest in the world. The rates are supposed to go down further with new measures to be taken by the Information Ministry.
In September 2004, the number of mobile phone connections crossed the number of fixed-line connections and presently dwarfs the wireline segment substantially. The mobile subscriber base has grown from 5 million subscribers in 2001 to over 1,179.32 million subscribers as of July 2018. India primarily follows the GSM mobile system, in the 900 MHz band. Recent operators also operate in the 1800 MHz band. The dominant players are Vi, Airtel, Jio, and BSNL/MTNL. International Roaming agreements exist between most operators and many foreign carriers. The government allowed Mobile number portability (MNP) which enables mobile telephone users to retain their mobile telephone numbers when changing from one mobile network operator to another. In 2014, Thiruvananthapuram became the first city in India to cross the mobile penetration milestone of 100 mobile connections per 100 people. In 2015 three more cities from Kerala, Kollam, Kochi and Kottayam crossed the 100 mark. In 2017 many other major cities in the country like Chennai, Mysore, Mangalore, Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc. also crossed the milestone. Currently Thiruvananthapuram tops the Indian cities with a mobile penetration of 168.4 followed by Kollam 143.2 and Kochi 141.7.
Market share of FixedLine telecom operators in India as of 30 November 2022 according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI):
Public, commercial Internet access in India was launched by Tata Communications (VSNL) on 15 August 1995, though access was available via the Educational Research Network (ERNET) to educational institutions as early as 1986. VSNL was able to add about 10,000 Internet users within 6 months. However, for the next 10 years the Internet experience in the country remained less attractive, with narrow-band connections having speeds less than 56 kbit/s (dial-up). In 2004, the government formulated its broadband policy which defined broadband as "an always-on Internet connection with a download speed of 256 kbit/s or above." From 2005 onward the growth of the broadband sector in the country accelerated but remained below the growth estimates of the government and related agencies due to resource issues in last-mile access which were predominantly wired-line technologies. This bottleneck was removed in 2010 when the government auctioned 3G spectrum followed by an equally high-profile auction of 4G spectrum that set the scene for a competitive and invigorated wireless broadband market. Now Internet access in India is provided by both public and private companies using a variety of technologies and media including dial-up (PSTN), xDSL, coaxial cable, Ethernet, FTTH, ISDN, HSDPA (3G), 4G, WiFi, WiMAX, etc. at a wide range of speeds and costs.
According to the Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the Internet user base in the country stood at 190 million at the end of June 2013, rosing to 378.10 million in January 2018. Cumulative Annual Growth rate (CAGR) of broadband during the five-year period between 2005 and 2010 was about 117 per cent.
There were 204 Internet service provider (ISPs) offering broadband services in India as of 31 December 2017. As of January 2018, the top five ISPs in terms subscriber base were Reliance Jio (168.39 million), Bharti Airtel (75.01 million), Vodafone (54.83 million), Idea Cellular (37.33 million) and BSNL (21.81 million). In 2009, about 37 per cent of the users access the Internet from cyber cafes, 30 per cent from an office, and 23 per cent from home. However, the number of mobile Internet users increased rapidly from 2009 on and there were about 359.80 million mobile users at the end of January 2018, with a majority using 4G mobile networks.
One of the major issues facing the Internet segment in India is the lower average bandwidth of broadband connections compared to that of developed countries. According to 2007 statistics, the average download speed in India hovered at about 40 KB per second (256 Kbits/s), the minimum speed set by TRAI, whereas the international average was 5.6 Mbit/s during the same period. In order to attend this infrastructure issue the government declared 2007 as "the year of broadband". To compete with international standards of defining broadband speed the Indian Government has taken the aggressive step of proposing a $13 billion national broadband network to connect all cities, towns and villages with a population of more than 500 in two phases targeted for completion by 2012 and 2013. The network was supposed to provide speeds up to 10 Mbit/s in 63 metropolitan areas and 4 Mbit/s in an additional 352 cities. In February 2018, the average broadband speed of fixed-line connection in India was 20.72 Mbit/s, which is less than the global average download speed of 42.71 Mbit/s. In terms of mobile internet speed, India performed quite poorly, with average speed of 9.01 Mbit/s when compared with global average mobile broadband speed was 22.16 Mbit/s.
As of December 2017, according to Internet and Mobile Association of India, the Internet penetration rate in India is one of the lowest in the world and only accounts for 35% of the population compared to the global average internet penetration is over 54.4%. Another issue is the digital divide where growth is biased in favour of urban areas; according to December 2017 statistics, internet penetration in urban India was 64.84%, whereas internet penetration in rural India is only 20.26%. Regulators have tried to boost the growth of broadband in rural areas by promoting higher investment in rural infrastructure and establishing subsidised tariffs for rural subscribers under the Universal service scheme of the Indian government.
As of May 2014, the Internet was delivered to India mainly by 9 different undersea fibres, including SEA-ME-WE 3, Bay of Bengal Gateway and Europe India Gateway, arriving at 5 different landing points.
In March 2015, the TRAI released a formal consultation paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-the-top (OTT) services, seeking comments from the public. The consultation paper was criticised for being one sided and having confusing statements. It was condemned by various politicians and internet users. By 18 April 2015, over 800,000 emails had been sent to TRAI demanding net neutrality.
The TRAI on 8 February 2016, notified the Prohibition of Discriminatory Tariffs for Data Services Regulations, 2016 which barred telecom service providers from charging differential rates for data services.
The 2016 Regulation, stipulates that:
Television broadcasting began in India in 1959 by Doordarshan, a state-run medium of communication, and had slow expansion for more than two decades. The policy reforms of the government in the 1990s attracted private initiatives in this sector, and since then, satellite television has increasingly shaped popular culture and Indian society. However, still, only the government-owned Doordarshan has the licence for terrestrial television broadcast. Private companies reach the public using satellite channels; both cable television as well as DTH has obtained a wide subscriber base in India. In 2012, India had about 148 million TV homes of which 126 million has access to cable and satellite services.
Following the economic reforms in the 1990s, satellite television channels from around the world—BBC, CNN, CNBC, and other private television channels gained a foothold in the country. There are no regulations to control the ownership of satellite dish antennas and also for operating cable television systems in India, which in turn has helped for an impressive growth in the viewership. The growth in the number of satellite channels was triggered by corporate business houses such as Disney Networks Group Asia Pacific group and Zee Entertainment Enterprises. Initially restricted to music and entertainment channels, viewership grew, giving rise to several channels in regional languages, especially Hindi. The main news channels available were CNN and BBC News. In the late 1990s, many current affairs and news channels sprouted, becoming immensely popular because of the alternative viewpoint they offered compared to Doordarshan. Some of the notable ones are Aaj Tak (run by the India Today group) and ABP News, CNN-News18, Times Now, initially run by the NDTV group and their lead anchor, Prannoy Roy (NDTV now has its own channels, NDTV 24x7, NDTV Profit and NDTV India). Over the years, Doordarshan services also have grown from a single national channel to six national and eleven regional channels. Nonetheless, it has lost the leadership in market, though it underwent many phases of modernisation in order to contain tough competition from private channels.
Today, television is the most penetrative media in India with industry estimates indicating that there are over 554 million TV consumers, 462 million with satellite connections, compared to other forms of mass media such as radio or internet. Government of India has used the popularity of TV and radio among rural people for the implementation of many social-programmes including that of mass-education. On 16 November 2006, the Government of India released the community radio policy which allowed agricultural centres, educational institutions and civil society organisations to apply for community based FM broadcasting licence. Community Radio is allowed 100 watts of Effective Radiated Power (ERP) with a maximum tower height of 30 metres. The licence is valid for five years and one organisation can only get one licence, which is non-transferable and to be used for community development purposes.
As of June 2018, there are 328 private FM radio stations in India. Apart from the private FM radio stations, Akashvani, the national public radio broadcaster of India, runs multiple radio channels. AIR's service comprises 420 stations located across the country, reaching nearly 92% of the country's area and 99.19% of the total population. AIR originates programming in 23 languages and 179 dialects.
Historically, the role of telecommunication has evolved from that of plain information exchange to a multi-service field, with Value Added Services (VAS) integrated with various discrete networks like PSTN, PLMN, Internet Backbone etc. However, with decreasing average revenue per user and increasing demand for VAS has become a compelling reason for the service providers to think of the convergence of these parallel networks into a single core network with service layers separated from network layer. Next-generation networking is such a convergence concept which according to ITU-T is:
A next-generation network (NGN) is a packet-based network which can provide services including Telecommunication Services and able to make use of multiple broadband, quality of service-enabled transport technologies and in which service-related functions are independent from underlying transport-related technologies. It offers unrestricted access by users to different service providers. It supports generalised mobility which will allow the consistent and ubiquitous provision of services to users.
Access network: The user can connect to the IP-core of NGN in various ways, most of which use the standard Internet Protocol (IP). User terminals such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and computers can register directly on NGN-core, even when they are roaming in another network or country. The only requirement is that they can use IP and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Fixed access (e.g., digital subscriber line (DSL), cable modems, Ethernet), mobile access (e.g. UMTS, CDMA2000, GSM, GPRS) and wireless access (e.g.WLAN, WiMAX) are all supported. Other phone systems like plain old telephone service and non-compatible VoIP systems, are supported through gateways. With the deployment of the NGN, users may subscribe to many simultaneous access-providers providing telephony, internet or entertainment services. This may provide end-users with virtually unlimited options to choose between service providers for these services in NGN environment.
The hyper-competition in the telecom market, which was effectively caused by the introduction of Universal Access Service (UAS) licence in 2003 became much tougher after 3G and 4G competitive auction. About 670,000 route-kilometres (420,000 mi) of optical fibre has been laid in India by the major operators, including in the financially nonviable rural areas and the process continues. Keeping in mind the viability of providing services in rural areas, the government of India also took a proactive role to promote the NGN implementation in the country; an expert committee called NGN eCO was constituted in order to deliberate on the licensing, interconnection and quality of service (QoS) issues related to NGN and it submitted its report on 24 August 2007. Telecom operators found the NGN model advantageous, but huge investment requirements have prompted them to adopt a multi-phase migration and they have already started the migration process to NGN with the implementation of IP-based core-network.
LIRNEasia's Telecommunications Regulatory Environment (TRE) index, which summarises stakeholders' perception on certain TRE dimensions, provides insight into how conducive the environment is for further development and progress. The most recent survey was conducted in July 2008 in eight Asian countries, including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines. The tool measured seven dimensions: i) market entry; ii) access to scarce resources; iii) interconnection; iv) tariff regulation; v) anti-competitive practices; and vi) universal services; vii) quality of service, for the fixed, mobile and broadband sectors.
The results for India, point out to the fact that the stakeholders perceive the TRE to be most conducive for the mobile sector followed by fixed and then broadband. Other than for Access to ScarceResources the fixed sector lags behind the mobile sector. The fixed and mobile sectors have the highest scores for Tariff Regulation. Market entry also scores well for the mobile sector as competition is well entrenched with most of the circles with 4–5 mobile service providers. The broadband sector has the lowest score in the aggregate. The low penetration of broadband of mere 3.87 against the policy objective of 9 million at the end of 2007 clearly indicates that the regulatory environment is not very conducive.
In 2013 the home ministry stated that legislation must ensure that law enforcement agencies are empowered to intercept communications.
In India, electromagnetic spectrum, being a scarce resource for wireless communication, is auctioned by the Government of India to telecom companies for use. As an example of its value, in 2010, 20 Hertz of 3G spectrum was auctioned for ₹677 billion (US$8.5 billion). This part of the spectrum is allocated for terrestrial communication (cell phones). However, in January 2005, Antrix Corporation (commercial arm of ISRO) signed an agreement with Devas Multimedia (a private company formed by former ISRO employees and venture capitalists from USA) for lease of S band transponders (amounting to 70 MHz of spectrum) on two ISRO satellites (GSAT 6 and GSAT 6A) for a price of ₹14 billion (US$180 million), to be paid over a period of 12 years. The spectrum used in these satellites (2500 MHz and above) is allocated by the International Telecommunication Union specifically for satellite-based communication in India. Hypothetically, if the spectrum allocation is changed for utilisation for terrestrial transmission and if this 70 MHz of spectrum were sold at the 2010 auction price of the 3G spectrum, its value would have been over ₹2,000 billion (US$25 billion). This was a hypothetical situation. However, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India considered this hypothetical situation and estimated the difference between the prices as a loss to the Indian Government.
There were lapses on implementing Government of India procedures. Antrix/ISRO had allocated the capacity of the above two satellites to Devas Multimedia on an exclusive basis, while rules said it should always be non-exclusive. The Union Council of Ministers was misinformed in November 2005 that several service providers were interested in using satellite capacity, while the Devas deal was already signed. Also, the Space Commission was kept in the dark while taking approval for the second satellite (its cost was diluted so that Cabinet approval was not needed). ISRO committed to spending ₹7.66 billion (US$96 million) of public money on building, launching, and operating two satellites that were leased out for Devas.
In late 2009, some ISRO insiders exposed information about the Devas-Antrix deal, and the ensuing investigations resulted in the deal being annulled. G. Madhavan Nair (ISRO Chairperson when the agreement was signed) was barred from holding any post under the Department of Space. Some former scientists were found guilty of "acts of commission" or "acts of omission". Devas and Deutsche Telekom demanded US$2 billion and US$1 billion, respectively, in damages.
The Central Bureau of Investigation concluded investigations into the Antrix-Devas scam and registered a case against the accused in the Antrix-Devas deal under Section 120-B, besides Section 420 of IPC and Section 13(2) read with 13(1)(d) of PC Act, 1988 on 18 March 2015 against the then executive director of Antrix Corporation, two officials of USA-based company, Bangalore based private multimedia company, and other unknown officials of Antrix Corporation or Department of Space.
Devas Multimedia started arbitration proceedings against Antrix in June 2011. In September 2015, the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce ruled in favour of Devas, and directed Antrix to pay US$672 million (Rs 44.35 billion) in damages to Devas. Antrix opposed the Devas plea for tribunal award in the Delhi High Court.
The adjusted gross revenue in the telecom service sector was ₹160,814 crore (equivalent to ₹2.3 trillion or US$28.2 billion in 2023) in 2017 as against ₹198,207 crore (equivalent to ₹2.8 trillion or US$35.7 billion in 2023) in 2016, registering a negative growth of 18.87%. The major contributions to this revenue are as follows (in INR crores): | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "India's telecommunication network is the second largest in the world by number of telephone users (both fixed and mobile phones) with 1179.49 million subscribers as on 31 January 2021. It has one of the lowest call tariffs in the world enabled by mega telecom operators and hyper-competition among them. India has the world's second-largest Internet user-base with 747.41 million broadband internet subscribers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Major sectors of the Indian telecommunication industry are telephone, internet and television broadcast industry in the country which is in an ongoing process of transforming into a Next-generation network, employs an extensive system of modern network elements such as digital telephone exchanges, Network switching subsystem, media gateways and Signaling gateway at the core, interconnected by a wide variety of transmission systems using Optical fiber or Microwave radio relay networks. The access network, which connects the subscriber to the core, is highly diversified with different copper-pair, Optical fiber and wireless technologies. Satellite television, a relatively new broadcasting technology has attained significant popularity in the Television segment. The introduction of private FM has boosted radio broadcasting in India. Telecommunication in India has greatly been supported by the Indian National Satellite System system of the country, one of the largest domestic satellite systems in the world. India possesses a diversified communications system, which links all parts of the country by telephone, Internet, radio, television and satellite.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Indian telecom industry underwent a high pace of market liberalisation and growth since the 1990s and now has become the world's most competitive and one of the fastest growing telecom markets.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Telecommunication has supported the socioeconomic development of India and has played a significant role in narrowing down the rural-urban digital divide to some extent. It also has helped to increase the transparency of governance with the introduction of e-governance in India. The government has pragmatically used modern telecommunication facilities to deliver mass education programmes for the rural folk of India.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "According to the London-based telecom trade body GSMA, the telecom sector accounted for 6.5% of India's GDP in 2015, or about ₹9 lakh crore (US$110 billion), and supported direct employment for 2.2 million people in the country. GSMA estimates that the Indian telecom sector will contribute ₹14.5 lakh crore (US$180 billion) to the economy and support 3 million direct jobs and 2 million indirect jobs by 2020.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In today's period of progress and wealth, technological modernization is increasingly seen as a foreseen necessity for every country. With better technology and more competition from established businesses, telecommunications has entered a new era of development. The continuous rise of the mobile industry is linked to technological advancements in the telecommunications sector. The service providers' primary goal is to build a loyal customer base by measuring their performance and maintaining existing consumers in order to profit from their loyalty. The purpose of the paper is to address these concerns.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Telecommunications in India began with the introduction of the Telegraphy. The Indian postal and telecom sectors are one of the world's oldest. In 1850, the first experimental electric telegraph line was started between Kolkata and Diamond Harbour. In 1851, it was opened for the use of the East India Company. The Posts and Telegraphs department occupied a small corner of the Public Works Department at that time.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The construction of 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of telegraph lines was started in November 1853. These connected Kolkata (then Calcutta) and Peshawar in the north; Agra, Mumbai (then Bombay) through Sindwa Ghats, and Chennai (then Madras) in the south; Ooty and Bangalore. William O'Shaughnessy, who pioneered the Telegraphy and telephone in India, belonged to the Public Works Department, and worked towards the development of telecom throughout this period. A separate department was opened in 1854 when telegraph facilities were opened to the public.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1880, two Telephone company namely The Oriental Telephone Company Ltd. and The Anglo-Indian Telephone Company Ltd. approached the Government of India to establish Telephone exchange in India. The permission was refused on the grounds that the establishment of telephones was a Government monopoly and that the Government itself would undertake the work. In 1881, the Government later reversed its earlier decision and a licence was granted to the Oriental Telephone Company Limited of England for opening telephone exchanges at Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and Ahmedabad and the first formal telephone service was established in the country. On 28 January 1882, Major E. Baring, Member of the Governor General of India's Council declared open the Telephone Exchanges in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The exchange in Calcutta named the \"Central Exchange\" had a total of 93 subscribers in its early stage. Later that year, Bombay also witnessed the opening of a telephone exchange.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Development of Broadcasting: Radio broadcasting was initiated in 1927 but became state responsibility only in 1930. In 1937 it was given the name All India Radio and since 1957 it has been called Akashvani. Limited duration of television programming began in 1959, and complete broadcasting followed in 1965. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting owned and maintained the audio-visual apparatus—including the television channel Doordarshan—in the country prior to the economic reforms of 1991. In 1997, an autonomous body was established in the name of Prasar Bharti to take care of the public service broadcasting under the Prasar Bharti Act. All India Radio and Doordarshan, which earlier were working as media units under the Ministry of I&B became constituents of the body.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Pre-liberalisation statistics: While all the major cities and towns in the country were linked with telephones during the British period, the total number of telephones in 1948 numbered only around 80,000. Post-independence, growth remained slow because the telephone was seen more as a status symbol rather than being an instrument of utility. The number of telephones grew leisurely to 980,000 in 1971, 2.15 million in 1981 and 5.07 million in 1991, the year economic reforms were initiated in the country.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Liberalisation of Indian telecommunication in industry started in 1981 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi signed contracts with Alcatel CIT of France to merge with the state owned Telecom Company (ITI), in an effort to set up 5,000,000 lines per year. But soon the policy was let down because of political opposition. Attempts to liberalise the telecommunication industry were continued by the following government under the prime-minister-ship of Rajiv Gandhi. He invited Sam Pitroda, a US-based Non-resident Indian NRI and a former Rockwell International executive to set up a Centre for Development of Telematics(C-DOT) which manufactured electronic telephone exchanges in India for the first time. Sam Pitroda had a significant role as a consultant and adviser in the development of telecommunication in India.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1985, the Department of Telecom(DoT) was separated from Indian Post & Telecommunication Department. DoT was responsible for telecom services in entire country until 1986 when Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) and Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) were carved out of DoT to run the telecom services of metro cities (Delhi and Mumbai) and international long-distance operations respectively.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The demand for telephones was ever increasing and in the 1990s Indian government was under increasing pressure to open up the telecom sector for private investment as a part of Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation policies that the government had to accept to overcome the severe fiscal crisis and resultant balance of payments issue in 1991. Consequently, private investment in the sector of Value Added Services (VAS) was allowed and cellular telecom sector were opened up for competition from private investments. It was during this period that the Narsimha Rao-led government introduced the National Telecommunications policy (NTP) in 1994 which brought changes in the following areas: ownership, service and regulation of telecommunications infrastructure. The policy introduced the concept of telecommunication for all and its vision was to expand the telecommunication facilities to all the villages in India. Liberalisation in the basic telecom sector was also envisaged in this policy. They were also successful in establishing joint ventures between state owned telecom companies and international players. Foreign firms were eligible to 49% of the total stake. The multi-nationals were just involved in technology transfer, and not policy making.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "During this period, the World Bank and ITU had advised the Indian Government to liberalise long-distance services to release the monopoly of the state-owned DoT and VSNL and to enable competition in the long-distance carrier business which would help reduce tariff's and better the economy of the country. The Rao run government instead liberalised the local services, taking the opposite political parties into confidence and assuring foreign involvement in the long-distance business after 5 years. The country was divided into 20 telecommunication circles for basic telephony and 18 circles for mobile services. These circles were divided into category A, B and C depending on the value of the revenue in each circle. The government threw open the bids to one private company per circle along with government-owned DoT per circle. For cellular service two service providers were allowed per circle and a 15 years licence was given to each provider. During all these improvements, the government did face oppositions from ITI, DoT, MTNL, VSNL and other labour unions, but they managed to keep away from all the hurdles.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1997, the government set up TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) which reduced the interference of Government in deciding tariffs and policymaking. The political powers changed in 1999 and the new government under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee was more pro-reforms and introduced better liberalisation policies. In 2000, the Vajpayee government constituted the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) through an amendment of the TRAI Act, 1997. The primary objective of TDSAT's establishment was to release TRAI from adjudicatory and dispute settlement functions in order to strengthen the regulatory framework. Any dispute involving parties like licensor, licensee, service provider and consumers are resolved by TDSAT. Moreover, any direction, order or decision of TRAI can be challenged by appealing in TDSAT. The government corporatised the operations wing of DoT on 1 October 2000 and named it as Department of Telecommunication Services (DTS) which was later named as Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL). The proposal of raising the stake of foreign investors from 49% to 74% was rejected by the opposite political parties and leftist thinkers. Domestic business groups wanted the government to privatise VSNL. Finally in April 2002, the government decided to cut its stake of 53% to 26% in VSNL and to throw it open for sale to private enterprises. TATA finally took 25% stake in VSNL.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "This was a gateway to many foreign investors to get entry into the Indian telecom markets. After March 2000, the government became more liberal in making policies and issuing licences to private operators. The government further reduced licence fees for [cellular service providers and increased the allowable stake to 74% for foreign companies. Because of all these factors, the service fees finally reduced and the call costs were cut greatly enabling every common middle-class family in India to afford a cell phone. Nearly 32 million handsets were sold in India. The data reveals the real potential for growth of the Indian mobile market. Many private operators, such as Reliance Communications, Jio, Tata Indicom, Vodafone, Loop Mobile, Airtel, Idea etc., successfully entered the high potential Indian telecom market. In the initial 5–6 years the average monthly subscribers additions were around 0.05 to 0.1 million only and the total mobile subscribers base in December 2002 stood at 10.5 million. However, after a number of proactive initiatives taken by regulators and licensors, the total number of mobile subscribers has increased rapidly to over 929 million subscribers as of May 2012.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In March 2008, the total GSM and CDMA mobile subscriber base in the country was 375 million, which represented a nearly 50% growth when compared with previous year. As the unbranded Chinese cell phones which do not have International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers pose a serious security risk to the country, Mobile network operators therefore suspended the usage of around 30 million mobile phones (about 8% of all mobiles in the country) by 30 April 2009. Phones without valid IMEI cannot be connected to cellular operators.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "India has opted for the use of both the GSM (global system for mobile communications) and CDMA (code-division multiple access) technologies in the mobile sector. In addition to landline and mobile phones, some of the companies also provide the WLL service. The mobile tariffs in India have also become the lowest in the world. A new mobile connection can be activated with a monthly commitment of US$0.15 only.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "On 2 February 2012 the Supreme Court ruled on petitions filed by Subramanian Swamy and the Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL) represented by Prashant Bhushan, challenging the 2008 allotment of 2G licenses, cancelling all 122 spectrum licences granted during A. Raja (Minister of Communications & IT from 2007 to 2009), the primary official accused's term as communications minister. and described the allocation of 2G spectrum as \"unconstitutional and arbitrary\". The bench of GS Singhvi and Asok Kumar Ganguly imposed a fine of ₹50 million (US$630,000) on Unitech Wireless, Swan Telecom and Tata Teleservices and a ₹5 million (US$63,000) fine on Loop Telecom, S Tel, Allianz Infratech and Sistema Shyam Tele Services. According to the ruling the then granted licences would remain in place for four months, after which time the government would reissue the licences.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Post starting of the commercial operation of Reliance Jio in September 2016, the telecom market saw a huge change in terms of falling tariff rates and reduction of data charges, which changed the economics for some of the telecom players. This resulted in exit of many smaller players from the market. Players like Videocon and Systema sold their spectrum under spectrum trading agreements to Airtel and RCOM respectively in Q4 2016.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On 23 February 2017, Telenor India announced that Bharti Airtel will take over all its business and assets in India and deal will be completed in 12 months timeframe. On 14 May 2018, Department of Telecom approved the merger of Telenor India with Bharti Airtel paving the way for final commercial closing of the merger between the two companies. Telenor India has been acquired by Airtel almost without any cost.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "On 12 October 2017, Bharti Airtel announced that it would acquire the consumer mobile businesses of Tata Teleservices Ltd (TTSL) and Tata Teleservices Maharastra Ltd (TTML) in a debt-free cash-free deal. The deal was essentially free for Airtel which incurred TTSL's unpaid spectrum payment liability. TTSL will continue to operate its enterprise, fixed line and broadband businesses and its stake in tower company Viom Networks. The consumer mobile businesses of Tata Docomo, Tata Teleservices (TTSL) and Tata Teleservices Maharashtra Limited (TTML) have been merged into Bharti Airtel from 1 July 2019",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Reliance Communications had to shut down its 2G and 3G services including all voice services and only offer 4G data services from 29 December 2017, as a result of debt and a failed merger with Aircel. Surprisingly, the shut down was shortly after completion of acquisition of MTS India on 31 October 2017. In February 2019, the company filed for bankruptcy as it was unable to sell assets to repay its debt. It has an estimated debt of ₹ 57,383 crore against assets worth ₹18,000 crore.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Aircel shut down its operations in unprofitable circles including, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh (West) from 30 January 2018. Aircel along with its units - Aircel Cellular and Dishnet Wireless - on 1 March 2018, filed for bankruptcy in the National Companies Law Tribunal (NCLT) in Mumbai due to huge competition and high levels of debt.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Vodafone and Idea Cellular completed their merger on 31 August 2018, and the merged entity is renamed to Vi. The merger created the largest telecom company in India by subscribers and by revenue, and the second largest mobile network in terms of number of subscribers in the world. Under the terms of the deal, the Vodafone Group holds a 45.1% stake in the combined entity, the Aditya Birla Group holds 26% and the remaining shares will be held by the public. However, even after the merger both the brands have been continued to carry their own independent brands.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "With all this consolidation, the Indian mobile market has turned into a four-player market, with Jio as the number-one player, with revenue market share of 34%, Airtel India in second position, with revenue market share of 28% and Vi, with revenue market share of 27%. The government operator BSNL/MTNL is in the distant 4th position, with an approximate market share of 11%",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Market share of mobile telecom operators in India as of 31 August 2021 according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI):",
"title": "Telephony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Market share of FixedLine telecom operators in India as of 31 August 2021 according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI):",
"title": "Telephony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Private-sector and two state-run businesses dominate the telephony segment. Most companies were formed by a recent revolution and restructuring launched within a decade, directed by Ministry of Communications and IT, Department of Telecommunications and Minister of Finance. Since then, most companies gained 2G, 3G and 4G licences and engaged fixed-line, mobile and internet business in India. On landlines, intra-circle calls are considered local calls while inter-circle are considered long-distance calls. Foreign Direct Investment policy which increased the foreign ownership cap from 49% to 100%. The Government is working to integrate the whole country in one telecom circle. For long-distance calls, the area code prefixed with a zero is dialled first which is then followed by the number (i.e., to call Delhi, 011 would be dialled first followed by the phone number). For international calls, \"00\" must be dialled first followed by the country code, TNP and local Telephone number. The country code for India is 91. Several international fibre-optic links include those to Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Russia, and Germany. Some major telecom operators in India include the privately owned companies like Vi, Airtel, and Reliance Jio and the state-owned companies - BSNL and MTNL.",
"title": "Telephony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Before the New Telecom Policy was announced in 1999, only the Government-owned BSNL and MTNL were allowed to provide land-line phone services through Copper conductor in India with MTNL operating in Delhi and Mumbai and BSNL servicing all other areas of the country. Due to the rapid growth of the cellular phone industry in India, landlines are facing stiff competition from cellular operators, with the number of wireline subscribers fell from 37.90 million in December 2008 to 20 million in October 2020. This has forced land-line service providers to become more efficient and improve their quality of service. As of October 2020, India has 20 million wireline customers.",
"title": "Telephony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "On July 21, 1995, then Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu made the first mobile phone call in India using Nokia handset, inaugurating Modi Telstra's MobileNet service from Writers' Building to then Union Telecom Minister Sukhram at Sanchar Bhaban of New Delhi. Sixteen years later 4G services were launched in Kolkata in 2012.",
"title": "Telephony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "With a subscriber base of more than 1151.8 million (31 Oct 2020), the mobile telecommunications system in India is the second-largest in the world and it was thrown open to private players in the 1990s. GSM was comfortably maintaining its position as the dominant mobile technology with 80% of the mobile subscriber market, but CDMA seemed to have stabilised its market share at 20% for the time being.",
"title": "Telephony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The country is divided into multiple zones, called circles (roughly along state boundaries). Government and several private players run local and long-distance telephone services. Competition, especially after entry of Reliance Jio, has caused prices to drop across India, which are already one of the cheapest in the world. The rates are supposed to go down further with new measures to be taken by the Information Ministry.",
"title": "Telephony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In September 2004, the number of mobile phone connections crossed the number of fixed-line connections and presently dwarfs the wireline segment substantially. The mobile subscriber base has grown from 5 million subscribers in 2001 to over 1,179.32 million subscribers as of July 2018. India primarily follows the GSM mobile system, in the 900 MHz band. Recent operators also operate in the 1800 MHz band. The dominant players are Vi, Airtel, Jio, and BSNL/MTNL. International Roaming agreements exist between most operators and many foreign carriers. The government allowed Mobile number portability (MNP) which enables mobile telephone users to retain their mobile telephone numbers when changing from one mobile network operator to another. In 2014, Thiruvananthapuram became the first city in India to cross the mobile penetration milestone of 100 mobile connections per 100 people. In 2015 three more cities from Kerala, Kollam, Kochi and Kottayam crossed the 100 mark. In 2017 many other major cities in the country like Chennai, Mysore, Mangalore, Bangalore, Hyderabad, etc. also crossed the milestone. Currently Thiruvananthapuram tops the Indian cities with a mobile penetration of 168.4 followed by Kollam 143.2 and Kochi 141.7.",
"title": "Telephony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Market share of FixedLine telecom operators in India as of 30 November 2022 according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI):",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Public, commercial Internet access in India was launched by Tata Communications (VSNL) on 15 August 1995, though access was available via the Educational Research Network (ERNET) to educational institutions as early as 1986. VSNL was able to add about 10,000 Internet users within 6 months. However, for the next 10 years the Internet experience in the country remained less attractive, with narrow-band connections having speeds less than 56 kbit/s (dial-up). In 2004, the government formulated its broadband policy which defined broadband as \"an always-on Internet connection with a download speed of 256 kbit/s or above.\" From 2005 onward the growth of the broadband sector in the country accelerated but remained below the growth estimates of the government and related agencies due to resource issues in last-mile access which were predominantly wired-line technologies. This bottleneck was removed in 2010 when the government auctioned 3G spectrum followed by an equally high-profile auction of 4G spectrum that set the scene for a competitive and invigorated wireless broadband market. Now Internet access in India is provided by both public and private companies using a variety of technologies and media including dial-up (PSTN), xDSL, coaxial cable, Ethernet, FTTH, ISDN, HSDPA (3G), 4G, WiFi, WiMAX, etc. at a wide range of speeds and costs.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "According to the Internet And Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the Internet user base in the country stood at 190 million at the end of June 2013, rosing to 378.10 million in January 2018. Cumulative Annual Growth rate (CAGR) of broadband during the five-year period between 2005 and 2010 was about 117 per cent.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "There were 204 Internet service provider (ISPs) offering broadband services in India as of 31 December 2017. As of January 2018, the top five ISPs in terms subscriber base were Reliance Jio (168.39 million), Bharti Airtel (75.01 million), Vodafone (54.83 million), Idea Cellular (37.33 million) and BSNL (21.81 million). In 2009, about 37 per cent of the users access the Internet from cyber cafes, 30 per cent from an office, and 23 per cent from home. However, the number of mobile Internet users increased rapidly from 2009 on and there were about 359.80 million mobile users at the end of January 2018, with a majority using 4G mobile networks.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "One of the major issues facing the Internet segment in India is the lower average bandwidth of broadband connections compared to that of developed countries. According to 2007 statistics, the average download speed in India hovered at about 40 KB per second (256 Kbits/s), the minimum speed set by TRAI, whereas the international average was 5.6 Mbit/s during the same period. In order to attend this infrastructure issue the government declared 2007 as \"the year of broadband\". To compete with international standards of defining broadband speed the Indian Government has taken the aggressive step of proposing a $13 billion national broadband network to connect all cities, towns and villages with a population of more than 500 in two phases targeted for completion by 2012 and 2013. The network was supposed to provide speeds up to 10 Mbit/s in 63 metropolitan areas and 4 Mbit/s in an additional 352 cities. In February 2018, the average broadband speed of fixed-line connection in India was 20.72 Mbit/s, which is less than the global average download speed of 42.71 Mbit/s. In terms of mobile internet speed, India performed quite poorly, with average speed of 9.01 Mbit/s when compared with global average mobile broadband speed was 22.16 Mbit/s.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "As of December 2017, according to Internet and Mobile Association of India, the Internet penetration rate in India is one of the lowest in the world and only accounts for 35% of the population compared to the global average internet penetration is over 54.4%. Another issue is the digital divide where growth is biased in favour of urban areas; according to December 2017 statistics, internet penetration in urban India was 64.84%, whereas internet penetration in rural India is only 20.26%. Regulators have tried to boost the growth of broadband in rural areas by promoting higher investment in rural infrastructure and establishing subsidised tariffs for rural subscribers under the Universal service scheme of the Indian government.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "As of May 2014, the Internet was delivered to India mainly by 9 different undersea fibres, including SEA-ME-WE 3, Bay of Bengal Gateway and Europe India Gateway, arriving at 5 different landing points.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In March 2015, the TRAI released a formal consultation paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-the-top (OTT) services, seeking comments from the public. The consultation paper was criticised for being one sided and having confusing statements. It was condemned by various politicians and internet users. By 18 April 2015, over 800,000 emails had been sent to TRAI demanding net neutrality.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The TRAI on 8 February 2016, notified the Prohibition of Discriminatory Tariffs for Data Services Regulations, 2016 which barred telecom service providers from charging differential rates for data services.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The 2016 Regulation, stipulates that:",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Television broadcasting began in India in 1959 by Doordarshan, a state-run medium of communication, and had slow expansion for more than two decades. The policy reforms of the government in the 1990s attracted private initiatives in this sector, and since then, satellite television has increasingly shaped popular culture and Indian society. However, still, only the government-owned Doordarshan has the licence for terrestrial television broadcast. Private companies reach the public using satellite channels; both cable television as well as DTH has obtained a wide subscriber base in India. In 2012, India had about 148 million TV homes of which 126 million has access to cable and satellite services.",
"title": "Television broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Following the economic reforms in the 1990s, satellite television channels from around the world—BBC, CNN, CNBC, and other private television channels gained a foothold in the country. There are no regulations to control the ownership of satellite dish antennas and also for operating cable television systems in India, which in turn has helped for an impressive growth in the viewership. The growth in the number of satellite channels was triggered by corporate business houses such as Disney Networks Group Asia Pacific group and Zee Entertainment Enterprises. Initially restricted to music and entertainment channels, viewership grew, giving rise to several channels in regional languages, especially Hindi. The main news channels available were CNN and BBC News. In the late 1990s, many current affairs and news channels sprouted, becoming immensely popular because of the alternative viewpoint they offered compared to Doordarshan. Some of the notable ones are Aaj Tak (run by the India Today group) and ABP News, CNN-News18, Times Now, initially run by the NDTV group and their lead anchor, Prannoy Roy (NDTV now has its own channels, NDTV 24x7, NDTV Profit and NDTV India). Over the years, Doordarshan services also have grown from a single national channel to six national and eleven regional channels. Nonetheless, it has lost the leadership in market, though it underwent many phases of modernisation in order to contain tough competition from private channels.",
"title": "Television broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Today, television is the most penetrative media in India with industry estimates indicating that there are over 554 million TV consumers, 462 million with satellite connections, compared to other forms of mass media such as radio or internet. Government of India has used the popularity of TV and radio among rural people for the implementation of many social-programmes including that of mass-education. On 16 November 2006, the Government of India released the community radio policy which allowed agricultural centres, educational institutions and civil society organisations to apply for community based FM broadcasting licence. Community Radio is allowed 100 watts of Effective Radiated Power (ERP) with a maximum tower height of 30 metres. The licence is valid for five years and one organisation can only get one licence, which is non-transferable and to be used for community development purposes.",
"title": "Television broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "As of June 2018, there are 328 private FM radio stations in India. Apart from the private FM radio stations, Akashvani, the national public radio broadcaster of India, runs multiple radio channels. AIR's service comprises 420 stations located across the country, reaching nearly 92% of the country's area and 99.19% of the total population. AIR originates programming in 23 languages and 179 dialects.",
"title": "Radio"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Historically, the role of telecommunication has evolved from that of plain information exchange to a multi-service field, with Value Added Services (VAS) integrated with various discrete networks like PSTN, PLMN, Internet Backbone etc. However, with decreasing average revenue per user and increasing demand for VAS has become a compelling reason for the service providers to think of the convergence of these parallel networks into a single core network with service layers separated from network layer. Next-generation networking is such a convergence concept which according to ITU-T is:",
"title": "Next-generation networks (NGN)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "A next-generation network (NGN) is a packet-based network which can provide services including Telecommunication Services and able to make use of multiple broadband, quality of service-enabled transport technologies and in which service-related functions are independent from underlying transport-related technologies. It offers unrestricted access by users to different service providers. It supports generalised mobility which will allow the consistent and ubiquitous provision of services to users.",
"title": "Next-generation networks (NGN)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Access network: The user can connect to the IP-core of NGN in various ways, most of which use the standard Internet Protocol (IP). User terminals such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and computers can register directly on NGN-core, even when they are roaming in another network or country. The only requirement is that they can use IP and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Fixed access (e.g., digital subscriber line (DSL), cable modems, Ethernet), mobile access (e.g. UMTS, CDMA2000, GSM, GPRS) and wireless access (e.g.WLAN, WiMAX) are all supported. Other phone systems like plain old telephone service and non-compatible VoIP systems, are supported through gateways. With the deployment of the NGN, users may subscribe to many simultaneous access-providers providing telephony, internet or entertainment services. This may provide end-users with virtually unlimited options to choose between service providers for these services in NGN environment.",
"title": "Next-generation networks (NGN)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The hyper-competition in the telecom market, which was effectively caused by the introduction of Universal Access Service (UAS) licence in 2003 became much tougher after 3G and 4G competitive auction. About 670,000 route-kilometres (420,000 mi) of optical fibre has been laid in India by the major operators, including in the financially nonviable rural areas and the process continues. Keeping in mind the viability of providing services in rural areas, the government of India also took a proactive role to promote the NGN implementation in the country; an expert committee called NGN eCO was constituted in order to deliberate on the licensing, interconnection and quality of service (QoS) issues related to NGN and it submitted its report on 24 August 2007. Telecom operators found the NGN model advantageous, but huge investment requirements have prompted them to adopt a multi-phase migration and they have already started the migration process to NGN with the implementation of IP-based core-network.",
"title": "Next-generation networks (NGN)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "LIRNEasia's Telecommunications Regulatory Environment (TRE) index, which summarises stakeholders' perception on certain TRE dimensions, provides insight into how conducive the environment is for further development and progress. The most recent survey was conducted in July 2008 in eight Asian countries, including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines. The tool measured seven dimensions: i) market entry; ii) access to scarce resources; iii) interconnection; iv) tariff regulation; v) anti-competitive practices; and vi) universal services; vii) quality of service, for the fixed, mobile and broadband sectors.",
"title": "Regulatory environment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The results for India, point out to the fact that the stakeholders perceive the TRE to be most conducive for the mobile sector followed by fixed and then broadband. Other than for Access to ScarceResources the fixed sector lags behind the mobile sector. The fixed and mobile sectors have the highest scores for Tariff Regulation. Market entry also scores well for the mobile sector as competition is well entrenched with most of the circles with 4–5 mobile service providers. The broadband sector has the lowest score in the aggregate. The low penetration of broadband of mere 3.87 against the policy objective of 9 million at the end of 2007 clearly indicates that the regulatory environment is not very conducive.",
"title": "Regulatory environment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 2013 the home ministry stated that legislation must ensure that law enforcement agencies are empowered to intercept communications.",
"title": "Regulatory environment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In India, electromagnetic spectrum, being a scarce resource for wireless communication, is auctioned by the Government of India to telecom companies for use. As an example of its value, in 2010, 20 Hertz of 3G spectrum was auctioned for ₹677 billion (US$8.5 billion). This part of the spectrum is allocated for terrestrial communication (cell phones). However, in January 2005, Antrix Corporation (commercial arm of ISRO) signed an agreement with Devas Multimedia (a private company formed by former ISRO employees and venture capitalists from USA) for lease of S band transponders (amounting to 70 MHz of spectrum) on two ISRO satellites (GSAT 6 and GSAT 6A) for a price of ₹14 billion (US$180 million), to be paid over a period of 12 years. The spectrum used in these satellites (2500 MHz and above) is allocated by the International Telecommunication Union specifically for satellite-based communication in India. Hypothetically, if the spectrum allocation is changed for utilisation for terrestrial transmission and if this 70 MHz of spectrum were sold at the 2010 auction price of the 3G spectrum, its value would have been over ₹2,000 billion (US$25 billion). This was a hypothetical situation. However, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India considered this hypothetical situation and estimated the difference between the prices as a loss to the Indian Government.",
"title": "S-band spectrum scam"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "There were lapses on implementing Government of India procedures. Antrix/ISRO had allocated the capacity of the above two satellites to Devas Multimedia on an exclusive basis, while rules said it should always be non-exclusive. The Union Council of Ministers was misinformed in November 2005 that several service providers were interested in using satellite capacity, while the Devas deal was already signed. Also, the Space Commission was kept in the dark while taking approval for the second satellite (its cost was diluted so that Cabinet approval was not needed). ISRO committed to spending ₹7.66 billion (US$96 million) of public money on building, launching, and operating two satellites that were leased out for Devas.",
"title": "S-band spectrum scam"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In late 2009, some ISRO insiders exposed information about the Devas-Antrix deal, and the ensuing investigations resulted in the deal being annulled. G. Madhavan Nair (ISRO Chairperson when the agreement was signed) was barred from holding any post under the Department of Space. Some former scientists were found guilty of \"acts of commission\" or \"acts of omission\". Devas and Deutsche Telekom demanded US$2 billion and US$1 billion, respectively, in damages.",
"title": "S-band spectrum scam"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Central Bureau of Investigation concluded investigations into the Antrix-Devas scam and registered a case against the accused in the Antrix-Devas deal under Section 120-B, besides Section 420 of IPC and Section 13(2) read with 13(1)(d) of PC Act, 1988 on 18 March 2015 against the then executive director of Antrix Corporation, two officials of USA-based company, Bangalore based private multimedia company, and other unknown officials of Antrix Corporation or Department of Space.",
"title": "S-band spectrum scam"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Devas Multimedia started arbitration proceedings against Antrix in June 2011. In September 2015, the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce ruled in favour of Devas, and directed Antrix to pay US$672 million (Rs 44.35 billion) in damages to Devas. Antrix opposed the Devas plea for tribunal award in the Delhi High Court.",
"title": "S-band spectrum scam"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The adjusted gross revenue in the telecom service sector was ₹160,814 crore (equivalent to ₹2.3 trillion or US$28.2 billion in 2023) in 2017 as against ₹198,207 crore (equivalent to ₹2.8 trillion or US$35.7 billion in 2023) in 2016, registering a negative growth of 18.87%. The major contributions to this revenue are as follows (in INR crores):",
"title": "Revenue and growth"
}
]
| India's telecommunication network is the second largest in the world by number of telephone users with 1179.49 million subscribers as on 31 January 2021. It has one of the lowest call tariffs in the world enabled by mega telecom operators and hyper-competition among them. India has the world's second-largest Internet user-base with 747.41 million broadband internet subscribers. Major sectors of the Indian telecommunication industry are telephone, internet and television broadcast industry in the country which is in an ongoing process of transforming into a Next-generation network, employs an extensive system of modern network elements such as digital telephone exchanges, Network switching subsystem, media gateways and Signaling gateway at the core, interconnected by a wide variety of transmission systems using Optical fiber or Microwave radio relay networks. The access network, which connects the subscriber to the core, is highly diversified with different copper-pair, Optical fiber and wireless technologies. Satellite television, a relatively new broadcasting technology has attained significant popularity in the Television segment. The introduction of private FM has boosted radio broadcasting in India. Telecommunication in India has greatly been supported by the Indian National Satellite System system of the country, one of the largest domestic satellite systems in the world. India possesses a diversified communications system, which links all parts of the country by telephone, Internet, radio, television and satellite. Indian telecom industry underwent a high pace of market liberalisation and growth since the 1990s and now has become the world's most competitive and one of the fastest growing telecom markets. Telecommunication has supported the socioeconomic development of India and has played a significant role in narrowing down the rural-urban digital divide to some extent. It also has helped to increase the transparency of governance with the introduction of e-governance in India. The government has pragmatically used modern telecommunication facilities to deliver mass education programmes for the rural folk of India. According to the London-based telecom trade body GSMA, the telecom sector accounted for 6.5% of India's GDP in 2015, or about ₹9 lakh crore (US$110 billion), and supported direct employment for 2.2 million people in the country. GSMA estimates that the Indian telecom sector will contribute ₹14.5 lakh crore (US$180 billion) to the economy and support 3 million direct jobs and 2 million indirect jobs by 2020. In today's period of progress and wealth, technological modernization is increasingly seen as a foreseen necessity for every country. With better technology and more competition from established businesses, telecommunications has entered a new era of development. The continuous rise of the mobile industry is linked to technological advancements in the telecommunications sector. The service providers' primary goal is to build a loyal customer base by measuring their performance and maintaining existing consumers in order to profit from their loyalty. The purpose of the paper is to address these concerns. | 2001-05-04T23:20:38Z | 2023-12-22T11:57:05Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_India |
14,602 | Transport in India | Transport in India consists of transport by land, water and air. Road transport is the primary mode of transport for most Indian citizens, and India's road transport systems are among the most heavily used in the world.
India's road network is the second-largest, after the United States and one of the busiest in the world, transporting 8.225 billion passengers and over 980 million tonnes of cargo annually, as of 2015. India's rail network is the fourth largest and second busiest in the world, transporting 8.09 billion passengers and 1.20 billion tonnes of freight annually, as of 2020. Aviation in India is broadly divided into military and civil aviation which is the fastest-growing aviation market in the world (IATA data). India's waterways network, in the form of rivers, canals, backwaters and creeks, is the ninth largest waterway network in the world. Freight transport by waterways is highly under utilised in India with the total cargo moved (in tonne kilometres) by inland waterways being 0.1 percent of the total inland traffic in India. In total, about 21 percent of households have two wheelers whereas 4.70 percent of households in India have cars or vans as per the 2011 census of India. The automobile industry in India is currently growing rapidly with an annual production of over 4.6 million vehicles, with an annual growth rate of 10.5% and vehicle volume is expected to rise greatly in the future.
Walking was a major transport form in ancient times. People used to cover long distances on foot or bullock carts. For instance, Adi Sankaracharya travelled all over India from Kalady near Kochi. Walking still constitutes an important mode of transport in rural areas. In the city of Mumbai, to further improve the transit conditions for pedestrians, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, has commenced the construction of more than 50 skywalks, as part of the Mumbai Skywalk project, which is very helpful as walk enthusiasts take part in reducing traffic. The Dakshineswar Skywalk has also come up in West Bengal.
Palanquins, also known as palkis, were one of the luxurious methods used by the rich and noblemen for travelling and also to carry a deity (idol) of a god. Many temples have sculptures of a god being carried in palkis. Modern use of the palanquin is limited to Indian weddings, pilgrimage and carrying idols of gods.
Bullock carts were used to be ways of transportation in India, but it can't be seen today due to low speed and safety.
Many years ago, the government banned bullock carts.
Bicycles or cycles, have ownership rates ranging from around 30% to 75% at the state level. Along with walking, cycling accounts for 50% to 80% of the commuter trips for those in the informal sector in urban areas. However, recent developments suggest that bicycle riding is quickly becoming popular in the metropolitan cities of India. In recent years, government development authorities all over India encourages the setup and use of separate bicycle lanes alongside the roads to combat pollution and ease traffic congestion.
Human-pulled rickshaws are nowadays rarely available in various cities and villages in the country. Many local governments have proposed a ban on these rickshaws describing them as "inhuman". The Government of West Bengal proposed a ban on these rickshaws in 2005. Though a bill aiming to address this issue, termed as Calcutta Hackney Carriage Bill, was passed by the West Bengal Assembly in 2006, it has not yet been implemented. The Government of West Bengal is working on an amendment to this bill to avoid the loopholes that were exposed when the Hand-pulled Rickshaw Owners' Association filed a petition against the bill.
Cycle rickshaws were introduced in India in the 1940s. They are bigger than a tricycle where two people sit on an elevated seat at the back and a person pedals from the front. In the late 2000s, they were banned in several cities for causing traffic congestion. The Delhi Police recently submitted an affidavit against plying of cycle rickshaws to ease traffic congestion in the city but it was dismissed by the Delhi High Court. In addition, environmentalists have supported the retention of cycle rickshaws as a non-polluting mode of transport.
As per 2017 estimates, the total road length in India is 5,603,293 km (3,481,725 mi); making the Indian road network the second largest road network in the world after the United States. At 0.66 km of highway per square kilometre of land the density of India's highway network is higher than that of the United States (0.65) and far higher than that of China's (0.16) or Brazil's (0.20).
India has a network of National Highways connecting all the major cities and state capitals, forming the economic backbone of the country. As of 2013, India has a total of 66,754 km (41,479 mi) of National Highways, of which 1,205 km (749 mi) are classified as expressways. Although India has large network of four or more lane highways of international quality standards, but without access control (entry/exit control), they are not called as expressways but simply highways.
As per the National Highways Authority of India, about 66% of freight and 82% passenger traffic is carried by the roads. The National Highways carry about 40% of total road traffic, though only about 2% of the road network is covered by these roads. Average growth of the number of vehicles has been around 10.16% per annum over recent years.
India also has many bridges and flyovers in major cities to reduce traffic congestion. Some notable projects include Bandra - Worli Sea link in Mumbai and Kathipara Cloverleaf Interchange in Chennai. India's metropolitan intra-city average traffic vehicle speed in Delhi was 25 km/h (16 mph), in Mumbai 20.7 km/h (12.9 mph), in Chennai 18.9 km/h (11.7 mph) and in Kolkata 19.2 km/h (11.9 mph), as per a study by Ola Cabs in 2017.
Under National Highways Development Project (NHDP), work is under progress to equip national highways with at least four lanes; there is also a plan to convert some stretches of these roads to six lanes. In recent years construction has commenced on a nationwide system of multi-lane highways, including the Golden Quadrilateral connecting four important metropolitan cities of India (Delhi-Kolkata-Chennai-Mumbai) and North-South and East-West Corridors which link the largest cities in India.
In 2000, around 40% of villages in India lacked access to all-weather roads and remained isolated during the monsoon season. To improve rural connectivity, Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (Prime Minister's Rural Road Program), a project funded by the Central Government with the help of the World Bank, was launched in 2000 to build all-weather roads to connect all habitations with a population of 500 or above (250 or above for hilly areas).
Buses are an important means of public transport in India. Due to this social significance, urban bus transport is often owned and operated by public agencies, and most state governments operate bus services through a state road transport corporation. These corporations have proven extremely useful in connecting villages and towns across the country. Alongside the public companies there are many private bus fleets: As of 2012, there were 131,800 publicly owned buses in India, but 1,544,700 buses owned by private companies.
However, the share of buses is negligible in most Indian cities as compared to personalised vehicles, and two-wheelers and cars account for more than 80 percent of the vehicle population in most large cities.
Bus rapid transit systems (BRTS), exist in several cities. Buses take up over 90% of public transport in Indian cities, and serve as an important mode of transport. Services are mostly run by state government owned transport corporations. In 1990s, all government state transport corporations have introduced various facilities like low-floor buses for the disabled and air-conditioned buses to attract private car owners to help decongest roads.
In 2010, the Ahmedabad Bus Rapid Transit System won the prestigious Sustainable Transport Award from the Transportation Research Board in Washington. Rainbow BRTS in Pune is the first BRTS system in the country. Mumbai introduced air conditioned buses in 1998. Bangalore was the first city in India to introduce Volvo B7RLE intra-city buses in India in January 2005. Bangalore is the first Indian city to have an air-conditioned bus stop, located near Cubbon Park. It was built by Airtel. The city of Chennai houses one of Asia's largest bus terminus, the Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus.
Motorised two-wheeler vehicles like scooters, motorcycles and mopeds are very popular due to their fuel efficiency and ease of use in congested roads or streets. The number of two-wheelers sold is several times to that of cars. There were 47.5 million powered two-wheelers in India in 2003 compared with just 8.6 million cars.
Manufacture of motorcycles in India started when Royal Enfield began assembly in its plant in Chennai in 1948. Royal Enfield, an iconic brand name in the country, manufactures different variants of the British Bullet motorcycle which is a classic motorcycle that is still in production. Hero MotoCorp (formerly Hero Honda), Honda, Bajaj Auto, Yamaha, TVS Motors and Mahindra 2 Wheelers are the largest two-wheeler companies in terms of market-share.
Manufacture of scooters in India started when Automobile Products of India (API) set up at Mumbai and incorporated in 1949. They began assembling Innocenti-built Lambretta scooters in India. They eventually acquired a licence for the Li150 series model, of which they began full-fledged production from the early 1960s onwards. In 1972, Scooters India Limited (SIL), a state-run enterprise based in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, bought the entire manufacturing rights of the last Innocenti Lambretta model. API has infrastructural facilities at Mumbai, Aurangabad, and Chennai, but has been non-operational since 2002. SIL stopped producing scooters in 1998.
Motorcycles and scooters can be rented in many cities, Wicked Ride, Metro Bikes and many other companies are working with state governments to solve last-mile connectivity problems with mass-transit. Wearing protective headgear is mandatory for both the rider and the pillion-rider in most cities.
Private automobiles account for 30% of the total transport demand in urban areas of India. An average of 963 new private vehicles are registered every day in Delhi alone. The number of automobiles produced in India rose from 6.3 million in 2002–2003 to 11 million (11.2 million) in 2008–2009. There is substantial variation among cities and states in terms of dependence on private cars: Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and Kolkata have 185, 127, 157 and 140 cars per 1,000 people respectively, which is much lower compared to developed countries. This reflects different levels of urban density and varied qualities of public transport infrastructure. Nationwide, India still has a very low rate of car ownership. When comparing car ownership between BRICS developing countries, it is on a par with China, and exceeded by Brazil and Russia.
Compact cars, especially hatchbacks predominate due to affordability, fuel efficiency, congestion, and lack of parking space in most cities. Chennai is known as the "Detroit of India" for its automobile industry.
Maruti, Hyundai and Tata Motors are the most popular brands in the order of their market share. The Ambassador once had a monopoly, but is now an icon of pre-liberalisation India, and is still used by taxi companies. The Maruti 800 launched in 1984, created the first revolution in the Indian auto sector because of its low price and high quality. It had the highest market share until 2004, when it was overtaken by other low-cost models from Maruti such as the Alto and the Wagon R, the Indica from Tata Motors and the Santro from Hyundai. Over the 20 years since its introduction, about 2.4 million Maruti 800s have been sold. However, with the launch of the Tata Nano, the least expensive production car in the world, the Maruti 800 lost its popularity. India is also known for a variety of indigenous vehicles made in villages out of simple motors and vehicle spare parts. A few of these innovations are the jugaad, maruta, chhakda, and the peter rehra.
In the city of Bangalore, Radio One and the Bangalore Traffic Police, launched a carpooling drive which has involved celebrities such as Robin Uthappa, and Rahul Dravid encouraging the public to carpool. The initiative got a good response, and by the end of May 2009, 10,000 people are said to have carpooled in the city. There have been efforts to improve the energy efficiency of transport systems in Indian cities, including by introducing performance standards for private automobiles or by banning particularly polluting older cars. The city of Kolkata, for example, passed a law in 2009/10 phasing out vehicles over 15 years old with the purpose of reducing air pollution. However, the effects were mixed. On the one hand, poorer urban residents are more likely to see public health improvements from better air quality, since they are more likely to live in polluted areas and work outdoors than richer urban residents. On the other hand, drivers of such vehicles suffered from losing their livelihoods as a result of this environmental regulation.
The first utility vehicle in India was manufactured by Mahindra. It was a copy of the original Jeep and was manufactured under licence. The vehicle was an instant hit and made Mahindra one of the top companies in India. The Indian Army and police extensively use Mahindra vehicles along with Maruti Gypsys for transporting personnel and equipment. Tata Motors, the automobile manufacturing arm of the Tata Group, launched its first utility vehicle, the Tata Sumo, in 1994. The Sumo, owing to its then-modern design, captured a 31% share of the market within two years. The Tempo Trax from Force Motors until recently was ruling the rural areas. Sports utility vehicles now form a sizeable part of the passenger vehicle market. Models from Tata, Honda, Hyundai, Ford and other brands are available.
Most of the taxicabs in Mumbai and Kolkata are either Premier Padmini or Hindustan Ambassador cars. In all other cities, taxi fleets comprise more modern cars. However, foreign-developed app-based taxi services like Uber as well as an Indian-developed app-based taxi services like Ola coming to the fore, taxicabs now include sedans, SUVs and even motorcycle taxis. Depending on the city/state, taxis can either be hailed or hired from taxi-stands. In cities such as Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, taxis need to be hired over phone, whereas in cities like Kolkata and Mumbai, taxis can also be hailed on the street. According to Government of India regulations, all taxis are required to have a fare-meter installed. There are additional surcharges for luggage, late-night rides and toll taxes are to be paid by the passenger. Since year 2006, radio taxis have become increasingly popular with the public due to reasons of safety and convenience.
In cities and localities where taxis are expensive or do not charge as per the government or municipal regulated fares, people use share taxis. These are normal taxis which carry one or more passengers travelling to destinations either on one route to the final destination, or near the final destination. The passengers are charged according to the number of people with different destinations. The city of Mumbai will soon be the first city in India to have an "in-taxi" magazine, titled MumBaee, which will be issued to taxis which are part of the Mumbai Taximen's Union. The magazine debuted on 13 July 2009. In Kolkata, there are many no refusal taxis available with white and blue in colour.
An auto is a three-wheeler vehicle for hire that does not have doors and is generally characterised by a small cabin for the driver in the front and a seat for passengers in the rear. Generally it is painted in yellow, green or black and has a black, yellow or green canopy on the top, but designs vary considerably from place to place. The colour of the auto rickshaw is also determined by the fuel that it is powered by, for example Agartala, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Pune and Delhi have green or black autos indicating the use of compressed natural gas, whereas the autos of Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad have green autos indicating the use of LPG.
In Mumbai and other metropolitan cities, 'autos' or 'rickshaws', as they are popularly known, have regulated metered fares. A recent law prohibits auto rickshaw drivers from charging more than the specified fare, or charging night-fare before midnight, and also prohibits the driver from refusing to go to a particular location. Mumbai and Kolkata are also the only two cities, which prohibit auto rickshaws from entering a certain part of the city, in these cases being South Mumbai and certain parts of Downtown Kolkata. However, in cities like Chennai, it is common to see autorickshaw drivers demand more than the specified fare and refuse to use fare meter.
Airports and railway stations at many cities such as Howrah, Chennai and Bengaluru provide a facility of prepaid auto booths, which requires a fixed payment, with a base fare of Rs. 30 and a rate of Rs.14.20 per kilometre after 1.5 kilometres of travel, set by the authorities as of May, 2022. On this basis, the fare is calculated and is to be paid by the passenger.
Electric rickshaw is new popular means of transport, rapidly growing in number in India, due to low running and initial cost, other economic and environmental benefits, these vehicles are becoming popular in India. E-Rickshaws are made in fiberglass or metal body, powered by a BLDC Electric Motor with max power 2000W and speed 25 km/h.
Country-wide rail services in India are provided by the state-run Indian Railways (IR) under the supervision of the Ministry of Railways. IR is divided into eighteen zones including the Kolkata Metro Railway. The IR are further sub-divided into sixty seven divisions, each having a divisional headquarters.
The railway network travels across the country, covering more than 7,321 stations over a total route length of more than 67,415 km (41,890 mi) and track length of about 123,542 km (76,765 mi) as of March 2021. About 45,000 km (28,000 mi) or 71% of the route-kilometre was electrified as in March 2019. IR provides an important mode of transport in India, transporting 23.1 million passengers and 3.3 million tons of freight daily as of March 2019. IR is the world's eighth-largest employer, it had 1.227 million employees as of March 2019. As to rolling stock, IR owns over 289,185 (freight) wagons, 74,003 coaches and 12,147 locomotives as of March 2019. It also owns locomotive and coach production facilities. It operates both long distance and suburban rail systems.
The IR runs a number of special types of services which are given higher priority. The fastest train at present is the Vande Bharat Express with operation speeds of up to 180 km/h, though the fastest service is Gatimaan Express with an operational speed of 160 km/h (99 mph) and average speed of 100 km/h (62 mph), since the Vande Bharat Express is capped at 120 km/h for safety reasons. The Rajdhani trains introduced in 1969 provides connectivity between the national capital, Delhi and capitals of the states. On the other hand, Shatabdi Express provides connectivity between centres of tourism, pilgrimage or business. The Shatabdi Express trains run over short to medium distances and do not have sleepers while the Rajdhani Expresses run over longer distances and have only sleeping accommodation. Both series of trains have a maximum permissible speed of 110 to 140 km/h (68 to 87 mph) but average speed of less than 100 km/h.. Besides, the IR also operates a number of luxury trains which cater to various tourist circuits. For instance, the Palace on Wheels serves the Rajasthan circuit and The Golden Chariot serves the Karnataka and Goa circuits. There are two UNESCO World Heritage Sites on IR, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus and the Mountain railways of India. The latter consists of three separate railway lines located in different parts of India, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a 610 mm (2 ft) narrow gauge railway in Lesser Himalayas in West Bengal, the Nilgiri Mountain Railway, a 1,000 mm (3 ft 3+3⁄8 in) metre gauge rack railway in the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu and the Kalka-Shimla Railway, a 762 mm (2 ft 6 in) narrow gauge railway in the Siwalik Hills in Himachal Pradesh.
In the freight segment, IR ferries various commodities and fuels in industrial, consumer, and agricultural segments across the length and breadth of India. IR has historically subsidised the passenger segment with income from the freight business. As a result, freight services are unable to compete with other modes of transport on both cost and speed of delivery, leading to continuous erosion of market share. To counter this downward trend, IR has started new initiatives in freight segments including upgrading of existing goods sheds, attracting private capital to build multi-commodity multi-modal logistics terminals, changing container sizes, operating time-tabled freight trains, and tweaking with the freight pricing/product mix.
In 1999, the Konkan Railway Corporation introduced the Roll on Roll off (RORO) service, a unique road-rail synergy system, on the section between Kolad in Maharashtra and Verna in Goa, which was extended up to Surathkal in Karnataka in 2004. The RORO service, the first of its kind in India, allowed trucks to be transported on flatbed trailers. It was highly popular, carrying about 110,000 trucks and bringing in about ₹ 740 million worth of earnings to the corporation until 2007.
Perhaps the game-changer for IR in the freight segment are the new dedicated freight corridors that are expected to be completed by 2020. When fully implemented, the new corridors, spanning around 3300 km, could support hauling of trains up to 1.5 km in length with 32.5-ton axle-load at speeds of 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph). Also, they will free-up capacity on dense passenger routes and will allow IR to run more trains at higher speeds. Additional corridors are being planned to augment the freight infrastructure in the country.
In many Indian metropolitan regions, rail is the more efficient and affordable mode of public transport for daily commute. Examples of types of services include long-established local or suburban rail services in cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, the century-old tram service in Kolkata, the more recent metro service in Kolkata, Delhi and Chennai and Monorail feeder service in Mumbai.
The Mumbai Suburban Railway was the first rail system in India, which began its services in Mumbai in 1853, transporting 6.3 million passengers daily and has the highest passenger density in the world. The Kolkata Suburban Railway was established in 1854, and the Chennai Suburban Railway in 1931. The operational suburban rail systems in India are in Mumbai Suburban Railway, Kolkata Suburban Railway, Chennai Suburban Railway, Lucknow-Kanpur Suburban Railway, Delhi Suburban Railway, Pune Suburban Railway, Hyderabad Multi-Modal Transport System, Barabanki-Lucknow Suburban Railway and Karwar railway division. Other planned systems are Bengaluru Commuter Rail, Ahmedabad Suburban Railway and Coimbatore Suburban Railway.
The Chennai MRTS, which began services in 1995, remains the country's first and only mass rapid transit rail. Although distinct from the Chennai Suburban Railway, the MRTS remains integrated in a wider urban rail network.
The first modern rapid transit in India is the Kolkata Metro which started its operations in 1984 as the 17th Zone of the Indian Railways. The Delhi Metro in New Delhi is India's second conventional metro and began operations in 2002. The Namma Metro in Bengaluru is India's third operational rapid transit and began operations in 2011.
The operational systems are Kolkata Metro, Delhi Metro, Bengaluru Metro, Gurgaon Metro, Mumbai Metro, Jaipur Metro, Chennai Metro, Kochi Metro, Lucknow Metro, Nagpur Metro, Noida Metro, Hyderabad Metro, Kanpur Metro, Ahmedabad Metro, Pune Metro, Navi Mumbai Metro.
The under implementation systems are Metro-Link Express for Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad, Varanasi Metro, Bareilly Metro, Vijayawada Metro, Patna Metro, Meerut Metro, Guwahati Metro, Chandigarh Metro, Bhopal Metro, Kozhikode Light Metro, Indore Metro, Thiruvananthapuram Light Metro, Agra Metro, Coimbatore Metro, Visakhapatnam Metro, Surat Metro, Jammu Metro, Srinagar Metro, Greater Gwalior Metro, Jabalpur Metro and Greater Nashik Metro. Currently, rapid transit is under construction or in planning in several major cities of India and will be opened shortly.
Monorail is generally considered as feeder system for the metro trains in India. In 2004, monorail was first proposed for Kolkata. But, later the idea was put on hold due to lack of funds and infeasibility. The Mumbai Monorail, which started in 2014, is the first operational monorail network in India (excluding the Skybus Metro) since the Patiala State Monorail Trainways closed in 1927.
Other planned systems are Chennai Monorail, Kolkata Monorail, Allahabad Monorail, Bengaluru Monorail, Delhi Monorail, Indore Monorail, Kanpur Monorail, Navi Mumbai Monorail, Patna Monorail, Pune Monorail, Ahmedabad Monorail, Aizawl Monorail, Bhubaneswar Monorail, Jodhpur Monorail, Kota Monorail, Nagpur Monorail and Nashik Monorail.
In addition to trains, trams were introduced in many cities in late 19th century, though almost all of these were phased out. The trams in Kolkata is currently the only tram system in the country.
Rail links between India and neighbouring countries are not well-developed.Bangladesh is connected by a biweekly train, the Maitree Express that runs from Kolkata to Dhaka and a weekly train, the Bandhan Express that runs from Kolkata to Khulna. Two rail links to Nepal exist—passenger services between Jaynagar and Bijalpura, and freight services between Raxaul and Birganj.
No rail link exists with Myanmar but a railway line is to be built through from Jiribam (in Manipur) to Tamu through Imphal and Moreh. The construction of this missing link, as per the feasibility study conducted by the Ministry of External Affairs through RITES Ltd, is estimated to cost ₹29.41 billion (US$370 million). An 18 km railway link with Bhutan is being constructed from Hashimara in West Bengal to Toribari in Bhutan. No rail link exists with either China or Sri Lanka.
India does not have any railways classified as high-speed rail (HSR), which have operational speeds in excess of 200 km/h (120 mph).
Prior to the 2014 general election, the major national party (Indian National Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party) pledged to introduce high-speed rail. The INC pledged to connect "all of India's million-plus cities by high-speed rail." Later, the BJP, which won the election, promised to build the Diamond Quadrilateral project, which would connect the cities of Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai via high-speed rail. This project was approved as a priority for the new government in the incoming prime minister's speech. Construction of one kilometer of high speed railway track will cost ₹1 billion (US$13 million) – ₹1.4 billion (US$18 million), which is 10–14 times higher than the construction of standard railway. Indian government approved the choice of Japan to build India's first high-speed railway. The planned rail would run some 500 km (310 mi) between Mumbai and the western city of Ahmedabad, at a top speed of 320 km/h (200 mph). Under the proposal, construction is expected to begin in 2017 and be completed in 2023. It would cost about ₹980 billion (US$12 billion) and be financed by a low-interest loan from Japan. India will use the wheel-based 300 km/h HSR technology, instead of new maglev 600 km/h technology of Japan used in Chūō Shinkansen. India is expected to have its HSR line operational from 2025 onwards, once the safety checks are completed.
Like monorail, light rail is also considered as a feeder system for the metro systems. The planned systems are Kolkata Light Rail Transit and Delhi Light Rail Transit.
Directorate General of Civil Aviation is the national regulatory body for the aviation industry. It is controlled by the Ministry of Civil Aviation. The ministry also controls aviation related autonomous organisations like the Airports Authority of India (AAI), Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS), Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi and Public Sector Undertakings including Pawan Hans Helicopters Limited and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.
Air India is India's national flag carrier after merging with Indian (airline) in 2011 and plays a major role in connecting India with the rest of the world. IndiGo, Air India, Spicejet, Vistara, Jet Airways and Go First are the major carriers in order of their market share. These airlines connect more than 80 cities across India and also operate overseas routes after the liberalisation of Indian aviation. Several other foreign airlines connect Indian cities with other major cities across the globe. However, a large section of country's air transport potential remains untapped, even though the Mumbai-Delhi air corridor was ranked the world's tenth busiest route by Amadeus in 2012.
While there are 346 civilian airfields in India – 253 with paved runways and 93 with unpaved runways, only 132 were classified as "airports" as of November 2014. Of these, Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi is the busiest in the country. The operations of the major airports in India have been privatised over the past five years and this has resulted in better equipped and cleaner airports. The terminals have either been refurbished or expanded.
India also has 33 "ghost airports," which were built in an effort to make air travel more accessible for those in remote regions but are now non-operational due to a lack of demand. The Jaisalmer Airport in Rajasthan, for example, was completed in 2013 and was expected to host 300,000 passengers a year but has yet to see any commercial flights take off. Despite the number of non-operational airports, India is currently planning on constructing another 200 "low-cost" airports over the next 20 years.
As of 2021, there are 45 heliports in India. India also has the world's highest helipad at the Siachen Glacier at a height of 6,400 m (21,000 ft) above mean sea level. Pawan Hans Helicopters Limited is a public sector company that provides helicopter services to ONGC to its off-shore locations, and also to various State Governments in India, particularly in North-east India.
India has a coastline of 7,517 km (4,671 mi), and thus ports are the main centres of trade. India also has an extensive network of inland waterways.
In India, about 96% of the foreign trade by quantity and 70% by value takes place through the ports. Mumbai Port & JNPT(Navi Mumbai) handles 70% of maritime trade in India. There are twelve major ports: Navi Mumbai, Mumbai, Chennai, Ennore, Thoothukudi, Kochi, Kolkata (including Haldia), Paradip, Visakhapatnam, New Mangaluru, Mormugao and Kandla. Other than these, there are 187 minor and intermediate ports, 43 of which handle cargo.
Maritime transportation in India is managed by the Shipping Corporation of India, a government-owned company that also manages offshore and other marine transport infrastructure in the country. It owns and operates about 35% of Indian tonnage and operates in practically all areas of shipping business servicing both national and international trades. The only Indian state with three ports is Tamil Nadu, they are Ennore, Chennai and Tuticorin.
It has a fleet of 79 ships of 2,750,000 GT (4.8 million DWT) and also manages 53 research, survey and support vessels of 120,000 GT (060,000 DWT) on behalf of various government departments and other organisations. Personnel are trained at the Maritime Training Institute in Mumbai, a branch of the World Maritime University, which was set up in 1987. The corporation also operates in Malta and Iran through joint ventures.
The distinction between major and minor ports is not based on the amount of cargo handled. The major ports are managed by port trusts which are regulated by the central government. They come under the purview of the Major Port Trusts Act, 1963. The minor ports are regulated by the respective state governments and many of these ports are private ports or captive ports. The total amount of traffic handled at the major ports in 2005–2006 was 382.33 Mt.
India has an extensive network of inland waterways in the form of rivers, canals, backwaters and creeks. The total navigable length is 14,500 kilometres (9,000 mi), out of which about 5,200 km (3,231 mi) of river and 485 km (301 mi) of canals can be used by mechanised crafts. Freight transport by waterways is highly underutilised in India compared to other large countries. The total cargo moved by inland waterways is just 0.15% of the total inland traffic in India, compared to the corresponding figures of 20% for Germany and 32% for Bangladesh.
Cargo that is transported in an organised manner is confined to a few waterways in Goa, West Bengal, Assam and Kerala. The Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) is the statutory authority in charge of the waterways in India. It does the function of building the necessary infrastructure in these waterways, surveying the economic feasibility of new projects and also administration and regulation. The following waterways have been declared as National Waterways:
Oil and gas industry in India imports 82% of its oil needs and aims to bring that down to 67% by 2022 by replacing it with local exploration, renewable energy and indigenous ethanol fuel (c. Jan 2018).
Cable transport, commonly known as Ropeways in India, are mostly located in mountainous areas such as in Kashmir. Some of them are also located in amusement parks such Nicco Park and Science City in Kolkata.
Logistics in India ranking moved up to 35th place in 2016 from 54th in 2014 on World Bank's Global Logistics Performance Index. Government strategy aims to raise the share of global trade in India's GDP (US$2.7 trillion in FY 2017–18) to 40%, including half of it (20% of GDP) from exports (c. Jan 2019). Cost of logistics in India is 14% of GDP, which is higher than the developed nations, and government reforms aim to bring it down to 10% of GDP by 2022 (c. Jan 2018). Ministry of Commerce and Industry has created a new dedicated centralised Logistics division in collaboration with Singapore and Japan to handle the logistics which was earlier handled by several different ministries, such as railways, roads, shipping and aviation. To boot exports, each state will have exports and logistic policy and Nodal officers will be appointed at district level (c. Jan 2018). There are 64 transactions and 37 government agencies in the end-to-end production-to-export process. To further improve the ranking, improve speed of logistics, ease of doing business and reduce the cost of logistics, India is creating a "common online integrated logistics e-marketplace portal" that will cover all transactions in production and export, connect buyers with logistics service providers and government agencies such as the customs department Icegate system, Port Community Systems, Sea and Air Port terminals, Shipping lines, Railways, etc. (c. Jan 2018).
As part of the US$125 billion port-led development project Sagarmala, the government will define the regulatory framework for the Indian logistics operational standards by India's 300 dry ports logistics parks (inland container depots or ICDs) to the top 10 logistics international best practices nations to boost exports, remove supply chain bottlenecks, reduce transaction costs, optimise logistics mix, set up new hub-and-spoke dry ports (c. January 2018). To reduce the logistics costs by 10% and CO2 emissions by 12%, the government is also developing 35 new "Multimodal Logistics Parks" (MMLPs) on 36 ring roads, which will facilitate 50% of the freight moved in India. Land has been earmarked and pre-feasibility studies are underway for six of these MMLPs (c. May 2017).
Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and government will organise an annual national logistics convention. Major shippers include Container Corporation of India and Transport Corporation of India, and Logistics Management magazine is one of the industry publications.
In 1998, the Supreme Court of India published a directive that specified the date of April 2001 as deadline to replace or convert all buses, three-wheelers and taxis in Delhi to compressed natural gas.
The Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation was the first state transport undertaking in India to utilise bio-fuels and ethanol-blended fuels. KSRTC took an initiative to do research in alternative fuel forms by experimenting with various alternatives — blending diesel with biofuels such as honge, palm, sunflower, groundnut, coconut and sesame. In 2009, the corporation decided to promote the use of biofuel buses.
In 2017, the government announced that by 2030, only electric vehicles would be sold in the country. It also announced that by 2022 all trains would be electric.
In March 2020, the Government of India temporarily suspended all passenger rail, metro and bus services due to COVID-19
This article incorporates public domain material from The World Factbook. CIA. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Transport in India consists of transport by land, water and air. Road transport is the primary mode of transport for most Indian citizens, and India's road transport systems are among the most heavily used in the world.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "India's road network is the second-largest, after the United States and one of the busiest in the world, transporting 8.225 billion passengers and over 980 million tonnes of cargo annually, as of 2015. India's rail network is the fourth largest and second busiest in the world, transporting 8.09 billion passengers and 1.20 billion tonnes of freight annually, as of 2020. Aviation in India is broadly divided into military and civil aviation which is the fastest-growing aviation market in the world (IATA data). India's waterways network, in the form of rivers, canals, backwaters and creeks, is the ninth largest waterway network in the world. Freight transport by waterways is highly under utilised in India with the total cargo moved (in tonne kilometres) by inland waterways being 0.1 percent of the total inland traffic in India. In total, about 21 percent of households have two wheelers whereas 4.70 percent of households in India have cars or vans as per the 2011 census of India. The automobile industry in India is currently growing rapidly with an annual production of over 4.6 million vehicles, with an annual growth rate of 10.5% and vehicle volume is expected to rise greatly in the future.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Walking was a major transport form in ancient times. People used to cover long distances on foot or bullock carts. For instance, Adi Sankaracharya travelled all over India from Kalady near Kochi. Walking still constitutes an important mode of transport in rural areas. In the city of Mumbai, to further improve the transit conditions for pedestrians, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, has commenced the construction of more than 50 skywalks, as part of the Mumbai Skywalk project, which is very helpful as walk enthusiasts take part in reducing traffic. The Dakshineswar Skywalk has also come up in West Bengal.",
"title": "Traditional means of transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Palanquins, also known as palkis, were one of the luxurious methods used by the rich and noblemen for travelling and also to carry a deity (idol) of a god. Many temples have sculptures of a god being carried in palkis. Modern use of the palanquin is limited to Indian weddings, pilgrimage and carrying idols of gods.",
"title": "Traditional means of transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Bullock carts were used to be ways of transportation in India, but it can't be seen today due to low speed and safety.",
"title": "Traditional means of transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Many years ago, the government banned bullock carts.",
"title": "Traditional means of transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Bicycles or cycles, have ownership rates ranging from around 30% to 75% at the state level. Along with walking, cycling accounts for 50% to 80% of the commuter trips for those in the informal sector in urban areas. However, recent developments suggest that bicycle riding is quickly becoming popular in the metropolitan cities of India. In recent years, government development authorities all over India encourages the setup and use of separate bicycle lanes alongside the roads to combat pollution and ease traffic congestion.",
"title": "Bicycles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Human-pulled rickshaws are nowadays rarely available in various cities and villages in the country. Many local governments have proposed a ban on these rickshaws describing them as \"inhuman\". The Government of West Bengal proposed a ban on these rickshaws in 2005. Though a bill aiming to address this issue, termed as Calcutta Hackney Carriage Bill, was passed by the West Bengal Assembly in 2006, it has not yet been implemented. The Government of West Bengal is working on an amendment to this bill to avoid the loopholes that were exposed when the Hand-pulled Rickshaw Owners' Association filed a petition against the bill.",
"title": "Bicycles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Cycle rickshaws were introduced in India in the 1940s. They are bigger than a tricycle where two people sit on an elevated seat at the back and a person pedals from the front. In the late 2000s, they were banned in several cities for causing traffic congestion. The Delhi Police recently submitted an affidavit against plying of cycle rickshaws to ease traffic congestion in the city but it was dismissed by the Delhi High Court. In addition, environmentalists have supported the retention of cycle rickshaws as a non-polluting mode of transport.",
"title": "Bicycles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "As per 2017 estimates, the total road length in India is 5,603,293 km (3,481,725 mi); making the Indian road network the second largest road network in the world after the United States. At 0.66 km of highway per square kilometre of land the density of India's highway network is higher than that of the United States (0.65) and far higher than that of China's (0.16) or Brazil's (0.20).",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "India has a network of National Highways connecting all the major cities and state capitals, forming the economic backbone of the country. As of 2013, India has a total of 66,754 km (41,479 mi) of National Highways, of which 1,205 km (749 mi) are classified as expressways. Although India has large network of four or more lane highways of international quality standards, but without access control (entry/exit control), they are not called as expressways but simply highways.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "As per the National Highways Authority of India, about 66% of freight and 82% passenger traffic is carried by the roads. The National Highways carry about 40% of total road traffic, though only about 2% of the road network is covered by these roads. Average growth of the number of vehicles has been around 10.16% per annum over recent years.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "India also has many bridges and flyovers in major cities to reduce traffic congestion. Some notable projects include Bandra - Worli Sea link in Mumbai and Kathipara Cloverleaf Interchange in Chennai. India's metropolitan intra-city average traffic vehicle speed in Delhi was 25 km/h (16 mph), in Mumbai 20.7 km/h (12.9 mph), in Chennai 18.9 km/h (11.7 mph) and in Kolkata 19.2 km/h (11.9 mph), as per a study by Ola Cabs in 2017.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Under National Highways Development Project (NHDP), work is under progress to equip national highways with at least four lanes; there is also a plan to convert some stretches of these roads to six lanes. In recent years construction has commenced on a nationwide system of multi-lane highways, including the Golden Quadrilateral connecting four important metropolitan cities of India (Delhi-Kolkata-Chennai-Mumbai) and North-South and East-West Corridors which link the largest cities in India.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 2000, around 40% of villages in India lacked access to all-weather roads and remained isolated during the monsoon season. To improve rural connectivity, Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (Prime Minister's Rural Road Program), a project funded by the Central Government with the help of the World Bank, was launched in 2000 to build all-weather roads to connect all habitations with a population of 500 or above (250 or above for hilly areas).",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Buses are an important means of public transport in India. Due to this social significance, urban bus transport is often owned and operated by public agencies, and most state governments operate bus services through a state road transport corporation. These corporations have proven extremely useful in connecting villages and towns across the country. Alongside the public companies there are many private bus fleets: As of 2012, there were 131,800 publicly owned buses in India, but 1,544,700 buses owned by private companies.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "However, the share of buses is negligible in most Indian cities as compared to personalised vehicles, and two-wheelers and cars account for more than 80 percent of the vehicle population in most large cities.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Bus rapid transit systems (BRTS), exist in several cities. Buses take up over 90% of public transport in Indian cities, and serve as an important mode of transport. Services are mostly run by state government owned transport corporations. In 1990s, all government state transport corporations have introduced various facilities like low-floor buses for the disabled and air-conditioned buses to attract private car owners to help decongest roads.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 2010, the Ahmedabad Bus Rapid Transit System won the prestigious Sustainable Transport Award from the Transportation Research Board in Washington. Rainbow BRTS in Pune is the first BRTS system in the country. Mumbai introduced air conditioned buses in 1998. Bangalore was the first city in India to introduce Volvo B7RLE intra-city buses in India in January 2005. Bangalore is the first Indian city to have an air-conditioned bus stop, located near Cubbon Park. It was built by Airtel. The city of Chennai houses one of Asia's largest bus terminus, the Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Motorised two-wheeler vehicles like scooters, motorcycles and mopeds are very popular due to their fuel efficiency and ease of use in congested roads or streets. The number of two-wheelers sold is several times to that of cars. There were 47.5 million powered two-wheelers in India in 2003 compared with just 8.6 million cars.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Manufacture of motorcycles in India started when Royal Enfield began assembly in its plant in Chennai in 1948. Royal Enfield, an iconic brand name in the country, manufactures different variants of the British Bullet motorcycle which is a classic motorcycle that is still in production. Hero MotoCorp (formerly Hero Honda), Honda, Bajaj Auto, Yamaha, TVS Motors and Mahindra 2 Wheelers are the largest two-wheeler companies in terms of market-share.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Manufacture of scooters in India started when Automobile Products of India (API) set up at Mumbai and incorporated in 1949. They began assembling Innocenti-built Lambretta scooters in India. They eventually acquired a licence for the Li150 series model, of which they began full-fledged production from the early 1960s onwards. In 1972, Scooters India Limited (SIL), a state-run enterprise based in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, bought the entire manufacturing rights of the last Innocenti Lambretta model. API has infrastructural facilities at Mumbai, Aurangabad, and Chennai, but has been non-operational since 2002. SIL stopped producing scooters in 1998.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Motorcycles and scooters can be rented in many cities, Wicked Ride, Metro Bikes and many other companies are working with state governments to solve last-mile connectivity problems with mass-transit. Wearing protective headgear is mandatory for both the rider and the pillion-rider in most cities.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Private automobiles account for 30% of the total transport demand in urban areas of India. An average of 963 new private vehicles are registered every day in Delhi alone. The number of automobiles produced in India rose from 6.3 million in 2002–2003 to 11 million (11.2 million) in 2008–2009. There is substantial variation among cities and states in terms of dependence on private cars: Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and Kolkata have 185, 127, 157 and 140 cars per 1,000 people respectively, which is much lower compared to developed countries. This reflects different levels of urban density and varied qualities of public transport infrastructure. Nationwide, India still has a very low rate of car ownership. When comparing car ownership between BRICS developing countries, it is on a par with China, and exceeded by Brazil and Russia.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Compact cars, especially hatchbacks predominate due to affordability, fuel efficiency, congestion, and lack of parking space in most cities. Chennai is known as the \"Detroit of India\" for its automobile industry.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Maruti, Hyundai and Tata Motors are the most popular brands in the order of their market share. The Ambassador once had a monopoly, but is now an icon of pre-liberalisation India, and is still used by taxi companies. The Maruti 800 launched in 1984, created the first revolution in the Indian auto sector because of its low price and high quality. It had the highest market share until 2004, when it was overtaken by other low-cost models from Maruti such as the Alto and the Wagon R, the Indica from Tata Motors and the Santro from Hyundai. Over the 20 years since its introduction, about 2.4 million Maruti 800s have been sold. However, with the launch of the Tata Nano, the least expensive production car in the world, the Maruti 800 lost its popularity. India is also known for a variety of indigenous vehicles made in villages out of simple motors and vehicle spare parts. A few of these innovations are the jugaad, maruta, chhakda, and the peter rehra.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In the city of Bangalore, Radio One and the Bangalore Traffic Police, launched a carpooling drive which has involved celebrities such as Robin Uthappa, and Rahul Dravid encouraging the public to carpool. The initiative got a good response, and by the end of May 2009, 10,000 people are said to have carpooled in the city. There have been efforts to improve the energy efficiency of transport systems in Indian cities, including by introducing performance standards for private automobiles or by banning particularly polluting older cars. The city of Kolkata, for example, passed a law in 2009/10 phasing out vehicles over 15 years old with the purpose of reducing air pollution. However, the effects were mixed. On the one hand, poorer urban residents are more likely to see public health improvements from better air quality, since they are more likely to live in polluted areas and work outdoors than richer urban residents. On the other hand, drivers of such vehicles suffered from losing their livelihoods as a result of this environmental regulation.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The first utility vehicle in India was manufactured by Mahindra. It was a copy of the original Jeep and was manufactured under licence. The vehicle was an instant hit and made Mahindra one of the top companies in India. The Indian Army and police extensively use Mahindra vehicles along with Maruti Gypsys for transporting personnel and equipment. Tata Motors, the automobile manufacturing arm of the Tata Group, launched its first utility vehicle, the Tata Sumo, in 1994. The Sumo, owing to its then-modern design, captured a 31% share of the market within two years. The Tempo Trax from Force Motors until recently was ruling the rural areas. Sports utility vehicles now form a sizeable part of the passenger vehicle market. Models from Tata, Honda, Hyundai, Ford and other brands are available.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Most of the taxicabs in Mumbai and Kolkata are either Premier Padmini or Hindustan Ambassador cars. In all other cities, taxi fleets comprise more modern cars. However, foreign-developed app-based taxi services like Uber as well as an Indian-developed app-based taxi services like Ola coming to the fore, taxicabs now include sedans, SUVs and even motorcycle taxis. Depending on the city/state, taxis can either be hailed or hired from taxi-stands. In cities such as Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad, taxis need to be hired over phone, whereas in cities like Kolkata and Mumbai, taxis can also be hailed on the street. According to Government of India regulations, all taxis are required to have a fare-meter installed. There are additional surcharges for luggage, late-night rides and toll taxes are to be paid by the passenger. Since year 2006, radio taxis have become increasingly popular with the public due to reasons of safety and convenience.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In cities and localities where taxis are expensive or do not charge as per the government or municipal regulated fares, people use share taxis. These are normal taxis which carry one or more passengers travelling to destinations either on one route to the final destination, or near the final destination. The passengers are charged according to the number of people with different destinations. The city of Mumbai will soon be the first city in India to have an \"in-taxi\" magazine, titled MumBaee, which will be issued to taxis which are part of the Mumbai Taximen's Union. The magazine debuted on 13 July 2009. In Kolkata, there are many no refusal taxis available with white and blue in colour.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "An auto is a three-wheeler vehicle for hire that does not have doors and is generally characterised by a small cabin for the driver in the front and a seat for passengers in the rear. Generally it is painted in yellow, green or black and has a black, yellow or green canopy on the top, but designs vary considerably from place to place. The colour of the auto rickshaw is also determined by the fuel that it is powered by, for example Agartala, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Pune and Delhi have green or black autos indicating the use of compressed natural gas, whereas the autos of Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad have green autos indicating the use of LPG.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In Mumbai and other metropolitan cities, 'autos' or 'rickshaws', as they are popularly known, have regulated metered fares. A recent law prohibits auto rickshaw drivers from charging more than the specified fare, or charging night-fare before midnight, and also prohibits the driver from refusing to go to a particular location. Mumbai and Kolkata are also the only two cities, which prohibit auto rickshaws from entering a certain part of the city, in these cases being South Mumbai and certain parts of Downtown Kolkata. However, in cities like Chennai, it is common to see autorickshaw drivers demand more than the specified fare and refuse to use fare meter.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Airports and railway stations at many cities such as Howrah, Chennai and Bengaluru provide a facility of prepaid auto booths, which requires a fixed payment, with a base fare of Rs. 30 and a rate of Rs.14.20 per kilometre after 1.5 kilometres of travel, set by the authorities as of May, 2022. On this basis, the fare is calculated and is to be paid by the passenger.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Electric rickshaw is new popular means of transport, rapidly growing in number in India, due to low running and initial cost, other economic and environmental benefits, these vehicles are becoming popular in India. E-Rickshaws are made in fiberglass or metal body, powered by a BLDC Electric Motor with max power 2000W and speed 25 km/h.",
"title": "Road"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Country-wide rail services in India are provided by the state-run Indian Railways (IR) under the supervision of the Ministry of Railways. IR is divided into eighteen zones including the Kolkata Metro Railway. The IR are further sub-divided into sixty seven divisions, each having a divisional headquarters.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The railway network travels across the country, covering more than 7,321 stations over a total route length of more than 67,415 km (41,890 mi) and track length of about 123,542 km (76,765 mi) as of March 2021. About 45,000 km (28,000 mi) or 71% of the route-kilometre was electrified as in March 2019. IR provides an important mode of transport in India, transporting 23.1 million passengers and 3.3 million tons of freight daily as of March 2019. IR is the world's eighth-largest employer, it had 1.227 million employees as of March 2019. As to rolling stock, IR owns over 289,185 (freight) wagons, 74,003 coaches and 12,147 locomotives as of March 2019. It also owns locomotive and coach production facilities. It operates both long distance and suburban rail systems.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The IR runs a number of special types of services which are given higher priority. The fastest train at present is the Vande Bharat Express with operation speeds of up to 180 km/h, though the fastest service is Gatimaan Express with an operational speed of 160 km/h (99 mph) and average speed of 100 km/h (62 mph), since the Vande Bharat Express is capped at 120 km/h for safety reasons. The Rajdhani trains introduced in 1969 provides connectivity between the national capital, Delhi and capitals of the states. On the other hand, Shatabdi Express provides connectivity between centres of tourism, pilgrimage or business. The Shatabdi Express trains run over short to medium distances and do not have sleepers while the Rajdhani Expresses run over longer distances and have only sleeping accommodation. Both series of trains have a maximum permissible speed of 110 to 140 km/h (68 to 87 mph) but average speed of less than 100 km/h.. Besides, the IR also operates a number of luxury trains which cater to various tourist circuits. For instance, the Palace on Wheels serves the Rajasthan circuit and The Golden Chariot serves the Karnataka and Goa circuits. There are two UNESCO World Heritage Sites on IR, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus and the Mountain railways of India. The latter consists of three separate railway lines located in different parts of India, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a 610 mm (2 ft) narrow gauge railway in Lesser Himalayas in West Bengal, the Nilgiri Mountain Railway, a 1,000 mm (3 ft 3+3⁄8 in) metre gauge rack railway in the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu and the Kalka-Shimla Railway, a 762 mm (2 ft 6 in) narrow gauge railway in the Siwalik Hills in Himachal Pradesh.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In the freight segment, IR ferries various commodities and fuels in industrial, consumer, and agricultural segments across the length and breadth of India. IR has historically subsidised the passenger segment with income from the freight business. As a result, freight services are unable to compete with other modes of transport on both cost and speed of delivery, leading to continuous erosion of market share. To counter this downward trend, IR has started new initiatives in freight segments including upgrading of existing goods sheds, attracting private capital to build multi-commodity multi-modal logistics terminals, changing container sizes, operating time-tabled freight trains, and tweaking with the freight pricing/product mix.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 1999, the Konkan Railway Corporation introduced the Roll on Roll off (RORO) service, a unique road-rail synergy system, on the section between Kolad in Maharashtra and Verna in Goa, which was extended up to Surathkal in Karnataka in 2004. The RORO service, the first of its kind in India, allowed trucks to be transported on flatbed trailers. It was highly popular, carrying about 110,000 trucks and bringing in about ₹ 740 million worth of earnings to the corporation until 2007.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Perhaps the game-changer for IR in the freight segment are the new dedicated freight corridors that are expected to be completed by 2020. When fully implemented, the new corridors, spanning around 3300 km, could support hauling of trains up to 1.5 km in length with 32.5-ton axle-load at speeds of 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph). Also, they will free-up capacity on dense passenger routes and will allow IR to run more trains at higher speeds. Additional corridors are being planned to augment the freight infrastructure in the country.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In many Indian metropolitan regions, rail is the more efficient and affordable mode of public transport for daily commute. Examples of types of services include long-established local or suburban rail services in cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, the century-old tram service in Kolkata, the more recent metro service in Kolkata, Delhi and Chennai and Monorail feeder service in Mumbai.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Mumbai Suburban Railway was the first rail system in India, which began its services in Mumbai in 1853, transporting 6.3 million passengers daily and has the highest passenger density in the world. The Kolkata Suburban Railway was established in 1854, and the Chennai Suburban Railway in 1931. The operational suburban rail systems in India are in Mumbai Suburban Railway, Kolkata Suburban Railway, Chennai Suburban Railway, Lucknow-Kanpur Suburban Railway, Delhi Suburban Railway, Pune Suburban Railway, Hyderabad Multi-Modal Transport System, Barabanki-Lucknow Suburban Railway and Karwar railway division. Other planned systems are Bengaluru Commuter Rail, Ahmedabad Suburban Railway and Coimbatore Suburban Railway.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Chennai MRTS, which began services in 1995, remains the country's first and only mass rapid transit rail. Although distinct from the Chennai Suburban Railway, the MRTS remains integrated in a wider urban rail network.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The first modern rapid transit in India is the Kolkata Metro which started its operations in 1984 as the 17th Zone of the Indian Railways. The Delhi Metro in New Delhi is India's second conventional metro and began operations in 2002. The Namma Metro in Bengaluru is India's third operational rapid transit and began operations in 2011.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The operational systems are Kolkata Metro, Delhi Metro, Bengaluru Metro, Gurgaon Metro, Mumbai Metro, Jaipur Metro, Chennai Metro, Kochi Metro, Lucknow Metro, Nagpur Metro, Noida Metro, Hyderabad Metro, Kanpur Metro, Ahmedabad Metro, Pune Metro, Navi Mumbai Metro.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The under implementation systems are Metro-Link Express for Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad, Varanasi Metro, Bareilly Metro, Vijayawada Metro, Patna Metro, Meerut Metro, Guwahati Metro, Chandigarh Metro, Bhopal Metro, Kozhikode Light Metro, Indore Metro, Thiruvananthapuram Light Metro, Agra Metro, Coimbatore Metro, Visakhapatnam Metro, Surat Metro, Jammu Metro, Srinagar Metro, Greater Gwalior Metro, Jabalpur Metro and Greater Nashik Metro. Currently, rapid transit is under construction or in planning in several major cities of India and will be opened shortly.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Monorail is generally considered as feeder system for the metro trains in India. In 2004, monorail was first proposed for Kolkata. But, later the idea was put on hold due to lack of funds and infeasibility. The Mumbai Monorail, which started in 2014, is the first operational monorail network in India (excluding the Skybus Metro) since the Patiala State Monorail Trainways closed in 1927.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Other planned systems are Chennai Monorail, Kolkata Monorail, Allahabad Monorail, Bengaluru Monorail, Delhi Monorail, Indore Monorail, Kanpur Monorail, Navi Mumbai Monorail, Patna Monorail, Pune Monorail, Ahmedabad Monorail, Aizawl Monorail, Bhubaneswar Monorail, Jodhpur Monorail, Kota Monorail, Nagpur Monorail and Nashik Monorail.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In addition to trains, trams were introduced in many cities in late 19th century, though almost all of these were phased out. The trams in Kolkata is currently the only tram system in the country.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Rail links between India and neighbouring countries are not well-developed.Bangladesh is connected by a biweekly train, the Maitree Express that runs from Kolkata to Dhaka and a weekly train, the Bandhan Express that runs from Kolkata to Khulna. Two rail links to Nepal exist—passenger services between Jaynagar and Bijalpura, and freight services between Raxaul and Birganj.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "No rail link exists with Myanmar but a railway line is to be built through from Jiribam (in Manipur) to Tamu through Imphal and Moreh. The construction of this missing link, as per the feasibility study conducted by the Ministry of External Affairs through RITES Ltd, is estimated to cost ₹29.41 billion (US$370 million). An 18 km railway link with Bhutan is being constructed from Hashimara in West Bengal to Toribari in Bhutan. No rail link exists with either China or Sri Lanka.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "India does not have any railways classified as high-speed rail (HSR), which have operational speeds in excess of 200 km/h (120 mph).",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Prior to the 2014 general election, the major national party (Indian National Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party) pledged to introduce high-speed rail. The INC pledged to connect \"all of India's million-plus cities by high-speed rail.\" Later, the BJP, which won the election, promised to build the Diamond Quadrilateral project, which would connect the cities of Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai via high-speed rail. This project was approved as a priority for the new government in the incoming prime minister's speech. Construction of one kilometer of high speed railway track will cost ₹1 billion (US$13 million) – ₹1.4 billion (US$18 million), which is 10–14 times higher than the construction of standard railway. Indian government approved the choice of Japan to build India's first high-speed railway. The planned rail would run some 500 km (310 mi) between Mumbai and the western city of Ahmedabad, at a top speed of 320 km/h (200 mph). Under the proposal, construction is expected to begin in 2017 and be completed in 2023. It would cost about ₹980 billion (US$12 billion) and be financed by a low-interest loan from Japan. India will use the wheel-based 300 km/h HSR technology, instead of new maglev 600 km/h technology of Japan used in Chūō Shinkansen. India is expected to have its HSR line operational from 2025 onwards, once the safety checks are completed.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Like monorail, light rail is also considered as a feeder system for the metro systems. The planned systems are Kolkata Light Rail Transit and Delhi Light Rail Transit.",
"title": "Rail"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Directorate General of Civil Aviation is the national regulatory body for the aviation industry. It is controlled by the Ministry of Civil Aviation. The ministry also controls aviation related autonomous organisations like the Airports Authority of India (AAI), Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS), Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Uran Akademi and Public Sector Undertakings including Pawan Hans Helicopters Limited and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.",
"title": "Airways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Air India is India's national flag carrier after merging with Indian (airline) in 2011 and plays a major role in connecting India with the rest of the world. IndiGo, Air India, Spicejet, Vistara, Jet Airways and Go First are the major carriers in order of their market share. These airlines connect more than 80 cities across India and also operate overseas routes after the liberalisation of Indian aviation. Several other foreign airlines connect Indian cities with other major cities across the globe. However, a large section of country's air transport potential remains untapped, even though the Mumbai-Delhi air corridor was ranked the world's tenth busiest route by Amadeus in 2012.",
"title": "Airways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "While there are 346 civilian airfields in India – 253 with paved runways and 93 with unpaved runways, only 132 were classified as \"airports\" as of November 2014. Of these, Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi is the busiest in the country. The operations of the major airports in India have been privatised over the past five years and this has resulted in better equipped and cleaner airports. The terminals have either been refurbished or expanded.",
"title": "Airways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "India also has 33 \"ghost airports,\" which were built in an effort to make air travel more accessible for those in remote regions but are now non-operational due to a lack of demand. The Jaisalmer Airport in Rajasthan, for example, was completed in 2013 and was expected to host 300,000 passengers a year but has yet to see any commercial flights take off. Despite the number of non-operational airports, India is currently planning on constructing another 200 \"low-cost\" airports over the next 20 years.",
"title": "Airways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "As of 2021, there are 45 heliports in India. India also has the world's highest helipad at the Siachen Glacier at a height of 6,400 m (21,000 ft) above mean sea level. Pawan Hans Helicopters Limited is a public sector company that provides helicopter services to ONGC to its off-shore locations, and also to various State Governments in India, particularly in North-east India.",
"title": "Airways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "India has a coastline of 7,517 km (4,671 mi), and thus ports are the main centres of trade. India also has an extensive network of inland waterways.",
"title": "Water"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In India, about 96% of the foreign trade by quantity and 70% by value takes place through the ports. Mumbai Port & JNPT(Navi Mumbai) handles 70% of maritime trade in India. There are twelve major ports: Navi Mumbai, Mumbai, Chennai, Ennore, Thoothukudi, Kochi, Kolkata (including Haldia), Paradip, Visakhapatnam, New Mangaluru, Mormugao and Kandla. Other than these, there are 187 minor and intermediate ports, 43 of which handle cargo.",
"title": "Water"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Maritime transportation in India is managed by the Shipping Corporation of India, a government-owned company that also manages offshore and other marine transport infrastructure in the country. It owns and operates about 35% of Indian tonnage and operates in practically all areas of shipping business servicing both national and international trades. The only Indian state with three ports is Tamil Nadu, they are Ennore, Chennai and Tuticorin.",
"title": "Water"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "It has a fleet of 79 ships of 2,750,000 GT (4.8 million DWT) and also manages 53 research, survey and support vessels of 120,000 GT (060,000 DWT) on behalf of various government departments and other organisations. Personnel are trained at the Maritime Training Institute in Mumbai, a branch of the World Maritime University, which was set up in 1987. The corporation also operates in Malta and Iran through joint ventures.",
"title": "Water"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The distinction between major and minor ports is not based on the amount of cargo handled. The major ports are managed by port trusts which are regulated by the central government. They come under the purview of the Major Port Trusts Act, 1963. The minor ports are regulated by the respective state governments and many of these ports are private ports or captive ports. The total amount of traffic handled at the major ports in 2005–2006 was 382.33 Mt.",
"title": "Water"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "India has an extensive network of inland waterways in the form of rivers, canals, backwaters and creeks. The total navigable length is 14,500 kilometres (9,000 mi), out of which about 5,200 km (3,231 mi) of river and 485 km (301 mi) of canals can be used by mechanised crafts. Freight transport by waterways is highly underutilised in India compared to other large countries. The total cargo moved by inland waterways is just 0.15% of the total inland traffic in India, compared to the corresponding figures of 20% for Germany and 32% for Bangladesh.",
"title": "Water"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Cargo that is transported in an organised manner is confined to a few waterways in Goa, West Bengal, Assam and Kerala. The Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI) is the statutory authority in charge of the waterways in India. It does the function of building the necessary infrastructure in these waterways, surveying the economic feasibility of new projects and also administration and regulation. The following waterways have been declared as National Waterways:",
"title": "Water"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Oil and gas industry in India imports 82% of its oil needs and aims to bring that down to 67% by 2022 by replacing it with local exploration, renewable energy and indigenous ethanol fuel (c. Jan 2018).",
"title": "Pipelines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Cable transport, commonly known as Ropeways in India, are mostly located in mountainous areas such as in Kashmir. Some of them are also located in amusement parks such Nicco Park and Science City in Kolkata.",
"title": "Cable"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Logistics in India ranking moved up to 35th place in 2016 from 54th in 2014 on World Bank's Global Logistics Performance Index. Government strategy aims to raise the share of global trade in India's GDP (US$2.7 trillion in FY 2017–18) to 40%, including half of it (20% of GDP) from exports (c. Jan 2019). Cost of logistics in India is 14% of GDP, which is higher than the developed nations, and government reforms aim to bring it down to 10% of GDP by 2022 (c. Jan 2018). Ministry of Commerce and Industry has created a new dedicated centralised Logistics division in collaboration with Singapore and Japan to handle the logistics which was earlier handled by several different ministries, such as railways, roads, shipping and aviation. To boot exports, each state will have exports and logistic policy and Nodal officers will be appointed at district level (c. Jan 2018). There are 64 transactions and 37 government agencies in the end-to-end production-to-export process. To further improve the ranking, improve speed of logistics, ease of doing business and reduce the cost of logistics, India is creating a \"common online integrated logistics e-marketplace portal\" that will cover all transactions in production and export, connect buyers with logistics service providers and government agencies such as the customs department Icegate system, Port Community Systems, Sea and Air Port terminals, Shipping lines, Railways, etc. (c. Jan 2018).",
"title": "Logistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "As part of the US$125 billion port-led development project Sagarmala, the government will define the regulatory framework for the Indian logistics operational standards by India's 300 dry ports logistics parks (inland container depots or ICDs) to the top 10 logistics international best practices nations to boost exports, remove supply chain bottlenecks, reduce transaction costs, optimise logistics mix, set up new hub-and-spoke dry ports (c. January 2018). To reduce the logistics costs by 10% and CO2 emissions by 12%, the government is also developing 35 new \"Multimodal Logistics Parks\" (MMLPs) on 36 ring roads, which will facilitate 50% of the freight moved in India. Land has been earmarked and pre-feasibility studies are underway for six of these MMLPs (c. May 2017).",
"title": "Logistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and government will organise an annual national logistics convention. Major shippers include Container Corporation of India and Transport Corporation of India, and Logistics Management magazine is one of the industry publications.",
"title": "Logistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In 1998, the Supreme Court of India published a directive that specified the date of April 2001 as deadline to replace or convert all buses, three-wheelers and taxis in Delhi to compressed natural gas.",
"title": "Modernisation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation was the first state transport undertaking in India to utilise bio-fuels and ethanol-blended fuels. KSRTC took an initiative to do research in alternative fuel forms by experimenting with various alternatives — blending diesel with biofuels such as honge, palm, sunflower, groundnut, coconut and sesame. In 2009, the corporation decided to promote the use of biofuel buses.",
"title": "Modernisation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In 2017, the government announced that by 2030, only electric vehicles would be sold in the country. It also announced that by 2022 all trains would be electric.",
"title": "Modernisation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In March 2020, the Government of India temporarily suspended all passenger rail, metro and bus services due to COVID-19",
"title": "Modernisation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "This article incorporates public domain material from The World Factbook. CIA.",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Transport in India consists of transport by land, water and air. Road transport is the primary mode of transport for most Indian citizens, and India's road transport systems are among the most heavily used in the world. India's road network is the second-largest, after the United States and one of the busiest in the world, transporting 8.225 billion passengers and over 980 million tonnes of cargo annually, as of 2015. India's rail network is the fourth largest and second busiest in the world, transporting 8.09 billion passengers and 1.20 billion tonnes of freight annually, as of 2020. Aviation in India is broadly divided into military and civil aviation which is the fastest-growing aviation market in the world. India's waterways network, in the form of rivers, canals, backwaters and creeks, is the ninth largest waterway network in the world. Freight transport by waterways is highly under utilised in India with the total cargo moved by inland waterways being 0.1 percent of the total inland traffic in India. In total, about 21 percent of households have two wheelers whereas 4.70 percent of households in India have cars or vans as per the 2011 census of India. The automobile industry in India is currently growing rapidly with an annual production of over 4.6 million vehicles, with an annual growth rate of 10.5% and vehicle volume is expected to rise greatly in the future. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-12-31T23:08:13Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_India |
14,604 | Foreign relations of India | India, officially the Republic of India, has full diplomatic relations with 201 states, including Palestine, the Holy See, and Niue. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is the government agency responsible for the conduct of foreign relations of India. With the world's third largest military expenditure, second largest armed force, fifth largest economy by GDP nominal rates and third largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, India is a prominent regional power and a rising superpower.
According to the MEA, the main purposes of Indian diplomacy include protecting India's national interests, promoting friendly relations with other states, and providing consular services to "foreigners and Indian nationals abroad." In recent decades, India has pursued an expansive foreign policy, including the neighborhood-first policy embodied by SAARC as well as the Look East policy to forge more extensive economic and strategic relationships with other East Asian countries. It has also maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity, which involves its "no first use" nuclear policy and its neutral stance on the Russo-Ukrainian War.
India is a member of several intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations, the Asian Development Bank, BRICS, and the G-20. which is widely considered the main economic locus of emerging and developed nations. India exerts a salient influence as the founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. India has also played an important and influential role in other international organisations, such as the East Asia Summit, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund (IMF), G8+5 and IBSA Dialogue Forum. India is also a member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. As a former British colony, India is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and continues to maintain relationships with other Commonwealth countries.
India's relations with the world have evolved since the British Raj (1857–1947) when the British Empire took responsibility for handling external and defence relations. When India gained independence in 1947, few Indians had experience in making or conducting foreign policy. However, the country's oldest political party, the Indian National Congress, had established a small foreign department in 1925 to make overseas contacts and to publicise its independence struggle. From the late 1920s on, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had a long-standing interest in world affairs among independence leaders, formulated the Congress's stance on international issues. As Prime Minister and Minister of External Affairs from 1947, Nehru articulated India's approach to the world.
India's international influence varied over the years after independence. Indian prestige and moral authority were high in the 1950s and facilitated the acquisition of developmental assistance from both East and West. Although the prestige stemmed from India's nonaligned stance, the nation was unable to prevent Cold War politics from becoming intertwined with interstate relations in South Asia. On the intensely debated Kashmir issue with Pakistan, India lost credibility by rejecting United Nations' calls for a plebiscite in the disputed area.
In the 1960s and 1970s, India's international position among developed and developing countries faded during wars with China and Pakistan, disputes with other countries in South Asia, and India's attempt to match Pakistan's support from the United States and China by signing the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in August 1971. Although India obtained substantial Soviet military and economic aid, which helped to strengthen the nation, India's influence was undercut regionally and internationally by the perception that its friendship with the Soviet Union prevented a more forthright condemnation of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. In the late 1980s, India improved relations with the United States, other developed countries, and China while continuing close ties with the Soviet Union. Relations with its South Asian neighbours, especially Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, occupied much of the energies of the Ministry of External Affairs.
Even before independence, the Indian colonial government maintained semi-autonomous diplomatic relations. It had colonies (such as the Aden Settlement), that sent and received full missions. India was a founder member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. After India gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1947, it soon joined the Commonwealth of Nations and strongly supported independence movements in other colonies, like the Indonesian National Revolution. The partition and various territorial disputes, particularly that over Kashmir, would strain its relations with Pakistan for years to come. During the Cold War, India adopted a foreign policy of not aligning itself with any major power bloc. However, India developed close ties with the Soviet Union and received extensive military support from it.
The end of the Cold War significantly affected India's foreign policy, as it did for much of the world. The country now seeks to strengthen its diplomatic and economic ties with the United States, the European Union trading bloc, Japan, Israel, Mexico, and Brazil. India has also forged close ties with the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the Arab League and Iran.
Though India continues to have a military relationship with Russia, Israel has emerged as India's second-largest military partner while India has built a strong strategic partnership with the United States. The foreign policy of Narendra Modi indicated a shift towards focusing on the Asian region and, more broadly, trade deals.
India's foreign policy has always regarded the concept of neighbourhood as one of widening concentric circles, around a central axis of historical and cultural commonalities.
As many as 44 million people of Indian origin live and work abroad and constitute an important link with the mother country. An important role of India's foreign policy has been to ensure their welfare and well-being within the framework of the laws of the country where they live.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, promoted a strong personal role for the Prime Minister but a weak institutional structure. Nehru served concurrently as Prime Minister and Minister of External Affairs; he made all major foreign policy decisions himself after consulting with his advisers and then entrusted the conduct of international affairs to senior members of the Indian Foreign Service. He was the main founding father of the Panchsheel or the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence.
His successors continued to exercise considerable control over India's international dealings, although they appointed separate ministers of external affairs.
India's second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri (1964–66), expanded the Prime Minister's Office (sometimes called the Prime Minister's Secretariat) and enlarged its powers. By the 1970s, the Office of the Prime Minister had become the de facto coordinator and supra-ministry of the Indian government. The enhanced role of the office strengthened the prime minister's control over foreign policymaking at the expense of the Ministry of External Affairs. Advisers in the office provided channels of information and policy recommendations in addition to those offered by the Ministry of External Affairs. A subordinate part of the office—the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)—functioned in ways that significantly expanded the information available to the prime minister and his advisers. The RAW gathered intelligence, provided intelligence analysis to the Office of the Prime Minister, and conducted covert operations abroad.
The prime minister's control and reliance on personal advisers in the Office of the Prime Minister was particularly strong under the tenures of Indira Gandhi (1966–77 and 1980–84) and her son, Rajiv (1984–89), who succeeded her, and weaker during the periods of coalition governments. Observers find it difficult to determine whether the locus of decision-making authority on any issue lies with the Ministry of External Affairs, the Council of Ministers, the Office of the Prime Minister, or the prime minister himself.
The Prime Minister is however free to appoint advisers and special committees to examine various foreign policy options and areas of interest. In a recent instance, Manmohan Singh appointed K. Subrahmanyam in 2005 to head a special government task force to study 'Global Strategic Developments' over the next decade. The Task Force submitted its conclusions to the Prime Minister in 2006. The report has not yet been released in the public domain.
India's historical inclination towards a "non-aligned" foreign policy has witnessed a shift under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership since 2014, as New Delhi has displayed a heightened level of "assertiveness" in its international engagements.
The Ministry of External Affairs is the Indian government's agency responsible for the foreign relations of India. The Minister of External Affairs holds cabinet rank as a member of the Council of Ministers.
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is the current Minister of External Affairs. The Ministry has a Minister of State V Muraleedharan. The Indian Foreign Secretary is the head of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and therefore, serves as the head of all Indian (ambassadors) and high commissioners. Vinay Mohan Kwatra is the current Foreign Secretary of India.
In the post-Cold War era, a significant aspect of India's foreign policy is the Look East Policy. During the cold war, India's relations with its Southeast Asian neighbours were not strong. After the end of the cold war, the government of India particularly realised the importance of redressing this imbalance in India's foreign policy. Consequently, the Narsimha Rao government in the early nineties of the last century unveiled the look east policy. Initially, it focused on renewing political and economic contacts with the countries of East and South-East Asia.
At present, under the Look East Policy, the Government of India is giving special emphasis on the economic development of the backward northeastern region of India taking advantage of a huge market of ASEAN as well as of the energy resources available in some of the member countries of ASEAN like Burma. The look-east policy was launched in 1991 just after the end of the cold war, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After the start of liberalisation, it was a very strategic policy decision taken by the government in foreign policy. To quote Prime Minister Manmohan Singh "it was also a strategic shift in India's vision of the world and India's place in the evolving global economy".
The policy was given an initial thrust with the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao visiting China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Singapore and India becoming an important dialogue partner with ASEAN in 1992. Since the beginning of this century, India has given a big push to this policy by becoming a summit-level partner of ASEAN (2002) and getting involved in some regional initiatives such as the BIMSTEC and the Ganga–Mekong Cooperation and now becoming a member of the East Asia Summit (EAS) in December 2005.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, India has forged a closer partnership with Western powers. In the 1990s, India's economic problems and the demise of the bipolar world political system forced India to reassess its foreign policy and adjust its foreign relations. Previous policies proved inadequate to cope with the serious domestic and international problems facing India. The end of the Cold War gutted the core meaning of nonalignment and left Indian foreign policy without significant direction. The hard, pragmatic considerations of the early 1990s were still viewed within the nonaligned framework of the past, but the disintegration of the Soviet Union removed much of India's international leverage, for which relations with Russia and the other post-Soviet states could not compensate. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, India improved its relations with the United States, Canada, France, Japan, and Germany. In 1992, India established formal diplomatic relations with Israel and this relationship grew during the tenures of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and the subsequent United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments.
In the mid-1990s, India attracted the world's attention to Pakistan-backed terrorism in Kashmir. The Kargil War resulted in a major diplomatic victory for India. The United States and European Union recognised the fact that the Pakistani military had illegally infiltrated Indian territory and pressured Pakistan to withdraw from Kargil. Several anti-India militant groups based in Pakistan were labelled as terrorist groups by the United States and European Union.
In 1998, India tested nuclear weapons for the second time (see Pokhran-II) which resulted in several US, Japanese and European sanctions on India. India's then defence minister, George Fernandes, said that India's nuclear programme was necessary as it provided a deterrence to potential Chinese nuclear threat. Most of the sanctions imposed on India were removed by 2001.
After September 11 attacks in 2001, Indian intelligence agencies provided the US with significant information on Al-Qaeda and related groups' activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. India's extensive contribution to the War on Terror, coupled with a surge in its economy, has helped India's diplomatic relations with several countries. Over the past three years, India has held numerous joint military exercises with US and European nations that have resulted in a strengthened US-India and EU-India bilateral relationship. India's bilateral trade with Europe and the United States had more than doubled in the five years since 2003.
India has been pushing for reforms in the UN and WTO with mixed results. India's candidature for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council is currently backed by several countries including France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Australia and UAE. In 2004, the United States signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with India even though the latter is not a part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US argued that India's strong nuclear non-proliferation record made it an exception, however, this has not persuaded other Nuclear Suppliers Group members to sign similar deals with India. During a state visit to India in November 2010, US President Barack Obama announced US support for India's bid for permanent membership to UN Security Council as well as India's entry to Nuclear Suppliers Group, Wassenaar Arrangement, Australia Group and Missile Technology Control Regime. As of January 2018, India has become a member of Wassenaar Arrangement, Australia Group and Missile Technology Control Regime.
India's growing economy, strategic location, a mix of friendly and diplomatic foreign policy and large and vibrant diaspora has won it more allies than enemies. India has friendly relations with several countries in the developing world. Though India is not a part of any major military alliance, it has a close strategic and military relationship with most of its fellow major powers.
Countries considered India's closest include the United Arab Emirates, Russian Federation, Israel, Afghanistan, France, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and the United States. Russia is the largest supplier of military equipment to India, followed by Israel and France. According to some analysts, Israel is set to overtake Russia as India's largest military and strategic partner. The two countries also collaborate extensively in the sphere of counter-terrorism and space technology. India also enjoys strong military relations with several other countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Singapore, Brazil, South Africa and Italy. In addition, India operates an airbase in Tajikistan, signed a landmark defence accord with Qatar in 2008, and has leased out Assumption Island from Seychelles to build a naval base in 2015.
India has also forged relationships with developing countries, especially South Africa, Brazil, and Mexico. These countries often represent the interests of developing countries through economic forums such as the G8+5, IBSA and WTO. India was seen as one of the standard bearers of the developing world and claimed to speak for a collection of more than 30 other developing nations at the Doha Development Round. Indian Look East policy has helped it develop greater economic and strategic partnerships with Southeast Asian countries, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. India also enjoys friendly relations with the Persian Gulf countries and most members of the African Union.
The Foundation for National Security Research in New Delhi published India's Strategic Partners: A Comparative Assessment and ranked India's top strategic partners with a score out of 90 points: Russia comes out on top with 62, followed by the United States (58), France (51), UK (41), Germany (37), and Japan (34). One of the outcomes of the 2023 G20 summit is a transportation project that would facilitate Indian trade to the Middle East and Europe.
India has signed strategic partnership agreements with more than two dozen countries/supranational entities listed here in the chronological order of the pacts:
Currently, India is taking steps towards establishing strategic partnerships with Canada and Argentina. Although India has not signed any formal strategic partnership agreements with Bhutan and Qatar, its foreign ministry often describes relations with these countries as 'strategic'.
Burkina Faso
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 24 March 1962
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 18 October 1975
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 26 August 1967.
Djibouti
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 7 December 1981
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 1 July 1948.
India and Ethiopia have warm bilateral ties based on mutual cooperation and support. India has been a partner in Ethiopia's developmental efforts, training Ethiopian personnel under its ITEC programmer, providing it with several lines of credit and launching the Pan-African e-Network project there in 2007. The Second India–Africa Forum Summit was held in Addis Ababa in 2011. India is also Ethiopia's second-largest source of foreign direct investments.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 18 August 1947.
Modern Egypt-India relations go back to the contacts between Saad Zaghloul and Mohandas Gandhi on the common goals of their respective movements of independence. In 1955, Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser and India under Jawaharlal Nehru became the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement. During the 1956 War, Nehru stood supporting Egypt to the point of threatening to withdraw his country from the Commonwealth of Nations. In 1967, following the Arab–Israeli conflict, India supported Egypt and the Arabs. In 1977, New Delhi described the visit of President Anwar al-Sadat to Jerusalem as a "brave" move and considered the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel a primary step on the path of a just settlement of the Middle East problem. Major Egyptian exports to India include raw cotton, raw and manufactured fertilisers, oil and oil products, organic and non-organic chemicals, and leather and iron products. Major imports into Egypt from India are cotton yarn, sesame, coffee, herbs, tobacco, lentils, pharmaceutical products and transport equipment. The Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum is also currently negotiating the establishment of a natural gas-operated fertiliser plant with another Indian company. In 2004 the Gas Authority of India Limited bought 15% of Egypt's Nat Gas distribution and marketing company. In 2008 Egyptian investment in India was worth some 750 million dollars, according to the Egyptian ambassador. After the Arab Spring of 2011, with ousting of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt asked for the help of India in conducting nationwide elections.
Gabon maintains an embassy in New Delhi. The Embassy of India in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo is jointly accredited to Gabon.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 6 March 1957.
Relations between Ghana and India are generally close and cordial mixed with economic and cultural connections. Trade between India and Ghana amounted to US$818 million in 2010–11 and is expected to be worth US$1 billion by 2013. Ghana imports automobiles and buses from India and companies like Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland have a significant presence in the country. Ghanaian exports to India consist of gold, cocoa and timber while Indian exports to Ghana comprise pharmaceuticals, agricultural machinery, electrical equipment, plastics, steel and cement.
The Government of India has extended $228 million in lines of credit to Ghana which has been used for projects in sectors like agro-processing, fish processing, waste management, rural electrification and the expansion of Ghana's railways. India has also offered to set up an India-Africa Institute of Information Technology (IAIIT) and a Food Processing Business Incubation Centre in Ghana under the India–Africa Forum Summit.
India is among the largest foreign investors in Ghana's economy. At the end of 2011, Indian investments in Ghana amounted to $550 million covering some 548 projects. Indian investments are primarily in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors of Ghana while Ghanaian companies manufacture drugs in collaboration with Indian companies. The IT sector in Ghana too has a significant Indian presence in it. India and Ghana also have a Bilateral Investment Protection Agreement between them. India's Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilisers is in the process of setting up a fertiliser plant in Ghana at Nyankrom in the Shama District of the Western Region of Ghana. The project entails an investment of US$1.3 billion and the plant would have an annual production capacity of 1.1 million tones, the bulk of which would be exported to India. There are also plans to develop a sugar processing plant entailing an investment of US$36 million. Bank of Baroda, Bharti Airtel, Tata Motors and Tech Mahindra are amongst the major Indian companies in Ghana.
There are about seven to eight thousand Indians and Persons of Indian Origin living in Ghana today with some of them having been there for over 70 years. Ghana is home to a growing indigenous Hindu population that today numbers 3000 families. Hinduism first came to Ghana only in the late 1940s with the Sindhi traders who migrated here following India's Partition. It has been growing in Ghana and neighbouring Togo since the mid-1970s when an African Hindu monastery was established in Accra.
Guinea
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 8 July 1960.
The bilateral relations between India and Ivory Coast have expanded considerably in recent years as India seeks to develop an extensive commercial and strategic partnership in the West African region. The Indian diplomatic mission in Abidjan was opened in 1979. Ivory Coast opened its resident mission in New Delhi in September 2004. Both nations are currently fostering efforts to increase trade, investments and economic cooperation.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 14 December 1963
As littoral states of the Indian Ocean, trade links and commercial ties between India and Kenya go back several centuries. Kenya has a large minority of Indians and Persons of Indian Origin living there who are descendants of labourers who were brought in by the British to construct the Uganda Railway and Gujarati merchants. India and Kenya have growing trade and commercial ties. Bilateral trade amounted to $2.4 billion in 2010–2011 but with Kenyan imports from India accounting for $2.3 billion, the balance of trade was heavily in India's favour. India is Kenya's sixth-largest trading partner and the largest exporter to Kenya. Indian exports to Kenya include pharmaceuticals, steel, machinery and automobiles while Kenyan exports to India are primary commodities such as soda ash, vegetables and tea. Indian companies have a significant presence in Kenya with Indian corporates like the Tata Group, Essar Group, Reliance Industries and Bharti Airtel operating there.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 8 June 1971.
India operates a High Commission in Pretoria which serves Lesotho and Lesotho operates a residential mission in India. Lesotho and India have strong ties. Lesotho has backed India's bid for a Permanent UN seat and has also recognized Jammu and Kashmir as a part of India. India exported US$11 Million to Lesotho in the 2010–2011 year while only importing US$1 Million in goods from Lesotho. Since 2001, an Indian Army Training Team has trained several soldiers in the LDF.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 7 July 1960.
The bilateral relations between the Republic of India and the Republic of Liberia have expanded on growing bilateral trade and strategic cooperation. India is represented in Liberia through its embassy in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and an active honorary consulate in Monrovia since 1984. Liberia was represented in India through its resident mission in New Delhi which subsequently closed due to budgetary constraints.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 20 July 1952.
Malawi
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 19 October 1964.
Mali
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 24 January 1962.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 22 October 1965.
India is represented in Mauritania by its embassy in Bamako, Mali. India also has an honorary consulate in Nouakchott.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 12 March 1968.
The relations between India and Mauritius existed since 1730, diplomatic relations were established in 1948 before Mauritius became an independent state. The relationship is very cordial due to cultural affinities and long historical ties that exist between the two nations. More than 68% of the Mauritian population are of Indian origin, most known as Indo-Mauritian. The economic and commercial corporation has been increasing over the years. India has become Mauritius' largest source of imports since 2007 and Mauritius imported US$816 million worth of goods in the April 2010 – March 2011 financial year. Mauritius has remained the largest source of FDI for India for more than a decade with FDI equity inflows totalling US$55.2 billion in the period April 2000 to April 2011. India and Mauritius co-operate in combating piracy which has emerged as a major threat in the Indian Ocean region and support India's stand against terrorism.
The relationship between Mauritius and India date back to the early 1730s, when artisans were brought from Puducherry and Tamil Nadu. Diplomatic relations between India and Mauritius were established in 1948. Mauritius maintained contacts with India through successive Dutch, French and British rule. From the 1820s, Indian workers started coming to Mauritius to work on sugar plantations. From 1833 when slavery was abolished by Parliament, large numbers of Indian workers began to be brought into Mauritius as indentured labourers. On 2 November 1834, the ship named 'Atlas' docked in Mauritius carrying the first batch of Indian indentured labourers.
Morocco has an embassy in New Delhi. It also has an Honorary Consul based in Mumbai. India operates an embassy in Rabat. Both nations are part of the Non-Aligned Movement.
In the United Nations, India supported the decolonisation of Morocco and the Moroccan freedom movement. India recognised Morocco on 20 June 1956 and established relations in 1957. The Ministry of External Affairs of the Government of India states that "India and Morocco have enjoyed cordial and friendly relations and over the years bilateral relations have witnessed significant depth and growth."
The Indian Council for Cultural Relations promotes Indian culture in Morocco. Morocco seeks to increase its trade ties with India and is seeking Indian investment in various sectors The bilateral relations between India and Morocco strengthened after the Moroccan Ambassador to India spent a week in Srinagar, the capital city of Jammu and Kashmir. This showed Moroccan solidarity with India regarding Kashmir.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 25 June 1975.
India has a high commissioner in Maputo and Mozambique has a high commissioner in New Delhi.
Relations between India and Namibia are warm and cordial.
India was one of SWAPO's earliest supporters during the Namibian liberation movement. The first SWAPO embassy was established in India in 1986. India's observer mission was converted to a full High Commissioner on Namibia's Independence Day of 21 March 1990. India has helped train the Namibian Air Force since its creation in 1995. The two countries work closely in mutual multilateral organisations such as the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Commonwealth of Nations. Namibia supports the expansion of the United Nations Security Council to include a permanent seat for India.
In 2008–09, trade between the two countries stood at approximately US$80 million. Namibia's main imports from India were drugs and pharmaceuticals, chemicals, agricultural machinery, automobile and automobile parts, glass and glassware, and plastic and linoleum products. India primarily imported nonferrous metals, ores, and metal scraps. Indian products are also exported to neighbouring South Africa and re-imported to Namibia as South African imports. Namibian diamonds are often exported to European diamond markets before being again imported to India. In 2009, the first direct sale of Namibian diamonds to India took place. In 2008, two Indian companies won a US$105 million contract from NamPower to lay a high-voltage direct current bi-polar line from Katima Mulilo to Otjiwarongo. Namibia is a beneficiary of the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme for telecommunications professionals from developing countries.
India has a high commissioner in Windhoek and Namibia has a high commissioner in New Delhi. Namibia's high commissioner is also accredited for Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sri Lanka.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 18 July 1977.
India has close relations with this oil-rich West African country. Twenty percent of India's crude oil needs are met, by Nigeria. 40,000 barrels per day (6,400 m/d) of oil, is the amount of oil, that India receives from Nigeria. Trade, between these two countries stands at $875 million in 2005–2006. Indian companies have also invested in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, iron ore, steel, information technology, and communications, amongst other things. Both India and Nigeria, are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, G-77, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Former Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo was the guest of honour, at the Republic Day parade, in 1999, and the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Nigeria in 2007 and addressed the Nigerian Parliament.
Indo-Rwandan relations are the foreign relations between the Republic of India and the Republic of Rwanda. India is represented in Rwanda through its honorary consulate in Kigali. Rwanda has been operating its Embassy in New Delhi since 1998 and appointed its first resident Ambassador in 2001.
India–Seychelles relations are bilateral relations between the Republic of India and the Republic of Seychelles. India has a High Commission in Victoria while Seychelles maintains a High Commission in New Delhi.
India and South Africa, have always had strong relations even though India revoked diplomatic relations in protest of the apartheid regime in the mid-20th century. The history of British rule connects both lands. There is a large group of Indian South Africans. Mahatma Gandhi, spent many years in South Africa, during which time, he fought for the rights of the ethnic Indians. Nelson Mandela was inspired by Gandhi. After India's independence, India strongly condemned apartheid and refused diplomatic relations while apartheid was conducted as state policy in South Africa.
The two countries, now have close economic, political, and sports relations. Trade between the two countries grew from $3 million in 1992–1993 to $4 billion in 2005–2006, and aim to reach trade of $12 billion by 2010. One-third of India's imports from South Africa is gold bar. Diamonds, that are mined from South Africa, are polished in India. Nelson Mandela was awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize. The two countries are also members of the IBSA Dialogue Forum, with Brazil. India hopes to get large amounts of uranium, from resource-rich South Africa, for India's growing civilian nuclear energy sector.
India recognised South Sudan on 10 July 2011, a day after South Sudan became an independent state. Right now, relations are economic. Pramit Pal Chaudhuri wrote in the Hindustan Times that South Sudan "has other attractions. As the Indian Foreign Ministry's literature notes, South Sudan is reported to have "some of the largest oil reserves in Africa outside Nigeria and Angola". An article in The Telegraph reported that South Sudan is "one of the poorest [countries] in the world, [but] is oil rich. Foreign ministry officials said New Delhi has [a] keen interest in increasing its investments in the oil fields in South Sudan, which now owns over two-thirds of erstwhile united Sudan's oil fields."
In return for the oil resources that can be provided by South Sudan, India said it was willing to assist in developing infrastructure, training officials in health, education, and rural development. "We have compiled a definite road map using [sic] which India can help South Sudan."
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 7 May 1956.
Indo-Sudanese relations have always been characterised as longstanding, close, and friendly, even since the early development stages of their countries. At the time of Indian independence, Sudan had contributed 70,000 pounds, which was used to build part of the National Defence Academy in Pune. The main building of NDA is called Sudan Block. The two nations established diplomatic relations shortly after India became known as one of the first Asian countries to recognise the newly independent African country. India and Sudan also share geographic and historical similarities, as well as economic interests. Both countries are former British colonies, and remotely border Saudi Arabia using a body of water. India and Sudan continue to have cordial relations, despite issues such as India's close relationship with Israel, India's solidarity with Egypt over border issues with Sudan, and Sudan's intimate bonds with Pakistan and Bangladesh. India had also contributed some troops as United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 31 August 1962.
Togo opened its embassy in New Delhi in October 2010. The High Commission of India in Accra, Ghana is concurrently accredited to Togo. Togolese President Gnassingbé Eyadéma made an official state visit to India in September 1994. During the visit, the two countries agreed to establish Joint Commission.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 9 October 1962.
India and Uganda established diplomatic relations in 1965 and each maintains a High Commissioner in the other's capital. The Indian High Commission in Kampala has concurrent accreditation to Burundi and Rwanda. Uganda hosts a large Indian community and India–Uganda relations cover a broad range of sectors including political, economic, commercial, cultural, and scientific cooperation.
Relations between India and Uganda began with the arrival of over 30,000 Indians in Uganda in the 19th century who were brought there to construct the Mombasa–Kampala railway line. Ugandan independence activists were inspired in their struggle for Ugandan independence by the success of the Indian independence movement and were also supported in their struggle by the Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru. Indo-Ugandan relations have been good since Uganda's independence except during the regime of Idi Amin. Amin in 1972 expelled over 55,000 people of Indian origin and 5,000 Indians who had formed the commercial and economic backbone of the country accusing them of exploiting native Ugandans. Since the mid-1980s when President Yoweri Museveni came to power, relations have steadily improved. Today some 20,000 Indians and PIOs live or work in Uganda. Ethnic tensions between Indians and Ugandans have been a recurring issue in bilateral relations given the role of Indians in the Ugandan economy.
As of the year 2011, India's total trade with Africa is over US$46 billion and its total investment is over US$11 billion with a US$5.7 billion line of credit for executing various projects in Africa.
India has had good relationships with most sub-Saharan African nations for most of its history. In the Prime Minister's visit to Mauritius in 1997, the two countries secured a deal to new Credit Agreement of INR 105 million (US$3 million) to finance the import by Mauritius of capital goods, consultancy services and consumer durable from India. The government of India secured a rice and medicine agreement with the people of Seychelles. India continued to build upon its historically close relations with Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Visits from political ministers from Ethiopia provided opportunities for strengthening bilateral cooperation between the two countries in the fields of education and technical training, water resources management and development of small industries. This has allowed India to gain benefits from nations that are forgotten by other Western Nations. The South African President, Thabo Mbeki has called for a strategic relationship between India and South Africa to avoid imposition by Western Nations. India continued to build upon its close and friendly relations with Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The Minister of Foreign Affairs arranged for the sending of Special Envoys to each of these countries during 1996–97 as a reaffirmation of India's assurance to strengthening cooperation with these countries in a spirit of South-South partnership. These relations have created a position of strength with African nations that other nations may not possess.
India's commonalities with developing nations in Latin America, especially Brazil and Mexico have continued to grow. India and Brazil continue to work together on the reform of the Security Council through the G4 nations while having also increased strategic and economic cooperation through the IBSA Dialogue Forum. The process of finalizing a Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) with MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay) is on the itinerary and negotiations are being held with Chile. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was the guest of honor at the 2004 Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi.
Both countries have established diplomatic relations and have an Extradition Arrangement.
India and Barbados established diplomatic relations on 30 November 1966 (the date of Barbados' national independence). On that date, the government of India gifted Barbados the throne in Barbados' national House of Assembly. India is represented in Barbados through its embassy in Suriname and an Indian consulate in Holetown, St. James. In 2011–12 the Indian-based firm Era's Lucknow Medical College and Hospital, established the American University of Barbados (AUB), as the island's first Medical School for international students. In 2015 the governments of Barbados and India signed a joint Open Skies Agreement. Today around 3,000 persons from India call Barbados home. Two-thirds are from India's Surat district of Gujarat known as Suratis. Most of the Suratis are involved in trading. The rest are of Sindhis ancestry.
India has an Honorary Consulate in Belize City and Belize has an Honorary Consulate in New Delhi. Bilateral trade stood at US$45.3 Million in 2014 and has steadily increased since. Belize and India have engaged in dialogue in Central American Integration System (SICA) discussing anti-terrorism, climate change and food security. India signed a Tax Information Exchange Agreement in 2013 with Belize. India also provides Belize with US$30 Million as part of its foreign aid commitment to SICA countries. Citizens of Belize are eligible for scholarships in Indian universities under Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.
The two nations share a close cultural link due to Belize's large East Indian Population, estimated at 4% of the total population.
Indo-Canadian relations are the longstanding bilateral relations between India and Canada, which are built upon a "mutual commitment to democracy", "pluralism", and "people-to-people links", according to the government of Canada. In 2004, bilateral trade between India and Canada was at about C$2.45 billion. However, the botched handling of the Air India investigation and the case, in general, suffered a setback to Indo-Canadian relations. India's Smiling Buddha nuclear test led to connections between the two countries being frozen, with allegations that India broke the terms of the Colombo Plan. Although Jean Chrétien and Roméo LeBlanc both visited India in the late 1990s, relations were again halted after the Pokhran-II tests.
Canada-India relations have been on an upward trajectory since 2005. Governments at all levels, private-sector organisations, academic institutes in two countries, and people-to-people contacts—especially diaspora networks—have contributed through individual and concerted efforts to significant improvements in the bilateral relationship.
The two governments have agreed on important policy frameworks to advance the bilateral relationship. In particular, the Nuclear Cooperation Agreement (signed in June 2010) and the current successful negotiations of the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) constitute a watershed in Canada-India relations.
The two governments have attempted to make up for lost time and are eager to complete CEPA negotiations by 2013 and ensure its ratification by 2014. After the conclusion of CEPA, Canada and India must define the areas for their partnership which will depend on their ability to convert common interests into common action and respond effectively for steady cooperation. For example, during "pull-aside" meetings between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Stephen Harper at the G-20 summit in Mexico in June 2012, and an earlier meeting in Toronto between External Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna and John Baird, the leaders discussed developing a more comprehensive partnership going beyond food security and including the possibility of tie-ups in the energy sector, hydrocarbon.
Relations between India and Cuba are close and warm. Both nations are part of the Non-Aligned Movement. Cuba has repeatedly called for a more "democratic" representation of the United Nations Security Council and supports India's candidacy as a permanent member of a reformed Security Council. Fidel Castro said that "The maturity of India..., its unconditional adherence to the principles which lay at the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement give us the assurances that under the wise leadership of Indira Gandhi (the former Prime Minister of India), the non-aligned countries will continue advancing in their inalienable role as a bastion for peace, national independence and development..."
India has an embassy in Havana, the capital of Cuba which opened in January 1960. This had particular significance as it symbolised Indian solidarity with the Cuban revolution. India had been one of the first countries in the world to have recognised the new Cuban government after the Cuban Revolution.
Cuba has an embassy in New Delhi, the Indian capital.
Relations between India and Jamaica are generally cordial and close. There are many cultural and political connections inherited from British colonial rule, such as membership in the Commonwealth of Nations, parliamentary democracy, the English language and cricket.
Both nations are members of the Non-Aligned Movement, the United Nations and the Commonwealth, and Jamaica supports India's candidacy for permanent membership in a reformed UN Security Council.
During the British era, Indians voluntarily went to jobs in Jamaica and the West Indies. This has created a considerable population of people of Indian origin in Jamaica. India has a High Commission in Kingston, whilst Jamaica has a consulate in New Delhi and plans to upgrade it to a High Commission soon.
Mexico is a very important and major economic partner of India. Nobel Prize laureate and ambassador to India Octavio Paz wrote his book In Light of India which is an analysis of Indian history and culture. Both nations are regional powers and members of the G-20 major economies.
Bilateral relations between India and Nicaragua have been limited to SICA dialogue and visits by Nicaraguan Ministers to India. India maintains an honorary consul general in Nicaragua, concurrently accredited to the Indian embassy in Panama City and Nicaragua used to maintain an embassy in India but was reduced to an honorary consulate general in New Delhi. the current Foreign minister Samuel Santos López visited India in 2008 for the SICA-India Foreign ministers' meeting and in 2013 for high-level talks with the then External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid which also expanded bilateral trade with the two countries reaching a total of US$60.12 million during 2012–13.
Bilateral relations between Panama and India have been growing steadily, reflecting the crucial role the Panama Canal plays in global trade and commerce. Moreover, with over 15,000 Indians living in Panama, diplomatic ties have considerably increased over the past decade.
The opening of the expanded Canal in 2016 is expected to provide new prospects for maritime connectivity. In seeking to rapidly strengthen trade relations such as the flow of trade triples between the two countries, India is keen to leverage these transit trade facilities in Panama to access the wider market of Latin America. Along with pursuing a free trade agreement, India wants to promote investment in various sectors of Panama's economy, including the banking and maritime industry and the multimodal centre of the Colón Free Trade Zone.
The bilateral relations between the Republic of India and Paraguay have been traditionally strong due to strong commercial, cultural and strategic cooperation. India is represented in Paraguay through its embassy in Buenos Aires in Argentina. India also has an Honorary Consul-General in Asuncion. Paraguay opened its embassy in India in 2005.
Bilateral relations between the Republic of India and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago have considerably expanded in recent years with both nations building strategic and commercial ties. Both nations formally established diplomatic relations in 1962.
Both nations were part of the British Empire; India supported the independence of Trinidad and Tobago from British rule and established its diplomatic mission in 1962 – the year that Trinidad and Tobago officially gained independence. They possess diverse natural and economic resources and are the largest economies in their respective regions. Both are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, the United Nations, G-77 and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
The Republic of India operates a High Commission in Port of Spain, whilst the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago operates a High Commission in New Delhi.
Before and during the Second World War, the United States under President Roosevelt gave strong support to the Indian independence movement despite being allies to Britain. Relations between India and the United States were lukewarm following Indian independence, as India took a leading position in the Non-Aligned Movement, and received support from the Soviet Union. The US provided support to India in 1962 during its war with China. For most of the Cold War, the USA tended to have warmer relations with Pakistan, primarily as a way to contain Soviet-friendly India and to use Pakistan to back the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. An Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, signed in 1971, also positioned India against the USA.
After the Sino-Indian War and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, India made considerable changes to its foreign policy. It developed a close relationship with the Soviet Union and started receiving massive military equipment and financial assistance from the USSR. This harmed the Indo-US relationship. The United States saw Pakistan as a counterweight to pro-Soviet India and started giving the former military assistance. This created an atmosphere of suspicion between India and the US. The Indo-US relationship suffered a considerable setback when the Soviets took over Afghanistan and India overtly supported the Soviet Union.
Relations between India and the United States came to an all-time low during the early 1970s. Despite reports of atrocities in East Pakistan, and being told, most notably in the Blood telegram, of genocidal activities being perpetrated by Pakistani forces, the US. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and US President Richard Nixon did nothing to discourage then-Pakistani President Yahya Khan and the Pakistan Army. Kissinger was particularly concerned about Soviet expansion into South Asia as a result of a treaty of friendship that had recently been signed between India and the Soviet Union and sought to demonstrate to the People's Republic of China the value of a tacit alliance with the United States. During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, Indian Armed Forces, along with the Mukti Bahini, succeeded in liberating East Pakistan which soon declared independence. Nixon feared that an Indian invasion of West Pakistan would mean total Soviet domination of the region and that it would seriously undermine the global position of the United States and the regional position of America's new tacit ally, China. To demonstrate to China the bona fides of the United States as an ally, and in direct violation of the Congress-imposed sanctions on Pakistan, Nixon sent military supplies to Pakistan, routing them through Jordan and Iran, while also encouraging China to increase its arms supplies to Pakistan.
When Pakistan's defeat in the eastern sector seemed certain, Nixon sent the USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal, a move deemed by the Indians as a nuclear threat. The Enterprise arrived at the station on 11 December 1971. On 6 and 13 December, the Soviet Navy dispatched two groups of ships, armed with nuclear missiles, from Vladivostok; they trailed US Task Force 74 into the Indian Ocean from 18 December 1971 until 7 January 1972. The Soviets also sent nuclear submarines to ward off the threat posed by USS Enterprise in the Indian Ocean.
Though American efforts had no effect in turning the tide of the war, the incident involving USS Enterprise is viewed as the trigger for India's subsequent interest in developing nuclear weapons. American policy towards the end of the war was dictated primarily by a need to restrict the escalation of the war on the Western sector to prevent the 'dismemberment' of West Pakistan. Years after the war, many American writers criticised the White House policies during the war as being badly flawed and ill-serving to the interests of the United States. India carried out nuclear tests a few years later resulting in sanctions being imposed by the United States, further drifting the two countries apart. In recent years, Kissinger came under fire for comments made during the Indo-Pakistan War in which he described Indians as "bastards". Kissinger has since expressed his regret over the comments.
Since the end of the Cold War, India-USA relations have improved dramatically. This has been fostered by the fact that the United States and India are both democracies and have a large and growing trade relationship. During the Gulf War, the economy of India went through an extremely difficult phase. The Government of India adopted liberalised economic systems. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, India improved diplomatic relations with the members of NATO, particularly Canada, France, and Germany. In 1992, India established formal diplomatic relations with Israel.
In recent years, India-United States relations have still improved significantly during the Premiership of Narendra Modi since 2014.
In 1998, India tested nuclear weapons which resulted in several US, Japanese and European sanctions on India. India's then defence minister, George Fernandes, said that India's nuclear programme was necessary as it provided a deterrence to some potential nuclear threats. Most of the sanctions imposed on India were removed by 2001. India has categorically stated that it will never use weapons first but will defend itself if attacked.
The economic sanctions imposed by the United States in response to India's nuclear tests in May 1998 appeared, at least initially, to seriously damage Indo-American relations. President Bill Clinton imposed wide-ranging sanctions according to the 1994 Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act. US sanctions on Indian entities involved in the nuclear industry and opposition to international financial institution loans for non-humanitarian assistance projects in India. The United States encouraged India to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) immediately and without condition. The United States also called for restraint in missile and nuclear testing and deployment by both India and Pakistan. The non-proliferation dialogue initiated after the 1998 nuclear tests has bridged many of the gaps in understanding between the countries.
Formal relations between both countries were first established in 1949. India has an embassy in Buenos Aires and Argentina has an embassy in New Delhi. The current Indian Ambassador to Argentina (concurrently accredited to Uruguay and Paraguay) is R Viswanathan.
According to the Ministry of External Affairs of the Government of India, "Under the 1968 Visa agreement, (Argentine) fees for transit and tourist visas have been abolished. Under the new visa agreement signed during the Argentine Presidential visit in October 2009, it has been agreed that five-year multi-entry business visas would be given free of cost. The Embassy of India in Buenos Aires gives Cafe Con Visa (coffee with visa) to Argentine visitors. The applicants are invited for coffee and a visa is given immediately. This has been praised by the Argentine media, public and the Foreign Minister himself."
Relations between Brazil and India have been extended to diverse areas such as science and technology, pharmaceuticals and space as both are member nations of BRICS. The two-way trade in 2007 nearly tripled to US$3.12 billion from US$1.2 billion in 2004. India attaches tremendous importance to its relationship with this Latin American giant and hopes to see the areas of cooperation expand in the coming years.
Both countries want the participation of developing countries in the UNSC permanent membership since the underlying philosophy for both of them are: UNSC should be more democratic, legitimate and representative – the G4 is a novel grouping for this realization.
Brazil and India are deeply committed to IBSA (South-South cooperation) initiatives and attach utmost importance to this trilateral cooperation between the three large, multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-religious developing countries, which are bound by the common principle of pluralism and democracy.
Both countries established diplomatic ties on 19 January 1959. Since then, the relationship between the two countries has been gradually increasing with more frequent diplomatic visits to promote political, commercial cultural and academic exchanges. Colombia is currently the commercial point of entry into Latin America for Indian companies.
Diplomatic relations between India and Venezuela were established on 1 October 1959. India maintains an embassy in Caracas, while Venezuela maintains an embassy in New Delhi.
There have been several visits by heads of state and government, and other high-level officials between the countries. President Hugo Chávez visited New Delhi on 4–7 March 2005. Chávez met with Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The two countries signed six agreements including one to establish a Joint Commission to promote bilateral relations and another on cooperation in the hydrocarbon sector. Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro visited India to attend the First Meeting of the India-CELAC Troika Foreign Ministers meeting in New Delhi on 7 August 2012.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) and the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela signed an MoU during a visit by Indian Election Commissioner V S Sampath to Caracas in 2012. The Minister of State for Corporate Affairs visited Venezuela to attend the state funeral of President Chavez in March 2013. The President and Prime Minister of India expressed condolences on the death of Chávez. The Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, observed a minute's silence to mark his death. Ambassador Smita Purushottam represented India at the swearing-in ceremony of Chávez's successor Nicolás Maduro on 19 April 2013.
Citizens of Venezuela are eligible for scholarships under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.
India is working towards developing strong relations with this resource-rich Central Asian country. The Indian oil company, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation has got oil exploration and petroleum development grants in Kazakhstan. The two countries are collaborating in petrochemicals, information technology, and space technology. Kazakhstan has offered India five blocks for oil and gas exploration. India and Kazakhstan, are to set up joint projects in construction, minerals and metallurgy. India also signed four other pacts, including an extradition treaty, in the presence of President Prathibha Patil and her Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev. Kazakhstan will provide Uranium and related products under the MoU between Nuclear Power Corp. of India and Kazatomprom. These MoU also open possibilities of joint exploration of uranium in Kazakhstan, which has the world's second-largest reserves, and India building atomic power plants in the Central Asian country.
Diplomatic relations were established between India and Tajikistan following Tajikistan's independence from the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, which had been friendly with India. Tajikistan occupies a strategically important position in Central Asia, bordering Afghanistan, the People's Republic of China and separated by a small strip of Afghan territory from Pakistan. India's role in fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and its strategic rivalry with both China and Pakistan have made its ties with Tajikistan important to its strategic and security policies. Despite their common efforts, bilateral trade has been comparatively low, valued at US$12.09 million in 2005; India's exports to Tajikistan were valued at US$6.2 million and its imports at US$5.89 million. India's military presence and activities have been significant, beginning with India's extensive support of the anti-Taliban Afghan Northern Alliance (ANA). India began renovating the Farkhor Air Base and stationed aircraft of the Indian Air Force there. The Farkhor Air Base became fully operational in 2006, and 12 MiG-29 bombers and trainer aircraft are planned to be stationed there.
India has an embassy in Tashkent. Uzbekistan has an embassy in New Delhi. Uzbekistan has had a great impact on Indian culture mostly due to the Mughal Empire which was founded by Babur of Ferghana (in present-day Uzbekistan) who created his empire southward first in Afghanistan and then in India.
Despite lingering suspicions remaining from the 1962 Sino-Indian War, the 1967 Nathu La and Cho La incidents, and continuing boundary disputes over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh, Sino-Indian relations have improved gradually since 1988. Both countries have sought to reduce tensions along the frontier, expand trade and cultural ties, and normalise relations. A series of high-level visits between the two nations have helped improve relations. In December 1996, PRC President Jiang Zemin visited India during a tour of South Asia. While in New Delhi, he signed with the Indian Prime Minister a series of confidence-building measures for the disputed borders. Sino-Indian relations suffered a brief setback in May 1998 when the Indian Defence minister justified the country's nuclear tests by citing potential threats from the PRC. However, in June 1999, during the Kargil crisis, then-External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh visited Beijing and stated that India did not consider China a threat. By 2001, relations between India and the PRC were on the mend, and the two sides handled the move from Tibet to India of the 17th Karmapa in January 2000 with delicacy and tact. In 2003, India formally recognised Tibet as a part of China, and China recognised Sikkim as a formal part of India in 2004.
Since 2004, the economic rise of both China and India has also helped forge closer relations between the two. Sino-Indian trade reached US$65.47 billion in 2013–14, making China the single largest trading partner of India. The increasing economic reliance between India and China has also bought the two nations closer politically, with both India and China eager to resolve their boundary dispute. They have also collaborated on several issues ranging from WTO's Doha round in 2008 to regional free trade agreement. Similar to Indo-US nuclear deal, India and China have also agreed to cooperate in the field of civilian nuclear energy. However, China's economic interests have clashed with those of India. Both countries are the largest Asian investors in Africa and have competed for control over their large natural resources. There was a tense situation due to the soldiers' stand-off in Doklam, Bhutan; but that was resolved early.
Relations were lost due to Galwan Valley skirmishes and its progress. India ceased imports of Chinese products. Various measures were taken, such as several contracts with the Chinese companies involved in railways, networks and several items productions, which were cancelled in response.
The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic from Wuhan also hampered the relations. Following the straining of the bonds, both sides blamed each other for the conflict on LAC. On 29–30 August, it was reported that China had allegedly attempted to cross LAC to attain important hilltops, which was filed by Indian troops, as they were an advantage of acquiring important tops near LAC. India banned more than 250 Chinese apps, and on 16 October, it banned the import of ACs, Refrigerators and Coolers from China. Several core commanders' negotiations and talks were held, which resulted in nothing other than vague promises then. Cross-media blaming was common.
There was even a conference held in Moscow, Russia, on 5 September between the Defence Minister of India, Rajnath Singh and Chinese Army General, Wei Fenghe, but that also ended up with no success. The recent meeting of the Quad-alliance was also questioned by China, but was then downed by India.
In mid-January 2021, it was reported that both countries had finally agreed upon the de-escalation from their positions. Footage of Chinese troops removing tents/barracks was released. Both countries also agreed that India would move back to Finger-3, while China retained its position back to Finger-8, and also declared the area from Finger-3 to Finger-8 to be "No man's land".
India-Japan relations have always been strong. India has culturally influenced Japan through Buddhism. During World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army helped Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's Indian National Army. Relations have remained warm since India's independence, despite Japan imposing sanctions on India after the 1998 Pokhran-II nuclear tests (the sanctions were removed in 2001). Japanese companies, like Sony, Toyota, and Honda, have manufacturing facilities in India, and with the growth of the Indian economy, India is a big market for Japanese firms. The most prominent Japanese company to have a big investment in India is automobiles giant Suzuki which is in partnership with Indian automobile company Maruti Suzuki, the largest car manufacturer in India. Honda was also a partner in "Hero Honda", one of the largest motorcycle sellers in the world (the companies split in 2011).
According to Former Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's arc of freedom theory, it is in Japan's interests to develop closer ties with India, the world's most populous democracy, while its relations with China remain chilly. To this end, Japan has funded many infrastructure projects in India, most notably in New Delhi's metro subway system. In December 2006, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Japan culminated in the signing of the "Joint Statement Towards Japan-India Strategic and Global Partnership". Indian applicants were welcomed in 2006 to the JET Programme, starting with just one slot available in 2006 and 41 in 2007. Also, in 2007, the Japan Self-Defense Forces took part in a naval exercise in the Indian Ocean, known as Malabar 2007, which also involved the naval forces of India, Australia, Singapore and the United States.
In October 2008, Japan signed an agreement with India under which it would grant the latter a low-interest loan worth US$4.5 billion to construct a high-speed rail line between Delhi and Mumbai. This is the single largest overseas project being financed by Japan and reflects a growing economic partnership between the two. India and Japan signed a security cooperation agreement in which both will hold military exercises, police the Indian Ocean and conduct military-to-military exchanges on fighting terrorism, making India one of only three countries, the other two being the United States and Australia, with which Japan has such a security pact. There are 25,000 Indians in Japan as of 2008.
The relations between India and Mongolia are still at a nascent stage and Indo-Mongolian cooperation is limited to diplomatic visits, the provision of soft loans and financial aid and collaborations in the IT sector.
India established diplomatic relations in December 1955. India was the first country outside the Soviet bloc to establish diplomatic relations with Mongolia. Since then, there have been treaties of mutual friendship and cooperation between the two countries in 1973, 1994, 2001 and 2004.
India and North Korea have growing trade and diplomatic relations. India had a fully functioning embassy in Pyongyang which was closed down due to COVID-19 pandemic in the host country while North Korea still operates an embassy in New Delhi. India has said that it wants the "reunification" of Korea.
The cordial relationship between the two countries extends back to 48AD, when Queen Suro, or Princess Heo, travelled from the kingdom of Ayodhya to Korea. According to the Samguk Yusa, the princess had a dream about a heavenly king who was awaiting heaven's anointed ride. After Princess Heo had the dream, she asked her parents, the king and queen, for permission to set out and seek the man, which the king and queen urged with the belief that god orchestrated the whole fate. Upon approval, she set out on a boat, carrying gold, silver, a tea plant, and a stone which calmed the waters. Archeologists discovered a stone with two fish kissing each other, a symbol of the Gaya kingdom that is unique to the Mishra royal family in Ayodhya, India. This royal link provides further evidence that there was an active commercial engagement between India and Korea since the queen's arrival in Korea. Current descendants live in the city of Gimhae as well as abroad in the America states of New Jersey and Kentucky. Many of them became prominent and well-known around the world like President Kim Dae Jung and Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil. The relations between the countries have been relatively limited, although much progress arose during the three decades.
Since the formal establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries in 1973, several trade agreements have been reached. Trade between the two nations has increased exponentially, exemplified by the $530 million during the fiscal year of 1992–1993, and the $10 billion during 2006–2007. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, South Korean businesses sought to increase access to the global markets and began trade investments with India. The last two presidential visits from South Korea to India were in 1996 and 2006, and the embassy works between the two countries are seen as needing improvements. Recently, there have been acknowledgements in the Korean public and political spheres that expanding relations with India should be a major economic and political priority for South Korea. Much of the economic investments of South Korea have been drained into China; however, South Korea is currently the fifth largest source of investment in India. To The Times of India, President Roh Moo-hyun voiced his opinion that cooperation between India's software and Korea's IT industries would bring very efficient and successful outcomes. The two countries agreed to shift their focus to the revision of the visa policies between the two countries, expansion of trade, and establishment of free trade agreement to encourage further investment between the two countries. Korean companies such as LG, Hyundai and Samsung have established manufacturing and service facilities in India, and several Korean construction companies won grants for a portion of the many infrastructural building plans in India, such as the "National Highway Development Project". Tata Motor's purchase of Daewoo Commercial Vehicles at the cost of $102 million highlights India's investments in Korea, which consist mostly of subcontracting.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 10 December 1947.
Bilateral relations between India and Afghanistan have been traditionally strong and friendly. While India was the only South Asian country to recognise the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in the 1980s, its relations were diminished during the Afghan civil wars and the rule of the Islamist Taliban in the 1990s. India aided the overthrow of the Taliban and became the largest regional provider of humanitarian and reconstruction aid. The new democratically elected Afghan government strengthened its ties with India in the wake of persisting tensions and problems with Pakistan, which is continuing to shelter and support the Taliban. India pursues a policy of close cooperation to bolster its standing as a regional power and contains its rival Pakistan, which it maintains is supporting Islamic militants in Kashmir and other parts of India. India is the largest regional investor in Afghanistan, having committed more than US$3 billion for reconstruction purposes. After the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed, India participated in the evacuation of non-Muslim minorities and provided food aid to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
India was the second country to recognise Bangladesh as a separate and independent state, doing so on 6 December 1971. India fought alongside the Bangladeshis to liberate Bangladesh from West Pakistan in 1971.
Bangladesh's relationship with India has been difficult in terms of border killing, irrigation and land border disputes post-1976. However, India has enjoyed a favourable relationship with Bangladesh during governments formed by the Awami League in 1972 and 1996. The recent solutions to land and maritime disputes have taken out irritants in ties.
At the outset, India's relations with Bangladesh could not have been stronger because of India's unalloyed support for independence and opposition against Pakistan in 1971. During the independence war, many refugees fled to India. When the struggle of resistance matured in November 1971, India also intervened militarily and may have helped bring international attention to the issue through Indira Gandhi's visit to Washington, D.C. Afterwards India furnished relief and reconstruction aid. India extended recognition to Bangladesh before the end of the war in 1971 (the second country to do so after Bhutan) and subsequently lobbied others to follow suit. India also withdrew its military from the land of Bangladesh when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman requested Indira Gandhi to do so during the latter's visit to Dhaka in 1972.
Indo-Bangladesh relations have been somewhat less friendly since the fall of the Mujib government in August 1975. over the years over issues such as South Talpatti Island, the Tin Bigha Corridor and access to Nepal, the Farakka Barrage and water sharing, border conflicts near Tripura and the construction of a fence along most of the border which India explains as security provision against migrants, insurgents and terrorists. Many Bangladeshis feel India likes to play "big brother" to smaller neighbours, including Bangladesh. Bilateral relations warmed in 1996, due to a softer Indian foreign policy and the new Awami League Government. A 30-year water-sharing agreement for the Ganges River was signed in December 1996, after an earlier bilateral water-sharing agreement for the Ganges River lapsed in 1988. Both nations also have cooperated on the issue of flood warnings and preparedness. The Bangladesh Government and tribal insurgents signed a peace accord in December 1997, which allowed for the return of tribal refugees who had fled to India, beginning in 1986, to escape violence caused by an insurgency in their homeland in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The Bangladesh Army maintains a very strong presence in the area to this day. The army is increasingly concerned about the growing problem of the cultivation of illegal drugs.
There are also small pieces of land along the border region that Bangladesh is diplomatically trying to reclaim. Padua, part of Sylhet Division before 1971, has been under Indian control since the war in 1971. This small strip of land was re-occupied by the BDR in 2001 but later given back to India after the Bangladesh government decided to solve the problem through diplomatic negotiations. The Indian New Moore island no longer exists, but Bangladesh repeatedly claims it to be part of the Satkhira district of Bangladesh.
In recent years India has increasingly complained that Bangladesh does not secure its border properly. It fears an increasing flow of poor Bangladeshis and it accuses Bangladesh of harbouring Indian separatist groups like ULFA and alleged terrorist groups. The Bangladesh government has refused to accept these allegations. India estimates that over 20 million Bangladeshis are living illegally in India. One Bangladeshi official responded that "there is not a single Bangladeshi migrant in India". Since 2002, India has been constructing an India – Bangladesh Fence along much of the 2500-mile border. The failure to resolve migration disputes bears a human cost for illegal migrants, such as imprisonment and health risks (namely HIV/AIDS).
India's prime minister Narendra Modi and his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina have completed a landmark deal redrawing their messy shared border and thereby solving disputes between India and Bangladesh. Bangladesh has also given India a transit route to travel through Bangladesh to its North East states. India and Bangladesh also have free trade agreement on 7 June 2015.
Both countries solved their border dispute on 6 June 2015.
To connect Kolkata with Tripura via Bangladesh through railway, the Union Government on 10 February 2016 sanctioned about 580 crore rupees. The project which is expected to be completed by 2017 will pass through Bangladesh.
The Agartala-Akhaura rail link between Indian Railway and Bangladesh Railway will reduce the current 1700 km road distance between Kolkata to Agartala via Siliguri to just 350 kilometer by railway.
The project ranks high on Prime Minister's 'Act East Policy', and is expected to increase connectivity and boost trade between India and Bangladesh.
Historically, there have been close ties with India. Both countries signed a friendship treaty in 1949, where India would assist Bhutan in foreign relations. On 8 February 2007, the Indo-Bhutan Friendship Treaty was substantially revised under the Bhutanese King, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. Whereas in the Treaty of 1949 Article 2 read as "The Government of India undertakes to exercise no interference in the internal administration of Bhutan. On its part, the Government of Bhutan agrees to be guided by the advice of the Government of India regarding its external relations."
In the revised treaty it now reads as, "In keeping with the abiding ties of close friendship and cooperation between Bhutan and India, the Government of the Kingdom of Bhutan and the Government of the Republic of India shall cooperate closely with each other on issues relating to their national interests. Neither government shall allow the use of its territory for activities harmful to the national security and interest of the other". The revised treaty also includes in it the preamble "Reaffirming their respect for each other's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity", an element that was absent in the earlier version. The Indo-Bhutan Friendship Treaty of 2007 strengthens Bhutan's status as an independent and sovereign nation.
India continues to be the largest trade and development partner of Bhutan. Planned development efforts in Bhutan began in the early 1960s. The First Five Year Plan (FYP) of Bhutan was launched in 1961. Since then, India has been extending financial assistance to Bhutan's FYPs. The 10th FYP ended in June 2013. India's overall assistance to the 10th FYP was a little over Rs. 5000 crores, excluding grants for hydropower projects. India has committed Rs. 4500 crores for Bhutan's 11th FYP along with Rs. 500 crores as an Economic Stimulus Package.
The hydropower sector is one of the main pillars of bilateral cooperation, exemplifying mutually beneficial synergy by providing clean energy to India and exporting revenue to Bhutan (power contributes 14% to the Bhutanese GDP, comprising about 35% of Bhutan's total exports). Three hydroelectric projects (HEPs) totaling 1416 MW, (336 MW Chukha HEP, the 60 MW Kurichu HEP, and the 1020 MW Tala HEP), are already exporting electricity to India. In 2008 the two governments identified ten more projects for development with a total generation capacity of 10,000 MW. Of these, three projects totaling 2940 MW (1200 MW Punatsangchu-I, 1020 MW Punatsangchu-II and 720 MW Mangdechu HEPs) are under construction and are scheduled to be commissioned in the last quarter of 2017–2018. Out of the remaining 7 HEPs, 4 projects totaling 2120 MW (600 MW Kholongchhu, 180 MW Bunakha, 570 MW Wangchu and 770 MW Chamkarchu) will be constructed under a Joint Venture model, for which a Framework Inter-Governmental Agreement was signed between both governments in 2014. Of these 4 JV-model projects, pre-construction activities for Kholongchhu HEP have commenced. Tata Power is also building a hydroelectric dam in Bhutan.
India had assisted Bhutan by deploying its troops in Doklam in 2017- a territory claimed and controlled by the Bhutanese government- to resist a Chinese army's control and construction of military structures.
India enjoys a considerable influence over Maldives' foreign policy and provides extensive security cooperation, especially after Operation Cactus in 1988 during which India repelled Tamil mercenaries who invaded the country.
As a founder member in 1985 of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, SAARC, which brings together Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the country plays a very active role in SAARC. The Maldives has taken the lead in calling for a South Asian Free Trade Agreement, the formulation of a Social Charter, the initiation of informal political consultations in SAARC forums, the lobbying for greater action on environmental issues, the proposal of numerous human rights measures such as the regional convention on child rights and for setting up a SAARC Human Rights Resource Centre. The Maldives is also an advocate of greater international profile for SAARC such as through formulating common positions at the UN.
India is starting the process to bring the island country into India's security grid. The move comes after the moderate Islamic nation approached New Delhi earlier this year over fears that one of its island resorts could be taken over by terrorists given its lack of military assets and surveillance capabilities. India also signed an agreement with the Maldives in 2011 which is centred around the following:
Relations between India and Nepal are close yet fraught with difficulties stemming from border disputes, geography, economics, the problems inherent in big power-small power relations, and common ethnic and linguistic identities that overlap the two countries borders. In 1950 New Delhi and Kathmandu initiated their intertwined relationship with the Treaty of Peace and Friendship and accompanying secret letters that defined security relations between the two countries, and an agreement governing both bilateral trade and trade transiting Indian soil. The 1950 treaty and letters stated that "neither government shall tolerate any threat to the security of the other by a foreign aggressor" and obligated both sides "to inform each other of any serious friction or misunderstanding with any neighboring state likely to cause any breach in the friendly relations subsisting between the two governments", and also granted the Indian and Nepali citizens right to get involved in any economic activity such as work and business-related activity in each other's territory. These accords cemented a "special relationship" between India and Nepal that granted Nepalese in India the same economic and educational opportunities as Indian citizens.
Relations between India and Nepal reached their lowest in 1989 when India imposed a 13-month-long economic blockade on Nepal. Indian PM Narendra Modi visited Nepal in 2014, the first by an Indian PM in nearly 17 years.
In 2015, a blockade of the India-Nepal border affected relations. The blockade is led by ethnic communities angered by Nepal's recently promulgated new constitution. However, the Nepalese government accuses India of deliberately worsening the embargo, but India denies it.
India aided Nepal during the 2015 Kathmandu earthquake with the financial aid of $1 billion and launched Operation Maitri.
The relations were strained during mid-2020, when it was reported that a firing took place by the Nepalese police across the Indo-Nepalese border of Bihar on 12 July. Nepalese Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli commented about the pandemic of Coronavirus that the "Indian virus was deadlier" than the one which spread from Wuhan. As time progressed, certain claims were also made on the Indian territories, for example, Kalapani, Limpiyadhura and Lipulekh of Uttarakhand. Similarly, the claims were also made culturally, when it was said that Hindu God Ram was Nepalese, that he was born in Thori, west of Birgunj, and that Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh was fake. Rules were made strict for Indians in Nepal along with banning some Indian media.
Indian media stated that the actions of the Oli government were souring the relations, "and these were being done on the direction of China and propelled by Chinese ambassador Hou Yanqi". Speculations were made that since China could not handle India directly, in the aftermath of the LAC skirmish, it was lurking and trapping its neighboring countries and provoking them against India. In August, there were reports about the Chinese "illegal occupations" in Nepal's border states' areas.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 15 August 1947.
Despite historical, cultural and ethnic links between them, relations between India and Pakistan have been "plagued" by years of mistrust and suspicion ever since the partition of India in 1947. The principal source of contention between India and its western neighbour has been the Kashmir conflict. After an invasion by Pashtun tribesmen and Pakistani paramilitary forces, the Hindu Maharaja of the Dogra Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh, and its Muslim Prime Minister, Sheikh Abdullah, signed an Instrument of Accession with New Delhi. The First Kashmir War started after the Indian Army entered Srinagar, the capital of the state, to secure the area from the invading forces. The war ended in December 1948 with the Line of Control dividing the erstwhile princely state into territories administered by Pakistan (northern and western areas) and India (southern, central and northeastern areas). Pakistan contested the legality of the Instrument of Accession since the Dogra Kingdom has signed a standstill agreement with it. The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 started following the failure of Pakistan's Operation Gibraltar, which was designed to infiltrate forces into Jammu and Kashmir to precipitate an insurgency against rule by India. The five-week war caused thousands of casualties on both sides. It ended in a United Nations (UN) mandated ceasefire and the subsequent issuance of the Tashkent Declaration. India and Pakistan went to war again in 1971, this time the conflict being over East Pakistan. The large-scale atrocities committed there by the Pakistan army led to millions of Bengali refugees pouring over into India. India, along with the Mukti Bahini, defeated Pakistan and the Pakistani forces surrendered on the eastern front. The war resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. In 1998, India carried out the Pokhran-II nuclear tests which was followed by Pakistan's Chagai-I tests. Following the Lahore Declaration in February 1999, relations briefly improved. A few months later, however, Pakistani paramilitary forces and Pakistan Army, infiltrated in large numbers into the Kargil district of Indian Kashmir. This initiated the Kargil War after India moved in thousands of troops to successfully flush out the infiltrators. Although the conflict did not result in a full-scale war between India and Pakistan, relations between the two reached an all-time low which worsened even further following the involvement of Pakistan-based terrorists in the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Flight 814 in December 1999. Attempts to normalise relations, such as the Agra summit held in July 2001, failed. An attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, which was blamed on Pakistan, which had condemned the attack caused a military standoff between the two countries which lasted for nearly a year raising fears of nuclear warfare. However, a peace process, initiated in 2003, led to improved relations in the following years.
Since the initiation of the peace process, several confidence-building measures (CBMs) between India and Pakistan have taken shape. The Samjhauta Express and Delhi–Lahore Bus service are two of these successful measures which have played a crucial role in expanding people-to-people contact between the two countries. The initiation of the Srinagar–Muzaffarabad Bus service in 2005 and the opening of a historic trade route across the Line of Control in 2008 further reflects increasing eagerness between the two sides to improve relations. Although bilateral trade between India and Pakistan was a modest US$1.7 billion in March 2007, it is expected to cross US$10 billion by 2010. After the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, India sent aid to affected areas in Pakistani Kashmir and Punjab as well as Indian Kashmir.
The 2008 Mumbai attacks seriously undermined the relations between the two countries. India alleged Pakistan harbouring militants on their soil, while Pakistan vehemently denied such claims.
A new chapter started in India-Pakistan relations when a new NDA government took charge in Delhi after victory in the 2014 election and invited SAARC members' leaders to an oath-taking ceremony. Subsequently, the visit of the Indian prime minister on 25 December informally wished Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on his Birthday and participate in his daughter's wedding. It was hoped that the relationship between the neighbour will improve but an attack on an Indian army camp by Pakistani infiltrators on 18 September 2016 and a subsequent surgical strike by India aggravated the already strained relationship between the nations.
A SAARC summit scheduled in Islamabad was called off because of a boycott by India and other SAARC members subsequently.
The relationship took a further nosedive after another attack on CRPF in February 2019 by a terrorist associated with the Pakistan-based terror organisation, Jaish-e-Mohammed, when the terrorist rammed his vehicle packed with explosives against a bus carrying CRPF soldiers in Pulwama, Kashmir, killing 40. India blamed Pakistan which was denied by the Pakistani establishment. India retaliated with an airstrike on Balakot, a region claimed and controlled by Pakistan.
A new chapter in peace was ignited when it was suddenly declared that a back-door peace settlement over ceasing the cross-border firing across LOC was signed between the armies of both sides, and a steady growth in the countries coming together was observed.
Bilateral relations between Sri Lanka and India have enjoyed historically a good relationship. The two countries share near-identical racial and cultural ties. According to traditional Sri Lankan chronicles (Dipavamsa), Buddhism was introduced into Sri Lanka in the 4th century BCE by Venerable Mahinda, the son of Indian Emperor Ashoka, during the reign of Sri Lanka's King Devanampiya Tissa. During this time, a sapling of the Bodhi Tree was brought to Sri Lanka and the first monasteries and Buddhist monuments were established.
Nevertheless, relations post-independence were affected by the Sri Lankan Civil War and by the failure of Indian intervention during the civil war as well as India's support for Tamil Tiger militants. India is Sri Lanka's only neighbour, separated by the Palk Strait; both nations occupy a strategic position in South Asia and have sought to build a common security umbrella in the Indian Ocean.
India-Sri Lanka relations have undergone a qualitative and quantitative transformation in the recent past. Political relations are close, trade and investments have increased dramatically, infrastructural linkages are constantly being augmented, defence collaboration has increased and there is a general, broad-based improvement across all sectors of bilateral cooperation. India was the first country to respond to Sri Lanka's request for assistance after the tsunami in December 2004. In July 2006, India evacuated 430 Sri Lankan nationals from Lebanon, first to Cyprus by Indian Navy ships and then to Delhi and Colombo by special Air India flights.
There exists a broad consensus within the Sri Lankan polity on the primacy of India in Sri Lanka's external relations matrix. Both the major political parties in Sri Lanka, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the United Nationalist Party have contributed to the rapid development of bilateral relations in the last ten years. Sri Lanka has supported India's candidature to the permanent membership of the UN Security Council.
Certain aspects of India's relations within the subcontinent are conducted through the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Its members other than India are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Established in 1985, SAARC encourages cooperation in agriculture, rural development, science and technology, culture, health, population control, narcotics control and anti-terrorism.
SAARC has intentionally stressed these "core issues" and avoided more divisive political issues, although the political dialogue is often conducted on the margins of SAARC meetings. In 1993, India and its SAARC partners signed an agreement to gradually lower tariffs within the region. Forward movement in SAARC has come to a standstill because of the tension between India and Pakistan, and the SAARC Summit originally scheduled for, but not held in, November 1999 has not been rescheduled. The Fourteenth SAARC Summit was held during 3–4 April 2007 in New Delhi. The 19th SAARC summit that was scheduled to be held in Islamabad was cancelled due to terrorist acts, particularly the Uri attack.
Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation is now an "organization of member states" that are littorals of the Bay of Bengal or adjacent to it. The BIMSTEC member states – Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand – are among the major South and Southeast Asia countries dependent on the Bay of Bengal. India and some other countries, frustrated by the obstacles in SAARC's efforts to promote regional cooperation, have been working to make BIMSTEC the premier vehicle in this regard.
Brunei has a high commission in New Delhi, and India has a high commission in Bandar Seri Begawan. Both countries are full members of the Commonwealth of Nations.
Both nations have been in friendly relations.
The ties between Indonesia and India date back to the times of the Ramayana, "Yawadvipa" (Java) is mentioned in India's earliest epic, the Ramayana. Sugriva, the chief of Rama's army dispatched his men to Yawadvipa, the island of Java, in search of Sita. Indonesians had absorbed many aspects of Indian culture since almost two millennia ago. The most obvious trace is the large adoption of Sanskrit into the Indonesian language. Several Indonesian toponymy has Indian parallel or origin, such as Madura with Mathura, Serayu and Sarayu rivers, Kalingga from Kalinga Kingdom, and Ngayogyakarta from Ayodhya. Indianised Hindu–Buddhist kingdoms, such as Kalingga, Srivijaya, Mataram, Sunda, Kadiri, Singhasari and Majapahit were the predominant governments in Indonesia, and lasted from 200 to the 1500s, with the last remaining being in Bali. An example of profound Hindu-Buddhist influences in Indonesian history is the 9th-century Prambanan and Borobudur temples.
In 1950, the first President of Indonesia – Sukarno called upon the peoples of Indonesia and India to "intensify the cordial relations" that had existed between the two countries "for more than 1000 years" before they had been "disrupted" by colonial powers. In the spring of 1966, the foreign ministers of both countries began speaking again of an era of friendly relations. India had supported Indonesian independence and Nehru had raised the Indonesian question in the United Nations Security Council.
India has an embassy in Jakarta and Indonesia operates an embassy in Delhi. India regards Indonesia as a key member of ASEAN. Today, both countries maintain cooperative and friendly relations. India and Indonesia are one of the few (and also one of the largest) democracies in the Asian region which can be projected as a real democracy. Both nations had agreed to establish a strategic partnership. As fellow Asian democracies that share common values, it is natural for both countries to nurture and foster strategic alliances. Indonesia and India are member states of the G-20, the E7, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the United Nations.
In recent years, India has endeavoured to build relations, with this small Southeast Asian nation. They have strong military relations, and India shall be building an Airforce Academy in Laos.
India has a high commission in Kuala Lumpur, and Malaysia has a high commission in New Delhi. Both countries are full members of the Commonwealth of Nations and the Asian Union. India and Malaysia are also connected by various cultural and historical ties that date back to antiquity. The two countries are on friendly terms with each other and Malaysia harbours a small population of Indian immigrants. Mahathir bin Mohamad the fourth and longest-serving Prime Minister of Malaysia is of Indian origin. His father Mohamad Iskandar, is a Malayalee Muslim who migrated from Kerala and his mother Wan Tampawan, is a Malay.
Relations escalated when the Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad questioned the action of revocating the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and on CAA-NRC protests. The relations continue to be diminished, also during the palm oil export from Malaysia to India.
Even with the new government in power, currently, there seems no recovery, as former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad still favored Pakistan.
India established diplomatic relations after Burma's independence from Great Britain in 1948. For many years, Indo-Burmese relations were strong due to cultural links, flourishing commerce, common interests in regional affairs and the presence of a significant Indian community in Burma. India provided considerable support when Myanmar struggled with regional insurgencies. However, the overthrow of the democratic government by the Military of Burma led to strains in ties. Along with much of the world, India condemned the suppression of democracy and Myanmar ordered the expulsion of the Burmese Indian community, increasing its isolation from the world. Only China maintained close links with Myanmar while India supported the pro-democracy movement.
However, due to geopolitical concerns, India revived its relations and recognised the military junta ruling Myanmar in 1993, overcoming strains over drug trafficking, the suppression of democracy and the rule of the military junta in Myanmar. Myanmar is situated to the south of the states of Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India. and the proximity of the People's Republic of China gives strategic importance to Indo-Burmese relations. The Indo-Burmese border stretches over 1,600 kilometers and some insurgents in North-east India seek refuge in Myanmar. Consequently, India has been keen on increasing military cooperation with Myanmar in its counter-insurgency activities. In 2001, the Indian Army completed the construction of a major road along its border with Myanmar. India has also been building major roads, highways, ports and pipelines within Myanmar in an attempt to increase its strategic influence in the region and also to counter China's growing strides in the Indochina peninsula. Indian companies have also sought active participation in oil and natural gas exploration in Myanmar. In February 2007, India announced a plan to develop the Sittwe port, which would enable ocean access from Indian Northeastern states like Mizoram, via the Kaladan River.
India is a major customer of Burmese oil and gas. In 2007, Indian exports to Myanmar totaled US$185 million, while its imports from Myanmar were valued at around US$810 million, consisting mostly of oil and gas. India has granted US$100 million credit to fund highway infrastructure projects in Myanmar, while US$57 million has been offered to upgrade Burmese railways. A further US$27 million in grants has been pledged for road and rail projects. India is one of the few countries that has provided military assistance to the Burmese junta. However, there has been increasing pressure on India to cut some of its military supplies to Burma. Relations between the two remain close which was evident in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, when India was one of the few countries whose relief and rescue aid proposals were accepted by Myanmar's junta.
India maintains embassies in Rangoon and consulate generals in Mandalay.
Through the Srivijaya and Majapahit empires, Hindu influence has been visible in Philippine history from the 10th to 14th centuries. During the 18th century, there was robust trade between Manila with the Coromandel Coast and Bengal, involving Philippine exports of tobacco, silk, cotton, indigo, sugar cane and coffee.
Formal diplomatic relations between the Philippines and India were established on 16 November 1949. The first Philippine envoy to India was the late Foreign Secretary Narciso Ramos. Seven years after India's independence in 1947, the Philippines and India signed a Treaty of Friendship on 11 July 1952 in Manila to strengthen the friendly relations existing between the two countries. Soon after, the Philippine Legation in New Delhi was established and then elevated to an embassy. However, due to foreign policy differences as a result of the bipolar alliance structure of the Cold War, the development of bilateral relations was stunted. It was only in 1976 that relations started to normalise when Aditya Birla, one of India's successful industrialists, met with then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos to explore possibilities of setting up joint ventures in the Philippines. Today, like India, the Philippines is the leading voice-operated business process outsourcing (BPO) source in terms of revenue (US$5.7) and number of people (500,000) employed in the sector. In partnership with the Philippines, India has 20 IT/BPO companies in the Philippines. Philippines-India bilateral trade stood at US$986.60 million in 2009. In 2004 it was US$600 million. Both countries aim to reach US$1 billion by 2010. 60,000 Indians are living in the Philippines. The Philippines and India signed in October 2007 the Framework for Bilateral Cooperation which created the PH-India JCBC. It has working groups in trade, agriculture, tourism, health, and renewable energy, a regular policy consultation mechanism and security dialogue.
India and Singapore share long-standing cultural, commercial and strategic relations, with Singapore being a part of the "Greater India" cultural and commercial region. More than 300,000 people of Indian Tamil "தமிழ்" origin live in Singapore. Following its independence in 1965, Singapore was concerned with China-backed communist threats as well as domination from Malaysia and Indonesia and sought a close strategic relationship with India, which it saw as a counterbalance to Chinese influence and a partner in achieving regional security. Singapore had always been an important strategic trading post, giving India trade access to Maritime Southeast Asia and the Far East. Although the rival positions of both nations over the Vietnam War and the Cold War caused consternation between India and Singapore, their relationship expanded significantly in the 1990s; Singapore was one of the first to respond to the Indian Look East policy of expanding its economic, cultural and strategic ties in Southeast Asia to strengthen its standing as a regional power. Singapore, and especially, the Singaporean Foreign Minister, George Yeo, have taken an interest, in re-establishing the ancient Indian university, Nalanda University.
Singapore is the 8th largest source of investment in India and the largest among ASEAN member nations. It is also India's 9th biggest trading partner as of 2005–06. Its cumulative investment in India totals US$3 billion as of 2006 and is expected to rise to US$ 5 billion by 2010 and US$ 10 billion by 2015. India's economic liberalisation and its "Look East" policy have led to a major expansion in bilateral trade, which grew from US$2.2 billion in 2001 to US$ 9–10 billion in 2006 – a 400% growth in five years – and to US$50 billion by 2010. Singapore accounts for 38% of India's trade with ASEAN member nations and 3.4% of its total foreign trade. India's main exports to Singapore in 2005 included petroleum, gemstones, jewellery, and machinery and its imports from Singapore included electronic goods, organic chemicals and metals. More than half of Singapore's exports to India are basically "re-exports" – items that had been imported from India.
India's Indian Look East policy, saw India grow relations with ASEAN countries including Thailand, and Thailand's Look West policy, also saw it grow its relations with India. Both countries are members of BIMSTEC. Indian Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and Manmohan Singh, have visited Thailand, which was reciprocated by contemporary Thai Prime Ministers Chatichai Choonhavan, Thaksin Sinawatra, and Surayud Chulanont. In 2003, a Free Trade Agreement was signed between the two countries. India is the 13th largest investor in Thailand. The spheres of trade are in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, textiles, nylon, tyre cord, real estate, rayon fibres, paper-grade pulps, steel wires, and rods. However, IT services, and manufacturing, are the main spheres. Through Buddhism, India has culturally influenced Thailand. The Indian epics, Mahabharata, and Ramayana, are popular and are widely taught in schools as part of the curriculum in Thailand. The example can also be seen in temples around Thailand, where the story of Ramayana and renowned Indian folk stories are depicted on the temple wall. Thailand has become a big tourist destination for Indians.
Moreover, India and Thailand have been culturally linked for centuries and India has had a deep influence on Thai culture. There are a substantial number of words in Thai that are borrowed from Sanskrit, India's classical language. Pali, which was the language of Magadha and is a medium of Theravada, is another important root of Thai vocabulary. Buddhism, the major religion of Thailand, itself originates from India. The Hindu story of Ramayana is also well known throughout Thailand in the name Ramakien.
Both nations have friendly and collateral relations.
India supported Vietnam's independence from France, opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War and supported the unification of Vietnam. India established official diplomatic relations in 1972 and maintained friendly relations, especially in the wake of Vietnam's hostile relations with the People's Republic of China, which had become India's strategic rival.
India granted the "Most favoured nation" status to Vietnam in 1975 and both nations signed a bilateral trade agreement in 1978 and the Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (BIPPA) on 8 March 1997. In 2007, a fresh joint declaration was issued during the state visit of the Prime Minister of Vietnam Nguyen Tan Dung. Bilateral trade has increased rapidly since the liberalisation of the economies of both Vietnam and India. India is the 13th-largest exporter to Vietnam, with exports having grown steadily from US$11.5 million in 1985–86 to US$395.68 million by 2003. Vietnam's exports to India rose to US$180 million, including agricultural products, handicrafts, textiles, electronics and other goods. Between 2001 and 2006, the volume of bilateral trade expanded at 20–30% per annum to reach $1 billion by 2006. Continuing the rapid pace of growth, bilateral trade is expected to rise to $2 billion by 2008, two years ahead of the official target. India and Vietnam have also expanded cooperation in information technology, education and collaboration of the respective national space programmes. Direct air links and lax visa regulations have been established to bolster tourism.
India and Vietnam are members of the Mekong–Ganga Cooperation, created to develop to enhance close ties between India and nations of Southeast Asia. Vietnam has supported India's bid to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and join the Indo-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). In the 2003 joint declaration, India and Vietnam envisaged creating an "Arc of Advantage and Prosperity" in Southeast Asia; to this end, Vietnam has backed a more important relationship and role between India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its negotiation of an Indo–ASEAN free trade agreement. India and Vietnam have also built strategic partnerships, including extensive cooperation in developing nuclear power, enhancing regional security and fighting terrorism, transnational crime and drug trafficking.
India's interaction with ASEAN during the Cold War was very limited. India declined to get associated with ASEAN in the 1960s when full membership was offered even before the grouping was formed.
It is only with the formulation of the Look East policy in the last decade (1992), India started giving this region due importance in the foreign policy. India became a sectoral dialogue partner with ASEAN in 1992, a full dialogue partner in 1995, a member of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in 1996, and a summit-level partner (on par with China, Japan and Korea) in 2002.
The first India–ASEAN Business Summit was held in New Delhi in October 2002. The then Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee addressed this meeting and since then this business summit has become an annual feature before the India–ASEAN Summits, as a forum for networking and exchange of business experiences between policymakers and business leaders from ASEAN and India.
Four India-ASEAN Summits, first in 2002 at Phnom Penh (Cambodia), second in 2003 at Bali, Indonesia, third in 2004 at Vientiane, Laos, and the fourth in 2005 at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, have taken place.
The following agreements have been entered into with ASEAN:
The following proposals were announced by the Prime Minister at the 4th ASEAN-India Summit:
The ASEAN region has an abundance of natural resources and significant technological skills. These provide a natural base for the integration between ASEAN and India in both trade and investment. The present level of bilateral trade with ASEAN of nearly US$18 billion is reportedly increasing by about 25% per year. India hopes to reach the level of US$30 billion by 2007. India is also improving its relations with the help of other policy decisions like offers of lines of credit, better connectivity through the air (open skies policy), and rail and road links.
India established diplomatic relations with Armenia in December 1992. It wasn't recognised by some countries including Pakistan, which most of the nations did. As of the earliest days of the silk route, there have been strong cultural, moral and ancient other traditional relations among the nations. It fully supports India's bid for a permanent seat in UNSC and even completely supports India on Kashmir conflicts. There exists a small community of Armenians in India while there is also a small community of Indians.
India has an embassy in Baku and Azerbaijan has an embassy in New Delhi. Both have been connected through ancient cultural links and trade routes (especially the Silk Route).
India is a close ally of Bahrain, the Kingdom along with its GCC partners are (according to Indian officials) among the most prominent backers of India's bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and Bahraini officials have urged India to play a greater role in international affairs. For instance, over concerns about Iran's nuclear programme Bahrain's Crown Prince appealed to India to play an active role in resolving the crisis.
Ties between India and Bahrain go back generations, with many of Bahrain's most prominent figures having close connections: poet and constitutionalist Ebrahim Al-Arrayedh grew up in Bombay, while 17th-century Bahraini theologians Sheikh Salih Al-Karzakani and Sheikh Ja'far bin Kamal al-Din were influential figures in the Kingdom of Golkonda and the development of Shia thought in the sub-continent.
Bahraini politicians have sought to enhance these long-standing ties, with Parliamentary Speaker Khalifa Al Dhahrani in 2007 leading a delegation of parliamentarians and business leaders to meet the then Indian President Pratibha Patil, the then opposition leader L K Advani, and take part in training and media interviews. Politically, it is easier for Bahrain's politicians to seek training and advice from India than it is from the United States or other Western alternatives.
Adding further strength to the ties, Sheikh Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa visited India during which MOUs and bilateral deals worth $450 million were approved. India expressed its support for Bahrain's bid for a non-permanent seat in the UNSC in 2026–27.
India supported Cyprus during its struggle for independence from British colonial rule. India supported the Greeks in Cyprus during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and lobbied for the international recognition of the Government of Nicosia as the sole legal representative of the entire nation. India has consistently supported and voted for a peaceful resolution of the Cyprus dispute at the United Nations.
Independent India and Iran established diplomatic links on 15 March 1950. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iran withdrew from CENTO and dissociated itself from US-friendly countries, including Pakistan, which automatically meant an improved relationship with the Republic of India.
Currently, the two countries have friendly relations in many areas. There are significant trade ties, particularly in crude oil imports into India and diesel exports to Iran. Iran frequently objected to Pakistan's attempts to draft anti-India resolutions at international organisations such as the OIC. India welcomed Iran's inclusion as an observer state in the SAARC regional organisation. Lucknow continues to be a major centre of Shiite culture and Persian study in the subcontinent.
In the 1990s, India and Iran both supported the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against the Taliban regime. They continue to collaborate in supporting the broad-based anti-Taliban government led by Hamid Karzai and backed by the United States.
However, one complex issue in Indo-Iran relations is the issue of Iran's nuclear programme. In this intricate issue, India tries to make a delicate balance. According to Rejaul Laskar, an Indian expert on international relations, "India's position on Iran's nuclear programme has been consistent, principled and balanced, and makes an endeavour to reconcile Iran's quest for energy security with the international community's concerns on proliferation. So, while India acknowledges and supports Iran's ambitions to achieve energy security and in particular, its quest for peaceful use of nuclear energy, it is also India's principled position that Iran must meet all its obligations under international law, particularly its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and other such treaties to which it is a signatory"
Following an attack on an Israeli diplomat in India in February 2012, the Delhi Police contended that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had some involvement in the attack. This was subsequently confirmed in July 2012, after a report by the Delhi Police found evidence that members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had been involved in the 13 February bomb attack in the capital.
Iraq was one of the few countries in the Middle East with which India established diplomatic relations at the embassy level immediately after its independence in 1947. Both nations signed the "Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Friendship" in 1952 and an agreement of cooperation on cultural affairs in 1954. India was amongst the first to recognise the Ba'ath Party-led government, and Iraq remained neutral during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. However, Iraq sided alongside other Persian Gulf states in supporting Pakistan against India during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, which saw the creation of Bangladesh. The eight-year-long Iran–Iraq War caused a steep decline in trade and commerce between the two nations.
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, India remained neutral but permitted refuelling for US aircraft. It opposed UN sanctions on Iraq, but the period of war and Iraq's isolation further diminished India's commercial and diplomatic ties. From 1999 onwards, Iraq and India began to work towards a stronger relationship. Iraq had supported India's right to conduct nuclear tests following its tests of five nuclear weapons on 11 and 13 May 1998. In 2000, the then-Vice-President of Iraq Taha Yassin Ramadan visited India, and on 6 August 2002 President Saddam Hussein conveyed Iraq's "unwavering support" to India over the Kashmir conflict with Pakistan. India and Iraq established joint ministerial committees and trade delegations to promote extensive bilateral cooperation. Although initially disrupted during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, diplomatic and commercial ties between India and the new democratic government of Iraq have since been normalised.
The establishment of Israel at the end of World War II was a complex issue. Based on its own experience during partition, when 14 million people were displaced and an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 people were killed in Punjab Province, India had recommended a single state, as did Iran and Yugoslavia (later to undergo its genocidal partition). The state could allocate Arab- and Jewish-majority provinces to prevent the partition of historic Palestine and prevent widespread conflict. But, the final UN resolution recommended the partition of Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states based on religious and ethnic majorities. India opposed this in the final vote as it did not agree with the concept of partition based on religion.
Due to the security threat from a US-backed Pakistan and its nuclear programme in the 1980s, Israel and India started a clandestine relationship that involved cooperation between their respective intelligence agencies. Israel shared India's concerns about the growing danger posed by Pakistan and nuclear proliferation to Iran and other Arab states.
Since the establishment of full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, India has improved its relationship with the Jewish state. India is regarded as Israel's strongest ally in Asia, and Israel is India's second-largest arms supplier. Since India achieved its independence in 1947, it has supported Palestinian self-determination. India recognised Palestine's statehood following Palestine's declaration on 18 November 1988 and Indo-Palestinian relations was first established in 1974. This has not adversely affected India's improved relations with Israel.
India entertained the Israeli Prime Minister in a visit in 2003, and Israel has entertained Indian dignitaries such as Finance Minister Jaswant Singh in diplomatic visits. India and Israel collaborate in scientific and technological endeavours. Israel's Minister for Science and Technology has expressed interest in collaborating with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) towards using satellites to better manage land and other resources. Israel has also expressed interest in participating in ISRO's Chandrayaan Mission involving an uncrewed mission to the moon. On 21 January 2008, India successfully launched an Israeli spy satellite into orbit from the Sriharikota space station in southern India.
Israel and India share intelligence on terrorist groups. They have developed close defence and security ties since establishing diplomatic relations in 1992. India has bought more than $5 billion worth of Israeli equipment since 2002. In addition, Israel is training Indian military units and in 2008 was discussing an arrangement to give Indian commandos instruction in counter-terrorist tactics and urban warfare. In December 2008, Israel and India signed a memorandum to set up an Indo-Israel Legal Colloquium to facilitate discussions and exchange programmes between judges and jurists of the two countries.
Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, India stated that the Israeli use of force was "disproportionate and excessive".
The India-Israel relationship has been very close and warm under the premiership of Narendra Modi since 2014. In 2017, he was the first ever Prime Minister of India to visit Israel.
India and Lebanon enjoy cordial and friendly relations based on many complementarities such as a political system based on parliamentary democracy, non-alignment, human rights, commitment to a just world order, regional and global peace, a liberal market economy and a vibrant entrepreneurial spirit. India has a peacekeeping force as part of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). One infantry battalion is deployed in Lebanon and about 900 personnel are stationed in the Eastern part of Southern Lebanon. The force also provided non-patrol aid to citizens. India and Lebanon have had very good relations since the 1950s.
India–Oman relations are foreign relations between India and the Sultanate of Oman. India has an embassy in Muscat, Oman. The Indian consulate was opened in Muscat in February 1955 and five years later it was upgraded to a consulate general and later developed into a full-fledged embassy in 1971. The first Ambassador of India arrived in Muscat in 1973. Oman established its embassy in New Delhi in 1972 and a consulate general in Mumbai in 1976.
$5.6 bn Oman-India energy pipeline plans progressing: Fox Petroleum Group envisions a roughly five-year timeframe for the execution of the pipeline project.
Ajay Kumar, the chairman and managing director of Fox Petroleum, based in New Delhi, which is an associate company of Fox Petroleum FZC in the UAE, said that Mr. Modi had "fired the best weapon of economic development and growth". "He has given a red carpet for global players to invest in India," Mr. Kumar added. "It will boost all sectors of the industry – especially for small-scale manufacturing units and heavy industries too."
Bilateral relations between India and Saudi Arabia have strengthened considerably owing to cooperation in regional affairs and trade. Saudi Arabia is the one of largest suppliers of oil to India, which is one of the top seven trading partners and the 5th biggest investor in Saudi Arabia.
India was one of the first nations to establish ties with the Third Saudi State. During the 1930s, India heavily funded Nejd through financial subsidies.
India's strategic relations with Saudi Arabia have been affected by the latter's close ties with Pakistan. Saudi Arabia supported Pakistan's stance on the Kashmir conflict during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 at the expense of its relations with India. The Soviet Union's close relations with India also served as a source of consternation. During the Persian Gulf War (1990–91), India officially maintained neutrality. Saudi Arabia's close military and strategic ties with Pakistan have also been a source of continuing strain.
Since the 1990s, both nations have taken steps to improve ties. Saudi Arabia has supported granting observer status to India in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and has expanded its cooperation with India to fight terrorism. In January 2006, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made a special visit to India, becoming the first Saudi monarch in 51 years to do so. The Saudi king and former Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh signed an agreement forging a strategic energy partnership that was termed the "Delhi Declaration". The pact provides for a "reliable, stable and increased volume of crude oil supplies to India through long-term contracts." Both nations also agreed on joint ventures and the development of oil and natural gas in public and private sectors. An Indo-Saudi joint declaration in the Indian capital New Delhi described the king's visit as "heralding a new era in India-Saudi Arabia relations".
Bilateral relations between India and Syria are historic and the two have ancient civilizational ties. Both countries were on the Silk Road through which civilizational exchanges took place for centuries. Syriac Christianity, originating in ancient Syria, spread further to the East and created the first Christian communities in ancient India. The ancient Syriac language among the Syrian Christians of Kerala was also brought to Kerala by St Thomas in the 1st century CE. Even today the language continues to be taught in colleges and universities in Kerala.
A common nationalism and secular orientation, membership of NAM and similar perceptions on many issues further strengthened the bond between the two states. India supported "Syria's legitimate right to regain the occupied Golan Heights". In turn, this was reciprocated with Syrian recognition that Kashmir is a bilateral issue as well as general support of India's concerns and even candidature at various international forums.
Due to controversial issues such as Turkey's close relationship with Pakistan, relations between the two countries have often been blistered at certain times, but better at others. India and Turkey's relationship alters from unsureness to collaboration when the two nations work together to combat terrorism in Central and South Asia, and the Middle East. India and Turkey are also connected by history, seeing as they have known each other since the days of the Ottoman Empire, and seeing as India was one of the countries to send aid to Turkey following its war of independence. The Indian real estate firm GMR has invested in and is working towards the modernisation of Istanbul's Sabiha Gökçen International Airport.
The relations took a nose-dive after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke against India on the Kashmir issue and supported Pakistan, during his address at United Nations General Assembly after Pakistan PM Imran Khan, in September 2019. In February 2020, he visited Islamabad and held talks with Imran Khan, on "improving and bolding the relations with Islamabad". At the end of the month, during the riots in Delhi and CAA-NRC protests in India, he criticized the government for its policies. He also criticized the move of the Indian Government on the Galwan Valley skirmishes with China on LAC.
India–United Arab Emirates relations refer to the bilateral relations that exist between the Republic of India and the United Arab Emirates. After the creation of the Federation in 1971, India-UAE relations flourished. Today UAE and India share political, economic and cultural links. There are over a million Indians in the United Arab Emirates, being by far the largest migrant group in the country.[1] A large Indian expatriate community resides and engages in the UAE in economically productive activities and has played a significant role in the evolution of the UAE. In 2008–09, India emerged as the largest trade partner of the UAE with bilateral trade between the two countries exceeding US$44.5 billion. [9] UAE and India are each other's main trading partners. The trade totals over $75 billion (AED275.25 billion).
India and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf enjoy strong cultural and economic ties. This is reflected in the fact that more than 50% of the oil consumed by India comes from the Persian Gulf countries and Indian nationals form the largest expatriate community in the Arabian peninsula. The annual remittance by Indian expatriates in the region amounted to US$20 billion in 2007. India is one of the largest trading partners of the CCASG with non-oil trade between India and Dubai alone amounting to US$19 billion in 2007. The Persian Gulf countries have also played an important role in addressing India's energy security concerns, with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait regularly increasing their oil supply to India to meet the country's rising energy demand. In 2005, Kuwait increased its oil exports to India by 10% increasing the net oil trade between the two to US$4.5 billion. In 2008, Qatar decided to invest US$5 billion in India's energy sector.
India has maritime security arrangements in place with Oman and Qatar. In 2008, a landmark defence pact was signed, under which India committed its military assets to protect "Qatar from external threats". There has been progress in a proposed deep-sea gas pipeline from Qatar, via Oman, to India.
Austria–India relations refers to the bilateral ties between Austria and India. Indo-Austrian relations were established in May 1949 by the first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru and the Chancellor of Austria Leopold Figl. Historically, Indo-Austrian ties have been particularly strong and India intervened in June 1953 in Austria's favour whilst negotiations were going on with the Soviet Union about the Austrian State Treaty. There is a fully functioning Indian embassy in Vienna, Austria's capital, which is concurrently accredited to the United Nations offices in the city. Austria is represented in India by its embassy and Trade Commission in New Delhi, India's capital, as well as honorary consulates in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Goa.
Belarus has an embassy in New Delhi. Since 14 May 1992, India has an embassy in Minsk.
Belgium has an embassy in New Delhi, consulates in Chennai and Mumbai, and an honorary consulate in Kolkata. India has an embassy in Brussels.
Bulgaria has an embassy in New Delhi and an honorary consulate in Kolkata. India has an embassy in Sofia.
Since February 1995, Croatia has an embassy in New Delhi and an honorary consulate in Mumbai. Since 28 April 1996, India has an embassy in Zagreb.
Czech-Indian relations were established in 1921 by a consulate in Bombay. The Czech Republic has an embassy in New Delhi. Consulates of the Czech Republic in India are in Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. India has an embassy in Prague.
Denmark has an embassy in New Delhi, and India has an embassy in Copenhagen.
Tranquebar, a town in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, was a Danish colony in India from 1620 to 1845. It is spelled Trankebar or Tranquebar in Danish, which comes from the native Tamil, Tarangambadi, meaning "place of the singing waves". It was sold, along with the other Danish settlements in mainland India, most notably Serampore (now in West Bengal), to Great Britain in 1845. The Nicobar Islands were also colonised by Denmark until sold to the British in 1868, who made them part of the British Indian Empire.
After Independence in 1947, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's visit to Denmark in 1957 laid the foundation for a friendly relationship between India and Denmark that has endured ever since. The bilateral relations between India and Denmark are cordial and friendly, based on synergies in political, economic, academic and research fields. There have been periodic high-level visits between the two countries.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Prime Minister of Denmark, accompanied by a large business delegation, paid a state visit to India from 4 to 8 February 2008. He visited Infosys, Biocon and IIM Bangalore in Bangalore and Agra. He launched an 'India Action Plan', which called for strengthening of the political dialogue, strengthening of cooperation in trade and investments, research in science and technology, energy, climate and environment, culture, education, student exchanges and attracting skilled manpower and IT experts to Denmark for short periods. The two countries signed an Agreement for the establishment of a Bilateral Joint Commission for Cooperation.
In July 2012, the Government of India decided to scale down its diplomatic ties with Denmark after that country's refusal to appeal in their Supreme Court against a decision of its lower court rejecting the extradition of Purulia arms drop case prime accused Kim Davy a.k.a. Niels Holck. Agitated over Denmark's refusal to act on India's repeated requests to appeal in their apex court to facilitate Davy's extradition to India, the government issued a circular directing all senior officials not to meet or entertain any Danish diplomat posted in India.
India's first recognition of Estonia came on 22 September 1921 when the former had just acquired membership in the League of Nations. India re-recognised Estonia on 9 September 1991 and diplomatic relations were established on 2 December of the same year in Helsinki. Neither country has a resident ambassador. Estonia is represented in India by an Embassy in New Delhi one honorary consulate in Mumbai. India is represented in Estonia through its embassy in Helsinki (Finland) and an honorary consulate in Tallinn.
France and India established diplomatic relations before India's independence from the British Empire on 17 February 1947. France's Indian possessions were returned to India after a treaty of cession was signed by the two countries in May 1956. On 16 August 1962, India and France exchanged the instruments of ratification under which France ceded to India full sovereignty over the territories it held. Pondicherry and the other enclaves of Karaikal, Mahe and Yanam came to be administered as the Union Territory of Puducherry on 1 July 1963.
France, Russia and Israel were the only countries that did not condemn India's decision to go nuclear in 1998. In 2003, France became the largest supplier of nuclear fuel and technology to India and remains a large military and economic trade partner. India's candidacy for permanent membership in the UN Security Council has found very strong support from former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The Indian Government's decisions to purchase French Scorpène-class submarines worth US$3 billion and 43 Airbus aircraft for Air India worth US$2.5 billion have further cemented the strategic, military and economic cooperation between India and France.
France's decision to ban schoolchildren from wearing headdresses and veils had the unintended consequence of affecting Sikh children who have been refused entry into public schools. The Indian Government, citing the historic traditions of the Sikh community, has requested French authorities to review the situation to not exclude Sikh children from education.
President Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande visited India in January 2008 and 2016 respectively as the Chief Guest of the annual Republic Day parade in New Delhi. France was the first country to sign a nuclear energy cooperation agreement with India; this was done during Prime Minister Singh's visit, following the waiver by the Nuclear Suppliers Group. During the Bastille Day celebrations on 14 July 2009, a detachment of 400 Indian troops marched alongside the French troops and the then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the guest of honour.
India has an embassy in Helsinki. Finland has an embassy in New Delhi and three honorary consulates in Kolkata, Chennai, and Mumbai.
During the Cold War India maintained diplomatic relations with both West Germany and East Germany. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the reunification of Germany, relations have further improved.
Germany is India's largest trade partner in Europe. Between 2004 and 2013, Indo-German trade grew in volume but dropped in importance. According to Indian Ministry of Commerce MX data: Total trade between India and Germany was $5.5 billion (3.8% share of Indian trade and ranked 6) in 2004 and $21.6 billion (2.6% share of Indian trade and ranked 9) in 2013. Indian exports to Germany were $2.54 billion (3.99% ranked 6) in 2004 and $7.3billion (2.41% ranked 10) in 2013. Indian imports from Germany were $2.92 billion (3.73% ranked 6) in 2004 and $14.33 billion (2.92% ranked 10) in 2013.
Indo-German ties are transactional. The strategic relationship between Germany and India suffers from sustained anti-Asian sentiment, institutionalized discrimination against minority groups, and xenophobic incidents against Indians in Germany. The 2007 Mügeln mob attack on Indians and the 2015 Leipzig University internship controversy have clouded the predominantly commercial-oriented relationship between the two countries. Stiff competition between foreign manufactured goods within the Indian market has seen machine tools, automotive parts and medical supplies from German Mittelstand ceding ground to high-technology imports manufactured by companies located in ASEAN & BRICS countries. The Volkswagen emissions scandal drew the spotlight on corrupt behaviour in German boardrooms and brought back memories of the HDW bribery scandal surrounding the procurement of Shishumar-class submarines by the Indian Navy. The India-Germany strategic relationship is limited by the insignificance of German geopolitical influence in Asian affairs. Germany has no strategic footprint in Asia. Germany like India is working towards gaining permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council.
For the Ancient Greeks "India" (Greek: Ινδία) meant only the upper Indus until the time of Alexander the Great. Afterwards, "India" meant to the Greeks most of the northern half of the Indian subcontinent. The Greeks referred to the Indians as "Indói" (Greek: Ἰνδοί), literally meaning "the people of the Indus River". Indians called the Greeks Yonas or "Yavanas" from Ionians.
Indo-Greek kingdoms were founded by the successor of Alexander the Great. (Greek conquests in India) The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea was a manual written in Greek for navigators who carried trade between Roman Empire and other regions, including ancient India. It gives detailed information about the ports, routes and commodities. The Greek ethnographer and explorer of the Hellenistic period, Megasthenes was the ambassador of Seleucus I in India. In his work, Indika (Greek: Ινδικά), he wrote the history of Indians and their culture. Megasthenes also mentioned the prehistoric arrival of the God Dionysus and Herakles (Megasthenes' Herakles) in India.
There is now tangible evidence indicating that the settlement of Greek merchants in Bengal must have begun as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century. Dimitrios Galanos (Greek: Δημήτριος Γαλανός, 1760–1833) was the earliest recorded Greek Indologist. His translations of Sanskrit texts into Greek made knowledge of the philosophical and religious ideas of India available to many Europeans. A "Dimitrios Galanos" Chair for Hellenic Studies was established at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India in September 2000.
In modern times, diplomatic relations between Greece and India were established in May 1950. The new Greek Embassy building in New Delhi was inaugurated on 6 February 2001. As of 2020, the relationship between the two countries is closer than ever and is considered historical and strategic by both parties.
The Indian embassy is located in Budapest.
Iceland and India established diplomatic relations in 1972. The Embassy of Iceland in London was accredited to India and the Embassy of India in Oslo, Norway, was accredited to Iceland. However, it was only after 2003 that the two countries began close diplomatic and economic relationships. In 2003, President of Iceland Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson visited India on a diplomatic mission. This was the first visit by an Icelandic President to India. During the visit, Iceland pledged support to New Delhi's candidature for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council thus becoming the first Nordic country to do so. This was followed by an official visit of President of India A. P. J. Abdul Kalam to Iceland in May 2005. Following this, a new embassy of Iceland was opened in New Delhi on 26 February 2006. Soon, an Indian Navy team visited Iceland on a friendly mission. Gunnar Pálsson is the ambassador of Iceland to India. The Embassy's area of accreditation, apart from India includes Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Seychelles, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius and Nepal. India appointed S. Swaminathan as the first resident ambassador to Iceland in March 2008.
Indo-Irish relations picked up steam during their respective campaigns for independence from the British Empire. Political relations between the two states have largely been based on socio-cultural ties, although political and economic ties have also helped build relations. Indo-Irish relations were greatly strengthened by Pandit Nehru, Éamon de Valera, Rabindranath Tagore, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and, above all, Annie Besant. Politically, relations have not been cold or warm. Mutual benefit has led to economic ties that are fruitful for both states. Visits by government leaders have kept relations cordial at regular intervals.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 25 March 1948
India maintains an embassy in Rome and a consulate-general in Milan. Italy has an embassy in New Delhi, and consulate-generals in Mumbai and Calcutta.
Indo-Italian relations have historically been cordial. In recent times, their state has mirrored the political fortunes of Sonia Maino-Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of the Indian National Congress and de facto leader of the UPA government of Manmohan Singh.
Since 2012 the relationship has been affected by the ongoing Enrica Lexie case: two Indian fishermen were killed on the Indian fishing vessel St. Antony as a result of gunshot wounds following a confrontation with the Italian oil tanker Enrica Lexie in international waters, off the Kerala coast.
After a period of tension, in 2017 Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni visited India and met his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi; they held extensive talks to strengthen the political cooperation and to boost the bilateral trade.
There are around 150,000 people of Indian Origins living in Italy. Around 1,000 Italian citizens reside in India, mostly working on behalf of Italian industrial groups.
Relations were established in 1947, following India's independence. Luxembourg operates an Embassy in New Delhi whilst India operates a Consulate General in Luxembourg City. Bilateral Trade stood at US$37 Million in 2014 and trade continues to grow every year. Diplomats from both countries have visited the other several times. In 2019, Luxembourg plans to host the annual Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and open an economic mission in India.
Malta opened a High Commission of Malta, New Delhi in New Delhi in 2007. Malta also has an honorary consulate in Mumbai. India is represented in Malta by its high commission in Valletta.
The Indian embassy to Moldova is accredited by Bucharest, Romania. Moldova maintains an honorary consulate in New Delhi and a consulate in Mumbai. Both countries have taken steps to deepen their ties, which are still maintained at a modest level. Both countries have been found supporting each other on many international platforms like the United Nations through reciprocal support mechanisms. India-Moldova bilateral trade has been rather modest.
India–Netherlands relations refer to foreign relations between India and the Netherlands. India maintains an embassy in The Hague, Netherlands and the Netherlands maintains an embassy in New Delhi and a consulate general in Mumbai. Both countries established diplomatic relations on 17 April 1947.
In 2012, Trond Giske met with Minister of Finance Pranab Mukherjee, to save Telenor's investments to put forth Norway's "strong wish" that there must not be a waiting period between the confiscation of telecom licenses and the re-sale of those. The leader of Telenor attended the meeting.
Mother Teresa, honoured in the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta became an Indian citizen in 1951, and was born in Skopje (in present-day North Macedonia) in 1910. India has an embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria jointly accredited to the Republic of Macedonia. Both Macedonia has an embassy in New Delhi and an honorary consulate in Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore.
Historically, relations have generally been close and friendly, characterised by understanding and cooperation on the international front.
India and Portugal have a long history of relations ever since the Portuguese colonisation in British Raj.
Both countries established diplomatic relations on 13 April 1947
India's ties with the Russian Federation are time-tested and based on continuity, trust and mutual understanding. There is a national consensus in both countries on the need to preserve and strengthen India-Russia relations and further consolidate the strategic partnership between the two countries. A Declaration on Strategic Partnership was signed between present Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in October 2000 the partnership is also referred to asa "special and privileged strategic partnership".
Russia and India have decided not to renew the 1971 Indo-Soviet Peace and Friendship Treaty and have sought to follow what both describe as a more pragmatic, less ideological relationship. Russian President Yeltsin's visit to India in January 1993 helped cement this new relationship. Ties have grown stronger with President Vladimir Putin's 2004 visit. The pace of high-level visits has since increased, as discussed in major defence purchases. Russia is working on the development of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, which will be capable of producing 1000 MW of electricity. Gazprom is working for the development of oil and natural gas, in the Bay of Bengal. India and Russia, have collaborated extensively, on space technology. Other areas of collaboration include software, Ayurveda, etc. India and Russia, have set a determination in increasing trade to $10 billion. Cooperation between clothing manufacturers of the two countries continues to strengthen. India and Russia signed an agreement on joint efforts to increase investment and trade volumes in the textile industry in both countries. In signing the document included representatives of the Russian Union of Entrepreneurs of Textile and Light Industry Council and apparel exports of India (AEPC). A cooperation agreement provides, inter alia, the exchange of technology and know-how in textile production. For this purpose, a special Commission on Affairs Textile (Textile Communication Committee). Counter-terrorism techniques are also in place between Russia and India. In 2007 President Vladimir Putin was the guest of honour at the Republic Day celebration on 26 January 2007. 2008, has been declared by both countries as the Russia-India Friendship Year. Bollywood films are quite popular in Russia. The Indian public sector oil company ONGC bought Imperial Energy Corporation in 2008. In December 2008, during President Medvedev's visit, to New Delhi, India and Russia, signed a nuclear energy cooperation agreement. In March 2010, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed an additional 19 pacts with India which included civilian nuclear energy, space and military cooperation and the final sale of Admiral Gorshkov (Aircraft Carrier) along with MiG-29K fighter jets.
During the 2014 Crimean crisis, India refused to support American sanctions against Russia and one of India's national security advisers Shivshankar Menon was reported to have said "There are legitimate Russian and other interests involved and we hope they are discussed and resolved."
On 7 August 2014, India and Russia held a joint counter-terrorism exercise near the Moscow boundary with China and Mongolia. It involved the use of tanks and armoured vehicles.
India and Russia have so far conducted three rounds of INDRA exercises. The first exercise was carried out in 2005 in Rajasthan, followed by Prshkov in Russia. The third exercise was conducted at Chaubattia in Kumaon Hills in October 2010.
India has an embassy in Bucharest and an honorary consulate in Timișoara. Romania has an embassy in New Delhi and an honorary consulate in Kolkata.
India has an embassy in Bratislava and Slovakia has an embassy in New Delhi.
Diplomatic ties with Spain started in 1956. The first Spanish embassy was established in Delhi in 1958. India and Spain have had a cordial relationship with each other, especially after the establishment of democracy in Spain in 1978. Spain has been a main tourist spot for Indians over the years. Many presidents including Prathibha Patil visited Spain. The royal family of Spain has always liked the humble nature of the Indian government and they have thus paid several visits to India. There was no direct flight from India to Spain but it all changed in 1986 when Iberian travels started to fly directly from Mumbai to Madrid. However, it was stopped in 22 months. In 2006 this issue of the direct flight was reconsidered to improve the ties between India and Spain. "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara" was shot completely in Spain in 2011. The tourism ministry of Spain is using this movie to promote tourism to Spain in India.
India is one of Switzerland's most important partners in Asia. Bilateral and political contacts are constantly developing, and trade and scientific cooperation between the two countries are flourishing. Switzerland was the first country in the World to sign a Friendship treaty with India in 1947.
Diplomatic relations between India and Ukraine were established in January 1992. The Indian Embassy in Kyiv was opened in May 1992 and Ukraine opened its mission in New Delhi in February 1993. The Consulate General of India in Odesa functioned from 1962 until its closure in March 1999.
UK& India has a high commission in London and two consulates-general in Birmingham and Edinburgh. The United Kingdom has a high commission in New Delhi and five deputy high commissions in Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Since 1947, India's relations with the United Kingdom have been bilateral, as well as through the Commonwealth of Nations framework. Although the Sterling Area no longer exists and the Commonwealth is much more an informal forum, India and the UK still have many enduring links. This is in part due to the significant number of people of Indian origin living in the UK. The large South Asian population in the UK results in steady travel and communication between the two countries. The British Raj allowed for both cultures to imbibe tremendously from the other. The English language and cricket are perhaps the two most evident British exports, whilst in the UK food from the Indian subcontinent is very popular. The United Kingdom's favourite food is often reported to be Indian cuisine, although no official study reports this.
Economically the relationship between Britain and India is also strong. India is the second largest investor in Britain after the US. Britain is also one of the largest investors in India.
Formal bilateral relations between India and Vatican City have existed since 12 June 1948. An Apostolic Delegation existed in India from 1881. The Holy See has a nunciature in New Delhi whilst India has accredited its embassy in Bern, Switzerland to the Holy See as well. India's Ambassador in Bern has traditionally been accredited to the Holy See.
The connections between the Catholic Church and India can be traced back to the apostle St. Thomas, who, according to tradition, came to India in 52 CE in the 9th century, the patriarch of the Nestorians in Persia sent bishops to India. There is a record of an Indian bishop visiting Rome in the early part of the 12th century.
The diplomatic mission was established as the Apostolic Delegation to the East Indies in 1881, and included Ceylon, and was extended to Malaca in 1889, then to Burma in 1920, and eventually included Goa in 1923. It was raised to an Internunciature by Pope Pius XII on 12 June 1948 and to a full Apostolic Nunciature by Pope Paul VI on 22 August 1967.
There have been three Papal visits to India. The first Pope to visit India was Pope Paul VI, who visited Mumbai in 1964 to attend the Eucharistic Congress. Pope John Paul II visited India in February 1986 and November 1999. Several Indian dignitaries have, from time to time, called on the Pope in the Vatican. These include Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1981 and Prime Minister I. K. Gujral in September 1987. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Prime Minister, called on the Pope in June 2000 during his official visit to Italy. Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat represented the country at the funeral of Pope John Paul II.
India was one of the first countries to develop relations with the European Union. The Joint Political Statement of 1993 and the 1994 Cooperation Agreement were the foundational agreements for the bilateral partnership. In 2004, India and European Union became "Strategic Partners". A Joint Action Plan was agreed upon in 2005 and updated in 2008. India-EU Joint Statements were published in 2009 and 2012 following the India-European Union Summits.
India and the European Commission initiated negotiations on a Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA) in 2007. Seven rounds of negotiations have been completed without reaching a Free Trade Agreement.
According to the Government of India, trade between India and the EU was $57.25 billion between April and October 2014 and stood at $101.5 billion for the fiscal period of 2014–2015.
The European Union is India's second largest trade bloc, accounting for around 20% of Indian trade (Gulf Cooperation Council is the largest trade bloc with almost $160 billion in total trade). India was the European Union's 8th largest trading partner in 2010. EU-India trade grew from €28.6 billion in 2003 to €72.7 billion in 2013.
France, Germany and UK collectively represent the major part of EU-India trade. Annual trade in commercial services tripled from €5.2billion in 2002 to €17.9 billion in 2010. Denmark, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands are the other more prominent European Union countries that trade with India.
India & Australia are both Commonwealth members. Sporting and cultural ties are significant. Australian cricketers often undertake large commercial ventures in India, enhanced with the IPL, and, to a lesser degree, the ICL. Bollywood productions enjoy a large market in Australia. In 2007, PM John Howard visited Mumbai and its entertainment industry, in efforts to increase Tourism in India to Australia.
There are ongoing strategic attempts to form an "Asian NATO" with India, Japan, the US and Australia through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. During the first decade of the 21st century, the deepening of strategic relations between the two nations was prevented by a range of policy disagreements, such as India's refusal to sign the NPT and Australia's consequent refusal to provide India with uranium. Australia's parliament later allowed for the sale of uranium to India, following changes in government. Closer strategic cooperation between India, Japan, the United States and Australia also began during the second half of the 2010s, which some analysts attributed to a desire to balance Chinese initiatives in the Indo-Pacific region.
Fiji's relationship with the Republic of India is often seen by observers against the backdrop of the sometimes tense relations between its indigenous people and the 44 percent of the population who are of Indian descent. India has used its influence in international forums such as the Commonwealth of Nations and United Nations on behalf of ethnic Indians in Fiji, lobbying for sanctions against Fiji in the wake of the 1987 coups and the 2000 coup, both of which removed governments, one dominated and one led, by Indo-Fijians.
India and Nauru relations have been established since the island nation's independence in 1968. Leaders of both countries have been meeting on the sidelines of some of the international forums of which both nations are part such as the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement. India is one of the largest donors to the island by improving the education ministry and creating transportation and computer connections for the MPs and the Speaker of the Parliament of Nauru. There were numerous visits by the President of Nauru to the republic to further strengthen ties and cooperation.
Bilateral relations were established between India and New Zealand in 1952. India has a High Commission in Wellington with an Honorary Consulate in Auckland, while New Zealand has a High Commission in New Delhi along with a Consulate in Mumbai, trade offices in New Delhi and Mumbai and an Honorary Consulate in Chennai.
India–New Zealand relations were cordial but not extensive after Indian independence. More recently, New Zealand has shown interest in extending ties with India due to India's impressive GDP growth.
India and Papua New Guinea established relations in 1975, following PNG's independence from Australia. Since 1975, relations have grown between the two nations. India maintains a High Commission in Port Moresby while Papua New Guinea maintains a High Commission in New Delhi In the 2010 Fiscal Year, Trade between the two nations grew to US$239 Million. PNG has sent numerous military officers and students to be trained and educated in India's academies and universities respectively. In recent years, India and PNG have signed an Economic Partnership Agreement, allowing India to further invest in PNG's infrastructure, telecommunications and educational institutions.
Both countries established diplomatic relations in June 1970.
India has its High Commission in Wellington, New Zealand, accredited to Vanuatu.
Since its declaration of independence from Serbia, Kosovo sought recognition from the major of the world's most influential countries, among them, India. Indian views regarding the developments followed initial constringent to comment but dismissed to give recognition of statehood. There are almost negligible interactions.
After India achieved its independence in 1947, the country moved to support Palestinian self-determination following the partition of India. In light of a religious partition between India and Pakistan, the impetus to boost ties with Muslim states around the world was a further tie to India's support for the Palestinian cause. Though it started to waver in the late 1980s and 1990s, as the recognition of Israel led to diplomatic exchanges, the ultimate support for the Palestinian cause, was still an underlying concern. Beyond the recognition of Palestinian self-determination ties have been largely dependent upon socio-cultural bonds, while economic relations were neither cold nor warm.
India recognised Palestine's statehood following its declaration on 18 November 1988; although relations were first established in 1974.
PNA President Abbas paid a State visit to India in September 2012, during which India pledged $10 million as aid. Indian officials said it was the third such donation, adding that New Delhi was committed to helping other development projects. India also pledged support to Palestine's bid for full and equal membership of the UN.
India recognized the Republic of China (R.O.C) from 1947 to 1950. On 1 April 1950, India officially recognised the People's Republic of China (P.R.C) as "China" and continued to recognise the PRC's "One China" policy in which the island of Taiwan is a part of the Chinese territory. However, the bilateral relations between India and Taiwan have improved since the 1990s despite both nations not maintaining official diplomatic relations. Taiwan and India maintain non-governmental interaction via India-Taipei Association and Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre respectively. In July 2020, the Indian government appointed a top career diplomat, Joint Secretary Gourangalal Das, the former head of the U.S. division in India's Ministry of External Affairs, as its new envoy to Taiwan.
India participates in the following international organisations:
India became independent within the British Commonwealth in August 1947 as the Dominion of India after the partition of India into India and the Dominion of Pakistan. King George VI, the last Emperor of India became the King of India with the Governor-General of India as his viceregal representative.
India became the very first Commonwealth republic on 26 January 1950, as a result of the London Declaration.
India played an important role in the multilateral movements of colonies and newly independent countries that developed into the Non-Aligned Movement. Nonalignment had its origins in India's colonial experience and the nonviolent Indian independence movement led by the Congress, which left India determined to be the master of its fate in an international system dominated politically by Cold War alliances and economically by Western capitalism and Soviet communism. The principles of nonalignment, as articulated by Nehru and his successors, were the preservation of India's freedom of action internationally through refusal to align India with any bloc or alliance, particularly those led by the United States or the Soviet Union; nonviolence and international cooperation as a means of settling international disputes. Nonalignment was a consistent feature of Indian foreign policy by the late 1940s and enjoyed strong, almost unquestioning support among the Indian elite.
The term "Non-Alignment" was coined by V K Menon in his speech at the UN in 1953 which was later used by Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru during his speech in 1954 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In this speech, Nehru described the five pillars to be used as a guide for China–India relations, which were first put forth by PRC Premier Zhou Enlai. Called Panchsheel (five restraints), these principles would later serve as the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement. The five principles were:
Jawaharlal Nehru's concept of nonalignment brought India considerable international prestige among newly independent states that shared India's concerns about the military confrontation between the superpowers and the influence of the former colonial powers. New Delhi used nonalignment to establish a significant role for itself as a leader of the newly independent world in such multilateral organisations as the United Nations (UN) and the Nonaligned Movement. The signing of the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation between India and the Soviet Union in 1971 and India's involvement in the internal affairs of its smaller neighbours in the 1970s and 1980s tarnished New Delhi's image as a nonaligned nation and led some observers to note that in practice, nonalignment applied only to India's relations with countries outside South Asia.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD, also known as the Quad) is an informal strategic dialogue between the United States, India, Japan and Australia that is maintained by talks between member countries. The dialogue was initiated in 2007 by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, with the support of American Vice President Dick Cheney, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The dialogue was paralleled by joint military exercises of an unprecedented scale, titled Exercise Malabar. The diplomatic and military arrangement was widely viewed as a response to increased Chinese economic and military power. On 12 March 2021, the first summit meeting was held virtually between U.S President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
India was among the original members of the United Nations that signed the Declaration by United Nations at Washington on 1 January 1942 and also participated in the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco from 25 April to 26 June 1945. As a founding member of the United Nations, India strongly supports the purposes and principles of the UN and has made significant contributions to implementing the goals of the Charter and the evolution of the UN's specialised programmes and agencies. India is a charter member of the United Nations and participates in all of its specialised agencies and organisations. India has contributed troops to United Nations peacekeeping efforts in Korea, Egypt and the Congo in its earlier years and in Somalia, Angola, Haiti, Liberia, Lebanon and Rwanda in recent years, and more recently in the South Sudan conflict. India has been a member of the UN Security Council for eight terms (a total of 16 years). India is a member of the G4 group of nations who back each other in seeking a permanent seat on the security council and advocate in favour of the reformation of the UNSC. India is also part of the Group of 77.
Described by the WTO's former chief, Pascal Lamy, as one of the organisation's "big brothers", India was instrumental in bringing down the Doha Development Round of talks in 2008. It has played an important role in representing as many as 100 developing nations during WTO summits.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) had major repercussions for Indian foreign policy. Substantial trade with the former Soviet Union plummeted after the Soviet collapse and has yet to recover. Longstanding military supply relationships were similarly disrupted due to questions over financing, although Russia continues to be India's largest supplier of military systems and spare parts.
The relationship with USSR was tested (and proven) during the 1971 war with Pakistan, which led to the subsequent liberation of Bangladesh. Soon after the victory of the Indian Armed Forces, one of the foreign delegates to visit India was Admiral S.G. Gorshkov, Chief of the Soviet Navy. During his visit to Mumbai (Bombay), he came on board INS Vikrant. During a conversation with Vice Admiral Swaraj Prakash, Gorshkov asked the Vice Admiral, "Were you worried about a battle against the American carrier?" He answered himself: "Well, you had no reason to be worried, as I had a Soviet nuclear submarine trailing the American task force all the way into the Indian Ocean."
India had formal relations with the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until 1992 with the Breakup of Yugoslavia.
India's territorial disputes with neighbouring Pakistan and the People's Republic of China have played a crucial role in its foreign policy. India is also involved in minor territorial disputes with neighbouring Bangladesh, Nepal and Maldives. India currently maintains two manned stations in Antarctica but has made some unofficial territorial claims, which are yet to be clarified.
India is involved in the following border disputes:
Kalapani village of India is claimed by Nepal and Susta village in Nawalparasi district of Nepal is claimed by India. The dispute between India and Nepal involves about 75 km (30 sq mi) of area in Kalapani, where China, India, and Nepal meet. Indian forces occupied the area in 1962 after China and India fought their border war. Three villages are located in the disputed zone: Kuti [Kuthi, 30°19'N, 80°46'E], Gunji, and Knabe. India and Nepal disagree about how to interpret the 1816 Sugauli treaty between the British East India Company and Nepal, which delimited the boundary along the Maha Kali River (Sarda River in India). The dispute intensified in 1997 as the Nepali parliament considered a treaty on the hydroelectric development of the river. India and Nepal differ as to which stream constitutes the source of the river. Nepal regards the Limpiyadhura as the source; India claims the Lipu Lekh. Nepal has reportedly tabled an 1856 map from the British India Office to support its position. The countries have held several meetings about the dispute and discussed jointly surveying to resolve the issue. Although the Indo-Nepali dispute appears to be minor, it was aggravated in 1962 by tensions between China and India. Because the disputed area lies near the Sino-Indian frontier, it gains strategic value.
Two regions are claimed by both India and China. Aksai Chin is in the disputed territory of Ladakh, at the junction of India, Tibet and Xinjiang, India claims the 38,000-square-kilometre territory, currently administered by China after Sino-Indian War. India also considers the cessation of Shaksam Valley to China by Pakistan as illegal and a part of its territory. Arunachal Pradesh is a state of India in the country's northeast, bordering on Bhutan, Burma and China's Tibet, though it is under Indian administration since 1914, China claims the 90,000-square-kilometre area as South Tibet. Also, the boundary between the North Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand with China's Tibet is not properly demarcated with some portions under the de facto administration of India.
List of countries commemorating anniversaries of diplomatic relations with India through philately
Planned philatelic issues on diplomatic relations that did not materialize. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "India, officially the Republic of India, has full diplomatic relations with 201 states, including Palestine, the Holy See, and Niue. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is the government agency responsible for the conduct of foreign relations of India. With the world's third largest military expenditure, second largest armed force, fifth largest economy by GDP nominal rates and third largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, India is a prominent regional power and a rising superpower.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "According to the MEA, the main purposes of Indian diplomacy include protecting India's national interests, promoting friendly relations with other states, and providing consular services to \"foreigners and Indian nationals abroad.\" In recent decades, India has pursued an expansive foreign policy, including the neighborhood-first policy embodied by SAARC as well as the Look East policy to forge more extensive economic and strategic relationships with other East Asian countries. It has also maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity, which involves its \"no first use\" nuclear policy and its neutral stance on the Russo-Ukrainian War.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "India is a member of several intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations, the Asian Development Bank, BRICS, and the G-20. which is widely considered the main economic locus of emerging and developed nations. India exerts a salient influence as the founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. India has also played an important and influential role in other international organisations, such as the East Asia Summit, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund (IMF), G8+5 and IBSA Dialogue Forum. India is also a member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. As a former British colony, India is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and continues to maintain relationships with other Commonwealth countries.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "India's relations with the world have evolved since the British Raj (1857–1947) when the British Empire took responsibility for handling external and defence relations. When India gained independence in 1947, few Indians had experience in making or conducting foreign policy. However, the country's oldest political party, the Indian National Congress, had established a small foreign department in 1925 to make overseas contacts and to publicise its independence struggle. From the late 1920s on, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had a long-standing interest in world affairs among independence leaders, formulated the Congress's stance on international issues. As Prime Minister and Minister of External Affairs from 1947, Nehru articulated India's approach to the world.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "India's international influence varied over the years after independence. Indian prestige and moral authority were high in the 1950s and facilitated the acquisition of developmental assistance from both East and West. Although the prestige stemmed from India's nonaligned stance, the nation was unable to prevent Cold War politics from becoming intertwined with interstate relations in South Asia. On the intensely debated Kashmir issue with Pakistan, India lost credibility by rejecting United Nations' calls for a plebiscite in the disputed area.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In the 1960s and 1970s, India's international position among developed and developing countries faded during wars with China and Pakistan, disputes with other countries in South Asia, and India's attempt to match Pakistan's support from the United States and China by signing the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in August 1971. Although India obtained substantial Soviet military and economic aid, which helped to strengthen the nation, India's influence was undercut regionally and internationally by the perception that its friendship with the Soviet Union prevented a more forthright condemnation of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. In the late 1980s, India improved relations with the United States, other developed countries, and China while continuing close ties with the Soviet Union. Relations with its South Asian neighbours, especially Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, occupied much of the energies of the Ministry of External Affairs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Even before independence, the Indian colonial government maintained semi-autonomous diplomatic relations. It had colonies (such as the Aden Settlement), that sent and received full missions. India was a founder member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. After India gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1947, it soon joined the Commonwealth of Nations and strongly supported independence movements in other colonies, like the Indonesian National Revolution. The partition and various territorial disputes, particularly that over Kashmir, would strain its relations with Pakistan for years to come. During the Cold War, India adopted a foreign policy of not aligning itself with any major power bloc. However, India developed close ties with the Soviet Union and received extensive military support from it.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The end of the Cold War significantly affected India's foreign policy, as it did for much of the world. The country now seeks to strengthen its diplomatic and economic ties with the United States, the European Union trading bloc, Japan, Israel, Mexico, and Brazil. India has also forged close ties with the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the Arab League and Iran.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Though India continues to have a military relationship with Russia, Israel has emerged as India's second-largest military partner while India has built a strong strategic partnership with the United States. The foreign policy of Narendra Modi indicated a shift towards focusing on the Asian region and, more broadly, trade deals.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "India's foreign policy has always regarded the concept of neighbourhood as one of widening concentric circles, around a central axis of historical and cultural commonalities.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "As many as 44 million people of Indian origin live and work abroad and constitute an important link with the mother country. An important role of India's foreign policy has been to ensure their welfare and well-being within the framework of the laws of the country where they live.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, promoted a strong personal role for the Prime Minister but a weak institutional structure. Nehru served concurrently as Prime Minister and Minister of External Affairs; he made all major foreign policy decisions himself after consulting with his advisers and then entrusted the conduct of international affairs to senior members of the Indian Foreign Service. He was the main founding father of the Panchsheel or the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-existence.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "His successors continued to exercise considerable control over India's international dealings, although they appointed separate ministers of external affairs.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "India's second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri (1964–66), expanded the Prime Minister's Office (sometimes called the Prime Minister's Secretariat) and enlarged its powers. By the 1970s, the Office of the Prime Minister had become the de facto coordinator and supra-ministry of the Indian government. The enhanced role of the office strengthened the prime minister's control over foreign policymaking at the expense of the Ministry of External Affairs. Advisers in the office provided channels of information and policy recommendations in addition to those offered by the Ministry of External Affairs. A subordinate part of the office—the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)—functioned in ways that significantly expanded the information available to the prime minister and his advisers. The RAW gathered intelligence, provided intelligence analysis to the Office of the Prime Minister, and conducted covert operations abroad.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The prime minister's control and reliance on personal advisers in the Office of the Prime Minister was particularly strong under the tenures of Indira Gandhi (1966–77 and 1980–84) and her son, Rajiv (1984–89), who succeeded her, and weaker during the periods of coalition governments. Observers find it difficult to determine whether the locus of decision-making authority on any issue lies with the Ministry of External Affairs, the Council of Ministers, the Office of the Prime Minister, or the prime minister himself.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Prime Minister is however free to appoint advisers and special committees to examine various foreign policy options and areas of interest. In a recent instance, Manmohan Singh appointed K. Subrahmanyam in 2005 to head a special government task force to study 'Global Strategic Developments' over the next decade. The Task Force submitted its conclusions to the Prime Minister in 2006. The report has not yet been released in the public domain.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "India's historical inclination towards a \"non-aligned\" foreign policy has witnessed a shift under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership since 2014, as New Delhi has displayed a heightened level of \"assertiveness\" in its international engagements.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Ministry of External Affairs is the Indian government's agency responsible for the foreign relations of India. The Minister of External Affairs holds cabinet rank as a member of the Council of Ministers.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is the current Minister of External Affairs. The Ministry has a Minister of State V Muraleedharan. The Indian Foreign Secretary is the head of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) and therefore, serves as the head of all Indian (ambassadors) and high commissioners. Vinay Mohan Kwatra is the current Foreign Secretary of India.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In the post-Cold War era, a significant aspect of India's foreign policy is the Look East Policy. During the cold war, India's relations with its Southeast Asian neighbours were not strong. After the end of the cold war, the government of India particularly realised the importance of redressing this imbalance in India's foreign policy. Consequently, the Narsimha Rao government in the early nineties of the last century unveiled the look east policy. Initially, it focused on renewing political and economic contacts with the countries of East and South-East Asia.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "At present, under the Look East Policy, the Government of India is giving special emphasis on the economic development of the backward northeastern region of India taking advantage of a huge market of ASEAN as well as of the energy resources available in some of the member countries of ASEAN like Burma. The look-east policy was launched in 1991 just after the end of the cold war, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. After the start of liberalisation, it was a very strategic policy decision taken by the government in foreign policy. To quote Prime Minister Manmohan Singh \"it was also a strategic shift in India's vision of the world and India's place in the evolving global economy\".",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The policy was given an initial thrust with the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao visiting China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Singapore and India becoming an important dialogue partner with ASEAN in 1992. Since the beginning of this century, India has given a big push to this policy by becoming a summit-level partner of ASEAN (2002) and getting involved in some regional initiatives such as the BIMSTEC and the Ganga–Mekong Cooperation and now becoming a member of the East Asia Summit (EAS) in December 2005.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, India has forged a closer partnership with Western powers. In the 1990s, India's economic problems and the demise of the bipolar world political system forced India to reassess its foreign policy and adjust its foreign relations. Previous policies proved inadequate to cope with the serious domestic and international problems facing India. The end of the Cold War gutted the core meaning of nonalignment and left Indian foreign policy without significant direction. The hard, pragmatic considerations of the early 1990s were still viewed within the nonaligned framework of the past, but the disintegration of the Soviet Union removed much of India's international leverage, for which relations with Russia and the other post-Soviet states could not compensate. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, India improved its relations with the United States, Canada, France, Japan, and Germany. In 1992, India established formal diplomatic relations with Israel and this relationship grew during the tenures of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and the subsequent United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In the mid-1990s, India attracted the world's attention to Pakistan-backed terrorism in Kashmir. The Kargil War resulted in a major diplomatic victory for India. The United States and European Union recognised the fact that the Pakistani military had illegally infiltrated Indian territory and pressured Pakistan to withdraw from Kargil. Several anti-India militant groups based in Pakistan were labelled as terrorist groups by the United States and European Union.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1998, India tested nuclear weapons for the second time (see Pokhran-II) which resulted in several US, Japanese and European sanctions on India. India's then defence minister, George Fernandes, said that India's nuclear programme was necessary as it provided a deterrence to potential Chinese nuclear threat. Most of the sanctions imposed on India were removed by 2001.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "After September 11 attacks in 2001, Indian intelligence agencies provided the US with significant information on Al-Qaeda and related groups' activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. India's extensive contribution to the War on Terror, coupled with a surge in its economy, has helped India's diplomatic relations with several countries. Over the past three years, India has held numerous joint military exercises with US and European nations that have resulted in a strengthened US-India and EU-India bilateral relationship. India's bilateral trade with Europe and the United States had more than doubled in the five years since 2003.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "India has been pushing for reforms in the UN and WTO with mixed results. India's candidature for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council is currently backed by several countries including France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Australia and UAE. In 2004, the United States signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with India even though the latter is not a part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US argued that India's strong nuclear non-proliferation record made it an exception, however, this has not persuaded other Nuclear Suppliers Group members to sign similar deals with India. During a state visit to India in November 2010, US President Barack Obama announced US support for India's bid for permanent membership to UN Security Council as well as India's entry to Nuclear Suppliers Group, Wassenaar Arrangement, Australia Group and Missile Technology Control Regime. As of January 2018, India has become a member of Wassenaar Arrangement, Australia Group and Missile Technology Control Regime.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "India's growing economy, strategic location, a mix of friendly and diplomatic foreign policy and large and vibrant diaspora has won it more allies than enemies. India has friendly relations with several countries in the developing world. Though India is not a part of any major military alliance, it has a close strategic and military relationship with most of its fellow major powers.",
"title": "Strategic partners"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Countries considered India's closest include the United Arab Emirates, Russian Federation, Israel, Afghanistan, France, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and the United States. Russia is the largest supplier of military equipment to India, followed by Israel and France. According to some analysts, Israel is set to overtake Russia as India's largest military and strategic partner. The two countries also collaborate extensively in the sphere of counter-terrorism and space technology. India also enjoys strong military relations with several other countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, Singapore, Brazil, South Africa and Italy. In addition, India operates an airbase in Tajikistan, signed a landmark defence accord with Qatar in 2008, and has leased out Assumption Island from Seychelles to build a naval base in 2015.",
"title": "Strategic partners"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "India has also forged relationships with developing countries, especially South Africa, Brazil, and Mexico. These countries often represent the interests of developing countries through economic forums such as the G8+5, IBSA and WTO. India was seen as one of the standard bearers of the developing world and claimed to speak for a collection of more than 30 other developing nations at the Doha Development Round. Indian Look East policy has helped it develop greater economic and strategic partnerships with Southeast Asian countries, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. India also enjoys friendly relations with the Persian Gulf countries and most members of the African Union.",
"title": "Strategic partners"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Foundation for National Security Research in New Delhi published India's Strategic Partners: A Comparative Assessment and ranked India's top strategic partners with a score out of 90 points: Russia comes out on top with 62, followed by the United States (58), France (51), UK (41), Germany (37), and Japan (34). One of the outcomes of the 2023 G20 summit is a transportation project that would facilitate Indian trade to the Middle East and Europe.",
"title": "Strategic partners"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "India has signed strategic partnership agreements with more than two dozen countries/supranational entities listed here in the chronological order of the pacts:",
"title": "Strategic partners"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Currently, India is taking steps towards establishing strategic partnerships with Canada and Argentina. Although India has not signed any formal strategic partnership agreements with Bhutan and Qatar, its foreign ministry often describes relations with these countries as 'strategic'.",
"title": "Strategic partners"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Burkina Faso",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 24 March 1962",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 18 October 1975",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 26 August 1967.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Djibouti",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 7 December 1981",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 1 July 1948.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "India and Ethiopia have warm bilateral ties based on mutual cooperation and support. India has been a partner in Ethiopia's developmental efforts, training Ethiopian personnel under its ITEC programmer, providing it with several lines of credit and launching the Pan-African e-Network project there in 2007. The Second India–Africa Forum Summit was held in Addis Ababa in 2011. India is also Ethiopia's second-largest source of foreign direct investments.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 18 August 1947.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Modern Egypt-India relations go back to the contacts between Saad Zaghloul and Mohandas Gandhi on the common goals of their respective movements of independence. In 1955, Egypt under Gamal Abdul Nasser and India under Jawaharlal Nehru became the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement. During the 1956 War, Nehru stood supporting Egypt to the point of threatening to withdraw his country from the Commonwealth of Nations. In 1967, following the Arab–Israeli conflict, India supported Egypt and the Arabs. In 1977, New Delhi described the visit of President Anwar al-Sadat to Jerusalem as a \"brave\" move and considered the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel a primary step on the path of a just settlement of the Middle East problem. Major Egyptian exports to India include raw cotton, raw and manufactured fertilisers, oil and oil products, organic and non-organic chemicals, and leather and iron products. Major imports into Egypt from India are cotton yarn, sesame, coffee, herbs, tobacco, lentils, pharmaceutical products and transport equipment. The Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum is also currently negotiating the establishment of a natural gas-operated fertiliser plant with another Indian company. In 2004 the Gas Authority of India Limited bought 15% of Egypt's Nat Gas distribution and marketing company. In 2008 Egyptian investment in India was worth some 750 million dollars, according to the Egyptian ambassador. After the Arab Spring of 2011, with ousting of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt asked for the help of India in conducting nationwide elections.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Gabon maintains an embassy in New Delhi. The Embassy of India in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo is jointly accredited to Gabon.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 6 March 1957.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Relations between Ghana and India are generally close and cordial mixed with economic and cultural connections. Trade between India and Ghana amounted to US$818 million in 2010–11 and is expected to be worth US$1 billion by 2013. Ghana imports automobiles and buses from India and companies like Tata Motors and Ashok Leyland have a significant presence in the country. Ghanaian exports to India consist of gold, cocoa and timber while Indian exports to Ghana comprise pharmaceuticals, agricultural machinery, electrical equipment, plastics, steel and cement.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Government of India has extended $228 million in lines of credit to Ghana which has been used for projects in sectors like agro-processing, fish processing, waste management, rural electrification and the expansion of Ghana's railways. India has also offered to set up an India-Africa Institute of Information Technology (IAIIT) and a Food Processing Business Incubation Centre in Ghana under the India–Africa Forum Summit.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "India is among the largest foreign investors in Ghana's economy. At the end of 2011, Indian investments in Ghana amounted to $550 million covering some 548 projects. Indian investments are primarily in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors of Ghana while Ghanaian companies manufacture drugs in collaboration with Indian companies. The IT sector in Ghana too has a significant Indian presence in it. India and Ghana also have a Bilateral Investment Protection Agreement between them. India's Rashtriya Chemicals and Fertilisers is in the process of setting up a fertiliser plant in Ghana at Nyankrom in the Shama District of the Western Region of Ghana. The project entails an investment of US$1.3 billion and the plant would have an annual production capacity of 1.1 million tones, the bulk of which would be exported to India. There are also plans to develop a sugar processing plant entailing an investment of US$36 million. Bank of Baroda, Bharti Airtel, Tata Motors and Tech Mahindra are amongst the major Indian companies in Ghana.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "There are about seven to eight thousand Indians and Persons of Indian Origin living in Ghana today with some of them having been there for over 70 years. Ghana is home to a growing indigenous Hindu population that today numbers 3000 families. Hinduism first came to Ghana only in the late 1940s with the Sindhi traders who migrated here following India's Partition. It has been growing in Ghana and neighbouring Togo since the mid-1970s when an African Hindu monastery was established in Accra.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Guinea",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 8 July 1960.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The bilateral relations between India and Ivory Coast have expanded considerably in recent years as India seeks to develop an extensive commercial and strategic partnership in the West African region. The Indian diplomatic mission in Abidjan was opened in 1979. Ivory Coast opened its resident mission in New Delhi in September 2004. Both nations are currently fostering efforts to increase trade, investments and economic cooperation.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 14 December 1963",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "As littoral states of the Indian Ocean, trade links and commercial ties between India and Kenya go back several centuries. Kenya has a large minority of Indians and Persons of Indian Origin living there who are descendants of labourers who were brought in by the British to construct the Uganda Railway and Gujarati merchants. India and Kenya have growing trade and commercial ties. Bilateral trade amounted to $2.4 billion in 2010–2011 but with Kenyan imports from India accounting for $2.3 billion, the balance of trade was heavily in India's favour. India is Kenya's sixth-largest trading partner and the largest exporter to Kenya. Indian exports to Kenya include pharmaceuticals, steel, machinery and automobiles while Kenyan exports to India are primary commodities such as soda ash, vegetables and tea. Indian companies have a significant presence in Kenya with Indian corporates like the Tata Group, Essar Group, Reliance Industries and Bharti Airtel operating there.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 8 June 1971.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "India operates a High Commission in Pretoria which serves Lesotho and Lesotho operates a residential mission in India. Lesotho and India have strong ties. Lesotho has backed India's bid for a Permanent UN seat and has also recognized Jammu and Kashmir as a part of India. India exported US$11 Million to Lesotho in the 2010–2011 year while only importing US$1 Million in goods from Lesotho. Since 2001, an Indian Army Training Team has trained several soldiers in the LDF.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 7 July 1960.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The bilateral relations between the Republic of India and the Republic of Liberia have expanded on growing bilateral trade and strategic cooperation. India is represented in Liberia through its embassy in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and an active honorary consulate in Monrovia since 1984. Liberia was represented in India through its resident mission in New Delhi which subsequently closed due to budgetary constraints.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 20 July 1952.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Malawi",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 19 October 1964.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Mali",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 24 January 1962.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 22 October 1965.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "India is represented in Mauritania by its embassy in Bamako, Mali. India also has an honorary consulate in Nouakchott.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 12 March 1968.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The relations between India and Mauritius existed since 1730, diplomatic relations were established in 1948 before Mauritius became an independent state. The relationship is very cordial due to cultural affinities and long historical ties that exist between the two nations. More than 68% of the Mauritian population are of Indian origin, most known as Indo-Mauritian. The economic and commercial corporation has been increasing over the years. India has become Mauritius' largest source of imports since 2007 and Mauritius imported US$816 million worth of goods in the April 2010 – March 2011 financial year. Mauritius has remained the largest source of FDI for India for more than a decade with FDI equity inflows totalling US$55.2 billion in the period April 2000 to April 2011. India and Mauritius co-operate in combating piracy which has emerged as a major threat in the Indian Ocean region and support India's stand against terrorism.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The relationship between Mauritius and India date back to the early 1730s, when artisans were brought from Puducherry and Tamil Nadu. Diplomatic relations between India and Mauritius were established in 1948. Mauritius maintained contacts with India through successive Dutch, French and British rule. From the 1820s, Indian workers started coming to Mauritius to work on sugar plantations. From 1833 when slavery was abolished by Parliament, large numbers of Indian workers began to be brought into Mauritius as indentured labourers. On 2 November 1834, the ship named 'Atlas' docked in Mauritius carrying the first batch of Indian indentured labourers.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Morocco has an embassy in New Delhi. It also has an Honorary Consul based in Mumbai. India operates an embassy in Rabat. Both nations are part of the Non-Aligned Movement.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In the United Nations, India supported the decolonisation of Morocco and the Moroccan freedom movement. India recognised Morocco on 20 June 1956 and established relations in 1957. The Ministry of External Affairs of the Government of India states that \"India and Morocco have enjoyed cordial and friendly relations and over the years bilateral relations have witnessed significant depth and growth.\"",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Indian Council for Cultural Relations promotes Indian culture in Morocco. Morocco seeks to increase its trade ties with India and is seeking Indian investment in various sectors The bilateral relations between India and Morocco strengthened after the Moroccan Ambassador to India spent a week in Srinagar, the capital city of Jammu and Kashmir. This showed Moroccan solidarity with India regarding Kashmir.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 25 June 1975.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "India has a high commissioner in Maputo and Mozambique has a high commissioner in New Delhi.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Relations between India and Namibia are warm and cordial.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "India was one of SWAPO's earliest supporters during the Namibian liberation movement. The first SWAPO embassy was established in India in 1986. India's observer mission was converted to a full High Commissioner on Namibia's Independence Day of 21 March 1990. India has helped train the Namibian Air Force since its creation in 1995. The two countries work closely in mutual multilateral organisations such as the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement and the Commonwealth of Nations. Namibia supports the expansion of the United Nations Security Council to include a permanent seat for India.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In 2008–09, trade between the two countries stood at approximately US$80 million. Namibia's main imports from India were drugs and pharmaceuticals, chemicals, agricultural machinery, automobile and automobile parts, glass and glassware, and plastic and linoleum products. India primarily imported nonferrous metals, ores, and metal scraps. Indian products are also exported to neighbouring South Africa and re-imported to Namibia as South African imports. Namibian diamonds are often exported to European diamond markets before being again imported to India. In 2009, the first direct sale of Namibian diamonds to India took place. In 2008, two Indian companies won a US$105 million contract from NamPower to lay a high-voltage direct current bi-polar line from Katima Mulilo to Otjiwarongo. Namibia is a beneficiary of the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme for telecommunications professionals from developing countries.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "India has a high commissioner in Windhoek and Namibia has a high commissioner in New Delhi. Namibia's high commissioner is also accredited for Bangladesh, the Maldives and Sri Lanka.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 18 July 1977.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "India has close relations with this oil-rich West African country. Twenty percent of India's crude oil needs are met, by Nigeria. 40,000 barrels per day (6,400 m/d) of oil, is the amount of oil, that India receives from Nigeria. Trade, between these two countries stands at $875 million in 2005–2006. Indian companies have also invested in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, iron ore, steel, information technology, and communications, amongst other things. Both India and Nigeria, are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, G-77, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Former Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo was the guest of honour, at the Republic Day parade, in 1999, and the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Nigeria in 2007 and addressed the Nigerian Parliament.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Indo-Rwandan relations are the foreign relations between the Republic of India and the Republic of Rwanda. India is represented in Rwanda through its honorary consulate in Kigali. Rwanda has been operating its Embassy in New Delhi since 1998 and appointed its first resident Ambassador in 2001.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "India–Seychelles relations are bilateral relations between the Republic of India and the Republic of Seychelles. India has a High Commission in Victoria while Seychelles maintains a High Commission in New Delhi.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "India and South Africa, have always had strong relations even though India revoked diplomatic relations in protest of the apartheid regime in the mid-20th century. The history of British rule connects both lands. There is a large group of Indian South Africans. Mahatma Gandhi, spent many years in South Africa, during which time, he fought for the rights of the ethnic Indians. Nelson Mandela was inspired by Gandhi. After India's independence, India strongly condemned apartheid and refused diplomatic relations while apartheid was conducted as state policy in South Africa.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The two countries, now have close economic, political, and sports relations. Trade between the two countries grew from $3 million in 1992–1993 to $4 billion in 2005–2006, and aim to reach trade of $12 billion by 2010. One-third of India's imports from South Africa is gold bar. Diamonds, that are mined from South Africa, are polished in India. Nelson Mandela was awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize. The two countries are also members of the IBSA Dialogue Forum, with Brazil. India hopes to get large amounts of uranium, from resource-rich South Africa, for India's growing civilian nuclear energy sector.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "India recognised South Sudan on 10 July 2011, a day after South Sudan became an independent state. Right now, relations are economic. Pramit Pal Chaudhuri wrote in the Hindustan Times that South Sudan \"has other attractions. As the Indian Foreign Ministry's literature notes, South Sudan is reported to have \"some of the largest oil reserves in Africa outside Nigeria and Angola\". An article in The Telegraph reported that South Sudan is \"one of the poorest [countries] in the world, [but] is oil rich. Foreign ministry officials said New Delhi has [a] keen interest in increasing its investments in the oil fields in South Sudan, which now owns over two-thirds of erstwhile united Sudan's oil fields.\"",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In return for the oil resources that can be provided by South Sudan, India said it was willing to assist in developing infrastructure, training officials in health, education, and rural development. \"We have compiled a definite road map using [sic] which India can help South Sudan.\"",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 7 May 1956.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Indo-Sudanese relations have always been characterised as longstanding, close, and friendly, even since the early development stages of their countries. At the time of Indian independence, Sudan had contributed 70,000 pounds, which was used to build part of the National Defence Academy in Pune. The main building of NDA is called Sudan Block. The two nations established diplomatic relations shortly after India became known as one of the first Asian countries to recognise the newly independent African country. India and Sudan also share geographic and historical similarities, as well as economic interests. Both countries are former British colonies, and remotely border Saudi Arabia using a body of water. India and Sudan continue to have cordial relations, despite issues such as India's close relationship with Israel, India's solidarity with Egypt over border issues with Sudan, and Sudan's intimate bonds with Pakistan and Bangladesh. India had also contributed some troops as United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 31 August 1962.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Togo opened its embassy in New Delhi in October 2010. The High Commission of India in Accra, Ghana is concurrently accredited to Togo. Togolese President Gnassingbé Eyadéma made an official state visit to India in September 1994. During the visit, the two countries agreed to establish Joint Commission.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 9 October 1962.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "India and Uganda established diplomatic relations in 1965 and each maintains a High Commissioner in the other's capital. The Indian High Commission in Kampala has concurrent accreditation to Burundi and Rwanda. Uganda hosts a large Indian community and India–Uganda relations cover a broad range of sectors including political, economic, commercial, cultural, and scientific cooperation.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Relations between India and Uganda began with the arrival of over 30,000 Indians in Uganda in the 19th century who were brought there to construct the Mombasa–Kampala railway line. Ugandan independence activists were inspired in their struggle for Ugandan independence by the success of the Indian independence movement and were also supported in their struggle by the Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru. Indo-Ugandan relations have been good since Uganda's independence except during the regime of Idi Amin. Amin in 1972 expelled over 55,000 people of Indian origin and 5,000 Indians who had formed the commercial and economic backbone of the country accusing them of exploiting native Ugandans. Since the mid-1980s when President Yoweri Museveni came to power, relations have steadily improved. Today some 20,000 Indians and PIOs live or work in Uganda. Ethnic tensions between Indians and Ugandans have been a recurring issue in bilateral relations given the role of Indians in the Ugandan economy.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "As of the year 2011, India's total trade with Africa is over US$46 billion and its total investment is over US$11 billion with a US$5.7 billion line of credit for executing various projects in Africa.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "India has had good relationships with most sub-Saharan African nations for most of its history. In the Prime Minister's visit to Mauritius in 1997, the two countries secured a deal to new Credit Agreement of INR 105 million (US$3 million) to finance the import by Mauritius of capital goods, consultancy services and consumer durable from India. The government of India secured a rice and medicine agreement with the people of Seychelles. India continued to build upon its historically close relations with Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Visits from political ministers from Ethiopia provided opportunities for strengthening bilateral cooperation between the two countries in the fields of education and technical training, water resources management and development of small industries. This has allowed India to gain benefits from nations that are forgotten by other Western Nations. The South African President, Thabo Mbeki has called for a strategic relationship between India and South Africa to avoid imposition by Western Nations. India continued to build upon its close and friendly relations with Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The Minister of Foreign Affairs arranged for the sending of Special Envoys to each of these countries during 1996–97 as a reaffirmation of India's assurance to strengthening cooperation with these countries in a spirit of South-South partnership. These relations have created a position of strength with African nations that other nations may not possess.",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "India's commonalities with developing nations in Latin America, especially Brazil and Mexico have continued to grow. India and Brazil continue to work together on the reform of the Security Council through the G4 nations while having also increased strategic and economic cooperation through the IBSA Dialogue Forum. The process of finalizing a Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) with MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay) is on the itinerary and negotiations are being held with Chile. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was the guest of honor at the 2004 Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Both countries have established diplomatic relations and have an Extradition Arrangement.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "India and Barbados established diplomatic relations on 30 November 1966 (the date of Barbados' national independence). On that date, the government of India gifted Barbados the throne in Barbados' national House of Assembly. India is represented in Barbados through its embassy in Suriname and an Indian consulate in Holetown, St. James. In 2011–12 the Indian-based firm Era's Lucknow Medical College and Hospital, established the American University of Barbados (AUB), as the island's first Medical School for international students. In 2015 the governments of Barbados and India signed a joint Open Skies Agreement. Today around 3,000 persons from India call Barbados home. Two-thirds are from India's Surat district of Gujarat known as Suratis. Most of the Suratis are involved in trading. The rest are of Sindhis ancestry.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "India has an Honorary Consulate in Belize City and Belize has an Honorary Consulate in New Delhi. Bilateral trade stood at US$45.3 Million in 2014 and has steadily increased since. Belize and India have engaged in dialogue in Central American Integration System (SICA) discussing anti-terrorism, climate change and food security. India signed a Tax Information Exchange Agreement in 2013 with Belize. India also provides Belize with US$30 Million as part of its foreign aid commitment to SICA countries. Citizens of Belize are eligible for scholarships in Indian universities under Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The two nations share a close cultural link due to Belize's large East Indian Population, estimated at 4% of the total population.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Indo-Canadian relations are the longstanding bilateral relations between India and Canada, which are built upon a \"mutual commitment to democracy\", \"pluralism\", and \"people-to-people links\", according to the government of Canada. In 2004, bilateral trade between India and Canada was at about C$2.45 billion. However, the botched handling of the Air India investigation and the case, in general, suffered a setback to Indo-Canadian relations. India's Smiling Buddha nuclear test led to connections between the two countries being frozen, with allegations that India broke the terms of the Colombo Plan. Although Jean Chrétien and Roméo LeBlanc both visited India in the late 1990s, relations were again halted after the Pokhran-II tests.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Canada-India relations have been on an upward trajectory since 2005. Governments at all levels, private-sector organisations, academic institutes in two countries, and people-to-people contacts—especially diaspora networks—have contributed through individual and concerted efforts to significant improvements in the bilateral relationship.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The two governments have agreed on important policy frameworks to advance the bilateral relationship. In particular, the Nuclear Cooperation Agreement (signed in June 2010) and the current successful negotiations of the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) constitute a watershed in Canada-India relations.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "The two governments have attempted to make up for lost time and are eager to complete CEPA negotiations by 2013 and ensure its ratification by 2014. After the conclusion of CEPA, Canada and India must define the areas for their partnership which will depend on their ability to convert common interests into common action and respond effectively for steady cooperation. For example, during \"pull-aside\" meetings between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Stephen Harper at the G-20 summit in Mexico in June 2012, and an earlier meeting in Toronto between External Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna and John Baird, the leaders discussed developing a more comprehensive partnership going beyond food security and including the possibility of tie-ups in the energy sector, hydrocarbon.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Relations between India and Cuba are close and warm. Both nations are part of the Non-Aligned Movement. Cuba has repeatedly called for a more \"democratic\" representation of the United Nations Security Council and supports India's candidacy as a permanent member of a reformed Security Council. Fidel Castro said that \"The maturity of India..., its unconditional adherence to the principles which lay at the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement give us the assurances that under the wise leadership of Indira Gandhi (the former Prime Minister of India), the non-aligned countries will continue advancing in their inalienable role as a bastion for peace, national independence and development...\"",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "India has an embassy in Havana, the capital of Cuba which opened in January 1960. This had particular significance as it symbolised Indian solidarity with the Cuban revolution. India had been one of the first countries in the world to have recognised the new Cuban government after the Cuban Revolution.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Cuba has an embassy in New Delhi, the Indian capital.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Relations between India and Jamaica are generally cordial and close. There are many cultural and political connections inherited from British colonial rule, such as membership in the Commonwealth of Nations, parliamentary democracy, the English language and cricket.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Both nations are members of the Non-Aligned Movement, the United Nations and the Commonwealth, and Jamaica supports India's candidacy for permanent membership in a reformed UN Security Council.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "During the British era, Indians voluntarily went to jobs in Jamaica and the West Indies. This has created a considerable population of people of Indian origin in Jamaica. India has a High Commission in Kingston, whilst Jamaica has a consulate in New Delhi and plans to upgrade it to a High Commission soon.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Mexico is a very important and major economic partner of India. Nobel Prize laureate and ambassador to India Octavio Paz wrote his book In Light of India which is an analysis of Indian history and culture. Both nations are regional powers and members of the G-20 major economies.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Bilateral relations between India and Nicaragua have been limited to SICA dialogue and visits by Nicaraguan Ministers to India. India maintains an honorary consul general in Nicaragua, concurrently accredited to the Indian embassy in Panama City and Nicaragua used to maintain an embassy in India but was reduced to an honorary consulate general in New Delhi. the current Foreign minister Samuel Santos López visited India in 2008 for the SICA-India Foreign ministers' meeting and in 2013 for high-level talks with the then External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid which also expanded bilateral trade with the two countries reaching a total of US$60.12 million during 2012–13.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Bilateral relations between Panama and India have been growing steadily, reflecting the crucial role the Panama Canal plays in global trade and commerce. Moreover, with over 15,000 Indians living in Panama, diplomatic ties have considerably increased over the past decade.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "The opening of the expanded Canal in 2016 is expected to provide new prospects for maritime connectivity. In seeking to rapidly strengthen trade relations such as the flow of trade triples between the two countries, India is keen to leverage these transit trade facilities in Panama to access the wider market of Latin America. Along with pursuing a free trade agreement, India wants to promote investment in various sectors of Panama's economy, including the banking and maritime industry and the multimodal centre of the Colón Free Trade Zone.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "The bilateral relations between the Republic of India and Paraguay have been traditionally strong due to strong commercial, cultural and strategic cooperation. India is represented in Paraguay through its embassy in Buenos Aires in Argentina. India also has an Honorary Consul-General in Asuncion. Paraguay opened its embassy in India in 2005.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Bilateral relations between the Republic of India and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago have considerably expanded in recent years with both nations building strategic and commercial ties. Both nations formally established diplomatic relations in 1962.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Both nations were part of the British Empire; India supported the independence of Trinidad and Tobago from British rule and established its diplomatic mission in 1962 – the year that Trinidad and Tobago officially gained independence. They possess diverse natural and economic resources and are the largest economies in their respective regions. Both are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, the United Nations, G-77 and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "The Republic of India operates a High Commission in Port of Spain, whilst the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago operates a High Commission in New Delhi.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Before and during the Second World War, the United States under President Roosevelt gave strong support to the Indian independence movement despite being allies to Britain. Relations between India and the United States were lukewarm following Indian independence, as India took a leading position in the Non-Aligned Movement, and received support from the Soviet Union. The US provided support to India in 1962 during its war with China. For most of the Cold War, the USA tended to have warmer relations with Pakistan, primarily as a way to contain Soviet-friendly India and to use Pakistan to back the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. An Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, signed in 1971, also positioned India against the USA.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "After the Sino-Indian War and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, India made considerable changes to its foreign policy. It developed a close relationship with the Soviet Union and started receiving massive military equipment and financial assistance from the USSR. This harmed the Indo-US relationship. The United States saw Pakistan as a counterweight to pro-Soviet India and started giving the former military assistance. This created an atmosphere of suspicion between India and the US. The Indo-US relationship suffered a considerable setback when the Soviets took over Afghanistan and India overtly supported the Soviet Union.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Relations between India and the United States came to an all-time low during the early 1970s. Despite reports of atrocities in East Pakistan, and being told, most notably in the Blood telegram, of genocidal activities being perpetrated by Pakistani forces, the US. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and US President Richard Nixon did nothing to discourage then-Pakistani President Yahya Khan and the Pakistan Army. Kissinger was particularly concerned about Soviet expansion into South Asia as a result of a treaty of friendship that had recently been signed between India and the Soviet Union and sought to demonstrate to the People's Republic of China the value of a tacit alliance with the United States. During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, Indian Armed Forces, along with the Mukti Bahini, succeeded in liberating East Pakistan which soon declared independence. Nixon feared that an Indian invasion of West Pakistan would mean total Soviet domination of the region and that it would seriously undermine the global position of the United States and the regional position of America's new tacit ally, China. To demonstrate to China the bona fides of the United States as an ally, and in direct violation of the Congress-imposed sanctions on Pakistan, Nixon sent military supplies to Pakistan, routing them through Jordan and Iran, while also encouraging China to increase its arms supplies to Pakistan.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "When Pakistan's defeat in the eastern sector seemed certain, Nixon sent the USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal, a move deemed by the Indians as a nuclear threat. The Enterprise arrived at the station on 11 December 1971. On 6 and 13 December, the Soviet Navy dispatched two groups of ships, armed with nuclear missiles, from Vladivostok; they trailed US Task Force 74 into the Indian Ocean from 18 December 1971 until 7 January 1972. The Soviets also sent nuclear submarines to ward off the threat posed by USS Enterprise in the Indian Ocean.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Though American efforts had no effect in turning the tide of the war, the incident involving USS Enterprise is viewed as the trigger for India's subsequent interest in developing nuclear weapons. American policy towards the end of the war was dictated primarily by a need to restrict the escalation of the war on the Western sector to prevent the 'dismemberment' of West Pakistan. Years after the war, many American writers criticised the White House policies during the war as being badly flawed and ill-serving to the interests of the United States. India carried out nuclear tests a few years later resulting in sanctions being imposed by the United States, further drifting the two countries apart. In recent years, Kissinger came under fire for comments made during the Indo-Pakistan War in which he described Indians as \"bastards\". Kissinger has since expressed his regret over the comments.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "Since the end of the Cold War, India-USA relations have improved dramatically. This has been fostered by the fact that the United States and India are both democracies and have a large and growing trade relationship. During the Gulf War, the economy of India went through an extremely difficult phase. The Government of India adopted liberalised economic systems. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, India improved diplomatic relations with the members of NATO, particularly Canada, France, and Germany. In 1992, India established formal diplomatic relations with Israel.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "In recent years, India-United States relations have still improved significantly during the Premiership of Narendra Modi since 2014.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "In 1998, India tested nuclear weapons which resulted in several US, Japanese and European sanctions on India. India's then defence minister, George Fernandes, said that India's nuclear programme was necessary as it provided a deterrence to some potential nuclear threats. Most of the sanctions imposed on India were removed by 2001. India has categorically stated that it will never use weapons first but will defend itself if attacked.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "The economic sanctions imposed by the United States in response to India's nuclear tests in May 1998 appeared, at least initially, to seriously damage Indo-American relations. President Bill Clinton imposed wide-ranging sanctions according to the 1994 Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act. US sanctions on Indian entities involved in the nuclear industry and opposition to international financial institution loans for non-humanitarian assistance projects in India. The United States encouraged India to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) immediately and without condition. The United States also called for restraint in missile and nuclear testing and deployment by both India and Pakistan. The non-proliferation dialogue initiated after the 1998 nuclear tests has bridged many of the gaps in understanding between the countries.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "Formal relations between both countries were first established in 1949. India has an embassy in Buenos Aires and Argentina has an embassy in New Delhi. The current Indian Ambassador to Argentina (concurrently accredited to Uruguay and Paraguay) is R Viswanathan.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "According to the Ministry of External Affairs of the Government of India, \"Under the 1968 Visa agreement, (Argentine) fees for transit and tourist visas have been abolished. Under the new visa agreement signed during the Argentine Presidential visit in October 2009, it has been agreed that five-year multi-entry business visas would be given free of cost. The Embassy of India in Buenos Aires gives Cafe Con Visa (coffee with visa) to Argentine visitors. The applicants are invited for coffee and a visa is given immediately. This has been praised by the Argentine media, public and the Foreign Minister himself.\"",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Relations between Brazil and India have been extended to diverse areas such as science and technology, pharmaceuticals and space as both are member nations of BRICS. The two-way trade in 2007 nearly tripled to US$3.12 billion from US$1.2 billion in 2004. India attaches tremendous importance to its relationship with this Latin American giant and hopes to see the areas of cooperation expand in the coming years.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "Both countries want the participation of developing countries in the UNSC permanent membership since the underlying philosophy for both of them are: UNSC should be more democratic, legitimate and representative – the G4 is a novel grouping for this realization.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "Brazil and India are deeply committed to IBSA (South-South cooperation) initiatives and attach utmost importance to this trilateral cooperation between the three large, multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-religious developing countries, which are bound by the common principle of pluralism and democracy.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic ties on 19 January 1959. Since then, the relationship between the two countries has been gradually increasing with more frequent diplomatic visits to promote political, commercial cultural and academic exchanges. Colombia is currently the commercial point of entry into Latin America for Indian companies.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "Diplomatic relations between India and Venezuela were established on 1 October 1959. India maintains an embassy in Caracas, while Venezuela maintains an embassy in New Delhi.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "There have been several visits by heads of state and government, and other high-level officials between the countries. President Hugo Chávez visited New Delhi on 4–7 March 2005. Chávez met with Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The two countries signed six agreements including one to establish a Joint Commission to promote bilateral relations and another on cooperation in the hydrocarbon sector. Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro visited India to attend the First Meeting of the India-CELAC Troika Foreign Ministers meeting in New Delhi on 7 August 2012.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "The Election Commission of India (ECI) and the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela signed an MoU during a visit by Indian Election Commissioner V S Sampath to Caracas in 2012. The Minister of State for Corporate Affairs visited Venezuela to attend the state funeral of President Chavez in March 2013. The President and Prime Minister of India expressed condolences on the death of Chávez. The Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, observed a minute's silence to mark his death. Ambassador Smita Purushottam represented India at the swearing-in ceremony of Chávez's successor Nicolás Maduro on 19 April 2013.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "Citizens of Venezuela are eligible for scholarships under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.",
"title": "Americas"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "India is working towards developing strong relations with this resource-rich Central Asian country. The Indian oil company, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation has got oil exploration and petroleum development grants in Kazakhstan. The two countries are collaborating in petrochemicals, information technology, and space technology. Kazakhstan has offered India five blocks for oil and gas exploration. India and Kazakhstan, are to set up joint projects in construction, minerals and metallurgy. India also signed four other pacts, including an extradition treaty, in the presence of President Prathibha Patil and her Kazakh counterpart Nursultan Nazarbayev. Kazakhstan will provide Uranium and related products under the MoU between Nuclear Power Corp. of India and Kazatomprom. These MoU also open possibilities of joint exploration of uranium in Kazakhstan, which has the world's second-largest reserves, and India building atomic power plants in the Central Asian country.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "Diplomatic relations were established between India and Tajikistan following Tajikistan's independence from the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, which had been friendly with India. Tajikistan occupies a strategically important position in Central Asia, bordering Afghanistan, the People's Republic of China and separated by a small strip of Afghan territory from Pakistan. India's role in fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and its strategic rivalry with both China and Pakistan have made its ties with Tajikistan important to its strategic and security policies. Despite their common efforts, bilateral trade has been comparatively low, valued at US$12.09 million in 2005; India's exports to Tajikistan were valued at US$6.2 million and its imports at US$5.89 million. India's military presence and activities have been significant, beginning with India's extensive support of the anti-Taliban Afghan Northern Alliance (ANA). India began renovating the Farkhor Air Base and stationed aircraft of the Indian Air Force there. The Farkhor Air Base became fully operational in 2006, and 12 MiG-29 bombers and trainer aircraft are planned to be stationed there.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "India has an embassy in Tashkent. Uzbekistan has an embassy in New Delhi. Uzbekistan has had a great impact on Indian culture mostly due to the Mughal Empire which was founded by Babur of Ferghana (in present-day Uzbekistan) who created his empire southward first in Afghanistan and then in India.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "Despite lingering suspicions remaining from the 1962 Sino-Indian War, the 1967 Nathu La and Cho La incidents, and continuing boundary disputes over Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh, Sino-Indian relations have improved gradually since 1988. Both countries have sought to reduce tensions along the frontier, expand trade and cultural ties, and normalise relations. A series of high-level visits between the two nations have helped improve relations. In December 1996, PRC President Jiang Zemin visited India during a tour of South Asia. While in New Delhi, he signed with the Indian Prime Minister a series of confidence-building measures for the disputed borders. Sino-Indian relations suffered a brief setback in May 1998 when the Indian Defence minister justified the country's nuclear tests by citing potential threats from the PRC. However, in June 1999, during the Kargil crisis, then-External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh visited Beijing and stated that India did not consider China a threat. By 2001, relations between India and the PRC were on the mend, and the two sides handled the move from Tibet to India of the 17th Karmapa in January 2000 with delicacy and tact. In 2003, India formally recognised Tibet as a part of China, and China recognised Sikkim as a formal part of India in 2004.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Since 2004, the economic rise of both China and India has also helped forge closer relations between the two. Sino-Indian trade reached US$65.47 billion in 2013–14, making China the single largest trading partner of India. The increasing economic reliance between India and China has also bought the two nations closer politically, with both India and China eager to resolve their boundary dispute. They have also collaborated on several issues ranging from WTO's Doha round in 2008 to regional free trade agreement. Similar to Indo-US nuclear deal, India and China have also agreed to cooperate in the field of civilian nuclear energy. However, China's economic interests have clashed with those of India. Both countries are the largest Asian investors in Africa and have competed for control over their large natural resources. There was a tense situation due to the soldiers' stand-off in Doklam, Bhutan; but that was resolved early.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Relations were lost due to Galwan Valley skirmishes and its progress. India ceased imports of Chinese products. Various measures were taken, such as several contracts with the Chinese companies involved in railways, networks and several items productions, which were cancelled in response.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic from Wuhan also hampered the relations. Following the straining of the bonds, both sides blamed each other for the conflict on LAC. On 29–30 August, it was reported that China had allegedly attempted to cross LAC to attain important hilltops, which was filed by Indian troops, as they were an advantage of acquiring important tops near LAC. India banned more than 250 Chinese apps, and on 16 October, it banned the import of ACs, Refrigerators and Coolers from China. Several core commanders' negotiations and talks were held, which resulted in nothing other than vague promises then. Cross-media blaming was common.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "There was even a conference held in Moscow, Russia, on 5 September between the Defence Minister of India, Rajnath Singh and Chinese Army General, Wei Fenghe, but that also ended up with no success. The recent meeting of the Quad-alliance was also questioned by China, but was then downed by India.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "In mid-January 2021, it was reported that both countries had finally agreed upon the de-escalation from their positions. Footage of Chinese troops removing tents/barracks was released. Both countries also agreed that India would move back to Finger-3, while China retained its position back to Finger-8, and also declared the area from Finger-3 to Finger-8 to be \"No man's land\".",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "India-Japan relations have always been strong. India has culturally influenced Japan through Buddhism. During World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army helped Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's Indian National Army. Relations have remained warm since India's independence, despite Japan imposing sanctions on India after the 1998 Pokhran-II nuclear tests (the sanctions were removed in 2001). Japanese companies, like Sony, Toyota, and Honda, have manufacturing facilities in India, and with the growth of the Indian economy, India is a big market for Japanese firms. The most prominent Japanese company to have a big investment in India is automobiles giant Suzuki which is in partnership with Indian automobile company Maruti Suzuki, the largest car manufacturer in India. Honda was also a partner in \"Hero Honda\", one of the largest motorcycle sellers in the world (the companies split in 2011).",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "According to Former Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's arc of freedom theory, it is in Japan's interests to develop closer ties with India, the world's most populous democracy, while its relations with China remain chilly. To this end, Japan has funded many infrastructure projects in India, most notably in New Delhi's metro subway system. In December 2006, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Japan culminated in the signing of the \"Joint Statement Towards Japan-India Strategic and Global Partnership\". Indian applicants were welcomed in 2006 to the JET Programme, starting with just one slot available in 2006 and 41 in 2007. Also, in 2007, the Japan Self-Defense Forces took part in a naval exercise in the Indian Ocean, known as Malabar 2007, which also involved the naval forces of India, Australia, Singapore and the United States.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "In October 2008, Japan signed an agreement with India under which it would grant the latter a low-interest loan worth US$4.5 billion to construct a high-speed rail line between Delhi and Mumbai. This is the single largest overseas project being financed by Japan and reflects a growing economic partnership between the two. India and Japan signed a security cooperation agreement in which both will hold military exercises, police the Indian Ocean and conduct military-to-military exchanges on fighting terrorism, making India one of only three countries, the other two being the United States and Australia, with which Japan has such a security pact. There are 25,000 Indians in Japan as of 2008.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "The relations between India and Mongolia are still at a nascent stage and Indo-Mongolian cooperation is limited to diplomatic visits, the provision of soft loans and financial aid and collaborations in the IT sector.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "India established diplomatic relations in December 1955. India was the first country outside the Soviet bloc to establish diplomatic relations with Mongolia. Since then, there have been treaties of mutual friendship and cooperation between the two countries in 1973, 1994, 2001 and 2004.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "India and North Korea have growing trade and diplomatic relations. India had a fully functioning embassy in Pyongyang which was closed down due to COVID-19 pandemic in the host country while North Korea still operates an embassy in New Delhi. India has said that it wants the \"reunification\" of Korea.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "The cordial relationship between the two countries extends back to 48AD, when Queen Suro, or Princess Heo, travelled from the kingdom of Ayodhya to Korea. According to the Samguk Yusa, the princess had a dream about a heavenly king who was awaiting heaven's anointed ride. After Princess Heo had the dream, she asked her parents, the king and queen, for permission to set out and seek the man, which the king and queen urged with the belief that god orchestrated the whole fate. Upon approval, she set out on a boat, carrying gold, silver, a tea plant, and a stone which calmed the waters. Archeologists discovered a stone with two fish kissing each other, a symbol of the Gaya kingdom that is unique to the Mishra royal family in Ayodhya, India. This royal link provides further evidence that there was an active commercial engagement between India and Korea since the queen's arrival in Korea. Current descendants live in the city of Gimhae as well as abroad in the America states of New Jersey and Kentucky. Many of them became prominent and well-known around the world like President Kim Dae Jung and Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil. The relations between the countries have been relatively limited, although much progress arose during the three decades.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "Since the formal establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries in 1973, several trade agreements have been reached. Trade between the two nations has increased exponentially, exemplified by the $530 million during the fiscal year of 1992–1993, and the $10 billion during 2006–2007. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, South Korean businesses sought to increase access to the global markets and began trade investments with India. The last two presidential visits from South Korea to India were in 1996 and 2006, and the embassy works between the two countries are seen as needing improvements. Recently, there have been acknowledgements in the Korean public and political spheres that expanding relations with India should be a major economic and political priority for South Korea. Much of the economic investments of South Korea have been drained into China; however, South Korea is currently the fifth largest source of investment in India. To The Times of India, President Roh Moo-hyun voiced his opinion that cooperation between India's software and Korea's IT industries would bring very efficient and successful outcomes. The two countries agreed to shift their focus to the revision of the visa policies between the two countries, expansion of trade, and establishment of free trade agreement to encourage further investment between the two countries. Korean companies such as LG, Hyundai and Samsung have established manufacturing and service facilities in India, and several Korean construction companies won grants for a portion of the many infrastructural building plans in India, such as the \"National Highway Development Project\". Tata Motor's purchase of Daewoo Commercial Vehicles at the cost of $102 million highlights India's investments in Korea, which consist mostly of subcontracting.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 10 December 1947.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "Bilateral relations between India and Afghanistan have been traditionally strong and friendly. While India was the only South Asian country to recognise the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in the 1980s, its relations were diminished during the Afghan civil wars and the rule of the Islamist Taliban in the 1990s. India aided the overthrow of the Taliban and became the largest regional provider of humanitarian and reconstruction aid. The new democratically elected Afghan government strengthened its ties with India in the wake of persisting tensions and problems with Pakistan, which is continuing to shelter and support the Taliban. India pursues a policy of close cooperation to bolster its standing as a regional power and contains its rival Pakistan, which it maintains is supporting Islamic militants in Kashmir and other parts of India. India is the largest regional investor in Afghanistan, having committed more than US$3 billion for reconstruction purposes. After the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed, India participated in the evacuation of non-Muslim minorities and provided food aid to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "India was the second country to recognise Bangladesh as a separate and independent state, doing so on 6 December 1971. India fought alongside the Bangladeshis to liberate Bangladesh from West Pakistan in 1971.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 156,
"text": "Bangladesh's relationship with India has been difficult in terms of border killing, irrigation and land border disputes post-1976. However, India has enjoyed a favourable relationship with Bangladesh during governments formed by the Awami League in 1972 and 1996. The recent solutions to land and maritime disputes have taken out irritants in ties.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 157,
"text": "At the outset, India's relations with Bangladesh could not have been stronger because of India's unalloyed support for independence and opposition against Pakistan in 1971. During the independence war, many refugees fled to India. When the struggle of resistance matured in November 1971, India also intervened militarily and may have helped bring international attention to the issue through Indira Gandhi's visit to Washington, D.C. Afterwards India furnished relief and reconstruction aid. India extended recognition to Bangladesh before the end of the war in 1971 (the second country to do so after Bhutan) and subsequently lobbied others to follow suit. India also withdrew its military from the land of Bangladesh when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman requested Indira Gandhi to do so during the latter's visit to Dhaka in 1972.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 158,
"text": "Indo-Bangladesh relations have been somewhat less friendly since the fall of the Mujib government in August 1975. over the years over issues such as South Talpatti Island, the Tin Bigha Corridor and access to Nepal, the Farakka Barrage and water sharing, border conflicts near Tripura and the construction of a fence along most of the border which India explains as security provision against migrants, insurgents and terrorists. Many Bangladeshis feel India likes to play \"big brother\" to smaller neighbours, including Bangladesh. Bilateral relations warmed in 1996, due to a softer Indian foreign policy and the new Awami League Government. A 30-year water-sharing agreement for the Ganges River was signed in December 1996, after an earlier bilateral water-sharing agreement for the Ganges River lapsed in 1988. Both nations also have cooperated on the issue of flood warnings and preparedness. The Bangladesh Government and tribal insurgents signed a peace accord in December 1997, which allowed for the return of tribal refugees who had fled to India, beginning in 1986, to escape violence caused by an insurgency in their homeland in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The Bangladesh Army maintains a very strong presence in the area to this day. The army is increasingly concerned about the growing problem of the cultivation of illegal drugs.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 159,
"text": "There are also small pieces of land along the border region that Bangladesh is diplomatically trying to reclaim. Padua, part of Sylhet Division before 1971, has been under Indian control since the war in 1971. This small strip of land was re-occupied by the BDR in 2001 but later given back to India after the Bangladesh government decided to solve the problem through diplomatic negotiations. The Indian New Moore island no longer exists, but Bangladesh repeatedly claims it to be part of the Satkhira district of Bangladesh.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 160,
"text": "In recent years India has increasingly complained that Bangladesh does not secure its border properly. It fears an increasing flow of poor Bangladeshis and it accuses Bangladesh of harbouring Indian separatist groups like ULFA and alleged terrorist groups. The Bangladesh government has refused to accept these allegations. India estimates that over 20 million Bangladeshis are living illegally in India. One Bangladeshi official responded that \"there is not a single Bangladeshi migrant in India\". Since 2002, India has been constructing an India – Bangladesh Fence along much of the 2500-mile border. The failure to resolve migration disputes bears a human cost for illegal migrants, such as imprisonment and health risks (namely HIV/AIDS).",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 161,
"text": "India's prime minister Narendra Modi and his Bangladeshi counterpart Sheikh Hasina have completed a landmark deal redrawing their messy shared border and thereby solving disputes between India and Bangladesh. Bangladesh has also given India a transit route to travel through Bangladesh to its North East states. India and Bangladesh also have free trade agreement on 7 June 2015.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 162,
"text": "Both countries solved their border dispute on 6 June 2015.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 163,
"text": "To connect Kolkata with Tripura via Bangladesh through railway, the Union Government on 10 February 2016 sanctioned about 580 crore rupees. The project which is expected to be completed by 2017 will pass through Bangladesh.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 164,
"text": "The Agartala-Akhaura rail link between Indian Railway and Bangladesh Railway will reduce the current 1700 km road distance between Kolkata to Agartala via Siliguri to just 350 kilometer by railway.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 165,
"text": "The project ranks high on Prime Minister's 'Act East Policy', and is expected to increase connectivity and boost trade between India and Bangladesh.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 166,
"text": "Historically, there have been close ties with India. Both countries signed a friendship treaty in 1949, where India would assist Bhutan in foreign relations. On 8 February 2007, the Indo-Bhutan Friendship Treaty was substantially revised under the Bhutanese King, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. Whereas in the Treaty of 1949 Article 2 read as \"The Government of India undertakes to exercise no interference in the internal administration of Bhutan. On its part, the Government of Bhutan agrees to be guided by the advice of the Government of India regarding its external relations.\"",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 167,
"text": "In the revised treaty it now reads as, \"In keeping with the abiding ties of close friendship and cooperation between Bhutan and India, the Government of the Kingdom of Bhutan and the Government of the Republic of India shall cooperate closely with each other on issues relating to their national interests. Neither government shall allow the use of its territory for activities harmful to the national security and interest of the other\". The revised treaty also includes in it the preamble \"Reaffirming their respect for each other's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity\", an element that was absent in the earlier version. The Indo-Bhutan Friendship Treaty of 2007 strengthens Bhutan's status as an independent and sovereign nation.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 168,
"text": "India continues to be the largest trade and development partner of Bhutan. Planned development efforts in Bhutan began in the early 1960s. The First Five Year Plan (FYP) of Bhutan was launched in 1961. Since then, India has been extending financial assistance to Bhutan's FYPs. The 10th FYP ended in June 2013. India's overall assistance to the 10th FYP was a little over Rs. 5000 crores, excluding grants for hydropower projects. India has committed Rs. 4500 crores for Bhutan's 11th FYP along with Rs. 500 crores as an Economic Stimulus Package.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 169,
"text": "The hydropower sector is one of the main pillars of bilateral cooperation, exemplifying mutually beneficial synergy by providing clean energy to India and exporting revenue to Bhutan (power contributes 14% to the Bhutanese GDP, comprising about 35% of Bhutan's total exports). Three hydroelectric projects (HEPs) totaling 1416 MW, (336 MW Chukha HEP, the 60 MW Kurichu HEP, and the 1020 MW Tala HEP), are already exporting electricity to India. In 2008 the two governments identified ten more projects for development with a total generation capacity of 10,000 MW. Of these, three projects totaling 2940 MW (1200 MW Punatsangchu-I, 1020 MW Punatsangchu-II and 720 MW Mangdechu HEPs) are under construction and are scheduled to be commissioned in the last quarter of 2017–2018. Out of the remaining 7 HEPs, 4 projects totaling 2120 MW (600 MW Kholongchhu, 180 MW Bunakha, 570 MW Wangchu and 770 MW Chamkarchu) will be constructed under a Joint Venture model, for which a Framework Inter-Governmental Agreement was signed between both governments in 2014. Of these 4 JV-model projects, pre-construction activities for Kholongchhu HEP have commenced. Tata Power is also building a hydroelectric dam in Bhutan.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 170,
"text": "India had assisted Bhutan by deploying its troops in Doklam in 2017- a territory claimed and controlled by the Bhutanese government- to resist a Chinese army's control and construction of military structures.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 171,
"text": "India enjoys a considerable influence over Maldives' foreign policy and provides extensive security cooperation, especially after Operation Cactus in 1988 during which India repelled Tamil mercenaries who invaded the country.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 172,
"text": "As a founder member in 1985 of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, SAARC, which brings together Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, the country plays a very active role in SAARC. The Maldives has taken the lead in calling for a South Asian Free Trade Agreement, the formulation of a Social Charter, the initiation of informal political consultations in SAARC forums, the lobbying for greater action on environmental issues, the proposal of numerous human rights measures such as the regional convention on child rights and for setting up a SAARC Human Rights Resource Centre. The Maldives is also an advocate of greater international profile for SAARC such as through formulating common positions at the UN.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 173,
"text": "India is starting the process to bring the island country into India's security grid. The move comes after the moderate Islamic nation approached New Delhi earlier this year over fears that one of its island resorts could be taken over by terrorists given its lack of military assets and surveillance capabilities. India also signed an agreement with the Maldives in 2011 which is centred around the following:",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 174,
"text": "Relations between India and Nepal are close yet fraught with difficulties stemming from border disputes, geography, economics, the problems inherent in big power-small power relations, and common ethnic and linguistic identities that overlap the two countries borders. In 1950 New Delhi and Kathmandu initiated their intertwined relationship with the Treaty of Peace and Friendship and accompanying secret letters that defined security relations between the two countries, and an agreement governing both bilateral trade and trade transiting Indian soil. The 1950 treaty and letters stated that \"neither government shall tolerate any threat to the security of the other by a foreign aggressor\" and obligated both sides \"to inform each other of any serious friction or misunderstanding with any neighboring state likely to cause any breach in the friendly relations subsisting between the two governments\", and also granted the Indian and Nepali citizens right to get involved in any economic activity such as work and business-related activity in each other's territory. These accords cemented a \"special relationship\" between India and Nepal that granted Nepalese in India the same economic and educational opportunities as Indian citizens.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 175,
"text": "Relations between India and Nepal reached their lowest in 1989 when India imposed a 13-month-long economic blockade on Nepal. Indian PM Narendra Modi visited Nepal in 2014, the first by an Indian PM in nearly 17 years.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 176,
"text": "In 2015, a blockade of the India-Nepal border affected relations. The blockade is led by ethnic communities angered by Nepal's recently promulgated new constitution. However, the Nepalese government accuses India of deliberately worsening the embargo, but India denies it.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 177,
"text": "India aided Nepal during the 2015 Kathmandu earthquake with the financial aid of $1 billion and launched Operation Maitri.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 178,
"text": "The relations were strained during mid-2020, when it was reported that a firing took place by the Nepalese police across the Indo-Nepalese border of Bihar on 12 July. Nepalese Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli commented about the pandemic of Coronavirus that the \"Indian virus was deadlier\" than the one which spread from Wuhan. As time progressed, certain claims were also made on the Indian territories, for example, Kalapani, Limpiyadhura and Lipulekh of Uttarakhand. Similarly, the claims were also made culturally, when it was said that Hindu God Ram was Nepalese, that he was born in Thori, west of Birgunj, and that Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh was fake. Rules were made strict for Indians in Nepal along with banning some Indian media.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 179,
"text": "Indian media stated that the actions of the Oli government were souring the relations, \"and these were being done on the direction of China and propelled by Chinese ambassador Hou Yanqi\". Speculations were made that since China could not handle India directly, in the aftermath of the LAC skirmish, it was lurking and trapping its neighboring countries and provoking them against India. In August, there were reports about the Chinese \"illegal occupations\" in Nepal's border states' areas.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 180,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 15 August 1947.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 181,
"text": "Despite historical, cultural and ethnic links between them, relations between India and Pakistan have been \"plagued\" by years of mistrust and suspicion ever since the partition of India in 1947. The principal source of contention between India and its western neighbour has been the Kashmir conflict. After an invasion by Pashtun tribesmen and Pakistani paramilitary forces, the Hindu Maharaja of the Dogra Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh, and its Muslim Prime Minister, Sheikh Abdullah, signed an Instrument of Accession with New Delhi. The First Kashmir War started after the Indian Army entered Srinagar, the capital of the state, to secure the area from the invading forces. The war ended in December 1948 with the Line of Control dividing the erstwhile princely state into territories administered by Pakistan (northern and western areas) and India (southern, central and northeastern areas). Pakistan contested the legality of the Instrument of Accession since the Dogra Kingdom has signed a standstill agreement with it. The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 started following the failure of Pakistan's Operation Gibraltar, which was designed to infiltrate forces into Jammu and Kashmir to precipitate an insurgency against rule by India. The five-week war caused thousands of casualties on both sides. It ended in a United Nations (UN) mandated ceasefire and the subsequent issuance of the Tashkent Declaration. India and Pakistan went to war again in 1971, this time the conflict being over East Pakistan. The large-scale atrocities committed there by the Pakistan army led to millions of Bengali refugees pouring over into India. India, along with the Mukti Bahini, defeated Pakistan and the Pakistani forces surrendered on the eastern front. The war resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. In 1998, India carried out the Pokhran-II nuclear tests which was followed by Pakistan's Chagai-I tests. Following the Lahore Declaration in February 1999, relations briefly improved. A few months later, however, Pakistani paramilitary forces and Pakistan Army, infiltrated in large numbers into the Kargil district of Indian Kashmir. This initiated the Kargil War after India moved in thousands of troops to successfully flush out the infiltrators. Although the conflict did not result in a full-scale war between India and Pakistan, relations between the two reached an all-time low which worsened even further following the involvement of Pakistan-based terrorists in the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Flight 814 in December 1999. Attempts to normalise relations, such as the Agra summit held in July 2001, failed. An attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, which was blamed on Pakistan, which had condemned the attack caused a military standoff between the two countries which lasted for nearly a year raising fears of nuclear warfare. However, a peace process, initiated in 2003, led to improved relations in the following years.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 182,
"text": "Since the initiation of the peace process, several confidence-building measures (CBMs) between India and Pakistan have taken shape. The Samjhauta Express and Delhi–Lahore Bus service are two of these successful measures which have played a crucial role in expanding people-to-people contact between the two countries. The initiation of the Srinagar–Muzaffarabad Bus service in 2005 and the opening of a historic trade route across the Line of Control in 2008 further reflects increasing eagerness between the two sides to improve relations. Although bilateral trade between India and Pakistan was a modest US$1.7 billion in March 2007, it is expected to cross US$10 billion by 2010. After the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, India sent aid to affected areas in Pakistani Kashmir and Punjab as well as Indian Kashmir.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 183,
"text": "The 2008 Mumbai attacks seriously undermined the relations between the two countries. India alleged Pakistan harbouring militants on their soil, while Pakistan vehemently denied such claims.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 184,
"text": "A new chapter started in India-Pakistan relations when a new NDA government took charge in Delhi after victory in the 2014 election and invited SAARC members' leaders to an oath-taking ceremony. Subsequently, the visit of the Indian prime minister on 25 December informally wished Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on his Birthday and participate in his daughter's wedding. It was hoped that the relationship between the neighbour will improve but an attack on an Indian army camp by Pakistani infiltrators on 18 September 2016 and a subsequent surgical strike by India aggravated the already strained relationship between the nations.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 185,
"text": "A SAARC summit scheduled in Islamabad was called off because of a boycott by India and other SAARC members subsequently.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 186,
"text": "The relationship took a further nosedive after another attack on CRPF in February 2019 by a terrorist associated with the Pakistan-based terror organisation, Jaish-e-Mohammed, when the terrorist rammed his vehicle packed with explosives against a bus carrying CRPF soldiers in Pulwama, Kashmir, killing 40. India blamed Pakistan which was denied by the Pakistani establishment. India retaliated with an airstrike on Balakot, a region claimed and controlled by Pakistan.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 187,
"text": "A new chapter in peace was ignited when it was suddenly declared that a back-door peace settlement over ceasing the cross-border firing across LOC was signed between the armies of both sides, and a steady growth in the countries coming together was observed.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 188,
"text": "Bilateral relations between Sri Lanka and India have enjoyed historically a good relationship. The two countries share near-identical racial and cultural ties. According to traditional Sri Lankan chronicles (Dipavamsa), Buddhism was introduced into Sri Lanka in the 4th century BCE by Venerable Mahinda, the son of Indian Emperor Ashoka, during the reign of Sri Lanka's King Devanampiya Tissa. During this time, a sapling of the Bodhi Tree was brought to Sri Lanka and the first monasteries and Buddhist monuments were established.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 189,
"text": "Nevertheless, relations post-independence were affected by the Sri Lankan Civil War and by the failure of Indian intervention during the civil war as well as India's support for Tamil Tiger militants. India is Sri Lanka's only neighbour, separated by the Palk Strait; both nations occupy a strategic position in South Asia and have sought to build a common security umbrella in the Indian Ocean.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 190,
"text": "India-Sri Lanka relations have undergone a qualitative and quantitative transformation in the recent past. Political relations are close, trade and investments have increased dramatically, infrastructural linkages are constantly being augmented, defence collaboration has increased and there is a general, broad-based improvement across all sectors of bilateral cooperation. India was the first country to respond to Sri Lanka's request for assistance after the tsunami in December 2004. In July 2006, India evacuated 430 Sri Lankan nationals from Lebanon, first to Cyprus by Indian Navy ships and then to Delhi and Colombo by special Air India flights.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 191,
"text": "There exists a broad consensus within the Sri Lankan polity on the primacy of India in Sri Lanka's external relations matrix. Both the major political parties in Sri Lanka, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the United Nationalist Party have contributed to the rapid development of bilateral relations in the last ten years. Sri Lanka has supported India's candidature to the permanent membership of the UN Security Council.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 192,
"text": "Certain aspects of India's relations within the subcontinent are conducted through the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Its members other than India are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Established in 1985, SAARC encourages cooperation in agriculture, rural development, science and technology, culture, health, population control, narcotics control and anti-terrorism.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 193,
"text": "SAARC has intentionally stressed these \"core issues\" and avoided more divisive political issues, although the political dialogue is often conducted on the margins of SAARC meetings. In 1993, India and its SAARC partners signed an agreement to gradually lower tariffs within the region. Forward movement in SAARC has come to a standstill because of the tension between India and Pakistan, and the SAARC Summit originally scheduled for, but not held in, November 1999 has not been rescheduled. The Fourteenth SAARC Summit was held during 3–4 April 2007 in New Delhi. The 19th SAARC summit that was scheduled to be held in Islamabad was cancelled due to terrorist acts, particularly the Uri attack.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 194,
"text": "Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation is now an \"organization of member states\" that are littorals of the Bay of Bengal or adjacent to it. The BIMSTEC member states – Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Thailand – are among the major South and Southeast Asia countries dependent on the Bay of Bengal. India and some other countries, frustrated by the obstacles in SAARC's efforts to promote regional cooperation, have been working to make BIMSTEC the premier vehicle in this regard.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 195,
"text": "Brunei has a high commission in New Delhi, and India has a high commission in Bandar Seri Begawan. Both countries are full members of the Commonwealth of Nations.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 196,
"text": "Both nations have been in friendly relations.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 197,
"text": "The ties between Indonesia and India date back to the times of the Ramayana, \"Yawadvipa\" (Java) is mentioned in India's earliest epic, the Ramayana. Sugriva, the chief of Rama's army dispatched his men to Yawadvipa, the island of Java, in search of Sita. Indonesians had absorbed many aspects of Indian culture since almost two millennia ago. The most obvious trace is the large adoption of Sanskrit into the Indonesian language. Several Indonesian toponymy has Indian parallel or origin, such as Madura with Mathura, Serayu and Sarayu rivers, Kalingga from Kalinga Kingdom, and Ngayogyakarta from Ayodhya. Indianised Hindu–Buddhist kingdoms, such as Kalingga, Srivijaya, Mataram, Sunda, Kadiri, Singhasari and Majapahit were the predominant governments in Indonesia, and lasted from 200 to the 1500s, with the last remaining being in Bali. An example of profound Hindu-Buddhist influences in Indonesian history is the 9th-century Prambanan and Borobudur temples.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 198,
"text": "In 1950, the first President of Indonesia – Sukarno called upon the peoples of Indonesia and India to \"intensify the cordial relations\" that had existed between the two countries \"for more than 1000 years\" before they had been \"disrupted\" by colonial powers. In the spring of 1966, the foreign ministers of both countries began speaking again of an era of friendly relations. India had supported Indonesian independence and Nehru had raised the Indonesian question in the United Nations Security Council.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 199,
"text": "India has an embassy in Jakarta and Indonesia operates an embassy in Delhi. India regards Indonesia as a key member of ASEAN. Today, both countries maintain cooperative and friendly relations. India and Indonesia are one of the few (and also one of the largest) democracies in the Asian region which can be projected as a real democracy. Both nations had agreed to establish a strategic partnership. As fellow Asian democracies that share common values, it is natural for both countries to nurture and foster strategic alliances. Indonesia and India are member states of the G-20, the E7, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the United Nations.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 200,
"text": "In recent years, India has endeavoured to build relations, with this small Southeast Asian nation. They have strong military relations, and India shall be building an Airforce Academy in Laos.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 201,
"text": "India has a high commission in Kuala Lumpur, and Malaysia has a high commission in New Delhi. Both countries are full members of the Commonwealth of Nations and the Asian Union. India and Malaysia are also connected by various cultural and historical ties that date back to antiquity. The two countries are on friendly terms with each other and Malaysia harbours a small population of Indian immigrants. Mahathir bin Mohamad the fourth and longest-serving Prime Minister of Malaysia is of Indian origin. His father Mohamad Iskandar, is a Malayalee Muslim who migrated from Kerala and his mother Wan Tampawan, is a Malay.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 202,
"text": "Relations escalated when the Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad questioned the action of revocating the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and on CAA-NRC protests. The relations continue to be diminished, also during the palm oil export from Malaysia to India.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 203,
"text": "Even with the new government in power, currently, there seems no recovery, as former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad still favored Pakistan.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 204,
"text": "India established diplomatic relations after Burma's independence from Great Britain in 1948. For many years, Indo-Burmese relations were strong due to cultural links, flourishing commerce, common interests in regional affairs and the presence of a significant Indian community in Burma. India provided considerable support when Myanmar struggled with regional insurgencies. However, the overthrow of the democratic government by the Military of Burma led to strains in ties. Along with much of the world, India condemned the suppression of democracy and Myanmar ordered the expulsion of the Burmese Indian community, increasing its isolation from the world. Only China maintained close links with Myanmar while India supported the pro-democracy movement.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 205,
"text": "However, due to geopolitical concerns, India revived its relations and recognised the military junta ruling Myanmar in 1993, overcoming strains over drug trafficking, the suppression of democracy and the rule of the military junta in Myanmar. Myanmar is situated to the south of the states of Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India. and the proximity of the People's Republic of China gives strategic importance to Indo-Burmese relations. The Indo-Burmese border stretches over 1,600 kilometers and some insurgents in North-east India seek refuge in Myanmar. Consequently, India has been keen on increasing military cooperation with Myanmar in its counter-insurgency activities. In 2001, the Indian Army completed the construction of a major road along its border with Myanmar. India has also been building major roads, highways, ports and pipelines within Myanmar in an attempt to increase its strategic influence in the region and also to counter China's growing strides in the Indochina peninsula. Indian companies have also sought active participation in oil and natural gas exploration in Myanmar. In February 2007, India announced a plan to develop the Sittwe port, which would enable ocean access from Indian Northeastern states like Mizoram, via the Kaladan River.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 206,
"text": "India is a major customer of Burmese oil and gas. In 2007, Indian exports to Myanmar totaled US$185 million, while its imports from Myanmar were valued at around US$810 million, consisting mostly of oil and gas. India has granted US$100 million credit to fund highway infrastructure projects in Myanmar, while US$57 million has been offered to upgrade Burmese railways. A further US$27 million in grants has been pledged for road and rail projects. India is one of the few countries that has provided military assistance to the Burmese junta. However, there has been increasing pressure on India to cut some of its military supplies to Burma. Relations between the two remain close which was evident in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, when India was one of the few countries whose relief and rescue aid proposals were accepted by Myanmar's junta.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 207,
"text": "India maintains embassies in Rangoon and consulate generals in Mandalay.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 208,
"text": "Through the Srivijaya and Majapahit empires, Hindu influence has been visible in Philippine history from the 10th to 14th centuries. During the 18th century, there was robust trade between Manila with the Coromandel Coast and Bengal, involving Philippine exports of tobacco, silk, cotton, indigo, sugar cane and coffee.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 209,
"text": "Formal diplomatic relations between the Philippines and India were established on 16 November 1949. The first Philippine envoy to India was the late Foreign Secretary Narciso Ramos. Seven years after India's independence in 1947, the Philippines and India signed a Treaty of Friendship on 11 July 1952 in Manila to strengthen the friendly relations existing between the two countries. Soon after, the Philippine Legation in New Delhi was established and then elevated to an embassy. However, due to foreign policy differences as a result of the bipolar alliance structure of the Cold War, the development of bilateral relations was stunted. It was only in 1976 that relations started to normalise when Aditya Birla, one of India's successful industrialists, met with then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos to explore possibilities of setting up joint ventures in the Philippines. Today, like India, the Philippines is the leading voice-operated business process outsourcing (BPO) source in terms of revenue (US$5.7) and number of people (500,000) employed in the sector. In partnership with the Philippines, India has 20 IT/BPO companies in the Philippines. Philippines-India bilateral trade stood at US$986.60 million in 2009. In 2004 it was US$600 million. Both countries aim to reach US$1 billion by 2010. 60,000 Indians are living in the Philippines. The Philippines and India signed in October 2007 the Framework for Bilateral Cooperation which created the PH-India JCBC. It has working groups in trade, agriculture, tourism, health, and renewable energy, a regular policy consultation mechanism and security dialogue.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 210,
"text": "India and Singapore share long-standing cultural, commercial and strategic relations, with Singapore being a part of the \"Greater India\" cultural and commercial region. More than 300,000 people of Indian Tamil \"தமிழ்\" origin live in Singapore. Following its independence in 1965, Singapore was concerned with China-backed communist threats as well as domination from Malaysia and Indonesia and sought a close strategic relationship with India, which it saw as a counterbalance to Chinese influence and a partner in achieving regional security. Singapore had always been an important strategic trading post, giving India trade access to Maritime Southeast Asia and the Far East. Although the rival positions of both nations over the Vietnam War and the Cold War caused consternation between India and Singapore, their relationship expanded significantly in the 1990s; Singapore was one of the first to respond to the Indian Look East policy of expanding its economic, cultural and strategic ties in Southeast Asia to strengthen its standing as a regional power. Singapore, and especially, the Singaporean Foreign Minister, George Yeo, have taken an interest, in re-establishing the ancient Indian university, Nalanda University.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 211,
"text": "Singapore is the 8th largest source of investment in India and the largest among ASEAN member nations. It is also India's 9th biggest trading partner as of 2005–06. Its cumulative investment in India totals US$3 billion as of 2006 and is expected to rise to US$ 5 billion by 2010 and US$ 10 billion by 2015. India's economic liberalisation and its \"Look East\" policy have led to a major expansion in bilateral trade, which grew from US$2.2 billion in 2001 to US$ 9–10 billion in 2006 – a 400% growth in five years – and to US$50 billion by 2010. Singapore accounts for 38% of India's trade with ASEAN member nations and 3.4% of its total foreign trade. India's main exports to Singapore in 2005 included petroleum, gemstones, jewellery, and machinery and its imports from Singapore included electronic goods, organic chemicals and metals. More than half of Singapore's exports to India are basically \"re-exports\" – items that had been imported from India.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 212,
"text": "India's Indian Look East policy, saw India grow relations with ASEAN countries including Thailand, and Thailand's Look West policy, also saw it grow its relations with India. Both countries are members of BIMSTEC. Indian Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and Manmohan Singh, have visited Thailand, which was reciprocated by contemporary Thai Prime Ministers Chatichai Choonhavan, Thaksin Sinawatra, and Surayud Chulanont. In 2003, a Free Trade Agreement was signed between the two countries. India is the 13th largest investor in Thailand. The spheres of trade are in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, textiles, nylon, tyre cord, real estate, rayon fibres, paper-grade pulps, steel wires, and rods. However, IT services, and manufacturing, are the main spheres. Through Buddhism, India has culturally influenced Thailand. The Indian epics, Mahabharata, and Ramayana, are popular and are widely taught in schools as part of the curriculum in Thailand. The example can also be seen in temples around Thailand, where the story of Ramayana and renowned Indian folk stories are depicted on the temple wall. Thailand has become a big tourist destination for Indians.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 213,
"text": "Moreover, India and Thailand have been culturally linked for centuries and India has had a deep influence on Thai culture. There are a substantial number of words in Thai that are borrowed from Sanskrit, India's classical language. Pali, which was the language of Magadha and is a medium of Theravada, is another important root of Thai vocabulary. Buddhism, the major religion of Thailand, itself originates from India. The Hindu story of Ramayana is also well known throughout Thailand in the name Ramakien.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 214,
"text": "Both nations have friendly and collateral relations.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 215,
"text": "India supported Vietnam's independence from France, opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War and supported the unification of Vietnam. India established official diplomatic relations in 1972 and maintained friendly relations, especially in the wake of Vietnam's hostile relations with the People's Republic of China, which had become India's strategic rival.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 216,
"text": "India granted the \"Most favoured nation\" status to Vietnam in 1975 and both nations signed a bilateral trade agreement in 1978 and the Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (BIPPA) on 8 March 1997. In 2007, a fresh joint declaration was issued during the state visit of the Prime Minister of Vietnam Nguyen Tan Dung. Bilateral trade has increased rapidly since the liberalisation of the economies of both Vietnam and India. India is the 13th-largest exporter to Vietnam, with exports having grown steadily from US$11.5 million in 1985–86 to US$395.68 million by 2003. Vietnam's exports to India rose to US$180 million, including agricultural products, handicrafts, textiles, electronics and other goods. Between 2001 and 2006, the volume of bilateral trade expanded at 20–30% per annum to reach $1 billion by 2006. Continuing the rapid pace of growth, bilateral trade is expected to rise to $2 billion by 2008, two years ahead of the official target. India and Vietnam have also expanded cooperation in information technology, education and collaboration of the respective national space programmes. Direct air links and lax visa regulations have been established to bolster tourism.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 217,
"text": "India and Vietnam are members of the Mekong–Ganga Cooperation, created to develop to enhance close ties between India and nations of Southeast Asia. Vietnam has supported India's bid to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and join the Indo-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). In the 2003 joint declaration, India and Vietnam envisaged creating an \"Arc of Advantage and Prosperity\" in Southeast Asia; to this end, Vietnam has backed a more important relationship and role between India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its negotiation of an Indo–ASEAN free trade agreement. India and Vietnam have also built strategic partnerships, including extensive cooperation in developing nuclear power, enhancing regional security and fighting terrorism, transnational crime and drug trafficking.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 218,
"text": "India's interaction with ASEAN during the Cold War was very limited. India declined to get associated with ASEAN in the 1960s when full membership was offered even before the grouping was formed.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 219,
"text": "It is only with the formulation of the Look East policy in the last decade (1992), India started giving this region due importance in the foreign policy. India became a sectoral dialogue partner with ASEAN in 1992, a full dialogue partner in 1995, a member of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in 1996, and a summit-level partner (on par with China, Japan and Korea) in 2002.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 220,
"text": "The first India–ASEAN Business Summit was held in New Delhi in October 2002. The then Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee addressed this meeting and since then this business summit has become an annual feature before the India–ASEAN Summits, as a forum for networking and exchange of business experiences between policymakers and business leaders from ASEAN and India.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 221,
"text": "Four India-ASEAN Summits, first in 2002 at Phnom Penh (Cambodia), second in 2003 at Bali, Indonesia, third in 2004 at Vientiane, Laos, and the fourth in 2005 at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, have taken place.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 222,
"text": "The following agreements have been entered into with ASEAN:",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 223,
"text": "The following proposals were announced by the Prime Minister at the 4th ASEAN-India Summit:",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 224,
"text": "The ASEAN region has an abundance of natural resources and significant technological skills. These provide a natural base for the integration between ASEAN and India in both trade and investment. The present level of bilateral trade with ASEAN of nearly US$18 billion is reportedly increasing by about 25% per year. India hopes to reach the level of US$30 billion by 2007. India is also improving its relations with the help of other policy decisions like offers of lines of credit, better connectivity through the air (open skies policy), and rail and road links.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 225,
"text": "India established diplomatic relations with Armenia in December 1992. It wasn't recognised by some countries including Pakistan, which most of the nations did. As of the earliest days of the silk route, there have been strong cultural, moral and ancient other traditional relations among the nations. It fully supports India's bid for a permanent seat in UNSC and even completely supports India on Kashmir conflicts. There exists a small community of Armenians in India while there is also a small community of Indians.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 226,
"text": "India has an embassy in Baku and Azerbaijan has an embassy in New Delhi. Both have been connected through ancient cultural links and trade routes (especially the Silk Route).",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 227,
"text": "India is a close ally of Bahrain, the Kingdom along with its GCC partners are (according to Indian officials) among the most prominent backers of India's bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and Bahraini officials have urged India to play a greater role in international affairs. For instance, over concerns about Iran's nuclear programme Bahrain's Crown Prince appealed to India to play an active role in resolving the crisis.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 228,
"text": "Ties between India and Bahrain go back generations, with many of Bahrain's most prominent figures having close connections: poet and constitutionalist Ebrahim Al-Arrayedh grew up in Bombay, while 17th-century Bahraini theologians Sheikh Salih Al-Karzakani and Sheikh Ja'far bin Kamal al-Din were influential figures in the Kingdom of Golkonda and the development of Shia thought in the sub-continent.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 229,
"text": "Bahraini politicians have sought to enhance these long-standing ties, with Parliamentary Speaker Khalifa Al Dhahrani in 2007 leading a delegation of parliamentarians and business leaders to meet the then Indian President Pratibha Patil, the then opposition leader L K Advani, and take part in training and media interviews. Politically, it is easier for Bahrain's politicians to seek training and advice from India than it is from the United States or other Western alternatives.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 230,
"text": "Adding further strength to the ties, Sheikh Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa visited India during which MOUs and bilateral deals worth $450 million were approved. India expressed its support for Bahrain's bid for a non-permanent seat in the UNSC in 2026–27.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 231,
"text": "India supported Cyprus during its struggle for independence from British colonial rule. India supported the Greeks in Cyprus during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and lobbied for the international recognition of the Government of Nicosia as the sole legal representative of the entire nation. India has consistently supported and voted for a peaceful resolution of the Cyprus dispute at the United Nations.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 232,
"text": "Independent India and Iran established diplomatic links on 15 March 1950. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iran withdrew from CENTO and dissociated itself from US-friendly countries, including Pakistan, which automatically meant an improved relationship with the Republic of India.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 233,
"text": "Currently, the two countries have friendly relations in many areas. There are significant trade ties, particularly in crude oil imports into India and diesel exports to Iran. Iran frequently objected to Pakistan's attempts to draft anti-India resolutions at international organisations such as the OIC. India welcomed Iran's inclusion as an observer state in the SAARC regional organisation. Lucknow continues to be a major centre of Shiite culture and Persian study in the subcontinent.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 234,
"text": "In the 1990s, India and Iran both supported the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against the Taliban regime. They continue to collaborate in supporting the broad-based anti-Taliban government led by Hamid Karzai and backed by the United States.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 235,
"text": "However, one complex issue in Indo-Iran relations is the issue of Iran's nuclear programme. In this intricate issue, India tries to make a delicate balance. According to Rejaul Laskar, an Indian expert on international relations, \"India's position on Iran's nuclear programme has been consistent, principled and balanced, and makes an endeavour to reconcile Iran's quest for energy security with the international community's concerns on proliferation. So, while India acknowledges and supports Iran's ambitions to achieve energy security and in particular, its quest for peaceful use of nuclear energy, it is also India's principled position that Iran must meet all its obligations under international law, particularly its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and other such treaties to which it is a signatory\"",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 236,
"text": "Following an attack on an Israeli diplomat in India in February 2012, the Delhi Police contended that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had some involvement in the attack. This was subsequently confirmed in July 2012, after a report by the Delhi Police found evidence that members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had been involved in the 13 February bomb attack in the capital.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 237,
"text": "Iraq was one of the few countries in the Middle East with which India established diplomatic relations at the embassy level immediately after its independence in 1947. Both nations signed the \"Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Friendship\" in 1952 and an agreement of cooperation on cultural affairs in 1954. India was amongst the first to recognise the Ba'ath Party-led government, and Iraq remained neutral during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. However, Iraq sided alongside other Persian Gulf states in supporting Pakistan against India during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, which saw the creation of Bangladesh. The eight-year-long Iran–Iraq War caused a steep decline in trade and commerce between the two nations.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 238,
"text": "During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, India remained neutral but permitted refuelling for US aircraft. It opposed UN sanctions on Iraq, but the period of war and Iraq's isolation further diminished India's commercial and diplomatic ties. From 1999 onwards, Iraq and India began to work towards a stronger relationship. Iraq had supported India's right to conduct nuclear tests following its tests of five nuclear weapons on 11 and 13 May 1998. In 2000, the then-Vice-President of Iraq Taha Yassin Ramadan visited India, and on 6 August 2002 President Saddam Hussein conveyed Iraq's \"unwavering support\" to India over the Kashmir conflict with Pakistan. India and Iraq established joint ministerial committees and trade delegations to promote extensive bilateral cooperation. Although initially disrupted during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, diplomatic and commercial ties between India and the new democratic government of Iraq have since been normalised.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 239,
"text": "The establishment of Israel at the end of World War II was a complex issue. Based on its own experience during partition, when 14 million people were displaced and an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 people were killed in Punjab Province, India had recommended a single state, as did Iran and Yugoslavia (later to undergo its genocidal partition). The state could allocate Arab- and Jewish-majority provinces to prevent the partition of historic Palestine and prevent widespread conflict. But, the final UN resolution recommended the partition of Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states based on religious and ethnic majorities. India opposed this in the final vote as it did not agree with the concept of partition based on religion.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 240,
"text": "Due to the security threat from a US-backed Pakistan and its nuclear programme in the 1980s, Israel and India started a clandestine relationship that involved cooperation between their respective intelligence agencies. Israel shared India's concerns about the growing danger posed by Pakistan and nuclear proliferation to Iran and other Arab states.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 241,
"text": "Since the establishment of full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, India has improved its relationship with the Jewish state. India is regarded as Israel's strongest ally in Asia, and Israel is India's second-largest arms supplier. Since India achieved its independence in 1947, it has supported Palestinian self-determination. India recognised Palestine's statehood following Palestine's declaration on 18 November 1988 and Indo-Palestinian relations was first established in 1974. This has not adversely affected India's improved relations with Israel.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 242,
"text": "India entertained the Israeli Prime Minister in a visit in 2003, and Israel has entertained Indian dignitaries such as Finance Minister Jaswant Singh in diplomatic visits. India and Israel collaborate in scientific and technological endeavours. Israel's Minister for Science and Technology has expressed interest in collaborating with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) towards using satellites to better manage land and other resources. Israel has also expressed interest in participating in ISRO's Chandrayaan Mission involving an uncrewed mission to the moon. On 21 January 2008, India successfully launched an Israeli spy satellite into orbit from the Sriharikota space station in southern India.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 243,
"text": "Israel and India share intelligence on terrorist groups. They have developed close defence and security ties since establishing diplomatic relations in 1992. India has bought more than $5 billion worth of Israeli equipment since 2002. In addition, Israel is training Indian military units and in 2008 was discussing an arrangement to give Indian commandos instruction in counter-terrorist tactics and urban warfare. In December 2008, Israel and India signed a memorandum to set up an Indo-Israel Legal Colloquium to facilitate discussions and exchange programmes between judges and jurists of the two countries.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 244,
"text": "Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, India stated that the Israeli use of force was \"disproportionate and excessive\".",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 245,
"text": "The India-Israel relationship has been very close and warm under the premiership of Narendra Modi since 2014. In 2017, he was the first ever Prime Minister of India to visit Israel.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 246,
"text": "India and Lebanon enjoy cordial and friendly relations based on many complementarities such as a political system based on parliamentary democracy, non-alignment, human rights, commitment to a just world order, regional and global peace, a liberal market economy and a vibrant entrepreneurial spirit. India has a peacekeeping force as part of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). One infantry battalion is deployed in Lebanon and about 900 personnel are stationed in the Eastern part of Southern Lebanon. The force also provided non-patrol aid to citizens. India and Lebanon have had very good relations since the 1950s.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 247,
"text": "India–Oman relations are foreign relations between India and the Sultanate of Oman. India has an embassy in Muscat, Oman. The Indian consulate was opened in Muscat in February 1955 and five years later it was upgraded to a consulate general and later developed into a full-fledged embassy in 1971. The first Ambassador of India arrived in Muscat in 1973. Oman established its embassy in New Delhi in 1972 and a consulate general in Mumbai in 1976.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 248,
"text": "$5.6 bn Oman-India energy pipeline plans progressing: Fox Petroleum Group envisions a roughly five-year timeframe for the execution of the pipeline project.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 249,
"text": "Ajay Kumar, the chairman and managing director of Fox Petroleum, based in New Delhi, which is an associate company of Fox Petroleum FZC in the UAE, said that Mr. Modi had \"fired the best weapon of economic development and growth\". \"He has given a red carpet for global players to invest in India,\" Mr. Kumar added. \"It will boost all sectors of the industry – especially for small-scale manufacturing units and heavy industries too.\"",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 250,
"text": "",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 251,
"text": "Bilateral relations between India and Saudi Arabia have strengthened considerably owing to cooperation in regional affairs and trade. Saudi Arabia is the one of largest suppliers of oil to India, which is one of the top seven trading partners and the 5th biggest investor in Saudi Arabia.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 252,
"text": "India was one of the first nations to establish ties with the Third Saudi State. During the 1930s, India heavily funded Nejd through financial subsidies.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 253,
"text": "India's strategic relations with Saudi Arabia have been affected by the latter's close ties with Pakistan. Saudi Arabia supported Pakistan's stance on the Kashmir conflict during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 at the expense of its relations with India. The Soviet Union's close relations with India also served as a source of consternation. During the Persian Gulf War (1990–91), India officially maintained neutrality. Saudi Arabia's close military and strategic ties with Pakistan have also been a source of continuing strain.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 254,
"text": "Since the 1990s, both nations have taken steps to improve ties. Saudi Arabia has supported granting observer status to India in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and has expanded its cooperation with India to fight terrorism. In January 2006, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made a special visit to India, becoming the first Saudi monarch in 51 years to do so. The Saudi king and former Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh signed an agreement forging a strategic energy partnership that was termed the \"Delhi Declaration\". The pact provides for a \"reliable, stable and increased volume of crude oil supplies to India through long-term contracts.\" Both nations also agreed on joint ventures and the development of oil and natural gas in public and private sectors. An Indo-Saudi joint declaration in the Indian capital New Delhi described the king's visit as \"heralding a new era in India-Saudi Arabia relations\".",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 255,
"text": "Bilateral relations between India and Syria are historic and the two have ancient civilizational ties. Both countries were on the Silk Road through which civilizational exchanges took place for centuries. Syriac Christianity, originating in ancient Syria, spread further to the East and created the first Christian communities in ancient India. The ancient Syriac language among the Syrian Christians of Kerala was also brought to Kerala by St Thomas in the 1st century CE. Even today the language continues to be taught in colleges and universities in Kerala.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 256,
"text": "A common nationalism and secular orientation, membership of NAM and similar perceptions on many issues further strengthened the bond between the two states. India supported \"Syria's legitimate right to regain the occupied Golan Heights\". In turn, this was reciprocated with Syrian recognition that Kashmir is a bilateral issue as well as general support of India's concerns and even candidature at various international forums.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 257,
"text": "Due to controversial issues such as Turkey's close relationship with Pakistan, relations between the two countries have often been blistered at certain times, but better at others. India and Turkey's relationship alters from unsureness to collaboration when the two nations work together to combat terrorism in Central and South Asia, and the Middle East. India and Turkey are also connected by history, seeing as they have known each other since the days of the Ottoman Empire, and seeing as India was one of the countries to send aid to Turkey following its war of independence. The Indian real estate firm GMR has invested in and is working towards the modernisation of Istanbul's Sabiha Gökçen International Airport.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 258,
"text": "The relations took a nose-dive after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke against India on the Kashmir issue and supported Pakistan, during his address at United Nations General Assembly after Pakistan PM Imran Khan, in September 2019. In February 2020, he visited Islamabad and held talks with Imran Khan, on \"improving and bolding the relations with Islamabad\". At the end of the month, during the riots in Delhi and CAA-NRC protests in India, he criticized the government for its policies. He also criticized the move of the Indian Government on the Galwan Valley skirmishes with China on LAC.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 259,
"text": "India–United Arab Emirates relations refer to the bilateral relations that exist between the Republic of India and the United Arab Emirates. After the creation of the Federation in 1971, India-UAE relations flourished. Today UAE and India share political, economic and cultural links. There are over a million Indians in the United Arab Emirates, being by far the largest migrant group in the country.[1] A large Indian expatriate community resides and engages in the UAE in economically productive activities and has played a significant role in the evolution of the UAE. In 2008–09, India emerged as the largest trade partner of the UAE with bilateral trade between the two countries exceeding US$44.5 billion. [9] UAE and India are each other's main trading partners. The trade totals over $75 billion (AED275.25 billion).",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 260,
"text": "India and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf enjoy strong cultural and economic ties. This is reflected in the fact that more than 50% of the oil consumed by India comes from the Persian Gulf countries and Indian nationals form the largest expatriate community in the Arabian peninsula. The annual remittance by Indian expatriates in the region amounted to US$20 billion in 2007. India is one of the largest trading partners of the CCASG with non-oil trade between India and Dubai alone amounting to US$19 billion in 2007. The Persian Gulf countries have also played an important role in addressing India's energy security concerns, with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait regularly increasing their oil supply to India to meet the country's rising energy demand. In 2005, Kuwait increased its oil exports to India by 10% increasing the net oil trade between the two to US$4.5 billion. In 2008, Qatar decided to invest US$5 billion in India's energy sector.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 261,
"text": "India has maritime security arrangements in place with Oman and Qatar. In 2008, a landmark defence pact was signed, under which India committed its military assets to protect \"Qatar from external threats\". There has been progress in a proposed deep-sea gas pipeline from Qatar, via Oman, to India.",
"title": "Asia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 262,
"text": "Austria–India relations refers to the bilateral ties between Austria and India. Indo-Austrian relations were established in May 1949 by the first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru and the Chancellor of Austria Leopold Figl. Historically, Indo-Austrian ties have been particularly strong and India intervened in June 1953 in Austria's favour whilst negotiations were going on with the Soviet Union about the Austrian State Treaty. There is a fully functioning Indian embassy in Vienna, Austria's capital, which is concurrently accredited to the United Nations offices in the city. Austria is represented in India by its embassy and Trade Commission in New Delhi, India's capital, as well as honorary consulates in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Goa.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 263,
"text": "Belarus has an embassy in New Delhi. Since 14 May 1992, India has an embassy in Minsk.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 264,
"text": "Belgium has an embassy in New Delhi, consulates in Chennai and Mumbai, and an honorary consulate in Kolkata. India has an embassy in Brussels.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 265,
"text": "Bulgaria has an embassy in New Delhi and an honorary consulate in Kolkata. India has an embassy in Sofia.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 266,
"text": "Since February 1995, Croatia has an embassy in New Delhi and an honorary consulate in Mumbai. Since 28 April 1996, India has an embassy in Zagreb.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 267,
"text": "Czech-Indian relations were established in 1921 by a consulate in Bombay. The Czech Republic has an embassy in New Delhi. Consulates of the Czech Republic in India are in Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. India has an embassy in Prague.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 268,
"text": "Denmark has an embassy in New Delhi, and India has an embassy in Copenhagen.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 269,
"text": "Tranquebar, a town in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, was a Danish colony in India from 1620 to 1845. It is spelled Trankebar or Tranquebar in Danish, which comes from the native Tamil, Tarangambadi, meaning \"place of the singing waves\". It was sold, along with the other Danish settlements in mainland India, most notably Serampore (now in West Bengal), to Great Britain in 1845. The Nicobar Islands were also colonised by Denmark until sold to the British in 1868, who made them part of the British Indian Empire.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 270,
"text": "After Independence in 1947, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's visit to Denmark in 1957 laid the foundation for a friendly relationship between India and Denmark that has endured ever since. The bilateral relations between India and Denmark are cordial and friendly, based on synergies in political, economic, academic and research fields. There have been periodic high-level visits between the two countries.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 271,
"text": "Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Prime Minister of Denmark, accompanied by a large business delegation, paid a state visit to India from 4 to 8 February 2008. He visited Infosys, Biocon and IIM Bangalore in Bangalore and Agra. He launched an 'India Action Plan', which called for strengthening of the political dialogue, strengthening of cooperation in trade and investments, research in science and technology, energy, climate and environment, culture, education, student exchanges and attracting skilled manpower and IT experts to Denmark for short periods. The two countries signed an Agreement for the establishment of a Bilateral Joint Commission for Cooperation.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 272,
"text": "In July 2012, the Government of India decided to scale down its diplomatic ties with Denmark after that country's refusal to appeal in their Supreme Court against a decision of its lower court rejecting the extradition of Purulia arms drop case prime accused Kim Davy a.k.a. Niels Holck. Agitated over Denmark's refusal to act on India's repeated requests to appeal in their apex court to facilitate Davy's extradition to India, the government issued a circular directing all senior officials not to meet or entertain any Danish diplomat posted in India.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 273,
"text": "India's first recognition of Estonia came on 22 September 1921 when the former had just acquired membership in the League of Nations. India re-recognised Estonia on 9 September 1991 and diplomatic relations were established on 2 December of the same year in Helsinki. Neither country has a resident ambassador. Estonia is represented in India by an Embassy in New Delhi one honorary consulate in Mumbai. India is represented in Estonia through its embassy in Helsinki (Finland) and an honorary consulate in Tallinn.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 274,
"text": "France and India established diplomatic relations before India's independence from the British Empire on 17 February 1947. France's Indian possessions were returned to India after a treaty of cession was signed by the two countries in May 1956. On 16 August 1962, India and France exchanged the instruments of ratification under which France ceded to India full sovereignty over the territories it held. Pondicherry and the other enclaves of Karaikal, Mahe and Yanam came to be administered as the Union Territory of Puducherry on 1 July 1963.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 275,
"text": "France, Russia and Israel were the only countries that did not condemn India's decision to go nuclear in 1998. In 2003, France became the largest supplier of nuclear fuel and technology to India and remains a large military and economic trade partner. India's candidacy for permanent membership in the UN Security Council has found very strong support from former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The Indian Government's decisions to purchase French Scorpène-class submarines worth US$3 billion and 43 Airbus aircraft for Air India worth US$2.5 billion have further cemented the strategic, military and economic cooperation between India and France.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 276,
"text": "France's decision to ban schoolchildren from wearing headdresses and veils had the unintended consequence of affecting Sikh children who have been refused entry into public schools. The Indian Government, citing the historic traditions of the Sikh community, has requested French authorities to review the situation to not exclude Sikh children from education.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 277,
"text": "President Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande visited India in January 2008 and 2016 respectively as the Chief Guest of the annual Republic Day parade in New Delhi. France was the first country to sign a nuclear energy cooperation agreement with India; this was done during Prime Minister Singh's visit, following the waiver by the Nuclear Suppliers Group. During the Bastille Day celebrations on 14 July 2009, a detachment of 400 Indian troops marched alongside the French troops and the then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the guest of honour.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 278,
"text": "India has an embassy in Helsinki. Finland has an embassy in New Delhi and three honorary consulates in Kolkata, Chennai, and Mumbai.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 279,
"text": "During the Cold War India maintained diplomatic relations with both West Germany and East Germany. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the reunification of Germany, relations have further improved.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 280,
"text": "Germany is India's largest trade partner in Europe. Between 2004 and 2013, Indo-German trade grew in volume but dropped in importance. According to Indian Ministry of Commerce MX data: Total trade between India and Germany was $5.5 billion (3.8% share of Indian trade and ranked 6) in 2004 and $21.6 billion (2.6% share of Indian trade and ranked 9) in 2013. Indian exports to Germany were $2.54 billion (3.99% ranked 6) in 2004 and $7.3billion (2.41% ranked 10) in 2013. Indian imports from Germany were $2.92 billion (3.73% ranked 6) in 2004 and $14.33 billion (2.92% ranked 10) in 2013.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 281,
"text": "Indo-German ties are transactional. The strategic relationship between Germany and India suffers from sustained anti-Asian sentiment, institutionalized discrimination against minority groups, and xenophobic incidents against Indians in Germany. The 2007 Mügeln mob attack on Indians and the 2015 Leipzig University internship controversy have clouded the predominantly commercial-oriented relationship between the two countries. Stiff competition between foreign manufactured goods within the Indian market has seen machine tools, automotive parts and medical supplies from German Mittelstand ceding ground to high-technology imports manufactured by companies located in ASEAN & BRICS countries. The Volkswagen emissions scandal drew the spotlight on corrupt behaviour in German boardrooms and brought back memories of the HDW bribery scandal surrounding the procurement of Shishumar-class submarines by the Indian Navy. The India-Germany strategic relationship is limited by the insignificance of German geopolitical influence in Asian affairs. Germany has no strategic footprint in Asia. Germany like India is working towards gaining permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 282,
"text": "For the Ancient Greeks \"India\" (Greek: Ινδία) meant only the upper Indus until the time of Alexander the Great. Afterwards, \"India\" meant to the Greeks most of the northern half of the Indian subcontinent. The Greeks referred to the Indians as \"Indói\" (Greek: Ἰνδοί), literally meaning \"the people of the Indus River\". Indians called the Greeks Yonas or \"Yavanas\" from Ionians.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 283,
"text": "Indo-Greek kingdoms were founded by the successor of Alexander the Great. (Greek conquests in India) The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea was a manual written in Greek for navigators who carried trade between Roman Empire and other regions, including ancient India. It gives detailed information about the ports, routes and commodities. The Greek ethnographer and explorer of the Hellenistic period, Megasthenes was the ambassador of Seleucus I in India. In his work, Indika (Greek: Ινδικά), he wrote the history of Indians and their culture. Megasthenes also mentioned the prehistoric arrival of the God Dionysus and Herakles (Megasthenes' Herakles) in India.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 284,
"text": "There is now tangible evidence indicating that the settlement of Greek merchants in Bengal must have begun as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century. Dimitrios Galanos (Greek: Δημήτριος Γαλανός, 1760–1833) was the earliest recorded Greek Indologist. His translations of Sanskrit texts into Greek made knowledge of the philosophical and religious ideas of India available to many Europeans. A \"Dimitrios Galanos\" Chair for Hellenic Studies was established at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India in September 2000.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 285,
"text": "In modern times, diplomatic relations between Greece and India were established in May 1950. The new Greek Embassy building in New Delhi was inaugurated on 6 February 2001. As of 2020, the relationship between the two countries is closer than ever and is considered historical and strategic by both parties.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 286,
"text": "The Indian embassy is located in Budapest.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 287,
"text": "Iceland and India established diplomatic relations in 1972. The Embassy of Iceland in London was accredited to India and the Embassy of India in Oslo, Norway, was accredited to Iceland. However, it was only after 2003 that the two countries began close diplomatic and economic relationships. In 2003, President of Iceland Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson visited India on a diplomatic mission. This was the first visit by an Icelandic President to India. During the visit, Iceland pledged support to New Delhi's candidature for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council thus becoming the first Nordic country to do so. This was followed by an official visit of President of India A. P. J. Abdul Kalam to Iceland in May 2005. Following this, a new embassy of Iceland was opened in New Delhi on 26 February 2006. Soon, an Indian Navy team visited Iceland on a friendly mission. Gunnar Pálsson is the ambassador of Iceland to India. The Embassy's area of accreditation, apart from India includes Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Seychelles, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius and Nepal. India appointed S. Swaminathan as the first resident ambassador to Iceland in March 2008.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 288,
"text": "Indo-Irish relations picked up steam during their respective campaigns for independence from the British Empire. Political relations between the two states have largely been based on socio-cultural ties, although political and economic ties have also helped build relations. Indo-Irish relations were greatly strengthened by Pandit Nehru, Éamon de Valera, Rabindranath Tagore, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and, above all, Annie Besant. Politically, relations have not been cold or warm. Mutual benefit has led to economic ties that are fruitful for both states. Visits by government leaders have kept relations cordial at regular intervals.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 289,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 25 March 1948",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 290,
"text": "India maintains an embassy in Rome and a consulate-general in Milan. Italy has an embassy in New Delhi, and consulate-generals in Mumbai and Calcutta.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 291,
"text": "Indo-Italian relations have historically been cordial. In recent times, their state has mirrored the political fortunes of Sonia Maino-Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of the Indian National Congress and de facto leader of the UPA government of Manmohan Singh.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 292,
"text": "Since 2012 the relationship has been affected by the ongoing Enrica Lexie case: two Indian fishermen were killed on the Indian fishing vessel St. Antony as a result of gunshot wounds following a confrontation with the Italian oil tanker Enrica Lexie in international waters, off the Kerala coast.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 293,
"text": "After a period of tension, in 2017 Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni visited India and met his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi; they held extensive talks to strengthen the political cooperation and to boost the bilateral trade.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 294,
"text": "There are around 150,000 people of Indian Origins living in Italy. Around 1,000 Italian citizens reside in India, mostly working on behalf of Italian industrial groups.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 295,
"text": "Relations were established in 1947, following India's independence. Luxembourg operates an Embassy in New Delhi whilst India operates a Consulate General in Luxembourg City. Bilateral Trade stood at US$37 Million in 2014 and trade continues to grow every year. Diplomats from both countries have visited the other several times. In 2019, Luxembourg plans to host the annual Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and open an economic mission in India.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 296,
"text": "Malta opened a High Commission of Malta, New Delhi in New Delhi in 2007. Malta also has an honorary consulate in Mumbai. India is represented in Malta by its high commission in Valletta.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 297,
"text": "The Indian embassy to Moldova is accredited by Bucharest, Romania. Moldova maintains an honorary consulate in New Delhi and a consulate in Mumbai. Both countries have taken steps to deepen their ties, which are still maintained at a modest level. Both countries have been found supporting each other on many international platforms like the United Nations through reciprocal support mechanisms. India-Moldova bilateral trade has been rather modest.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 298,
"text": "India–Netherlands relations refer to foreign relations between India and the Netherlands. India maintains an embassy in The Hague, Netherlands and the Netherlands maintains an embassy in New Delhi and a consulate general in Mumbai. Both countries established diplomatic relations on 17 April 1947.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 299,
"text": "In 2012, Trond Giske met with Minister of Finance Pranab Mukherjee, to save Telenor's investments to put forth Norway's \"strong wish\" that there must not be a waiting period between the confiscation of telecom licenses and the re-sale of those. The leader of Telenor attended the meeting.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 300,
"text": "Mother Teresa, honoured in the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta became an Indian citizen in 1951, and was born in Skopje (in present-day North Macedonia) in 1910. India has an embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria jointly accredited to the Republic of Macedonia. Both Macedonia has an embassy in New Delhi and an honorary consulate in Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 301,
"text": "Historically, relations have generally been close and friendly, characterised by understanding and cooperation on the international front.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 302,
"text": "India and Portugal have a long history of relations ever since the Portuguese colonisation in British Raj.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 303,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations on 13 April 1947",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 304,
"text": "India's ties with the Russian Federation are time-tested and based on continuity, trust and mutual understanding. There is a national consensus in both countries on the need to preserve and strengthen India-Russia relations and further consolidate the strategic partnership between the two countries. A Declaration on Strategic Partnership was signed between present Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in October 2000 the partnership is also referred to asa \"special and privileged strategic partnership\".",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 305,
"text": "",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 306,
"text": "Russia and India have decided not to renew the 1971 Indo-Soviet Peace and Friendship Treaty and have sought to follow what both describe as a more pragmatic, less ideological relationship. Russian President Yeltsin's visit to India in January 1993 helped cement this new relationship. Ties have grown stronger with President Vladimir Putin's 2004 visit. The pace of high-level visits has since increased, as discussed in major defence purchases. Russia is working on the development of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant, which will be capable of producing 1000 MW of electricity. Gazprom is working for the development of oil and natural gas, in the Bay of Bengal. India and Russia, have collaborated extensively, on space technology. Other areas of collaboration include software, Ayurveda, etc. India and Russia, have set a determination in increasing trade to $10 billion. Cooperation between clothing manufacturers of the two countries continues to strengthen. India and Russia signed an agreement on joint efforts to increase investment and trade volumes in the textile industry in both countries. In signing the document included representatives of the Russian Union of Entrepreneurs of Textile and Light Industry Council and apparel exports of India (AEPC). A cooperation agreement provides, inter alia, the exchange of technology and know-how in textile production. For this purpose, a special Commission on Affairs Textile (Textile Communication Committee). Counter-terrorism techniques are also in place between Russia and India. In 2007 President Vladimir Putin was the guest of honour at the Republic Day celebration on 26 January 2007. 2008, has been declared by both countries as the Russia-India Friendship Year. Bollywood films are quite popular in Russia. The Indian public sector oil company ONGC bought Imperial Energy Corporation in 2008. In December 2008, during President Medvedev's visit, to New Delhi, India and Russia, signed a nuclear energy cooperation agreement. In March 2010, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed an additional 19 pacts with India which included civilian nuclear energy, space and military cooperation and the final sale of Admiral Gorshkov (Aircraft Carrier) along with MiG-29K fighter jets.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 307,
"text": "During the 2014 Crimean crisis, India refused to support American sanctions against Russia and one of India's national security advisers Shivshankar Menon was reported to have said \"There are legitimate Russian and other interests involved and we hope they are discussed and resolved.\"",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 308,
"text": "On 7 August 2014, India and Russia held a joint counter-terrorism exercise near the Moscow boundary with China and Mongolia. It involved the use of tanks and armoured vehicles.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 309,
"text": "India and Russia have so far conducted three rounds of INDRA exercises. The first exercise was carried out in 2005 in Rajasthan, followed by Prshkov in Russia. The third exercise was conducted at Chaubattia in Kumaon Hills in October 2010.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 310,
"text": "India has an embassy in Bucharest and an honorary consulate in Timișoara. Romania has an embassy in New Delhi and an honorary consulate in Kolkata.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 311,
"text": "India has an embassy in Bratislava and Slovakia has an embassy in New Delhi.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 312,
"text": "Diplomatic ties with Spain started in 1956. The first Spanish embassy was established in Delhi in 1958. India and Spain have had a cordial relationship with each other, especially after the establishment of democracy in Spain in 1978. Spain has been a main tourist spot for Indians over the years. Many presidents including Prathibha Patil visited Spain. The royal family of Spain has always liked the humble nature of the Indian government and they have thus paid several visits to India. There was no direct flight from India to Spain but it all changed in 1986 when Iberian travels started to fly directly from Mumbai to Madrid. However, it was stopped in 22 months. In 2006 this issue of the direct flight was reconsidered to improve the ties between India and Spain. \"Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara\" was shot completely in Spain in 2011. The tourism ministry of Spain is using this movie to promote tourism to Spain in India.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 313,
"text": "India is one of Switzerland's most important partners in Asia. Bilateral and political contacts are constantly developing, and trade and scientific cooperation between the two countries are flourishing. Switzerland was the first country in the World to sign a Friendship treaty with India in 1947.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 314,
"text": "Diplomatic relations between India and Ukraine were established in January 1992. The Indian Embassy in Kyiv was opened in May 1992 and Ukraine opened its mission in New Delhi in February 1993. The Consulate General of India in Odesa functioned from 1962 until its closure in March 1999.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 315,
"text": "UK& India has a high commission in London and two consulates-general in Birmingham and Edinburgh. The United Kingdom has a high commission in New Delhi and five deputy high commissions in Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Since 1947, India's relations with the United Kingdom have been bilateral, as well as through the Commonwealth of Nations framework. Although the Sterling Area no longer exists and the Commonwealth is much more an informal forum, India and the UK still have many enduring links. This is in part due to the significant number of people of Indian origin living in the UK. The large South Asian population in the UK results in steady travel and communication between the two countries. The British Raj allowed for both cultures to imbibe tremendously from the other. The English language and cricket are perhaps the two most evident British exports, whilst in the UK food from the Indian subcontinent is very popular. The United Kingdom's favourite food is often reported to be Indian cuisine, although no official study reports this.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 316,
"text": "Economically the relationship between Britain and India is also strong. India is the second largest investor in Britain after the US. Britain is also one of the largest investors in India.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 317,
"text": "Formal bilateral relations between India and Vatican City have existed since 12 June 1948. An Apostolic Delegation existed in India from 1881. The Holy See has a nunciature in New Delhi whilst India has accredited its embassy in Bern, Switzerland to the Holy See as well. India's Ambassador in Bern has traditionally been accredited to the Holy See.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 318,
"text": "The connections between the Catholic Church and India can be traced back to the apostle St. Thomas, who, according to tradition, came to India in 52 CE in the 9th century, the patriarch of the Nestorians in Persia sent bishops to India. There is a record of an Indian bishop visiting Rome in the early part of the 12th century.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 319,
"text": "The diplomatic mission was established as the Apostolic Delegation to the East Indies in 1881, and included Ceylon, and was extended to Malaca in 1889, then to Burma in 1920, and eventually included Goa in 1923. It was raised to an Internunciature by Pope Pius XII on 12 June 1948 and to a full Apostolic Nunciature by Pope Paul VI on 22 August 1967.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 320,
"text": "There have been three Papal visits to India. The first Pope to visit India was Pope Paul VI, who visited Mumbai in 1964 to attend the Eucharistic Congress. Pope John Paul II visited India in February 1986 and November 1999. Several Indian dignitaries have, from time to time, called on the Pope in the Vatican. These include Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1981 and Prime Minister I. K. Gujral in September 1987. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Prime Minister, called on the Pope in June 2000 during his official visit to Italy. Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat represented the country at the funeral of Pope John Paul II.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 321,
"text": "India was one of the first countries to develop relations with the European Union. The Joint Political Statement of 1993 and the 1994 Cooperation Agreement were the foundational agreements for the bilateral partnership. In 2004, India and European Union became \"Strategic Partners\". A Joint Action Plan was agreed upon in 2005 and updated in 2008. India-EU Joint Statements were published in 2009 and 2012 following the India-European Union Summits.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 322,
"text": "India and the European Commission initiated negotiations on a Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA) in 2007. Seven rounds of negotiations have been completed without reaching a Free Trade Agreement.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 323,
"text": "According to the Government of India, trade between India and the EU was $57.25 billion between April and October 2014 and stood at $101.5 billion for the fiscal period of 2014–2015.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 324,
"text": "The European Union is India's second largest trade bloc, accounting for around 20% of Indian trade (Gulf Cooperation Council is the largest trade bloc with almost $160 billion in total trade). India was the European Union's 8th largest trading partner in 2010. EU-India trade grew from €28.6 billion in 2003 to €72.7 billion in 2013.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 325,
"text": "France, Germany and UK collectively represent the major part of EU-India trade. Annual trade in commercial services tripled from €5.2billion in 2002 to €17.9 billion in 2010. Denmark, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands are the other more prominent European Union countries that trade with India.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 326,
"text": "India & Australia are both Commonwealth members. Sporting and cultural ties are significant. Australian cricketers often undertake large commercial ventures in India, enhanced with the IPL, and, to a lesser degree, the ICL. Bollywood productions enjoy a large market in Australia. In 2007, PM John Howard visited Mumbai and its entertainment industry, in efforts to increase Tourism in India to Australia.",
"title": "Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 327,
"text": "There are ongoing strategic attempts to form an \"Asian NATO\" with India, Japan, the US and Australia through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. During the first decade of the 21st century, the deepening of strategic relations between the two nations was prevented by a range of policy disagreements, such as India's refusal to sign the NPT and Australia's consequent refusal to provide India with uranium. Australia's parliament later allowed for the sale of uranium to India, following changes in government. Closer strategic cooperation between India, Japan, the United States and Australia also began during the second half of the 2010s, which some analysts attributed to a desire to balance Chinese initiatives in the Indo-Pacific region.",
"title": "Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 328,
"text": "Fiji's relationship with the Republic of India is often seen by observers against the backdrop of the sometimes tense relations between its indigenous people and the 44 percent of the population who are of Indian descent. India has used its influence in international forums such as the Commonwealth of Nations and United Nations on behalf of ethnic Indians in Fiji, lobbying for sanctions against Fiji in the wake of the 1987 coups and the 2000 coup, both of which removed governments, one dominated and one led, by Indo-Fijians.",
"title": "Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 329,
"text": "India and Nauru relations have been established since the island nation's independence in 1968. Leaders of both countries have been meeting on the sidelines of some of the international forums of which both nations are part such as the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement. India is one of the largest donors to the island by improving the education ministry and creating transportation and computer connections for the MPs and the Speaker of the Parliament of Nauru. There were numerous visits by the President of Nauru to the republic to further strengthen ties and cooperation.",
"title": "Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 330,
"text": "Bilateral relations were established between India and New Zealand in 1952. India has a High Commission in Wellington with an Honorary Consulate in Auckland, while New Zealand has a High Commission in New Delhi along with a Consulate in Mumbai, trade offices in New Delhi and Mumbai and an Honorary Consulate in Chennai.",
"title": "Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 331,
"text": "India–New Zealand relations were cordial but not extensive after Indian independence. More recently, New Zealand has shown interest in extending ties with India due to India's impressive GDP growth.",
"title": "Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 332,
"text": "India and Papua New Guinea established relations in 1975, following PNG's independence from Australia. Since 1975, relations have grown between the two nations. India maintains a High Commission in Port Moresby while Papua New Guinea maintains a High Commission in New Delhi In the 2010 Fiscal Year, Trade between the two nations grew to US$239 Million. PNG has sent numerous military officers and students to be trained and educated in India's academies and universities respectively. In recent years, India and PNG have signed an Economic Partnership Agreement, allowing India to further invest in PNG's infrastructure, telecommunications and educational institutions.",
"title": "Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 333,
"text": "Both countries established diplomatic relations in June 1970.",
"title": "Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 334,
"text": "India has its High Commission in Wellington, New Zealand, accredited to Vanuatu.",
"title": "Oceania"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 335,
"text": "Since its declaration of independence from Serbia, Kosovo sought recognition from the major of the world's most influential countries, among them, India. Indian views regarding the developments followed initial constringent to comment but dismissed to give recognition of statehood. There are almost negligible interactions.",
"title": "De Facto"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 336,
"text": "After India achieved its independence in 1947, the country moved to support Palestinian self-determination following the partition of India. In light of a religious partition between India and Pakistan, the impetus to boost ties with Muslim states around the world was a further tie to India's support for the Palestinian cause. Though it started to waver in the late 1980s and 1990s, as the recognition of Israel led to diplomatic exchanges, the ultimate support for the Palestinian cause, was still an underlying concern. Beyond the recognition of Palestinian self-determination ties have been largely dependent upon socio-cultural bonds, while economic relations were neither cold nor warm.",
"title": "De Facto"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 337,
"text": "India recognised Palestine's statehood following its declaration on 18 November 1988; although relations were first established in 1974.",
"title": "De Facto"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 338,
"text": "PNA President Abbas paid a State visit to India in September 2012, during which India pledged $10 million as aid. Indian officials said it was the third such donation, adding that New Delhi was committed to helping other development projects. India also pledged support to Palestine's bid for full and equal membership of the UN.",
"title": "De Facto"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 339,
"text": "India recognized the Republic of China (R.O.C) from 1947 to 1950. On 1 April 1950, India officially recognised the People's Republic of China (P.R.C) as \"China\" and continued to recognise the PRC's \"One China\" policy in which the island of Taiwan is a part of the Chinese territory. However, the bilateral relations between India and Taiwan have improved since the 1990s despite both nations not maintaining official diplomatic relations. Taiwan and India maintain non-governmental interaction via India-Taipei Association and Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre respectively. In July 2020, the Indian government appointed a top career diplomat, Joint Secretary Gourangalal Das, the former head of the U.S. division in India's Ministry of External Affairs, as its new envoy to Taiwan.",
"title": "De Facto"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 340,
"text": "India participates in the following international organisations:",
"title": "International organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 341,
"text": "India became independent within the British Commonwealth in August 1947 as the Dominion of India after the partition of India into India and the Dominion of Pakistan. King George VI, the last Emperor of India became the King of India with the Governor-General of India as his viceregal representative.",
"title": "International organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 342,
"text": "India became the very first Commonwealth republic on 26 January 1950, as a result of the London Declaration.",
"title": "International organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 343,
"text": "India played an important role in the multilateral movements of colonies and newly independent countries that developed into the Non-Aligned Movement. Nonalignment had its origins in India's colonial experience and the nonviolent Indian independence movement led by the Congress, which left India determined to be the master of its fate in an international system dominated politically by Cold War alliances and economically by Western capitalism and Soviet communism. The principles of nonalignment, as articulated by Nehru and his successors, were the preservation of India's freedom of action internationally through refusal to align India with any bloc or alliance, particularly those led by the United States or the Soviet Union; nonviolence and international cooperation as a means of settling international disputes. Nonalignment was a consistent feature of Indian foreign policy by the late 1940s and enjoyed strong, almost unquestioning support among the Indian elite.",
"title": "International organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 344,
"text": "The term \"Non-Alignment\" was coined by V K Menon in his speech at the UN in 1953 which was later used by Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru during his speech in 1954 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In this speech, Nehru described the five pillars to be used as a guide for China–India relations, which were first put forth by PRC Premier Zhou Enlai. Called Panchsheel (five restraints), these principles would later serve as the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement. The five principles were:",
"title": "International organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 345,
"text": "Jawaharlal Nehru's concept of nonalignment brought India considerable international prestige among newly independent states that shared India's concerns about the military confrontation between the superpowers and the influence of the former colonial powers. New Delhi used nonalignment to establish a significant role for itself as a leader of the newly independent world in such multilateral organisations as the United Nations (UN) and the Nonaligned Movement. The signing of the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation between India and the Soviet Union in 1971 and India's involvement in the internal affairs of its smaller neighbours in the 1970s and 1980s tarnished New Delhi's image as a nonaligned nation and led some observers to note that in practice, nonalignment applied only to India's relations with countries outside South Asia.",
"title": "International organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 346,
"text": "The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD, also known as the Quad) is an informal strategic dialogue between the United States, India, Japan and Australia that is maintained by talks between member countries. The dialogue was initiated in 2007 by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, with the support of American Vice President Dick Cheney, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The dialogue was paralleled by joint military exercises of an unprecedented scale, titled Exercise Malabar. The diplomatic and military arrangement was widely viewed as a response to increased Chinese economic and military power. On 12 March 2021, the first summit meeting was held virtually between U.S President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.",
"title": "International organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 347,
"text": "India was among the original members of the United Nations that signed the Declaration by United Nations at Washington on 1 January 1942 and also participated in the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco from 25 April to 26 June 1945. As a founding member of the United Nations, India strongly supports the purposes and principles of the UN and has made significant contributions to implementing the goals of the Charter and the evolution of the UN's specialised programmes and agencies. India is a charter member of the United Nations and participates in all of its specialised agencies and organisations. India has contributed troops to United Nations peacekeeping efforts in Korea, Egypt and the Congo in its earlier years and in Somalia, Angola, Haiti, Liberia, Lebanon and Rwanda in recent years, and more recently in the South Sudan conflict. India has been a member of the UN Security Council for eight terms (a total of 16 years). India is a member of the G4 group of nations who back each other in seeking a permanent seat on the security council and advocate in favour of the reformation of the UNSC. India is also part of the Group of 77.",
"title": "International organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 348,
"text": "Described by the WTO's former chief, Pascal Lamy, as one of the organisation's \"big brothers\", India was instrumental in bringing down the Doha Development Round of talks in 2008. It has played an important role in representing as many as 100 developing nations during WTO summits.",
"title": "International organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 349,
"text": "The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) had major repercussions for Indian foreign policy. Substantial trade with the former Soviet Union plummeted after the Soviet collapse and has yet to recover. Longstanding military supply relationships were similarly disrupted due to questions over financing, although Russia continues to be India's largest supplier of military systems and spare parts.",
"title": "Former"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 350,
"text": "The relationship with USSR was tested (and proven) during the 1971 war with Pakistan, which led to the subsequent liberation of Bangladesh. Soon after the victory of the Indian Armed Forces, one of the foreign delegates to visit India was Admiral S.G. Gorshkov, Chief of the Soviet Navy. During his visit to Mumbai (Bombay), he came on board INS Vikrant. During a conversation with Vice Admiral Swaraj Prakash, Gorshkov asked the Vice Admiral, \"Were you worried about a battle against the American carrier?\" He answered himself: \"Well, you had no reason to be worried, as I had a Soviet nuclear submarine trailing the American task force all the way into the Indian Ocean.\"",
"title": "Former"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 351,
"text": "India had formal relations with the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until 1992 with the Breakup of Yugoslavia.",
"title": "Former"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 352,
"text": "India's territorial disputes with neighbouring Pakistan and the People's Republic of China have played a crucial role in its foreign policy. India is also involved in minor territorial disputes with neighbouring Bangladesh, Nepal and Maldives. India currently maintains two manned stations in Antarctica but has made some unofficial territorial claims, which are yet to be clarified.",
"title": "Border disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 353,
"text": "India is involved in the following border disputes:",
"title": "Border disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 354,
"text": "Kalapani village of India is claimed by Nepal and Susta village in Nawalparasi district of Nepal is claimed by India. The dispute between India and Nepal involves about 75 km (30 sq mi) of area in Kalapani, where China, India, and Nepal meet. Indian forces occupied the area in 1962 after China and India fought their border war. Three villages are located in the disputed zone: Kuti [Kuthi, 30°19'N, 80°46'E], Gunji, and Knabe. India and Nepal disagree about how to interpret the 1816 Sugauli treaty between the British East India Company and Nepal, which delimited the boundary along the Maha Kali River (Sarda River in India). The dispute intensified in 1997 as the Nepali parliament considered a treaty on the hydroelectric development of the river. India and Nepal differ as to which stream constitutes the source of the river. Nepal regards the Limpiyadhura as the source; India claims the Lipu Lekh. Nepal has reportedly tabled an 1856 map from the British India Office to support its position. The countries have held several meetings about the dispute and discussed jointly surveying to resolve the issue. Although the Indo-Nepali dispute appears to be minor, it was aggravated in 1962 by tensions between China and India. Because the disputed area lies near the Sino-Indian frontier, it gains strategic value.",
"title": "Border disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 355,
"text": "Two regions are claimed by both India and China. Aksai Chin is in the disputed territory of Ladakh, at the junction of India, Tibet and Xinjiang, India claims the 38,000-square-kilometre territory, currently administered by China after Sino-Indian War. India also considers the cessation of Shaksam Valley to China by Pakistan as illegal and a part of its territory. Arunachal Pradesh is a state of India in the country's northeast, bordering on Bhutan, Burma and China's Tibet, though it is under Indian administration since 1914, China claims the 90,000-square-kilometre area as South Tibet. Also, the boundary between the North Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand with China's Tibet is not properly demarcated with some portions under the de facto administration of India.",
"title": "Border disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 356,
"text": "List of countries commemorating anniversaries of diplomatic relations with India through philately",
"title": "Diplomatic relations with India through philately"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 357,
"text": "Planned philatelic issues on diplomatic relations that did not materialize.",
"title": "Diplomatic relations with India through philately"
}
]
| India, officially the Republic of India, has full diplomatic relations with 201 states, including Palestine, the Holy See, and Niue. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is the government agency responsible for the conduct of foreign relations of India. With the world's third largest military expenditure, second largest armed force, fifth largest economy by GDP nominal rates and third largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity, India is a prominent regional power and a rising superpower. According to the MEA, the main purposes of Indian diplomacy include protecting India's national interests, promoting friendly relations with other states, and providing consular services to "foreigners and Indian nationals abroad." In recent decades, India has pursued an expansive foreign policy, including the neighborhood-first policy embodied by SAARC as well as the Look East policy to forge more extensive economic and strategic relationships with other East Asian countries. It has also maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity, which involves its "no first use" nuclear policy and its neutral stance on the Russo-Ukrainian War. India is a member of several intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations, the Asian Development Bank, BRICS, and the G-20. which is widely considered the main economic locus of emerging and developed nations. India exerts a salient influence as the founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. India has also played an important and influential role in other international organisations, such as the East Asia Summit, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund (IMF), G8+5 and IBSA Dialogue Forum. India is also a member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. As a former British colony, India is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and continues to maintain relationships with other Commonwealth countries. | 2001-09-15T04:06:44Z | 2023-12-31T03:03:28Z | [
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14,605 | Indian religions | Indian religions as a percentage of world population
Indian religions, sometimes also termed Dharmic religions or Indic religions, are the religions that originated in the Indian subcontinent. These religions, which include Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, are also classified as Eastern religions. Although Indian religions are connected through the history of India, they constitute a wide range of religious communities, and are not confined to the Indian subcontinent.
Evidence attesting to prehistoric religion in the Indian subcontinent derives from scattered Mesolithic rock paintings. The Harappan people of the Indus Valley civilisation, which lasted from 3300 to 1300 BCE (mature period 2600–1900 BCE), had an early urbanized culture which predates the Vedic religion.
The documented history of Indian religions begins with the historical Vedic religion, the religious practices of the early Indo-Iranians, which were collected and later redacted into the Vedas, as well as the Agamas of Dravidian origin. The period of the composition, redaction, and commentary of these texts is known as the Vedic period, which lasted from roughly 1750 to 500 BCE. The philosophical portions of the Vedas were summarized in Upanishads, which are commonly referred to as Vedānta, variously interpreted to mean either the "last chapters, parts of the Veda" or "the object, the highest purpose of the Veda". The early Upanishads all predate the Common Era, five of the eleven principal Upanishads were composed in all likelihood before 6th century BCE, and contain the earliest mentions of Yoga and Moksha.
The śramaṇa period between 800 and 200 BCE marks a "turning point between the Vedic Hinduism and Puranic Hinduism". The Shramana movement, an ancient Indian religious movement parallel to but separate from Vedic tradition, often defied many of the Vedic and Upanishadic concepts of soul (Atman) and the ultimate reality (Brahman). In 6th century BCE, the Shramnic movement matured into Jainism and Buddhism and was responsible for the schism of Indian religions into two main philosophical branches of astika, which venerates Veda (e.g., six orthodox schools of Hinduism) and nastika (e.g., Buddhism, Jainism, Charvaka, etc.). However, both branches shared the related concepts of Yoga, saṃsāra (the cycle of birth and death) and moksha (liberation from that cycle).
The Puranic Period (200 BCE – 500 CE) and Early Medieval period (500–1100 CE) gave rise to new configurations of Hinduism, especially bhakti and Shaivism, Shaktism, Vaishnavism, Smarta, and smaller groups like the conservative Shrauta.
The early Islamic period (1100–1500 CE) also gave rise to new movements. Sikhism was founded in the 15th century on the teachings of Guru Nanak and the nine successive Sikh Gurus in Northern India. The vast majority of its adherents originate in the Punjab region. During the period of British rule in India, a reinterpretation and synthesis of Hinduism arose, which aided the Indian independence movement.
Scottish historian James Mill, in his seminal work The History of British India (1817), distinguished three phases in the history of India, namely the Hindu, Muslim, and British periods. This periodisation has been criticised, for the misconceptions it has given rise to. Another periodisation is the division into "ancient, classical, medieval, and modern periods", although this periodization has also received criticism.
Romila Thapar notes that the division of Hindu-Muslim-British periods of Indian history gives too much weight to "ruling dynasties and foreign invasions", neglecting the social-economic history which often showed a strong continuity. The division in Ancient-Medieval-Modern overlooks the fact that the Muslim-conquests took place between the eight and the fourteenth century, while the south was never completely conquered. According to Thapar, a periodisation could also be based on "significant social and economic changes", which are not strictly related to a change of ruling powers.
Smart and Michaels seem to follow Mill's periodisation, while Flood and Muesse follow the "ancient, classical, mediaeval and modern periods" periodisation. An elaborate periodisation may be as follows:
The earliest religion followed by the peoples of the Indian subcontinent, including those of the Indus Valley and Ganges Valley, was likely local animism that did not have missionaries.
Evidence attesting to prehistoric religion in the Indian subcontinent derives from scattered Mesolithic rock paintings such as at Bhimbetka, depicting dances and rituals. Neolithic agriculturalists inhabiting the Indus River Valley buried their dead in a manner suggestive of spiritual practices that incorporated notions of an afterlife and belief in magic. Other South Asian Stone Age sites, such as the Bhimbetka rock shelters in central Madhya Pradesh and the Kupgal petroglyphs of eastern Karnataka, contain rock art portraying religious rites and evidence of possible ritualised music.
The religion and belief system of the Indus valley people have received considerable attention, especially from the view of identifying precursors to deities and religious practices of Indian religions that later developed in the area. However, due to the sparsity of evidence, which is open to varying interpretations, and the fact that the Indus script remains undeciphered, the conclusions are partly speculative and largely based on a retrospective view from a much later Hindu perspective. An early and influential work in the area that set the trend for Hindu interpretations of archaeological evidence from the Harrapan sites was that of John Marshall, who in 1931 identified the following as prominent features of the Indus religion: a Great Male God and a Mother Goddess; deification or veneration of animals and plants; symbolic representation of the phallus (linga) and vulva (yoni); and, use of baths and water in religious practice. Marshall's interpretations have been much debated, and sometimes disputed over the following decades.
One Indus valley seal shows a seated, possibly ithyphallic and tricephalic, figure with a horned headdress, surrounded by animals. Marshall identified the figure as an early form of the Hindu god Shiva (or Rudra), who is associated with asceticism, yoga, and linga; regarded as a lord of animals; and often depicted as having three eyes. The seal has hence come to be known as the Pashupati Seal, after Pashupati (lord of all animals), an epithet of Shiva. While Marshall's work has earned some support, many critics and even supporters have raised several objections. Doris Srinivasan has argued that the figure does not have three faces, or yogic posture, and that in Vedic literature Rudra was not a protector of wild animals. Herbert Sullivan and Alf Hiltebeitel also rejected Marshall's conclusions, with the former claiming that the figure was female, while the latter associated the figure with Mahisha, the Buffalo God and the surrounding animals with vahanas (vehicles) of deities for the four cardinal directions. Writing in 2002, Gregory L. Possehl concluded that while it would be appropriate to recognise the figure as a deity, its association with the water buffalo, and its posture as one of ritual discipline, regarding it as a proto-Shiva would be going too far. Despite the criticisms of Marshall's association of the seal with a proto-Shiva icon, it has been interpreted as the Tirthankara Rishabha by Jains and Vilas Sangave or an early Buddha by Buddhists. Historians like Heinrich Zimmer, Thomas McEvilley are of the opinion that there exists some link between first Jain Tirthankara Rishabha and Indus Valley civilisation.
Marshall hypothesized the existence of a cult of Mother Goddess worship based upon excavation of several female figurines, and thought that this was a precursor of the Hindu sect of Shaktism. However the function of the female figurines in the life of Indus Valley people remains unclear, and Possehl does not regard the evidence for Marshall's hypothesis to be "terribly robust". Some of the baetyls interpreted by Marshall to be sacred phallic representations are now thought to have been used as pestles or game counters instead, while the ring stones that were thought to symbolise yoni were determined to be architectural features used to stand pillars, although the possibility of their religious symbolism cannot be eliminated.
Many Indus Valley seals show animals, with some depicting them being carried in processions, while others show chimeric creations. One seal from Mohen-jodaro shows a half-human, half-buffalo monster attacking a tiger, which may be a reference to the Sumerian myth of such a monster created by goddess Aruru to fight Gilgamesh. Some seals show a man wearing a hat with two horns and a plant sitting on a throne with animals surrounding him. Some scholars theorize that this was a predecessor to Shiva wearing a hat worn by some Sumerian divine beings and kings.
In contrast to contemporary Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations, the Indus Valley lacks any monumental palaces, even though excavated cities indicate that the society possessed the requisite engineering knowledge. This may suggest that religious ceremonies, if any, may have been largely confined to individual homes, small temples, or the open air. Several sites have been proposed by Marshall and later scholars as possibly devoted to religious purpose, but at present only the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro is widely thought to have been so used, as a place for ritual purification. The funerary practices of the Harappan civilisation is marked by its diversity with evidence of supine burial; fractional burial in which the body is reduced to skeletal remains by exposure to the elements before final interment; and even cremation.
The documented history of Indian religions begins with the historical Vedic religion, the religious practices of the early Indo-Aryans, which were collected and later redacted into the Samhitas (usually known as the Vedas), four canonical collections of hymns or mantras composed in archaic Sanskrit. These texts are the central shruti (revealed) texts of Hinduism. The period of the composition, redaction, and commentary of these texts is known as the Vedic period, which lasted from roughly 1750 to 500 BCE.
The Vedic Period is most significant for the composition of the four Vedas, Brahmanas and the older Upanishads (both presented as discussions on the rituals, mantras and concepts found in the four Vedas), which today are some of the most important canonical texts of Hinduism, and are the codification of much of what developed into the core beliefs of Hinduism.
Some modern Hindu scholars use the "Vedic religion" synonymously with "Hinduism." According to Sundararajan, Hinduism is also known as the Vedic religion. Other authors state that the Vedas contain "the fundamental truths about Hindu Dharma" which is called "the modern version of the ancient Vedic Dharma" The Arya Samaj is recognize the Vedic religion as true Hinduism. Nevertheless, according to Jamison and Witzel,
... to call this period Vedic Hinduism is a contradiction in terms since Vedic religion is very different from what we generally call Hindu religion – at least as much as Old Hebrew religion is from medieval and modern Christian religion. However, Vedic religion is treatable as a predecessor of Hinduism."
The rishis, the composers of the hymns of the Rigveda, were considered inspired poets and seers.
The mode of worship was the performance of Yajna, sacrifices which involved sacrifice and sublimation of the havana sámagri (herbal preparations) in the fire, accompanied by the singing of Samans and 'mumbling' of Yajus, the sacrificial mantras. The sublime meaning of the word yajna is derived from the Sanskrit verb yaj, which has a three-fold meaning of worship of deities (devapujana), unity (saògatikaraña), and charity (dána). An essential element was the sacrificial fire – the divine Agni – into which oblations were poured, as everything offered into the fire was believed to reach God.
Central concepts in the Vedas are Satya and Rta. Satya is derived from Sat, the present participle of the verbal root as, "to be, to exist, to live". Sat means "that which really exists [...] the really existent truth; the Good", and Sat-ya means "is-ness". Rta, "that which is properly joined; order, rule; truth", is the principle of natural order which regulates and coordinates the operation of the universe and everything within it. "Satya (truth as being) and rita (truth as law) are the primary principles of Reality and its manifestation is the background of the canons of dharma, or a life of righteousness." "Satya is the principle of integration rooted in the Absolute, rita is its application and function as the rule and order operating in the universe." Conformity with Ṛta would enable progress whereas its violation would lead to punishment. Panikkar remarks:
Ṛta is the ultimate foundation of everything; it is "the supreme", although this is not to be understood in a static sense. [...] It is the expression of the primordial dynamism that is inherent in everything...."
The term rta is inherited from the Proto-Indo-Iranian religion, the religion of the Indo-Iranian peoples prior to the earliest Vedic (Indo-Aryan) and Zoroastrian (Iranian) scriptures. "Asha" is the Avestan language term (corresponding to Vedic language ṛta) for a concept of cardinal importance to Zoroastrian theology and doctrine. The term "dharma" was already used in Brahmanical thought, where it was conceived as an aspect of Rta.
Major philosophers of this era were Rishis Narayana, Kanva, Rishaba, Vamadeva, and Angiras.
During the Middle Vedic period, the mantras of the Yajurveda and the older Brahmana texts were composed. The Brahmans became powerful intermediairies.
Historical roots of Jainism in India is traced back to 9th-century BC with the rise of Parshvanatha and his non-violent philosophy.
The Vedic religion evolved into Hinduism and Vedanta, a religious path considering itself the 'essence' of the Vedas, interpreting the Vedic pantheon as a unitary view of the universe with 'God' (Brahman) seen as immanent and transcendent in the forms of Ishvara and Brahman. This post-Vedic systems of thought, along with the Upanishads and later texts like epics (namely Gita of Mahabharat), is a major component of modern Hinduism. The ritualistic traditions of Vedic religion are preserved in the conservative Śrauta tradition.
Since Vedic times, "people from many strata of society throughout the subcontinent tended to adapt their religious and social life to Brahmanic norms", a process sometimes called Sanskritization. It is reflected in the tendency to identify local deities with the gods of the Sanskrit texts.
During the time of the shramanic reform movements "many elements of the Vedic religion were lost". According to Michaels, "it is justified to see a turning point between the Vedic religion and Hindu religions".
The late Vedic period (9th to 6th centuries BCE) marks the beginning of the Upanisadic or Vedantic period. This period heralded the beginning of much of what became classical Hinduism, with the composition of the Upanishads, later the Sanskrit epics, still later followed by the Puranas.
Upanishads form the speculative-philosophical basis of classical Hinduism and are known as Vedanta (conclusion of the Vedas). The older Upanishads launched attacks of increasing intensity on the ritual. Anyone who worships a divinity other than the Self is called a domestic animal of the gods in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The Mundaka launches the most scathing attack on the ritual by comparing those who value sacrifice with an unsafe boat that is endlessly overtaken by old age and death.
Scholars believe that Parsva, the 23rd Jain tirthankara lived during this period in the 9th century BCE.
Jainism and Buddhism belong to the śramaṇa traditions. These religions rose into prominence in 700–500 BCE in the Magadha kingdom., reflecting "the cosmology and anthropology of a much older, pre-Aryan upper class of northeastern India", and were responsible for the related concepts of saṃsāra (the cycle of birth and death) and moksha (liberation from that cycle).
The shramana movements challenged the orthodoxy of the rituals. The shramanas were wandering ascetics distinct from Vedism. Mahavira, proponent of Jainism, and Buddha (c. 563-483), founder of Buddhism were the most prominent icons of this movement.
Shramana gave rise to the concept of the cycle of birth and death, the concept of samsara, and the concept of liberation. The influence of Upanishads on Buddhism has been a subject of debate among scholars. While Radhakrishnan, Oldenberg and Neumann were convinced of Upanishadic influence on the Buddhist canon, Eliot and Thomas highlighted the points where Buddhism was opposed to Upanishads. Buddhism may have been influenced by some Upanishadic ideas, it however discarded their orthodox tendencies. In Buddhist texts Buddha is presented as rejecting avenues of salvation as "pernicious views".
Jainism was established by a lineage of 24 enlightened beings culminating with Parshvanatha (9th century BCE) and Mahavira (6th century BCE).
The 24th Tirthankara of Jainism, Mahavira, stressed five vows, including ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (non-stealing), and aparigraha (non-attachment). Jain orthodoxy believes the teachings of the Tirthankaras predates all known time and scholars believe Parshva, accorded status as the 23rd Tirthankara, was a historical figure. The Vedas are believed to have documented a few Tirthankaras and an ascetic order similar to the shramana movement.
Buddhism was historically founded by Siddhartha Gautama, a Kshatriya prince-turned-ascetic, and was spread beyond India through missionaries. It later experienced a decline in India, but survived in Nepal and Sri Lanka, and remains more widespread in Southeast and East Asia.
Gautama Buddha, who was called an "awakened one" (Buddha), was born into the Shakya clan living at Kapilavastu and Lumbini in what is now southern Nepal. The Buddha was born at Lumbini, as emperor Ashoka's Lumbini pillar records, just before the kingdom of Magadha (which traditionally is said to have lasted from c. 546–324 BCE) rose to power. The Shakyas claimed Angirasa and Gautama Maharishi lineage, via descent from the royal lineage of Ayodhya.
Buddhism emphasises enlightenment (nibbana, nirvana) and liberation from the rounds of rebirth. This objective is pursued through two schools, Theravada, the Way of the Elders (practiced in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, SE Asia, etc.) and Mahayana, the Greater Way (practiced in Tibet, China, Japan, etc.). There may be some differences in the practice between the two schools in reaching the objective.
Both Jainism and Buddhism spread throughout India during the period of the Magadha empire.
Buddhism flourished during the reign of Ashoka of the Maurya Empire, who patronised Buddhist teachings and unified the Indian subcontinent in the 3rd century BCE. He sent missionaries abroad, allowing Buddhism to spread across Asia.
Jainism began its golden period during the reign of Emperor Kharavela of Kalinga in the 2nd century BCE.
The early Dravidian religion constituted of non-Vedic form of Hinduism in that they were either historically or are at present Āgamic. The Agamas are non-vedic in origin and have been dated either as post-vedic texts. or as pre-vedic oral compositions. The Agamas are a collection of Tamil and later Sanskrit scriptures chiefly constituting the methods of temple construction and creation of murti, worship means of deities, philosophical doctrines, meditative practices, attainment of sixfold desires and four kinds of yoga. The worship of tutelary deity, sacred flora and fauna in Hinduism is also recognized as a survival of the pre-Vedic Dravidian religion.
Ancient Tamil grammatical works Tolkappiyam, the ten anthologies Pattuppāṭṭu, the eight anthologies Eṭṭuttokai also sheds light on early religion of ancient Dravidians. Seyon was glorified as the red god seated on the blue peacock, who is ever young and resplendent, as the favored god of the Tamils. Sivan was also seen as the supreme God. Early iconography of Seyyon and Sivan and their association with native flora and fauna goes back to Indus Valley Civilization. The Sangam landscape was classified into five categories, thinais, based on the mood, the season and the land. Tolkappiyam, mentions that each of these thinai had an associated deity such Seyyon in Kurinji-the hills, Thirumaal in Mullai-the forests, and Kotravai in Marutham-the plains, and Wanji-ko in the Neithal-the coasts and the seas. Other gods mentioned were Mayyon and Vaali who were all assimilated into Hinduism over time. Dravidian linguistic influence on early Vedic religion is evident, many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language, the language of the Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE), which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian. This represents an early religious and cultural fusion or synthesis between ancient Dravidians and Indo-Aryans, which became more evident over time with sacred iconography, traditions, philosophy, flora, and fauna that went on to influence Hinduism, Buddhism, Charvaka, Sramana, and Jainism.
Throughout Tamilakam, a king was considered to be divine by nature and possessed religious significance. The king was 'the representative of God on earth' and lived in a "koyil", which means the "residence of a god". The Modern Tamil word for temple is koil. Titual worship was also given to kings. Modern words for god like "kō" ("king"), "iṟai" ("emperor"), and "āṇḍavar" ("conqueror") now primarily refer to gods. These elements were incorporated later into Hinduism like the legendary marriage of Shiva to Queen Mīnātchi who ruled Madurai or Wanji-ko, a god who later merged into Indra. Tolkappiyar refers to the Three Crowned Kings as the "Three Glorified by Heaven". In the Dravidian-speaking South, the concept of divine kingship led to the assumption of major roles by state and temple.
The cult of the mother goddess is treated as an indication of a society which venerated femininity. This mother goddess was conceived as a virgin, one who has given birth to all and one, typically associated with Shaktism. The temples of the Sangam days, mainly of Madurai, seem to have had priestesses to the deity, which also appear predominantly a goddess. In the Sangam literature, there is an elaborate description of the rites performed by the Kurava priestess in the shrine Palamutircholai. Among the early Dravidians the practice of erecting memorial stones Natukal or Hero Stone had appeared, and it continued for quite a long time after the Sangam age, down to about 16th century. It was customary for people who sought victory in war to worship these hero stones to bless them with victory.
Flood and Muesse take the period between 200 BCE and 500 BCE as a separate period, in which the epics and the first puranas were being written. Michaels takes a greater timespan, namely the period between 200 BCE and 1100 CE, which saw the rise of so-called "Classical Hinduism", with its "golden age" during the Gupta Empire.
According to Alf Hiltebeitel, a period of consolidation in the development of Hinduism took place between the time of the late Vedic Upanishad (c. 500 BCE) and the period of the rise of the Guptas (c. 320–467 CE), which he calls the "Hindus synthesis", "Brahmanic synthesis", or "orthodox synthesis". It develops in interaction with other religions and peoples:
The emerging self-definitions of Hinduism were forged in the context of continuous interaction with heterodox religions (Buddhists, Jains, Ajivikas) throughout this whole period, and with foreign people (Yavanas, or Greeks; Sakas, or Scythians; Pahlavas, or Parthians; and Kusanas, or Kushans) from the third phase on [between the Mauryan empire and the rise of the Guptas].
The end of the Vedantic period around the 2nd century CE spawned a number of branches that furthered Vedantic philosophy, and which ended up being seminaries in their own right. Prominent among these developers were Yoga, Dvaita, Advaita, and the medieval Bhakti movement.
The smriti texts of the period between 200 BCE–100 CE proclaim the authority of the Vedas, and "nonrejection of the Vedas comes to be one of the most important touchstones for defining Hinduism over and against the heterodoxies, which rejected the Vedas." Of the six Hindu darsanas, the Mimamsa and the Vedanta "are rooted primarily in the Vedic sruti tradition and are sometimes called smarta schools in the sense that they develop smarta orthodox current of thoughts that are based, like smriti, directly on sruti." According to Hiltebeitel, "the consolidation of Hinduism takes place under the sign of bhakti." It is the Bhagavadgita that seals this achievement. The result is a universal achievement that may be called smarta. It views Shiva and Vishnu as "complementary in their functions but ontologically identical".
In earlier writings, Sanskrit 'Vedānta' simply referred to the Upanishads, the most speculative and philosophical of the Vedic texts. However, in the medieval period of Hinduism, the word Vedānta came to mean the school of philosophy that interpreted the Upanishads. Traditional Vedānta considers shabda pramāṇa (scriptural evidence) as the most authentic means of knowledge, while pratyakṣa (perception) and anumāna (logical inference) are considered to be subordinate (but valid).
The systematisation of Vedantic ideas into one coherent treatise was undertaken by Badarāyana in the Brahma Sutras which was composed around 200 BCE. The cryptic aphorisms of the Brahma Sutras are open to a variety of interpretations. This resulted in the formation of numerous Vedanta schools, each interpreting the texts in its own way and producing its own sub-commentaries.
After 200 CE several schools of thought were formally codified in Indian philosophy, including Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimāṃsā and Advaita Vedanta. Hinduism, otherwise a highly polytheistic, pantheistic or monotheistic religion, also tolerated atheistic schools. The thoroughly materialistic and anti-religious philosophical Cārvāka school that originated around the 6th century BCE is the most explicitly atheistic school of Indian philosophy. Cārvāka is classified as a nāstika ("heterodox") system; it is not included among the six schools of Hinduism generally regarded as orthodox. It is noteworthy as evidence of a materialistic movement within Hinduism. Our understanding of Cārvāka philosophy is fragmentary, based largely on criticism of the ideas by other schools, and it is no longer a living tradition. Other Indian philosophies generally regarded as atheistic include Samkhya and Mimāṃsā.
Two of Hinduism's most revered epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana were compositions of this period. Devotion to particular deities was reflected from the composition of texts composed to their worship. For example, the Ganapati Purana was written for devotion to Ganapati (or Ganesh). Popular deities of this era were Shiva, Vishnu, Durga, Surya, Skanda, and Ganesh (including the forms/incarnations of these deities).
In the latter Vedantic period, several texts were also composed as summaries/attachments to the Upanishads. These texts collectively called as Puranas allowed for a divine and mythical interpretation of the world, not unlike the ancient Hellenic or Roman religions. Legends and epics with a multitude of gods and goddesses with human-like characteristics were composed.
The Gupta period marked a watershed of Indian culture: the Guptas performed Vedic sacrifices to legitimize their rule, but they also patronized Buddhism, which continued to provide an alternative to Brahmanical orthodoxy. Buddhism continued to have a significant presence in some regions of India until the 12th century.
There were several Buddhistic kings who worshiped Vishnu, such as the Gupta Empire, Pala Empire, Chalukyas, Somavanshi, and Satavahana. Buddhism survived followed by Hindus.
Tantrism originated in the early centuries CE and developed into a fully articulated tradition by the end of the Gupta period. According to Michaels this was the "Golden Age of Hinduism" (c. 320–650 CE), which flourished during the Gupta Empire (320 to 550 CE) until the fall of the Harsha Empire (606 to 647 CE). During this period, power was centralised, along with a growth of far distance trade, standardizarion of legal procedures, and general spread of literacy. Mahayana Buddhism flourished, but the orthodox Brahmana culture began to be rejuvenated by the patronage of the Gupta Dynasty. The position of the Brahmans was reinforced, and the first Hindu temples emerged during the late Gupta age.
After the end of the Gupta Empire and the collapse of the Harsha Empire, power became decentralised in India. Several larger kingdoms emerged, with "countless vasal states". The kingdoms were ruled via a feudal system. Smaller kingdoms were dependent on the protection of the larger kingdoms. "The great king was remote, was exalted and deified", as reflected in the Tantric Mandala, which could also depict the king as the centre of the mandala.
The disintegration of central power also lead to regionalisation of religiosity, and religious rivalry. Local cults and languages were enhanced, and the influence of "Brahmanic ritualistic Hinduism" was diminished. Rural and devotional movements arose, along with Shaivism, Vaisnavism, Bhakti, and Tantra, though "sectarian groupings were only at the beginning of their development". Religious movements had to compete for recognition by the local lords. Buddhism lost its position, and began to disappear in India.
In the same period Vedanta changed, incorporating Buddhist thought and its emphasis on consciousness and the working of the mind. Buddhism, which was supported by the ancient Indian urban civilisation lost influence to the traditional religions, which were rooted in the countryside. In Bengal, Buddhism was even prosecuted. But at the same time, Buddhism was incorporated into Hinduism, when Gaudapada used Buddhist philosophy to reinterpret the Upanishads. This also marked a shift from Atman and Brahman as a "living substance" to "maya-vada", where Atman and Brahman are seen as "pure knowledge-consciousness". According to Scheepers, it is this "maya-vada" view which has come to dominate Indian thought.
Between 400 and 1000 CE Hinduism expanded as the decline of Buddhism in India continued. Buddhism subsequently became effectively extinct in India but survived in Nepal and Sri Lanka.
The Bhakti movement began with the emphasis on the worship of God, regardless of one's status – whether priestly or laypeople, men or women, higher social status or lower social status. The movements were mainly centered on the forms of Vishnu (Rama and Krishna) and Shiva. There were however popular devotees of this era of Durga. The best-known proponents of this movement were the Alvars and the Nayanars from southern India. The most popular Shaiva teacher of the south was Basava, while of the north it was Gorakhnath. Female saints include figures like Akkamadevi, Lalleshvari and Molla.
The Alvars (Tamil: ஆழ்வார்கள், āḻvārkaḷ [aːɻʋaːr], those immersed in god) were the Tamil poet-saints of south India, who lived between the 6th and 9th centuries CE and espoused "emotional devotion" or bhakti to Vishnu-Krishna in their songs of longing, ecstasy and service. The most popular Vaishnava teacher of the south was Ramanuja, while of the north it was Ramananda.
Several important icons were women. For example, within the Mahanubhava sect, the women outnumbered the men, and administration was many times composed mainly of women. Mirabai is the most popular female saint in India.
Sri Vallabha Acharya (1479–1531) is a very important figure from this era. He founded the Shuddha Advaita (Pure Non-dualism) school of Vedanta thought.
According to The Centre for Cultural Resources and Training,
Vaishanava bhakti literature was an all-India phenomenon, which started in the 6th–7th century A.D. in the Tamil-speaking region of South India, with twelve Alvar (one immersed in God) saint-poets, who wrote devotional songs. The religion of Alvar poets, which included a woman poet, Andal, was devotion to God through love (bhakti), and in the ecstasy of such devotions they sang hundreds of songs which embodied both depth of feeling and felicity of expressions.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, Turks and Afghans invaded parts of northern India and established the Delhi Sultanate in the former Rajput holdings. The subsequent Slave dynasty of Delhi managed to conquer large areas of northern India, approximately equal in extent to the ancient Gupta Empire, while the Khalji dynasty conquered most of central India but were ultimately unsuccessful in conquering and uniting the subcontinent. The Sultanate ushered in a period of Indian cultural renaissance. The resulting "Indo-Muslim" fusion of cultures left lasting syncretic monuments in architecture, music, literature, religion, and clothing.
During the 14th to 17th centuries, a great Bhakti movement swept through central and northern India, initiated by a loosely associated group of teachers or Sants. Ramananda, Ravidas, Srimanta Sankardeva, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Vallabha Acharya, Sur, Meera, Kabir, Tulsidas, Namdev, Dnyaneshwar, Tukaram, and other mystics spearheaded the Bhakti movement in the North while Annamacharya, Bhadrachala Ramadas, Tyagaraja, and others propagated Bhakti in the South. They taught that people could cast aside the heavy burdens of ritual and caste, and the subtle complexities of philosophy, and simply express their overwhelming love for God. This period was also characterized by a spate of devotional literature in vernacular prose and poetry in the ethnic languages of the various Indian states or provinces.
Lingayatism is a distinct Shaivite tradition in India, established in the 12th century by the philosopher and social reformer Basavanna. The adherents of this tradition are known as Lingayats. The term is derived from Lingavantha in Kannada, meaning "one who wears Ishtalinga on their body" (Ishtalinga is the representation of the God). In Lingayat theology, Ishtalinga is an oval-shaped emblem symbolising Parasiva, the absolute reality. Contemporary Lingayatism follows a progressive reform–based theology propounded, which has great influence in South India, especially in the state of Karnataka.
According to Nicholson, already between the 12th and 16th century,
... certain thinkers began to treat as a single whole the diverse philosophival teachings of the Upanishads, epics, Puranas, and the schools known retrospectively as the "six systems" (saddarsana) of mainstream Hindu philosophy.
The tendency of "a blurring of philosophical distinctions" has also been noted by Mikel Burley. Lorenzen locates the origins of a distinct Hindu identity in the interaction between Muslims and Hindus, and a process of "mutual self-definition with a contrasting Muslim other", which started well before 1800. Both the Indian and the European thinkers who developed the term "Hinduism" in the 19th century were influenced by these philosophers.
Sikhism originated in 15th-century Punjab, Delhi Sultanate (present-day India and Pakistan) with the teachings of Nanak and nine successive gurus. The principal belief in Sikhism is faith in Vāhigurū— represented by the sacred symbol of ēk ōaṅkār [meaning one god]. Sikhism's traditions and teachings are distinctly associated with the history, society and culture of the Punjab. Adherents of Sikhism are known as Sikhs (students or disciples) and number over 27 million across the world.
According to Gavin Flood, the modern period in India begins with the first contacts with western nations around 1500. The period of Mughal rule in India saw the rise of new forms of religiosity.
In the 19th century, under influence of the colonial forces, a synthetic vision of Hinduism was formulated by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Mahatma Gandhi. These thinkers have tended to take an inclusive view of India's religious history, emphasising the similarities between the various Indian religions.
The modern era has given rise to dozens of Hindu saints with international influence. For example, Brahma Baba established the Brahma Kumaris, one of the largest new Hindu religious movements which teaches the discipline of Raja Yoga to millions. Representing traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Prabhupada founded the Hare Krishna movement, another organisation with a global reach. In late 18th-century India, Swaminarayan founded the Swaminarayan Sampraday. Anandamurti, founder of the Ananda Marga, has also influenced many worldwide. Through the international influence of all of these new Hindu denominations, many Hindu practices such as yoga, meditation, mantra, divination, and vegetarianism have been adopted by new converts.
Jainism continues to be an influential religion and Jain communities live in Indian states Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. Jains authored several classical books in different Indian languages for a considerable period of time.
The Dalit Buddhist movement also referred to as Navayana is a 19th- and 20th-century Buddhist revival movement in India. It received its most substantial impetus from B. R. Ambedkar's call for the conversion of Dalits to Buddhism in 1956 and the opportunity to escape the caste-based society that considered them to be the lowest in the hierarchy.
According to Tilak, the religions of India can be interpreted "differentially" or "integrally", that is by either highlighting the differences or the similarities. According to Sherma and Sarma, western Indologists have tended to emphasise the differences, while Indian Indologists have tended to emphasise the similarities.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism share certain key concepts, which are interpreted differently by different groups and individuals. Until the 19th century, adherents of those various religions did not tend to label themselves as in opposition to each other, but "perceived themselves as belonging to the same extended cultural family."
The spectrum of these religions are called Dharmic religions because of their overlap over the core concept of Dharma. It has various meanings depending on the context. For example it could mean duty, righteousness, spiritual teachings, conduct, etc.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism share the concept of moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth. They differ however on the exact nature of this liberation.
Common traits can also be observed in ritual. The head-anointing ritual of abhiseka is of importance in three of these distinct traditions, excluding Sikhism (in Buddhism it is found within Vajrayana). Other noteworthy rituals are the cremation of the dead, the wearing of vermilion on the head by married women, and various marital rituals. In literature, many classical narratives and purana have Hindu, Buddhist or Jain versions. All four traditions have notions of karma, dharma, samsara, moksha and various forms of Yoga.
Rama is a heroic figure in all of these religions. In Hinduism he is the God-incarnate in the form of a princely king; in Buddhism, he is a Bodhisattva-incarnate; in Jainism, he is the perfect human being. Among the Buddhist Ramayanas are: Vessantarajataka, Reamker, Ramakien, Phra Lak Phra Lam, Hikayat Seri Rama, etc. There also exists the Khamti Ramayana among the Khamti tribe of Asom wherein Rama is an Avatar of a Bodhisattva who incarnates to punish the demon king Ravana (B.Datta 1993). The Tai Ramayana is another book retelling the divine story in Asom.
Critics point out that there exist vast differences between and even within the various Indian religions. All major religions are composed of innumerable sects and subsects.
Indian mythology also reflects the competition between the various Indian religions. A popular story tells how Vajrapani kills Mahesvara, a manifestation of Shiva depicted as an evil being. The story occurs in several scriptures, most notably the Sarvatathagatatattvasamgraha and the Vajrapany-abhiseka-mahatantra. According to Kalupahana, the story "echoes" the story of the conversion of Ambattha. It is to be understood in the context of the competition between Buddhist institutions and Shaivism.
Āstika and nāstika are variously defined terms sometimes used to categorise Indian religions. The traditional definition, followed by Adi Shankara, classifies religions and persons as āstika and nāstika according to whether they accept the authority of the main Hindu texts, the Vedas, as supreme revealed scriptures, or not. By this definition, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Purva Mimamsa and Vedanta are classified as āstika schools, while Charvaka is classified as a nāstika school. Buddhism and Jainism are also thus classified as nāstika religions since they do not accept the authority of the Vedas.
Another set of definitions—notably distinct from the usage of Hindu philosophy—loosely characterise āstika as "theist" and nāstika as "atheist". By these definitions, Sāṃkhya can be considered a nāstika philosophy, though it is traditionally classed among the Vedic āstika schools. From this point of view, Buddhism and Jainism remain nāstika religions.
Buddhists and Jains have disagreed that they are nastika and have redefined the phrases āstika and nāstika in their own view. Jains assign the term nastika to one who is ignorant of the meaning of the religious texts, or those who deny the existence of the soul was well known to the Jainas.
Frawley and Malhotra use the term "Dharmic traditions" to highlight the similarities between the various Indian religions. According to Frawley, "all religions in India have been called the Dharma", and can be
... put under the greater umbrella of "Dharmic traditions" which we can see as Hinduism or the spiritual traditions of India in the broadest sense.
According to Paul Hacker, as described by Halbfass, the term "dharma"
... assumed a fundamentally new meaning and function in modern Indian thought, beginning with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in the nineteenth century. This process, in which dharma was presented as an equivalent of, but also a response to, the western notion of "religion", reflects a fundamental change in the Hindu sense of identity and in the attitude toward other religious and cultural traditions. The foreign tools of "religion" and "nation" became tools of self-definition, and a new and precarious sense of the "unity of Hinduism" and of national as well as religious identity took root.
The emphasis on the similarities and integral unity of the dharmic faiths has been criticised for neglecting the vast differences between and even within the various Indian religions and traditions. According to Richard E. King it is typical of the "inclusivist appropriation of other traditions" of Neo-Vedanta:
The inclusivist appropriation of other traditions, so characteristic of neo-Vedanta ideology, appears on three basic levels. First, it is apparent in the suggestion that the (Advaita) Vedanta philosophy of Sankara (c. eighth century CE) constitutes the central philosophy of Hinduism. Second, in an Indian context, neo-Vedanta philosophy subsumes Buddhist philosophies in terms of its own Vedantic ideology. The Buddha becomes a member of the Vedanta tradition, merely attempting to reform it from within. Finally, at a global level, neo-Vedanta colonizes the religious traditions of the world by arguing for the centrality of a non-dualistic position as the philosophia perennis underlying all cultural differences.
The "Council of Dharmic Faiths" (UK) regards Zoroastrianism, while not originating in the Indian subcontinent, also as a Dharmic religion.
The inclusion of Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs within Hinduism is part of the Indian legal system. The 1955 Hindu Marriage Act "[defines] as Hindus all Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs and anyone who is not a Christian, Muslim, Parsee (Zoroastrian) or Jew". And the Indian Constitution says that "reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion".
In a judicial reminder, the Indian Supreme Court observed Sikhism and Jainism to be sub-sects or special faiths within the larger Hindu fold, and that Jainism is a denomination within the Hindu fold. Although the Indian Government counted Jains in India as a major religious community right from the first Census conducted in 1873, after independence in 1947 Sikhs and Jains were not treated as national minorities. In 2005, the Supreme Court of India declined to issue a writ of Mandamus granting Jains the status of a religious minority throughout India. The Court however left it to the respective states to decide on the minority status of Jain religion.
However, some individual states have over the past few decades differed on whether Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs are religious minorities or not, by either pronouncing judgments or passing legislation. One example is the judgment passed by the Supreme Court in 2006, in a case pertaining to the state of Uttar Pradesh, which declared Jainism to be indisputably distinct from Hinduism, but mentioned that, "The question as to whether the Jains are part of the Hindu religion is open to debate. However, the Supreme Court also noted various court cases that have held Jainism to be a distinct religion.
Another example is the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Bill, that is an amendment to a legislation that sought to define Jains and Buddhists as denominations within Hinduism. Ultimately on 31 July 2007, finding it not in conformity with the concept of freedom of religion as embodied in Article 25 (1) of the Constitution, Governor Naval Kishore Sharma returned the Gujarat Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Bill, 2006 citing the widespread protests by the Jains as well as Supreme Court's extrajudicial observation that Jainism is a "special religion formed on the basis of quintessence of Hindu religion by the Supreme Court". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Indian religions as a percentage of world population",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Indian religions, sometimes also termed Dharmic religions or Indic religions, are the religions that originated in the Indian subcontinent. These religions, which include Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, are also classified as Eastern religions. Although Indian religions are connected through the history of India, they constitute a wide range of religious communities, and are not confined to the Indian subcontinent.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Evidence attesting to prehistoric religion in the Indian subcontinent derives from scattered Mesolithic rock paintings. The Harappan people of the Indus Valley civilisation, which lasted from 3300 to 1300 BCE (mature period 2600–1900 BCE), had an early urbanized culture which predates the Vedic religion.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The documented history of Indian religions begins with the historical Vedic religion, the religious practices of the early Indo-Iranians, which were collected and later redacted into the Vedas, as well as the Agamas of Dravidian origin. The period of the composition, redaction, and commentary of these texts is known as the Vedic period, which lasted from roughly 1750 to 500 BCE. The philosophical portions of the Vedas were summarized in Upanishads, which are commonly referred to as Vedānta, variously interpreted to mean either the \"last chapters, parts of the Veda\" or \"the object, the highest purpose of the Veda\". The early Upanishads all predate the Common Era, five of the eleven principal Upanishads were composed in all likelihood before 6th century BCE, and contain the earliest mentions of Yoga and Moksha.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The śramaṇa period between 800 and 200 BCE marks a \"turning point between the Vedic Hinduism and Puranic Hinduism\". The Shramana movement, an ancient Indian religious movement parallel to but separate from Vedic tradition, often defied many of the Vedic and Upanishadic concepts of soul (Atman) and the ultimate reality (Brahman). In 6th century BCE, the Shramnic movement matured into Jainism and Buddhism and was responsible for the schism of Indian religions into two main philosophical branches of astika, which venerates Veda (e.g., six orthodox schools of Hinduism) and nastika (e.g., Buddhism, Jainism, Charvaka, etc.). However, both branches shared the related concepts of Yoga, saṃsāra (the cycle of birth and death) and moksha (liberation from that cycle).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Puranic Period (200 BCE – 500 CE) and Early Medieval period (500–1100 CE) gave rise to new configurations of Hinduism, especially bhakti and Shaivism, Shaktism, Vaishnavism, Smarta, and smaller groups like the conservative Shrauta.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The early Islamic period (1100–1500 CE) also gave rise to new movements. Sikhism was founded in the 15th century on the teachings of Guru Nanak and the nine successive Sikh Gurus in Northern India. The vast majority of its adherents originate in the Punjab region. During the period of British rule in India, a reinterpretation and synthesis of Hinduism arose, which aided the Indian independence movement.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Scottish historian James Mill, in his seminal work The History of British India (1817), distinguished three phases in the history of India, namely the Hindu, Muslim, and British periods. This periodisation has been criticised, for the misconceptions it has given rise to. Another periodisation is the division into \"ancient, classical, medieval, and modern periods\", although this periodization has also received criticism.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Romila Thapar notes that the division of Hindu-Muslim-British periods of Indian history gives too much weight to \"ruling dynasties and foreign invasions\", neglecting the social-economic history which often showed a strong continuity. The division in Ancient-Medieval-Modern overlooks the fact that the Muslim-conquests took place between the eight and the fourteenth century, while the south was never completely conquered. According to Thapar, a periodisation could also be based on \"significant social and economic changes\", which are not strictly related to a change of ruling powers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Smart and Michaels seem to follow Mill's periodisation, while Flood and Muesse follow the \"ancient, classical, mediaeval and modern periods\" periodisation. An elaborate periodisation may be as follows:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The earliest religion followed by the peoples of the Indian subcontinent, including those of the Indus Valley and Ganges Valley, was likely local animism that did not have missionaries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Evidence attesting to prehistoric religion in the Indian subcontinent derives from scattered Mesolithic rock paintings such as at Bhimbetka, depicting dances and rituals. Neolithic agriculturalists inhabiting the Indus River Valley buried their dead in a manner suggestive of spiritual practices that incorporated notions of an afterlife and belief in magic. Other South Asian Stone Age sites, such as the Bhimbetka rock shelters in central Madhya Pradesh and the Kupgal petroglyphs of eastern Karnataka, contain rock art portraying religious rites and evidence of possible ritualised music.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The religion and belief system of the Indus valley people have received considerable attention, especially from the view of identifying precursors to deities and religious practices of Indian religions that later developed in the area. However, due to the sparsity of evidence, which is open to varying interpretations, and the fact that the Indus script remains undeciphered, the conclusions are partly speculative and largely based on a retrospective view from a much later Hindu perspective. An early and influential work in the area that set the trend for Hindu interpretations of archaeological evidence from the Harrapan sites was that of John Marshall, who in 1931 identified the following as prominent features of the Indus religion: a Great Male God and a Mother Goddess; deification or veneration of animals and plants; symbolic representation of the phallus (linga) and vulva (yoni); and, use of baths and water in religious practice. Marshall's interpretations have been much debated, and sometimes disputed over the following decades.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "One Indus valley seal shows a seated, possibly ithyphallic and tricephalic, figure with a horned headdress, surrounded by animals. Marshall identified the figure as an early form of the Hindu god Shiva (or Rudra), who is associated with asceticism, yoga, and linga; regarded as a lord of animals; and often depicted as having three eyes. The seal has hence come to be known as the Pashupati Seal, after Pashupati (lord of all animals), an epithet of Shiva. While Marshall's work has earned some support, many critics and even supporters have raised several objections. Doris Srinivasan has argued that the figure does not have three faces, or yogic posture, and that in Vedic literature Rudra was not a protector of wild animals. Herbert Sullivan and Alf Hiltebeitel also rejected Marshall's conclusions, with the former claiming that the figure was female, while the latter associated the figure with Mahisha, the Buffalo God and the surrounding animals with vahanas (vehicles) of deities for the four cardinal directions. Writing in 2002, Gregory L. Possehl concluded that while it would be appropriate to recognise the figure as a deity, its association with the water buffalo, and its posture as one of ritual discipline, regarding it as a proto-Shiva would be going too far. Despite the criticisms of Marshall's association of the seal with a proto-Shiva icon, it has been interpreted as the Tirthankara Rishabha by Jains and Vilas Sangave or an early Buddha by Buddhists. Historians like Heinrich Zimmer, Thomas McEvilley are of the opinion that there exists some link between first Jain Tirthankara Rishabha and Indus Valley civilisation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Marshall hypothesized the existence of a cult of Mother Goddess worship based upon excavation of several female figurines, and thought that this was a precursor of the Hindu sect of Shaktism. However the function of the female figurines in the life of Indus Valley people remains unclear, and Possehl does not regard the evidence for Marshall's hypothesis to be \"terribly robust\". Some of the baetyls interpreted by Marshall to be sacred phallic representations are now thought to have been used as pestles or game counters instead, while the ring stones that were thought to symbolise yoni were determined to be architectural features used to stand pillars, although the possibility of their religious symbolism cannot be eliminated.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Many Indus Valley seals show animals, with some depicting them being carried in processions, while others show chimeric creations. One seal from Mohen-jodaro shows a half-human, half-buffalo monster attacking a tiger, which may be a reference to the Sumerian myth of such a monster created by goddess Aruru to fight Gilgamesh. Some seals show a man wearing a hat with two horns and a plant sitting on a throne with animals surrounding him. Some scholars theorize that this was a predecessor to Shiva wearing a hat worn by some Sumerian divine beings and kings.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In contrast to contemporary Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations, the Indus Valley lacks any monumental palaces, even though excavated cities indicate that the society possessed the requisite engineering knowledge. This may suggest that religious ceremonies, if any, may have been largely confined to individual homes, small temples, or the open air. Several sites have been proposed by Marshall and later scholars as possibly devoted to religious purpose, but at present only the Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro is widely thought to have been so used, as a place for ritual purification. The funerary practices of the Harappan civilisation is marked by its diversity with evidence of supine burial; fractional burial in which the body is reduced to skeletal remains by exposure to the elements before final interment; and even cremation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The documented history of Indian religions begins with the historical Vedic religion, the religious practices of the early Indo-Aryans, which were collected and later redacted into the Samhitas (usually known as the Vedas), four canonical collections of hymns or mantras composed in archaic Sanskrit. These texts are the central shruti (revealed) texts of Hinduism. The period of the composition, redaction, and commentary of these texts is known as the Vedic period, which lasted from roughly 1750 to 500 BCE.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Vedic Period is most significant for the composition of the four Vedas, Brahmanas and the older Upanishads (both presented as discussions on the rituals, mantras and concepts found in the four Vedas), which today are some of the most important canonical texts of Hinduism, and are the codification of much of what developed into the core beliefs of Hinduism.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Some modern Hindu scholars use the \"Vedic religion\" synonymously with \"Hinduism.\" According to Sundararajan, Hinduism is also known as the Vedic religion. Other authors state that the Vedas contain \"the fundamental truths about Hindu Dharma\" which is called \"the modern version of the ancient Vedic Dharma\" The Arya Samaj is recognize the Vedic religion as true Hinduism. Nevertheless, according to Jamison and Witzel,",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "... to call this period Vedic Hinduism is a contradiction in terms since Vedic religion is very different from what we generally call Hindu religion – at least as much as Old Hebrew religion is from medieval and modern Christian religion. However, Vedic religion is treatable as a predecessor of Hinduism.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The rishis, the composers of the hymns of the Rigveda, were considered inspired poets and seers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The mode of worship was the performance of Yajna, sacrifices which involved sacrifice and sublimation of the havana sámagri (herbal preparations) in the fire, accompanied by the singing of Samans and 'mumbling' of Yajus, the sacrificial mantras. The sublime meaning of the word yajna is derived from the Sanskrit verb yaj, which has a three-fold meaning of worship of deities (devapujana), unity (saògatikaraña), and charity (dána). An essential element was the sacrificial fire – the divine Agni – into which oblations were poured, as everything offered into the fire was believed to reach God.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Central concepts in the Vedas are Satya and Rta. Satya is derived from Sat, the present participle of the verbal root as, \"to be, to exist, to live\". Sat means \"that which really exists [...] the really existent truth; the Good\", and Sat-ya means \"is-ness\". Rta, \"that which is properly joined; order, rule; truth\", is the principle of natural order which regulates and coordinates the operation of the universe and everything within it. \"Satya (truth as being) and rita (truth as law) are the primary principles of Reality and its manifestation is the background of the canons of dharma, or a life of righteousness.\" \"Satya is the principle of integration rooted in the Absolute, rita is its application and function as the rule and order operating in the universe.\" Conformity with Ṛta would enable progress whereas its violation would lead to punishment. Panikkar remarks:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Ṛta is the ultimate foundation of everything; it is \"the supreme\", although this is not to be understood in a static sense. [...] It is the expression of the primordial dynamism that is inherent in everything....\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The term rta is inherited from the Proto-Indo-Iranian religion, the religion of the Indo-Iranian peoples prior to the earliest Vedic (Indo-Aryan) and Zoroastrian (Iranian) scriptures. \"Asha\" is the Avestan language term (corresponding to Vedic language ṛta) for a concept of cardinal importance to Zoroastrian theology and doctrine. The term \"dharma\" was already used in Brahmanical thought, where it was conceived as an aspect of Rta.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Major philosophers of this era were Rishis Narayana, Kanva, Rishaba, Vamadeva, and Angiras.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "During the Middle Vedic period, the mantras of the Yajurveda and the older Brahmana texts were composed. The Brahmans became powerful intermediairies.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Historical roots of Jainism in India is traced back to 9th-century BC with the rise of Parshvanatha and his non-violent philosophy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The Vedic religion evolved into Hinduism and Vedanta, a religious path considering itself the 'essence' of the Vedas, interpreting the Vedic pantheon as a unitary view of the universe with 'God' (Brahman) seen as immanent and transcendent in the forms of Ishvara and Brahman. This post-Vedic systems of thought, along with the Upanishads and later texts like epics (namely Gita of Mahabharat), is a major component of modern Hinduism. The ritualistic traditions of Vedic religion are preserved in the conservative Śrauta tradition.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Since Vedic times, \"people from many strata of society throughout the subcontinent tended to adapt their religious and social life to Brahmanic norms\", a process sometimes called Sanskritization. It is reflected in the tendency to identify local deities with the gods of the Sanskrit texts.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "During the time of the shramanic reform movements \"many elements of the Vedic religion were lost\". According to Michaels, \"it is justified to see a turning point between the Vedic religion and Hindu religions\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The late Vedic period (9th to 6th centuries BCE) marks the beginning of the Upanisadic or Vedantic period. This period heralded the beginning of much of what became classical Hinduism, with the composition of the Upanishads, later the Sanskrit epics, still later followed by the Puranas.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Upanishads form the speculative-philosophical basis of classical Hinduism and are known as Vedanta (conclusion of the Vedas). The older Upanishads launched attacks of increasing intensity on the ritual. Anyone who worships a divinity other than the Self is called a domestic animal of the gods in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The Mundaka launches the most scathing attack on the ritual by comparing those who value sacrifice with an unsafe boat that is endlessly overtaken by old age and death.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Scholars believe that Parsva, the 23rd Jain tirthankara lived during this period in the 9th century BCE.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Jainism and Buddhism belong to the śramaṇa traditions. These religions rose into prominence in 700–500 BCE in the Magadha kingdom., reflecting \"the cosmology and anthropology of a much older, pre-Aryan upper class of northeastern India\", and were responsible for the related concepts of saṃsāra (the cycle of birth and death) and moksha (liberation from that cycle).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The shramana movements challenged the orthodoxy of the rituals. The shramanas were wandering ascetics distinct from Vedism. Mahavira, proponent of Jainism, and Buddha (c. 563-483), founder of Buddhism were the most prominent icons of this movement.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Shramana gave rise to the concept of the cycle of birth and death, the concept of samsara, and the concept of liberation. The influence of Upanishads on Buddhism has been a subject of debate among scholars. While Radhakrishnan, Oldenberg and Neumann were convinced of Upanishadic influence on the Buddhist canon, Eliot and Thomas highlighted the points where Buddhism was opposed to Upanishads. Buddhism may have been influenced by some Upanishadic ideas, it however discarded their orthodox tendencies. In Buddhist texts Buddha is presented as rejecting avenues of salvation as \"pernicious views\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Jainism was established by a lineage of 24 enlightened beings culminating with Parshvanatha (9th century BCE) and Mahavira (6th century BCE).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The 24th Tirthankara of Jainism, Mahavira, stressed five vows, including ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (non-stealing), and aparigraha (non-attachment). Jain orthodoxy believes the teachings of the Tirthankaras predates all known time and scholars believe Parshva, accorded status as the 23rd Tirthankara, was a historical figure. The Vedas are believed to have documented a few Tirthankaras and an ascetic order similar to the shramana movement.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Buddhism was historically founded by Siddhartha Gautama, a Kshatriya prince-turned-ascetic, and was spread beyond India through missionaries. It later experienced a decline in India, but survived in Nepal and Sri Lanka, and remains more widespread in Southeast and East Asia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Gautama Buddha, who was called an \"awakened one\" (Buddha), was born into the Shakya clan living at Kapilavastu and Lumbini in what is now southern Nepal. The Buddha was born at Lumbini, as emperor Ashoka's Lumbini pillar records, just before the kingdom of Magadha (which traditionally is said to have lasted from c. 546–324 BCE) rose to power. The Shakyas claimed Angirasa and Gautama Maharishi lineage, via descent from the royal lineage of Ayodhya.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Buddhism emphasises enlightenment (nibbana, nirvana) and liberation from the rounds of rebirth. This objective is pursued through two schools, Theravada, the Way of the Elders (practiced in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, SE Asia, etc.) and Mahayana, the Greater Way (practiced in Tibet, China, Japan, etc.). There may be some differences in the practice between the two schools in reaching the objective.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Both Jainism and Buddhism spread throughout India during the period of the Magadha empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Buddhism flourished during the reign of Ashoka of the Maurya Empire, who patronised Buddhist teachings and unified the Indian subcontinent in the 3rd century BCE. He sent missionaries abroad, allowing Buddhism to spread across Asia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Jainism began its golden period during the reign of Emperor Kharavela of Kalinga in the 2nd century BCE.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The early Dravidian religion constituted of non-Vedic form of Hinduism in that they were either historically or are at present Āgamic. The Agamas are non-vedic in origin and have been dated either as post-vedic texts. or as pre-vedic oral compositions. The Agamas are a collection of Tamil and later Sanskrit scriptures chiefly constituting the methods of temple construction and creation of murti, worship means of deities, philosophical doctrines, meditative practices, attainment of sixfold desires and four kinds of yoga. The worship of tutelary deity, sacred flora and fauna in Hinduism is also recognized as a survival of the pre-Vedic Dravidian religion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Ancient Tamil grammatical works Tolkappiyam, the ten anthologies Pattuppāṭṭu, the eight anthologies Eṭṭuttokai also sheds light on early religion of ancient Dravidians. Seyon was glorified as the red god seated on the blue peacock, who is ever young and resplendent, as the favored god of the Tamils. Sivan was also seen as the supreme God. Early iconography of Seyyon and Sivan and their association with native flora and fauna goes back to Indus Valley Civilization. The Sangam landscape was classified into five categories, thinais, based on the mood, the season and the land. Tolkappiyam, mentions that each of these thinai had an associated deity such Seyyon in Kurinji-the hills, Thirumaal in Mullai-the forests, and Kotravai in Marutham-the plains, and Wanji-ko in the Neithal-the coasts and the seas. Other gods mentioned were Mayyon and Vaali who were all assimilated into Hinduism over time. Dravidian linguistic influence on early Vedic religion is evident, many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language, the language of the Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE), which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian. This represents an early religious and cultural fusion or synthesis between ancient Dravidians and Indo-Aryans, which became more evident over time with sacred iconography, traditions, philosophy, flora, and fauna that went on to influence Hinduism, Buddhism, Charvaka, Sramana, and Jainism.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Throughout Tamilakam, a king was considered to be divine by nature and possessed religious significance. The king was 'the representative of God on earth' and lived in a \"koyil\", which means the \"residence of a god\". The Modern Tamil word for temple is koil. Titual worship was also given to kings. Modern words for god like \"kō\" (\"king\"), \"iṟai\" (\"emperor\"), and \"āṇḍavar\" (\"conqueror\") now primarily refer to gods. These elements were incorporated later into Hinduism like the legendary marriage of Shiva to Queen Mīnātchi who ruled Madurai or Wanji-ko, a god who later merged into Indra. Tolkappiyar refers to the Three Crowned Kings as the \"Three Glorified by Heaven\". In the Dravidian-speaking South, the concept of divine kingship led to the assumption of major roles by state and temple.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The cult of the mother goddess is treated as an indication of a society which venerated femininity. This mother goddess was conceived as a virgin, one who has given birth to all and one, typically associated with Shaktism. The temples of the Sangam days, mainly of Madurai, seem to have had priestesses to the deity, which also appear predominantly a goddess. In the Sangam literature, there is an elaborate description of the rites performed by the Kurava priestess in the shrine Palamutircholai. Among the early Dravidians the practice of erecting memorial stones Natukal or Hero Stone had appeared, and it continued for quite a long time after the Sangam age, down to about 16th century. It was customary for people who sought victory in war to worship these hero stones to bless them with victory.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Flood and Muesse take the period between 200 BCE and 500 BCE as a separate period, in which the epics and the first puranas were being written. Michaels takes a greater timespan, namely the period between 200 BCE and 1100 CE, which saw the rise of so-called \"Classical Hinduism\", with its \"golden age\" during the Gupta Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "According to Alf Hiltebeitel, a period of consolidation in the development of Hinduism took place between the time of the late Vedic Upanishad (c. 500 BCE) and the period of the rise of the Guptas (c. 320–467 CE), which he calls the \"Hindus synthesis\", \"Brahmanic synthesis\", or \"orthodox synthesis\". It develops in interaction with other religions and peoples:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The emerging self-definitions of Hinduism were forged in the context of continuous interaction with heterodox religions (Buddhists, Jains, Ajivikas) throughout this whole period, and with foreign people (Yavanas, or Greeks; Sakas, or Scythians; Pahlavas, or Parthians; and Kusanas, or Kushans) from the third phase on [between the Mauryan empire and the rise of the Guptas].",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The end of the Vedantic period around the 2nd century CE spawned a number of branches that furthered Vedantic philosophy, and which ended up being seminaries in their own right. Prominent among these developers were Yoga, Dvaita, Advaita, and the medieval Bhakti movement.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The smriti texts of the period between 200 BCE–100 CE proclaim the authority of the Vedas, and \"nonrejection of the Vedas comes to be one of the most important touchstones for defining Hinduism over and against the heterodoxies, which rejected the Vedas.\" Of the six Hindu darsanas, the Mimamsa and the Vedanta \"are rooted primarily in the Vedic sruti tradition and are sometimes called smarta schools in the sense that they develop smarta orthodox current of thoughts that are based, like smriti, directly on sruti.\" According to Hiltebeitel, \"the consolidation of Hinduism takes place under the sign of bhakti.\" It is the Bhagavadgita that seals this achievement. The result is a universal achievement that may be called smarta. It views Shiva and Vishnu as \"complementary in their functions but ontologically identical\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In earlier writings, Sanskrit 'Vedānta' simply referred to the Upanishads, the most speculative and philosophical of the Vedic texts. However, in the medieval period of Hinduism, the word Vedānta came to mean the school of philosophy that interpreted the Upanishads. Traditional Vedānta considers shabda pramāṇa (scriptural evidence) as the most authentic means of knowledge, while pratyakṣa (perception) and anumāna (logical inference) are considered to be subordinate (but valid).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The systematisation of Vedantic ideas into one coherent treatise was undertaken by Badarāyana in the Brahma Sutras which was composed around 200 BCE. The cryptic aphorisms of the Brahma Sutras are open to a variety of interpretations. This resulted in the formation of numerous Vedanta schools, each interpreting the texts in its own way and producing its own sub-commentaries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "After 200 CE several schools of thought were formally codified in Indian philosophy, including Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimāṃsā and Advaita Vedanta. Hinduism, otherwise a highly polytheistic, pantheistic or monotheistic religion, also tolerated atheistic schools. The thoroughly materialistic and anti-religious philosophical Cārvāka school that originated around the 6th century BCE is the most explicitly atheistic school of Indian philosophy. Cārvāka is classified as a nāstika (\"heterodox\") system; it is not included among the six schools of Hinduism generally regarded as orthodox. It is noteworthy as evidence of a materialistic movement within Hinduism. Our understanding of Cārvāka philosophy is fragmentary, based largely on criticism of the ideas by other schools, and it is no longer a living tradition. Other Indian philosophies generally regarded as atheistic include Samkhya and Mimāṃsā.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Two of Hinduism's most revered epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana were compositions of this period. Devotion to particular deities was reflected from the composition of texts composed to their worship. For example, the Ganapati Purana was written for devotion to Ganapati (or Ganesh). Popular deities of this era were Shiva, Vishnu, Durga, Surya, Skanda, and Ganesh (including the forms/incarnations of these deities).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In the latter Vedantic period, several texts were also composed as summaries/attachments to the Upanishads. These texts collectively called as Puranas allowed for a divine and mythical interpretation of the world, not unlike the ancient Hellenic or Roman religions. Legends and epics with a multitude of gods and goddesses with human-like characteristics were composed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Gupta period marked a watershed of Indian culture: the Guptas performed Vedic sacrifices to legitimize their rule, but they also patronized Buddhism, which continued to provide an alternative to Brahmanical orthodoxy. Buddhism continued to have a significant presence in some regions of India until the 12th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "There were several Buddhistic kings who worshiped Vishnu, such as the Gupta Empire, Pala Empire, Chalukyas, Somavanshi, and Satavahana. Buddhism survived followed by Hindus.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Tantrism originated in the early centuries CE and developed into a fully articulated tradition by the end of the Gupta period. According to Michaels this was the \"Golden Age of Hinduism\" (c. 320–650 CE), which flourished during the Gupta Empire (320 to 550 CE) until the fall of the Harsha Empire (606 to 647 CE). During this period, power was centralised, along with a growth of far distance trade, standardizarion of legal procedures, and general spread of literacy. Mahayana Buddhism flourished, but the orthodox Brahmana culture began to be rejuvenated by the patronage of the Gupta Dynasty. The position of the Brahmans was reinforced, and the first Hindu temples emerged during the late Gupta age.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "After the end of the Gupta Empire and the collapse of the Harsha Empire, power became decentralised in India. Several larger kingdoms emerged, with \"countless vasal states\". The kingdoms were ruled via a feudal system. Smaller kingdoms were dependent on the protection of the larger kingdoms. \"The great king was remote, was exalted and deified\", as reflected in the Tantric Mandala, which could also depict the king as the centre of the mandala.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The disintegration of central power also lead to regionalisation of religiosity, and religious rivalry. Local cults and languages were enhanced, and the influence of \"Brahmanic ritualistic Hinduism\" was diminished. Rural and devotional movements arose, along with Shaivism, Vaisnavism, Bhakti, and Tantra, though \"sectarian groupings were only at the beginning of their development\". Religious movements had to compete for recognition by the local lords. Buddhism lost its position, and began to disappear in India.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In the same period Vedanta changed, incorporating Buddhist thought and its emphasis on consciousness and the working of the mind. Buddhism, which was supported by the ancient Indian urban civilisation lost influence to the traditional religions, which were rooted in the countryside. In Bengal, Buddhism was even prosecuted. But at the same time, Buddhism was incorporated into Hinduism, when Gaudapada used Buddhist philosophy to reinterpret the Upanishads. This also marked a shift from Atman and Brahman as a \"living substance\" to \"maya-vada\", where Atman and Brahman are seen as \"pure knowledge-consciousness\". According to Scheepers, it is this \"maya-vada\" view which has come to dominate Indian thought.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Between 400 and 1000 CE Hinduism expanded as the decline of Buddhism in India continued. Buddhism subsequently became effectively extinct in India but survived in Nepal and Sri Lanka.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The Bhakti movement began with the emphasis on the worship of God, regardless of one's status – whether priestly or laypeople, men or women, higher social status or lower social status. The movements were mainly centered on the forms of Vishnu (Rama and Krishna) and Shiva. There were however popular devotees of this era of Durga. The best-known proponents of this movement were the Alvars and the Nayanars from southern India. The most popular Shaiva teacher of the south was Basava, while of the north it was Gorakhnath. Female saints include figures like Akkamadevi, Lalleshvari and Molla.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Alvars (Tamil: ஆழ்வார்கள், āḻvārkaḷ [aːɻʋaːr], those immersed in god) were the Tamil poet-saints of south India, who lived between the 6th and 9th centuries CE and espoused \"emotional devotion\" or bhakti to Vishnu-Krishna in their songs of longing, ecstasy and service. The most popular Vaishnava teacher of the south was Ramanuja, while of the north it was Ramananda.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Several important icons were women. For example, within the Mahanubhava sect, the women outnumbered the men, and administration was many times composed mainly of women. Mirabai is the most popular female saint in India.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Sri Vallabha Acharya (1479–1531) is a very important figure from this era. He founded the Shuddha Advaita (Pure Non-dualism) school of Vedanta thought.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "According to The Centre for Cultural Resources and Training,",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Vaishanava bhakti literature was an all-India phenomenon, which started in the 6th–7th century A.D. in the Tamil-speaking region of South India, with twelve Alvar (one immersed in God) saint-poets, who wrote devotional songs. The religion of Alvar poets, which included a woman poet, Andal, was devotion to God through love (bhakti), and in the ecstasy of such devotions they sang hundreds of songs which embodied both depth of feeling and felicity of expressions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In the 12th and 13th centuries, Turks and Afghans invaded parts of northern India and established the Delhi Sultanate in the former Rajput holdings. The subsequent Slave dynasty of Delhi managed to conquer large areas of northern India, approximately equal in extent to the ancient Gupta Empire, while the Khalji dynasty conquered most of central India but were ultimately unsuccessful in conquering and uniting the subcontinent. The Sultanate ushered in a period of Indian cultural renaissance. The resulting \"Indo-Muslim\" fusion of cultures left lasting syncretic monuments in architecture, music, literature, religion, and clothing.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "During the 14th to 17th centuries, a great Bhakti movement swept through central and northern India, initiated by a loosely associated group of teachers or Sants. Ramananda, Ravidas, Srimanta Sankardeva, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Vallabha Acharya, Sur, Meera, Kabir, Tulsidas, Namdev, Dnyaneshwar, Tukaram, and other mystics spearheaded the Bhakti movement in the North while Annamacharya, Bhadrachala Ramadas, Tyagaraja, and others propagated Bhakti in the South. They taught that people could cast aside the heavy burdens of ritual and caste, and the subtle complexities of philosophy, and simply express their overwhelming love for God. This period was also characterized by a spate of devotional literature in vernacular prose and poetry in the ethnic languages of the various Indian states or provinces.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Lingayatism is a distinct Shaivite tradition in India, established in the 12th century by the philosopher and social reformer Basavanna. The adherents of this tradition are known as Lingayats. The term is derived from Lingavantha in Kannada, meaning \"one who wears Ishtalinga on their body\" (Ishtalinga is the representation of the God). In Lingayat theology, Ishtalinga is an oval-shaped emblem symbolising Parasiva, the absolute reality. Contemporary Lingayatism follows a progressive reform–based theology propounded, which has great influence in South India, especially in the state of Karnataka.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "According to Nicholson, already between the 12th and 16th century,",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "... certain thinkers began to treat as a single whole the diverse philosophival teachings of the Upanishads, epics, Puranas, and the schools known retrospectively as the \"six systems\" (saddarsana) of mainstream Hindu philosophy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The tendency of \"a blurring of philosophical distinctions\" has also been noted by Mikel Burley. Lorenzen locates the origins of a distinct Hindu identity in the interaction between Muslims and Hindus, and a process of \"mutual self-definition with a contrasting Muslim other\", which started well before 1800. Both the Indian and the European thinkers who developed the term \"Hinduism\" in the 19th century were influenced by these philosophers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Sikhism originated in 15th-century Punjab, Delhi Sultanate (present-day India and Pakistan) with the teachings of Nanak and nine successive gurus. The principal belief in Sikhism is faith in Vāhigurū— represented by the sacred symbol of ēk ōaṅkār [meaning one god]. Sikhism's traditions and teachings are distinctly associated with the history, society and culture of the Punjab. Adherents of Sikhism are known as Sikhs (students or disciples) and number over 27 million across the world.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "According to Gavin Flood, the modern period in India begins with the first contacts with western nations around 1500. The period of Mughal rule in India saw the rise of new forms of religiosity.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "In the 19th century, under influence of the colonial forces, a synthetic vision of Hinduism was formulated by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Mahatma Gandhi. These thinkers have tended to take an inclusive view of India's religious history, emphasising the similarities between the various Indian religions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The modern era has given rise to dozens of Hindu saints with international influence. For example, Brahma Baba established the Brahma Kumaris, one of the largest new Hindu religious movements which teaches the discipline of Raja Yoga to millions. Representing traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Prabhupada founded the Hare Krishna movement, another organisation with a global reach. In late 18th-century India, Swaminarayan founded the Swaminarayan Sampraday. Anandamurti, founder of the Ananda Marga, has also influenced many worldwide. Through the international influence of all of these new Hindu denominations, many Hindu practices such as yoga, meditation, mantra, divination, and vegetarianism have been adopted by new converts.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Jainism continues to be an influential religion and Jain communities live in Indian states Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. Jains authored several classical books in different Indian languages for a considerable period of time.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "The Dalit Buddhist movement also referred to as Navayana is a 19th- and 20th-century Buddhist revival movement in India. It received its most substantial impetus from B. R. Ambedkar's call for the conversion of Dalits to Buddhism in 1956 and the opportunity to escape the caste-based society that considered them to be the lowest in the hierarchy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "According to Tilak, the religions of India can be interpreted \"differentially\" or \"integrally\", that is by either highlighting the differences or the similarities. According to Sherma and Sarma, western Indologists have tended to emphasise the differences, while Indian Indologists have tended to emphasise the similarities.",
"title": "Similarities and differences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism share certain key concepts, which are interpreted differently by different groups and individuals. Until the 19th century, adherents of those various religions did not tend to label themselves as in opposition to each other, but \"perceived themselves as belonging to the same extended cultural family.\"",
"title": "Similarities and differences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The spectrum of these religions are called Dharmic religions because of their overlap over the core concept of Dharma. It has various meanings depending on the context. For example it could mean duty, righteousness, spiritual teachings, conduct, etc.",
"title": "Similarities and differences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism share the concept of moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth. They differ however on the exact nature of this liberation.",
"title": "Similarities and differences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Common traits can also be observed in ritual. The head-anointing ritual of abhiseka is of importance in three of these distinct traditions, excluding Sikhism (in Buddhism it is found within Vajrayana). Other noteworthy rituals are the cremation of the dead, the wearing of vermilion on the head by married women, and various marital rituals. In literature, many classical narratives and purana have Hindu, Buddhist or Jain versions. All four traditions have notions of karma, dharma, samsara, moksha and various forms of Yoga.",
"title": "Similarities and differences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Rama is a heroic figure in all of these religions. In Hinduism he is the God-incarnate in the form of a princely king; in Buddhism, he is a Bodhisattva-incarnate; in Jainism, he is the perfect human being. Among the Buddhist Ramayanas are: Vessantarajataka, Reamker, Ramakien, Phra Lak Phra Lam, Hikayat Seri Rama, etc. There also exists the Khamti Ramayana among the Khamti tribe of Asom wherein Rama is an Avatar of a Bodhisattva who incarnates to punish the demon king Ravana (B.Datta 1993). The Tai Ramayana is another book retelling the divine story in Asom.",
"title": "Similarities and differences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Critics point out that there exist vast differences between and even within the various Indian religions. All major religions are composed of innumerable sects and subsects.",
"title": "Similarities and differences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Indian mythology also reflects the competition between the various Indian religions. A popular story tells how Vajrapani kills Mahesvara, a manifestation of Shiva depicted as an evil being. The story occurs in several scriptures, most notably the Sarvatathagatatattvasamgraha and the Vajrapany-abhiseka-mahatantra. According to Kalupahana, the story \"echoes\" the story of the conversion of Ambattha. It is to be understood in the context of the competition between Buddhist institutions and Shaivism.",
"title": "Similarities and differences"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Āstika and nāstika are variously defined terms sometimes used to categorise Indian religions. The traditional definition, followed by Adi Shankara, classifies religions and persons as āstika and nāstika according to whether they accept the authority of the main Hindu texts, the Vedas, as supreme revealed scriptures, or not. By this definition, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Purva Mimamsa and Vedanta are classified as āstika schools, while Charvaka is classified as a nāstika school. Buddhism and Jainism are also thus classified as nāstika religions since they do not accept the authority of the Vedas.",
"title": "Āstika and nāstika categorisation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Another set of definitions—notably distinct from the usage of Hindu philosophy—loosely characterise āstika as \"theist\" and nāstika as \"atheist\". By these definitions, Sāṃkhya can be considered a nāstika philosophy, though it is traditionally classed among the Vedic āstika schools. From this point of view, Buddhism and Jainism remain nāstika religions.",
"title": "Āstika and nāstika categorisation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Buddhists and Jains have disagreed that they are nastika and have redefined the phrases āstika and nāstika in their own view. Jains assign the term nastika to one who is ignorant of the meaning of the religious texts, or those who deny the existence of the soul was well known to the Jainas.",
"title": "Āstika and nāstika categorisation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Frawley and Malhotra use the term \"Dharmic traditions\" to highlight the similarities between the various Indian religions. According to Frawley, \"all religions in India have been called the Dharma\", and can be",
"title": "Use of term \"Dharmic religions\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "... put under the greater umbrella of \"Dharmic traditions\" which we can see as Hinduism or the spiritual traditions of India in the broadest sense.",
"title": "Use of term \"Dharmic religions\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "According to Paul Hacker, as described by Halbfass, the term \"dharma\"",
"title": "Use of term \"Dharmic religions\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "... assumed a fundamentally new meaning and function in modern Indian thought, beginning with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in the nineteenth century. This process, in which dharma was presented as an equivalent of, but also a response to, the western notion of \"religion\", reflects a fundamental change in the Hindu sense of identity and in the attitude toward other religious and cultural traditions. The foreign tools of \"religion\" and \"nation\" became tools of self-definition, and a new and precarious sense of the \"unity of Hinduism\" and of national as well as religious identity took root.",
"title": "Use of term \"Dharmic religions\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "The emphasis on the similarities and integral unity of the dharmic faiths has been criticised for neglecting the vast differences between and even within the various Indian religions and traditions. According to Richard E. King it is typical of the \"inclusivist appropriation of other traditions\" of Neo-Vedanta:",
"title": "Use of term \"Dharmic religions\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The inclusivist appropriation of other traditions, so characteristic of neo-Vedanta ideology, appears on three basic levels. First, it is apparent in the suggestion that the (Advaita) Vedanta philosophy of Sankara (c. eighth century CE) constitutes the central philosophy of Hinduism. Second, in an Indian context, neo-Vedanta philosophy subsumes Buddhist philosophies in terms of its own Vedantic ideology. The Buddha becomes a member of the Vedanta tradition, merely attempting to reform it from within. Finally, at a global level, neo-Vedanta colonizes the religious traditions of the world by arguing for the centrality of a non-dualistic position as the philosophia perennis underlying all cultural differences.",
"title": "Use of term \"Dharmic religions\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "The \"Council of Dharmic Faiths\" (UK) regards Zoroastrianism, while not originating in the Indian subcontinent, also as a Dharmic religion.",
"title": "Use of term \"Dharmic religions\""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "The inclusion of Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs within Hinduism is part of the Indian legal system. The 1955 Hindu Marriage Act \"[defines] as Hindus all Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs and anyone who is not a Christian, Muslim, Parsee (Zoroastrian) or Jew\". And the Indian Constitution says that \"reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion\".",
"title": "Status of non-Hindus in the Republic of India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "In a judicial reminder, the Indian Supreme Court observed Sikhism and Jainism to be sub-sects or special faiths within the larger Hindu fold, and that Jainism is a denomination within the Hindu fold. Although the Indian Government counted Jains in India as a major religious community right from the first Census conducted in 1873, after independence in 1947 Sikhs and Jains were not treated as national minorities. In 2005, the Supreme Court of India declined to issue a writ of Mandamus granting Jains the status of a religious minority throughout India. The Court however left it to the respective states to decide on the minority status of Jain religion.",
"title": "Status of non-Hindus in the Republic of India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "However, some individual states have over the past few decades differed on whether Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs are religious minorities or not, by either pronouncing judgments or passing legislation. One example is the judgment passed by the Supreme Court in 2006, in a case pertaining to the state of Uttar Pradesh, which declared Jainism to be indisputably distinct from Hinduism, but mentioned that, \"The question as to whether the Jains are part of the Hindu religion is open to debate. However, the Supreme Court also noted various court cases that have held Jainism to be a distinct religion.",
"title": "Status of non-Hindus in the Republic of India"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Another example is the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Bill, that is an amendment to a legislation that sought to define Jains and Buddhists as denominations within Hinduism. Ultimately on 31 July 2007, finding it not in conformity with the concept of freedom of religion as embodied in Article 25 (1) of the Constitution, Governor Naval Kishore Sharma returned the Gujarat Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Bill, 2006 citing the widespread protests by the Jains as well as Supreme Court's extrajudicial observation that Jainism is a \"special religion formed on the basis of quintessence of Hindu religion by the Supreme Court\".",
"title": "Status of non-Hindus in the Republic of India"
}
]
| Indian religions, sometimes also termed Dharmic religions or Indic religions, are the religions that originated in the Indian subcontinent. These religions, which include Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, are also classified as Eastern religions. Although Indian religions are connected through the history of India, they constitute a wide range of religious communities, and are not confined to the Indian subcontinent. Evidence attesting to prehistoric religion in the Indian subcontinent derives from scattered Mesolithic rock paintings. The Harappan people of the Indus Valley civilisation, which lasted from 3300 to 1300 BCE, had an early urbanized culture which predates the Vedic religion. The documented history of Indian religions begins with the historical Vedic religion, the religious practices of the early Indo-Iranians, which were collected and later redacted into the Vedas, as well as the Agamas of Dravidian origin. The period of the composition, redaction, and commentary of these texts is known as the Vedic period, which lasted from roughly 1750 to 500 BCE. The philosophical portions of the Vedas were summarized in Upanishads, which are commonly referred to as Vedānta, variously interpreted to mean either the "last chapters, parts of the Veda" or "the object, the highest purpose of the Veda". The early Upanishads all predate the Common Era, five of the eleven principal Upanishads were composed in all likelihood before 6th century BCE, and contain the earliest mentions of Yoga and Moksha. The śramaṇa period between 800 and 200 BCE marks a "turning point between the Vedic Hinduism and Puranic Hinduism". The Shramana movement, an ancient Indian religious movement parallel to but separate from Vedic tradition, often defied many of the Vedic and Upanishadic concepts of soul (Atman) and the ultimate reality (Brahman). In 6th century BCE, the Shramnic movement matured into Jainism and Buddhism and was responsible for the schism of Indian religions into two main philosophical branches of astika, which venerates Veda and nastika. However, both branches shared the related concepts of Yoga, saṃsāra and moksha. The Puranic Period and Early Medieval period gave rise to new configurations of Hinduism, especially bhakti and Shaivism, Shaktism, Vaishnavism, Smarta, and smaller groups like the conservative Shrauta. The early Islamic period also gave rise to new movements. Sikhism was founded in the 15th century on the teachings of Guru Nanak and the nine successive Sikh Gurus in Northern India. The vast majority of its adherents originate in the Punjab region. During the period of British rule in India, a reinterpretation and synthesis of Hinduism arose, which aided the Indian independence movement. | 2001-08-03T03:18:19Z | 2023-12-01T19:08:19Z | [
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14,606 | Infusion (disambiguation) | Infusion refers to the process of extracting chemical compounds or flavors from plant material in a solvent by allowing the material to remain suspended in the solvent over time.
Infusion may also refer to: | [
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"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Infusion refers to the process of extracting chemical compounds or flavors from plant material in a solvent by allowing the material to remain suspended in the solvent over time.",
"title": ""
},
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"text": "Infusion may also refer to:",
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| Infusion refers to the process of extracting chemical compounds or flavors from plant material in a solvent by allowing the material to remain suspended in the solvent over time. Infusion may also refer to: A medical treatment in which liquid substances are delivered through various routes of administration:
Intravenous therapy, the infusion of liquid substances directly into a vein for medical purposes
Hypodermoclysis, also known as subcutaneous infusion
Infusion (band), an Australian dance-music act
Tea infuser, a device in which loose tea leaves are placed for brewing
Infusion, a roller coaster at Pleasure Beach, Blackpool, UK | 2023-01-05T21:12:17Z | [
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|
14,607 | Idaho | Idaho (/ˈaɪdəhoʊ/ EYE-də-hoh) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Montana and Wyoming to the east, Nevada and Utah to the south, and Washington and Oregon to the west. The state's capital and largest city is Boise. With an area of 83,570 square miles (216,400 km), Idaho is the 14th largest state by land area, but with a population of approximately 1.8 million, it ranks as the 13th least populous and the 6th least densely populated of the 50 U.S. states.
For thousands of years, and prior to European colonization, Idaho has been inhabited by native peoples. In the early 19th century, Idaho was considered part of the Oregon Country, an area of dispute between the U.S. and the British Empire. It officially became a U.S. territory with the signing of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, but a separate Idaho Territory was not organized until 1863, instead being included for periods in Oregon Territory and Washington Territory. Idaho was eventually admitted to the Union on July 3, 1890, becoming the 43rd state.
Forming part of the Pacific Northwest (and the associated Cascadia bioregion), Idaho is divided into several distinct geographic and climatic regions. The state's north, the relatively isolated Idaho Panhandle, is closely linked with Eastern Washington, with which it shares the Pacific Time Zone—the rest of the state uses the Mountain Time Zone. The state's south includes the Snake River Plain (which has most of the population and agricultural land), and the southeast incorporates part of the Great Basin. Idaho is quite mountainous and contains several stretches of the Rocky Mountains. The United States Forest Service holds about 38% of Idaho's land, the highest proportion of any state.
Industries significant for the state economy include manufacturing, agriculture, mining, forestry, and tourism. Several science and technology firms are either headquartered in Idaho or have factories there, and the state also contains the Idaho National Laboratory, which is the country's largest Department of Energy facility. Idaho's agricultural sector supplies many products, but the state is best known for its potato crop, which comprises around one-third of the nationwide yield. The official state nickname is the "Gem State", a figurative expression which references Idaho's natural beauty.
The name's origin remains a mystery. In the early 1860s, when the U.S. Congress was considering organizing a new territory in the Rocky Mountains, the name "Idaho" was suggested by George M. Willing, a politician posing as an unrecognized delegate from the unofficial Jefferson Territory. Willing claimed that the name was derived from a Shoshone term meaning "the sun comes from the mountains" or "gem of the mountains", but it was revealed later that there was no such term and Willing claimed that he had been inspired to coin the name when he met a little girl named Ida. Since the name appeared to be fabricated, the U.S. Congress ultimately decided to name the area Colorado Territory instead when it was created in February 1861, but by the time this decision was made, the town of Idaho Springs, Colorado had already been named after Willing's proposal.
The same year Congress created Colorado Territory, a county called Idaho County was created in eastern Washington Territory. The county was named after a steamship named Idaho, which was launched on the Columbia River in 1860. It is unclear whether the steamship was named before or after Willing's claim was revealed. Regardless, part of Washington Territory, including Idaho County, was used to create Idaho Territory in 1863. Idaho Territory would later change its boundaries to the area that became the U.S. state.
Humans may have been present in the Idaho area as long as 14,500 years ago. Excavations at Wilson Butte Cave near Twin Falls in 1959 revealed evidence of human activity, including arrowheads, that rank among the oldest dated artifacts in North America. American Indian peoples predominant in the area included the Nez Percé in the north and the Northern and Western Shoshone in the south.
A Late Upper Paleolithic site was identified at Cooper's Ferry in western Idaho near the town of Cottonwood by archaeologists in 2019. Based on evidence found at the site, first people lived in this area 15,300 to 16,600 years ago, predating the Beringia land bridge by about a thousand years. The discoverers emphasized that they possess similarities with tools and artifacts discovered in Japan that date from 16,000 to 13,000 years ago. The discovery also showed that the first people might not have come to North America by land, as previously theorized. On the contrary, they probably came through the water, using a Pacific coastal route.
The most parsimonious explanation we think is that people came down the Pacific Coast, and as they encountered the mouth of the Columbia River, they essentially found an off-ramp from this coastal migration and also found their first viable interior route to the areas that are south of the ice sheet.
An early presence of French-Canadian trappers is visible in names and toponyms: Nez Percé, Cœur d'Alène, Boisé, Payette. Some of these names appeared prior to the Lewis and Clark and Astorian expeditions, which included significant numbers of French and Métis guides recruited for their familiarity with the terrain.
Idaho, as part of the Oregon Country, was claimed by both the United States and Great Britain until the United States gained undisputed jurisdiction in 1846. From 1843 to 1849, present-day Idaho was under the de facto jurisdiction of the Provisional Government of Oregon. When Oregon became a state in 1849, what is now Idaho was situated in what remained of the original Oregon Territory, designated as the Washington Territory.
Between 1849 and the creation of the Idaho Territory in 1863, parts of present-day Idaho were included in the Oregon, Washington, and Dakota Territories. The new Idaho territory included present-day Idaho, Montana, and most of Wyoming. The Lewis and Clark expedition crossed Idaho in 1805 on the way to the Pacific, and in 1806, on the return trip, largely following the Clearwater River in both directions. The first non-indigenous settlement was Kullyspell House, established on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille in 1809 by David Thompson of the North West Company for fur trading. In 1812 Donald Mackenzie, working for the Pacific Fur Company at the time, established a post on the lower Clearwater River near present-day Lewiston. This post, known as "MacKenzie's Post" or "Clearwater", operated until the Pacific Fur Company was bought out by the North West Company in 1813, after which the post was abandoned. The first organized non-indigenous communities within the present borders of Idaho were established by Mormon pioneers in 1860. The first permanent, substantial incorporated community was Lewiston, in 1861. Early in its history, Idaho saw a large influx of Chinese immigrants, who by 1870 made up about 28.5% of the territory's population.
Idaho achieved statehood in 1890, following a difficult start as a territory, including the chaotic transfer of the territorial capital from Lewiston to Boise, disenfranchisement of Mormon polygamists upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890, and a federal attempt to split the territory between Washington Territory, which gained statehood in 1889, a year before Idaho, and the state of Nevada which had been a state since 1864.
Idaho was one of the hardest hit of the Pacific Northwest states during the Great Depression. Prices plummeted for Idaho's major crops: in 1932 a bushel of potatoes brought only ten cents compared to 1919 for $1.51, while Idaho farmers saw their annual income of $686 in 1929 drop to $250 by 1932.
In recent years, Idaho has expanded its commercial base as a tourism and agricultural state to include science and technology industries. Science and technology have become the largest single economic center (over 25% of the state's total revenue) within the state and are greater than agriculture, forestry and mining combined.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Idaho enacted statewide crisis standards of care as COVID-19 patients overwhelmed hospitals. The state had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country as of mid-October 2021.
Idaho shares a border with six U.S. states and one Canadian province. The states of Washington and Oregon are to the west, Nevada and Utah are to the south, and Montana and Wyoming are to the east. Idaho also shares a short border with the Canadian province of British Columbia to the north.
The landscape is rugged, with some of the largest unspoiled natural areas in the United States. For example, at 2.3 million acres (930,000 ha), the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Area is the largest contiguous area of protected wilderness in the continental United States. Idaho is a Rocky Mountain state with abundant natural resources and scenic areas. The state has snow-capped mountain ranges, rapids, vast lakes and steep canyons. The waters of the Snake River run through Hells Canyon, the deepest gorge in the United States. Shoshone Falls falls down cliffs from a height greater than Niagara Falls.
By far, the most important river in Idaho is the Snake River, a major tributary of the Columbia River. The Snake River flows from Yellowstone in northwestern Wyoming through the Snake River Plain in southern Idaho before turning north, leaving the state at Lewiston before joining the Columbia in Kennewick. Other major rivers are the Clark Fork/Pend Oreille River, the Spokane River, and, many major tributaries of the Snake River, including the Clearwater River, the Salmon River, the Boise River, and the Payette River. The Salmon River empties into the Snake in Hells Canyon and forms the southern boundary of Nez Perce County on its north shore, of which Lewiston is the county seat. The Port of Lewiston, at the confluence of the Clearwater and the Snake Rivers is the farthest inland seaport on the West Coast at 465 river miles from the Pacific at Astoria, Oregon.
The vast majority of Idaho's population lives in the Snake River Plain, a valley running from across the entirety of southern Idaho from east to west. The valley contains the major cities of Boise, Meridian, Nampa, Caldwell, Twin Falls, Idaho Falls, and Pocatello. The plain served as an easy pass through the Rocky Mountains for westward-bound settlers on the Oregon Trail, and many settlers chose to settle the area rather than risking the treacherous route through the Blue Mountains and the Cascade Range to the west. The western region of the plain is known as the Treasure Valley, bound between the Owyhee Mountains to the southwest and the Boise Mountains to the northeast. The central region of the Snake River Plain is known as the Magic Valley.
Idaho's highest point is Borah Peak, 12,662 ft (3,859 m), in the Lost River Range north of Mackay. Idaho's lowest point, 710 ft (216 m), is in Lewiston, where the Clearwater River joins the Snake River and continues into Washington. The Sawtooth Range is often considered Idaho's most famous mountain range. Other mountain ranges in Idaho include the Bitterroot Range, the White Cloud Mountains, the Lost River Range, the Clearwater Mountains, and the Salmon River Mountains.
Salmon-Challis National Forest is located in the east central sections of the state, with Salmon National Forest to the north and Challis National Forest to the south. The forest is in an area known as the Idaho Cobalt Belt, which consists of a 34 miles (55 km) long geological formation of sedimentary rock that contains some of the largest cobalt deposits in the U.S.
Idaho has two time zones, with the dividing line approximately midway between Canada and Nevada. Southern Idaho, including the Boise metropolitan area, Idaho Falls, Pocatello, and Twin Falls, are in the Mountain Time Zone. A legislative error (15 U.S.C. ch. 6 §264) theoretically placed this region in the Central Time Zone, but this was corrected with a 2007 amendment. Areas north of the Salmon River, including Coeur d'Alene, Moscow, Lewiston, and Sandpoint, are in the Pacific Time Zone, which contains less than a quarter of the state's population and land area.
Idaho's climate varies widely. Although the state's western border is about 330 miles (530 km) from the Pacific Ocean, the maritime influence is still felt in Idaho; especially, in the winter when cloud cover, humidity, and precipitation are at their maximum extent. This influence has a moderating effect in the winter where temperatures are not as low as would otherwise be expected for a northern state with predominantly high elevations. In the panhandle, moist air masses from the coast are released as precipitation over the North Central Rockies forests, creating the North American inland temperate rainforest. The maritime influence is least prominent in the state's eastern part where the precipitation patterns are often reversed, with wetter summers and drier winters, and seasonal temperature differences are more extreme, showing a more semi-arid continental climate.
Idaho can be hot, although extended periods over 98 °F (37 °C) are rare, except for the lowest point in elevation, Lewiston, which correspondingly sees little snow. Hot summer days are tempered by the low relative humidity and cooler evenings during summer months since, for most of the state, the highest diurnal difference in temperature is often in the summer. Winters can be cold, although extended periods of bitter cold weather below zero are unusual. Idaho's all-time highest temperature of 118 °F (48 °C) was recorded at Orofino on July 28, 1934; the all-time lowest temperature of −60 °F (−51 °C) was recorded at Island Park Dam on January 18, 1943.
As of 2018:
The United States Census Bureau determined Idaho's population was 1,900,923 on July 1, 2021, a 21% increase since the 2010 U.S. census.
Idaho had an estimated population of 1,754,208 in 2018, which was an increase of 37,265, from the prior year and an increase of 186,626, or 11.91%, since 2010. This included a natural increase since the last census of 58,884 (111,131 births minus 52,247 deaths) and an increase due to net migration of 75,795 people into the state. There are large numbers of Americans of English and German ancestry in Idaho. Immigration from outside the United States resulted in a net increase of 14,522 people, and migration within the country produced a net increase of 61,273 people.
According to the American Immigration Council, in 2018, the top countries of origin for Idaho's immigrants were Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, China and Germany.
Idaho's population increased by 17.3% from 2010 to 2020, the second fastest state growth rate in the decade.
Nampa, about 20 miles (30 km) west of downtown Boise, became the state's second largest city in the late 1990s, passing Pocatello and Idaho Falls. Nampa's population was under 29,000 in 1990 and grew to over 81,000 by 2010. Located between Nampa and Boise, Meridian also experienced high growth, from fewer than 10,000 residents in 1990 to more than 75,000 in 2010 and is now Idaho's third largest city. Growth of 5% or more over the same period has also been observed in Caldwell, Coeur d'Alene, Post Falls, and Twin Falls.
From 1990 to 2010, Idaho's population increased by over 560,000 (55%). The Boise metropolitan area (officially known as the Boise City-Nampa, ID Metropolitan Statistical Area) is Idaho's largest metropolitan area. Other metropolitan areas in order of size are Coeur d'Alene, Idaho Falls, Pocatello and Lewiston.
According to HUD's 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, there were an estimated 1,998 homeless people in Idaho.
The table below shows the ethnic composition of Idaho's population as of 2016.
According to the 2017 American Community Survey, 12.2% of Idaho's population were of Hispanic or Latino origin (of any race): Mexican (10.6%), Puerto Rican (0.2%), Cuban (0.1%), and other Hispanic or Latino origin (1.3%). The five largest ancestry groups were: German (17.5%), English (16.4%), Irish (9.3%), American (8.1%), and Scottish (3.2%).
The majority of Idaho's population is of European (white) descent. Most Idaho's white population trace their ancestry to the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, France, Italy, or Poland. Latinos constitute around one-tenth of the population. There are also small numbers of Native Americans, Asians, and African Americans in the state.
In 2018, The top countries of origin for Idaho's immigrants were Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, China and Germany.
Note: Births in table don't add up, because Hispanics are counted both by their ethnicity and by their race, giving a higher overall number.
Religious self-identification, per Public Religion Research Institute's 2022 American Values Survey
According to the Pew Research Center on Religion & Public Life, the self-identified religious affiliations of Idahoans over the age of 18 in 2008 and 2014 were:
According to the Association of Religion Data Archives, the largest denominations by number of members in 2010 were The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with 409,265; the Catholic Church with 123,400; the non-denominational Protestants with 62,637; and the Assemblies of God with 22,183. In 2020, the Association of Religion Data Archives revealed Mormons remained the largest with 462,069, followed by Catholics (203,790), and non-denominational Protestantism (98,996).
In 2022, the Public Religion Research Institute's American Values Survey estimated altogether, 72% of the population was Christian, 26% were religiously unaffiliated, and 3% were New Agers. Of its Christian population, 37% were Protestant, 24% Mormon, 9% Catholic, and 2% Jehovah's Witnesses.
English is the state's predominant language. Minority languages include Spanish and various Native American languages.
As of 2016, the state's total employment was 562,282, and the total employer establishments were 45,826.
Gross state product for 2015 was $64.9 billion, and the per capita income based on 2015 GDP and 2015 population estimates was $39,100.
Important industries in Idaho are food processing, lumber and wood products, machinery, chemical products, paper products, electronics manufacturing, silver and other mining, and tourism. The world's largest factory for barrel cheese, the raw product for processed cheese, is in Gooding, Idaho. It has a capacity of 120,000 metric tons per year of barrel cheese and belongs to the Glanbia group.
Hewlett-Packard has operated a large plant in Boise since the 1970s, which is devoted primarily to LaserJet printers production.
Idaho has a state gambling lottery, which contributed $333.5 million in payments to all Idaho public schools and Idaho higher education from 1990 to 2006.
Tax is collected by the Idaho State Tax Commission.
The state personal income tax is a flat 5.8%. Idahoans may apply for state tax credits for taxes paid to other states, as well as for donations to Idaho state educational entities and some nonprofit youth and rehabilitation facilities.
The state sales tax is 6% with a very limited, selective local option up to 6.5%. Sales tax applies to the sale, rental or lease of tangible personal property and some services. Food is taxed, but prescription drugs are not. Hotel, motel, and campground accommodations are taxed at a higher rate (7% to 11%). Some jurisdictions impose local option sales tax.
The sales tax was introduced at 3% in 1965, easily approved by voters, where it remained at 3% until 1983.
Idaho has a regulated electricity market, with the Idaho Public Utilities Commission regulating the three major utilities of Avista Utilities, Idaho Power, and Rocky Mountain Power.
Idaho consumes almost four times more energy that it produces. In 2022, renewable energy sources accounted for 75% of the total electricity generated in the state, the fourth-highest share of renewable electricity for any state. In 2022, half of Idaho's utility-scale (1 megawatt or larger) electricity generating capacity is at hydroelectric power plants, 25% from natural gas, 17% of the state's total in-state electricity net generation came from wind facilities, 4% from solar and 1% from geothermal. Washington State provides most of the natural gas used in Idaho through one of the two major pipeline systems supplying the state.
Idaho has an upper-boundary estimate of development potential to generate 44,320 GWh/year from 18,076 MW of wind power, and 7,467,000 GWh/year from solar power using 2,061,000 MW of photovoltaics (PV), including 3,224 MW of rooftop photovoltaics, and 1,267,000 MW of concentrated solar power. Idaho had 973 MW of installed wind power as of 2020.
The Idaho Transportation Department is the government agency responsible for Idaho's transportation infrastructure, including operations and maintenance, as well as planning for future needs. The agency is also responsible for overseeing the disbursement of federal, state, and grant funding for the transportation programs of the state.
Major federal aid highways in Idaho:
Major airports include the Boise Airport which serves the southwest region of Idaho and the Spokane International Airport (in Spokane, Washington) which serves northern Idaho. Other airports with scheduled service are the Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport serving the Palouse; the Lewiston-Nez Perce County Airport, serving the Lewis-Clark Valley and north central and west central Idaho; The Magic Valley Regional Airport in Twin Falls; Friedman Memorial Airport in Hailey; the Idaho Falls Regional Airport; and the Pocatello Regional Airport.
Idaho is served by three transcontinental railroads. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) connects the Idaho Panhandle with Seattle, Portland, and Spokane to the west, and Minneapolis and Chicago to the east. The BNSF travels through Kootenai, Bonner, and Boundary counties. The Union Pacific Railroad crosses North Idaho, entering from Canada through Boundary and Bonner, and proceeding to Spokane. Canadian Pacific Railway uses Union Pacific Railroad tracks in North Idaho, carrying products from Alberta to Spokane and Portland, Oregon. Amtrak's Empire Builder crosses northern Idaho, with its only stop being in Sandpoint. Montana Rail Link also operates between Billings, Montana, and Sandpoint, Idaho.
The Union Pacific Railroad also crosses southern Idaho traveling between Portland, Oregon, Green River, Wyoming, and Ogden, Utah, and serves Boise, Nampa, Twin Falls, and Pocatello.
The Port of Lewiston is the farthest inland Pacific port on the west coast. A series of dams and locks on the Snake River and Columbia River facilitate barge travel from Lewiston to Portland, where goods are loaded on ocean-going vessels.
The constitution of Idaho is roughly modeled on the national constitution, with several additions. The constitution defines the form and functions of the state government, and may be amended through plebiscite. The state constitution presently requires the state government to maintain a balanced budget.
All of Idaho's state laws are contained in the Idaho Code and Statutes. The code is amended through the legislature with the approval of the governor. Idaho still operates under its original (1889) state constitution.
Idaho has one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation. In April 2023, the Idaho became the first state to restrict interstate travel for abortion services. Nearly all abortions are banned and private citizens can sue abortion providers. The Idaho Supreme Court has ruled there is no constitutional right to abortion. A federal judge ruled in 2022 that doctors cannot be punished for performing an abortion to protect a patient's health. The state abortion laws have led to an outmigration of physicians who specialize in maternal/fetal care.
The constitution of Idaho provides for three branches of government: the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Idaho has a bicameral legislature, elected from 35 legislative districts, each represented by one senator and two representatives.
Since 1946, statewide elected constitutional officers have been elected to four-year terms. They include: Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Idaho state controller (Auditor before 1994), Treasurer, Attorney General, and Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Last contested in 1966, Inspector of Mines was an originally elected constitutional office. Afterward it was an appointed position and ultimately done away with entirely in 1974.
Idaho's government has an alcohol monopoly; the Idaho State Liquor Division.
The governor of Idaho serves a four-year term, and is elected during what is nationally referred to as midterm elections. As such, the governor is not elected in the same election year as the president of the United States. The current governor is Republican Brad Little, who was first elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. There are no term limits for governor of Idaho.
Idaho's legislature is part-time. Because of this, Idaho's legislators are considered "citizen legislators", meaning their position as a legislator is not their main occupation. However, the session may be extended if necessary, and often is.
Terms for both the Senate and House of Representatives are two years. Legislative elections occur every even numbered year.
Both of Idaho's state legislative chambers have been continuously controlled by Republicans since 1961, although Democratic legislators are routinely elected from Boise, Pocatello, Blaine County and the northern Panhandle.
The highest court in Idaho is the Idaho Supreme Court. There is also an intermediate appellate court, the Idaho Court of Appeals, which hears cases assigned to it from the Supreme Court. The state's District Courts serve seven judicial districts.
After the Civil War, many Midwestern and Southern Democrats moved to the Idaho Territory. As a result, the early territorial legislatures were solidly Democrat-controlled. In contrast, most of the territorial governors were appointed by Republican presidents and were Republicans. This led to sometimes-bitter clashes between the two parties, including a range war with the Democrats backing the sheepherders and the Republicans the cattlemen, which ended in the "Diamondfield" Jack Davis murder trial. In the 1880s, Republicans became more prominent in local politics.
In 1864, Clinton DeWitt Smith removed the territorial seal and the state constitution from a locked safe, and took them to Boise. This effectively moved the capital from where they were stored (Lewiston, Idaho) to the current capital, Boise.
Since statehood, the Republican Party has usually been the dominant party in Idaho. At one time, Idaho had two Democratic parties, one being the mainstream and the other called the Anti-Mormon Democrats, lasting into the early 20th century. In the 1890s and early 1900s, the Populist Party enjoyed prominence, while the Democratic Party maintained a brief dominance in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Since World War II, most statewide-elected officials have been Republicans, though the Democrats did hold the majority in the House (by one seat) in 1958 and the governorship from 1971 to 1995.
Idaho Congressional delegations have also been generally Republican since statehood. Several Idaho Democrats have had electoral success in the U.S. House of Representatives over the years, but the Senate delegation has been a Republican stronghold for decades. Several Idaho Republicans, including current Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, have won reelection to the Senate, but only Frank Church has won reelection as a Democrat. Church's 1974 victory was the last win for his party for either Senate seat, and Walt Minnick's 2008 victory in the 1st congressional district was the last Democratic win in any congressional race.
In modern times, Idaho has been a reliably Republican state in presidential politics. It has not supported a Democrat for president since 1964. Even in that election, Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the state by fewer than two percentage points, compared to a landslide nationally. In 2004, Republican George W. Bush carried Idaho by a margin of 38 percentage points and with 68.4% of the vote, winning in 43 of 44 counties. Only Blaine County, which contains the Sun Valley ski resort, supported John Kerry, who owns a home in the area. In 2008 Barack Obama's 36.1 percent showing was the best for a Democratic presidential candidate in Idaho since 1976. However, Republican margins were narrower in 1992 and 1976.
In the 2006 elections, Republicans, led by gubernatorial candidate Butch Otter, won all the state's constitutional offices and retained both of the state's seats in the House. However, Democrats picked up several seats in the Idaho Legislature, notably in the Boise area.
Republicans lost one of the House seats in 2008 to Minnick, but Republican Jim Risch retained Larry Craig's Senate seat for the GOP by a comfortable margin. Minnick lost his seat in the 2010 election to Republican State Rep. Raul Labrador.
Idaho retains the death penalty. Pending the outcome of a legal challenge on a bill passed on 20 March 2023, authorized methods of execution include the Firing Squad.
As of January 2020, the State of Idaho contains 105 school districts and 62 charter schools. The school districts range in enrollment from two to 39,507 students.
Idaho school districts are governed by elected school boards, which are elected in November of odd-numbered years, except for the Boise School District, whose elections are held in September.
The Idaho State Board of Education oversees three comprehensive universities. The University of Idaho in Moscow was the first university in the state (founded in 1889). It opened its doors in 1892 and is the land-grant institution and primary research university of the state. Idaho State University in Pocatello opened in 1901 as the Academy of Idaho, attained four-year status in 1947 and university status in 1963. Boise State University is the most recent school to attain university status in Idaho. The school opened in 1932 as Boise Junior College and became Boise State University in 1974. Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston is the only public, non-university four-year college in Idaho. It opened as a normal school in 1893.
Idaho has four regional community colleges: North Idaho College in Coeur d'Alene; College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls; College of Western Idaho in Nampa, which opened in 2009, College of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls, which transitioned from a technical college in 2017.
Private institutions in Idaho are Boise Bible College, affiliated with congregations of the Christian churches and churches of Christ; Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg, which is affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a sister college to Brigham Young University; The College of Idaho in Caldwell, which still maintains a loose affiliation with the Presbyterian Church; Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa; and New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, of reformed Christian theological background. McCall College is a non-affiliated two-year private college in McCall, which was founded in 2011 and later opened in 2013.
Central Idaho is home to one of North America's oldest ski resorts, Sun Valley, where the world's first chairlift was installed in 1936. Other noted outdoor sites include Hells Canyon, the Salmon River, and its embarkation point of Riggins.
The Boise Open professional golf tournament has been played at Hillcrest Country Club since 1990 as part of the Korn Ferry Tour. The Open has been part of the Korn Ferry Tour Finals since 2016.
High school sports are overseen by the Idaho High School Activities Association (IHSAA).
In 2016, Meridian's Michael Slagowski ran 800 meters in 1:48.70. That is one of the 35 fastest 800-meter times ever run by a high school boy in the United States.
The 1980 film Bronco Billy filmed in Boise, Idaho for two months. The 1985 film Pale Rider was primarily filmed in the Boulder Mountains and the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in central Idaho, just north of Sun Valley. River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves starred in the 1991 movie My Own Private Idaho, portions of which take place in Idaho. The 2004 cult film Napoleon Dynamite takes place in Preston, Idaho; the film's director, Jared Hess, attended Preston High School.
45°N 115°W / 45°N 115°W / 45; -115 (State of Idaho) | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Idaho (/ˈaɪdəhoʊ/ EYE-də-hoh) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Montana and Wyoming to the east, Nevada and Utah to the south, and Washington and Oregon to the west. The state's capital and largest city is Boise. With an area of 83,570 square miles (216,400 km), Idaho is the 14th largest state by land area, but with a population of approximately 1.8 million, it ranks as the 13th least populous and the 6th least densely populated of the 50 U.S. states.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "For thousands of years, and prior to European colonization, Idaho has been inhabited by native peoples. In the early 19th century, Idaho was considered part of the Oregon Country, an area of dispute between the U.S. and the British Empire. It officially became a U.S. territory with the signing of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, but a separate Idaho Territory was not organized until 1863, instead being included for periods in Oregon Territory and Washington Territory. Idaho was eventually admitted to the Union on July 3, 1890, becoming the 43rd state.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Forming part of the Pacific Northwest (and the associated Cascadia bioregion), Idaho is divided into several distinct geographic and climatic regions. The state's north, the relatively isolated Idaho Panhandle, is closely linked with Eastern Washington, with which it shares the Pacific Time Zone—the rest of the state uses the Mountain Time Zone. The state's south includes the Snake River Plain (which has most of the population and agricultural land), and the southeast incorporates part of the Great Basin. Idaho is quite mountainous and contains several stretches of the Rocky Mountains. The United States Forest Service holds about 38% of Idaho's land, the highest proportion of any state.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Industries significant for the state economy include manufacturing, agriculture, mining, forestry, and tourism. Several science and technology firms are either headquartered in Idaho or have factories there, and the state also contains the Idaho National Laboratory, which is the country's largest Department of Energy facility. Idaho's agricultural sector supplies many products, but the state is best known for its potato crop, which comprises around one-third of the nationwide yield. The official state nickname is the \"Gem State\", a figurative expression which references Idaho's natural beauty.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The name's origin remains a mystery. In the early 1860s, when the U.S. Congress was considering organizing a new territory in the Rocky Mountains, the name \"Idaho\" was suggested by George M. Willing, a politician posing as an unrecognized delegate from the unofficial Jefferson Territory. Willing claimed that the name was derived from a Shoshone term meaning \"the sun comes from the mountains\" or \"gem of the mountains\", but it was revealed later that there was no such term and Willing claimed that he had been inspired to coin the name when he met a little girl named Ida. Since the name appeared to be fabricated, the U.S. Congress ultimately decided to name the area Colorado Territory instead when it was created in February 1861, but by the time this decision was made, the town of Idaho Springs, Colorado had already been named after Willing's proposal.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The same year Congress created Colorado Territory, a county called Idaho County was created in eastern Washington Territory. The county was named after a steamship named Idaho, which was launched on the Columbia River in 1860. It is unclear whether the steamship was named before or after Willing's claim was revealed. Regardless, part of Washington Territory, including Idaho County, was used to create Idaho Territory in 1863. Idaho Territory would later change its boundaries to the area that became the U.S. state.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Humans may have been present in the Idaho area as long as 14,500 years ago. Excavations at Wilson Butte Cave near Twin Falls in 1959 revealed evidence of human activity, including arrowheads, that rank among the oldest dated artifacts in North America. American Indian peoples predominant in the area included the Nez Percé in the north and the Northern and Western Shoshone in the south.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A Late Upper Paleolithic site was identified at Cooper's Ferry in western Idaho near the town of Cottonwood by archaeologists in 2019. Based on evidence found at the site, first people lived in this area 15,300 to 16,600 years ago, predating the Beringia land bridge by about a thousand years. The discoverers emphasized that they possess similarities with tools and artifacts discovered in Japan that date from 16,000 to 13,000 years ago. The discovery also showed that the first people might not have come to North America by land, as previously theorized. On the contrary, they probably came through the water, using a Pacific coastal route.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The most parsimonious explanation we think is that people came down the Pacific Coast, and as they encountered the mouth of the Columbia River, they essentially found an off-ramp from this coastal migration and also found their first viable interior route to the areas that are south of the ice sheet.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "An early presence of French-Canadian trappers is visible in names and toponyms: Nez Percé, Cœur d'Alène, Boisé, Payette. Some of these names appeared prior to the Lewis and Clark and Astorian expeditions, which included significant numbers of French and Métis guides recruited for their familiarity with the terrain.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Idaho, as part of the Oregon Country, was claimed by both the United States and Great Britain until the United States gained undisputed jurisdiction in 1846. From 1843 to 1849, present-day Idaho was under the de facto jurisdiction of the Provisional Government of Oregon. When Oregon became a state in 1849, what is now Idaho was situated in what remained of the original Oregon Territory, designated as the Washington Territory.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Between 1849 and the creation of the Idaho Territory in 1863, parts of present-day Idaho were included in the Oregon, Washington, and Dakota Territories. The new Idaho territory included present-day Idaho, Montana, and most of Wyoming. The Lewis and Clark expedition crossed Idaho in 1805 on the way to the Pacific, and in 1806, on the return trip, largely following the Clearwater River in both directions. The first non-indigenous settlement was Kullyspell House, established on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille in 1809 by David Thompson of the North West Company for fur trading. In 1812 Donald Mackenzie, working for the Pacific Fur Company at the time, established a post on the lower Clearwater River near present-day Lewiston. This post, known as \"MacKenzie's Post\" or \"Clearwater\", operated until the Pacific Fur Company was bought out by the North West Company in 1813, after which the post was abandoned. The first organized non-indigenous communities within the present borders of Idaho were established by Mormon pioneers in 1860. The first permanent, substantial incorporated community was Lewiston, in 1861. Early in its history, Idaho saw a large influx of Chinese immigrants, who by 1870 made up about 28.5% of the territory's population.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Idaho achieved statehood in 1890, following a difficult start as a territory, including the chaotic transfer of the territorial capital from Lewiston to Boise, disenfranchisement of Mormon polygamists upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1890, and a federal attempt to split the territory between Washington Territory, which gained statehood in 1889, a year before Idaho, and the state of Nevada which had been a state since 1864.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Idaho was one of the hardest hit of the Pacific Northwest states during the Great Depression. Prices plummeted for Idaho's major crops: in 1932 a bushel of potatoes brought only ten cents compared to 1919 for $1.51, while Idaho farmers saw their annual income of $686 in 1929 drop to $250 by 1932.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In recent years, Idaho has expanded its commercial base as a tourism and agricultural state to include science and technology industries. Science and technology have become the largest single economic center (over 25% of the state's total revenue) within the state and are greater than agriculture, forestry and mining combined.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "During the COVID-19 pandemic, Idaho enacted statewide crisis standards of care as COVID-19 patients overwhelmed hospitals. The state had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country as of mid-October 2021.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Idaho shares a border with six U.S. states and one Canadian province. The states of Washington and Oregon are to the west, Nevada and Utah are to the south, and Montana and Wyoming are to the east. Idaho also shares a short border with the Canadian province of British Columbia to the north.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The landscape is rugged, with some of the largest unspoiled natural areas in the United States. For example, at 2.3 million acres (930,000 ha), the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Area is the largest contiguous area of protected wilderness in the continental United States. Idaho is a Rocky Mountain state with abundant natural resources and scenic areas. The state has snow-capped mountain ranges, rapids, vast lakes and steep canyons. The waters of the Snake River run through Hells Canyon, the deepest gorge in the United States. Shoshone Falls falls down cliffs from a height greater than Niagara Falls.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "By far, the most important river in Idaho is the Snake River, a major tributary of the Columbia River. The Snake River flows from Yellowstone in northwestern Wyoming through the Snake River Plain in southern Idaho before turning north, leaving the state at Lewiston before joining the Columbia in Kennewick. Other major rivers are the Clark Fork/Pend Oreille River, the Spokane River, and, many major tributaries of the Snake River, including the Clearwater River, the Salmon River, the Boise River, and the Payette River. The Salmon River empties into the Snake in Hells Canyon and forms the southern boundary of Nez Perce County on its north shore, of which Lewiston is the county seat. The Port of Lewiston, at the confluence of the Clearwater and the Snake Rivers is the farthest inland seaport on the West Coast at 465 river miles from the Pacific at Astoria, Oregon.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The vast majority of Idaho's population lives in the Snake River Plain, a valley running from across the entirety of southern Idaho from east to west. The valley contains the major cities of Boise, Meridian, Nampa, Caldwell, Twin Falls, Idaho Falls, and Pocatello. The plain served as an easy pass through the Rocky Mountains for westward-bound settlers on the Oregon Trail, and many settlers chose to settle the area rather than risking the treacherous route through the Blue Mountains and the Cascade Range to the west. The western region of the plain is known as the Treasure Valley, bound between the Owyhee Mountains to the southwest and the Boise Mountains to the northeast. The central region of the Snake River Plain is known as the Magic Valley.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Idaho's highest point is Borah Peak, 12,662 ft (3,859 m), in the Lost River Range north of Mackay. Idaho's lowest point, 710 ft (216 m), is in Lewiston, where the Clearwater River joins the Snake River and continues into Washington. The Sawtooth Range is often considered Idaho's most famous mountain range. Other mountain ranges in Idaho include the Bitterroot Range, the White Cloud Mountains, the Lost River Range, the Clearwater Mountains, and the Salmon River Mountains.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Salmon-Challis National Forest is located in the east central sections of the state, with Salmon National Forest to the north and Challis National Forest to the south. The forest is in an area known as the Idaho Cobalt Belt, which consists of a 34 miles (55 km) long geological formation of sedimentary rock that contains some of the largest cobalt deposits in the U.S.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Idaho has two time zones, with the dividing line approximately midway between Canada and Nevada. Southern Idaho, including the Boise metropolitan area, Idaho Falls, Pocatello, and Twin Falls, are in the Mountain Time Zone. A legislative error (15 U.S.C. ch. 6 §264) theoretically placed this region in the Central Time Zone, but this was corrected with a 2007 amendment. Areas north of the Salmon River, including Coeur d'Alene, Moscow, Lewiston, and Sandpoint, are in the Pacific Time Zone, which contains less than a quarter of the state's population and land area.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Idaho's climate varies widely. Although the state's western border is about 330 miles (530 km) from the Pacific Ocean, the maritime influence is still felt in Idaho; especially, in the winter when cloud cover, humidity, and precipitation are at their maximum extent. This influence has a moderating effect in the winter where temperatures are not as low as would otherwise be expected for a northern state with predominantly high elevations. In the panhandle, moist air masses from the coast are released as precipitation over the North Central Rockies forests, creating the North American inland temperate rainforest. The maritime influence is least prominent in the state's eastern part where the precipitation patterns are often reversed, with wetter summers and drier winters, and seasonal temperature differences are more extreme, showing a more semi-arid continental climate.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Idaho can be hot, although extended periods over 98 °F (37 °C) are rare, except for the lowest point in elevation, Lewiston, which correspondingly sees little snow. Hot summer days are tempered by the low relative humidity and cooler evenings during summer months since, for most of the state, the highest diurnal difference in temperature is often in the summer. Winters can be cold, although extended periods of bitter cold weather below zero are unusual. Idaho's all-time highest temperature of 118 °F (48 °C) was recorded at Orofino on July 28, 1934; the all-time lowest temperature of −60 °F (−51 °C) was recorded at Island Park Dam on January 18, 1943.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "As of 2018:",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The United States Census Bureau determined Idaho's population was 1,900,923 on July 1, 2021, a 21% increase since the 2010 U.S. census.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Idaho had an estimated population of 1,754,208 in 2018, which was an increase of 37,265, from the prior year and an increase of 186,626, or 11.91%, since 2010. This included a natural increase since the last census of 58,884 (111,131 births minus 52,247 deaths) and an increase due to net migration of 75,795 people into the state. There are large numbers of Americans of English and German ancestry in Idaho. Immigration from outside the United States resulted in a net increase of 14,522 people, and migration within the country produced a net increase of 61,273 people.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "According to the American Immigration Council, in 2018, the top countries of origin for Idaho's immigrants were Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, China and Germany.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Idaho's population increased by 17.3% from 2010 to 2020, the second fastest state growth rate in the decade.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Nampa, about 20 miles (30 km) west of downtown Boise, became the state's second largest city in the late 1990s, passing Pocatello and Idaho Falls. Nampa's population was under 29,000 in 1990 and grew to over 81,000 by 2010. Located between Nampa and Boise, Meridian also experienced high growth, from fewer than 10,000 residents in 1990 to more than 75,000 in 2010 and is now Idaho's third largest city. Growth of 5% or more over the same period has also been observed in Caldwell, Coeur d'Alene, Post Falls, and Twin Falls.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "From 1990 to 2010, Idaho's population increased by over 560,000 (55%). The Boise metropolitan area (officially known as the Boise City-Nampa, ID Metropolitan Statistical Area) is Idaho's largest metropolitan area. Other metropolitan areas in order of size are Coeur d'Alene, Idaho Falls, Pocatello and Lewiston.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "According to HUD's 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, there were an estimated 1,998 homeless people in Idaho.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The table below shows the ethnic composition of Idaho's population as of 2016.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "According to the 2017 American Community Survey, 12.2% of Idaho's population were of Hispanic or Latino origin (of any race): Mexican (10.6%), Puerto Rican (0.2%), Cuban (0.1%), and other Hispanic or Latino origin (1.3%). The five largest ancestry groups were: German (17.5%), English (16.4%), Irish (9.3%), American (8.1%), and Scottish (3.2%).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The majority of Idaho's population is of European (white) descent. Most Idaho's white population trace their ancestry to the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, France, Italy, or Poland. Latinos constitute around one-tenth of the population. There are also small numbers of Native Americans, Asians, and African Americans in the state.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 2018, The top countries of origin for Idaho's immigrants were Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, China and Germany.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Note: Births in table don't add up, because Hispanics are counted both by their ethnicity and by their race, giving a higher overall number.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Religious self-identification, per Public Religion Research Institute's 2022 American Values Survey",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "According to the Pew Research Center on Religion & Public Life, the self-identified religious affiliations of Idahoans over the age of 18 in 2008 and 2014 were:",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "According to the Association of Religion Data Archives, the largest denominations by number of members in 2010 were The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with 409,265; the Catholic Church with 123,400; the non-denominational Protestants with 62,637; and the Assemblies of God with 22,183. In 2020, the Association of Religion Data Archives revealed Mormons remained the largest with 462,069, followed by Catholics (203,790), and non-denominational Protestantism (98,996).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 2022, the Public Religion Research Institute's American Values Survey estimated altogether, 72% of the population was Christian, 26% were religiously unaffiliated, and 3% were New Agers. Of its Christian population, 37% were Protestant, 24% Mormon, 9% Catholic, and 2% Jehovah's Witnesses.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "English is the state's predominant language. Minority languages include Spanish and various Native American languages.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "As of 2016, the state's total employment was 562,282, and the total employer establishments were 45,826.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Gross state product for 2015 was $64.9 billion, and the per capita income based on 2015 GDP and 2015 population estimates was $39,100.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Important industries in Idaho are food processing, lumber and wood products, machinery, chemical products, paper products, electronics manufacturing, silver and other mining, and tourism. The world's largest factory for barrel cheese, the raw product for processed cheese, is in Gooding, Idaho. It has a capacity of 120,000 metric tons per year of barrel cheese and belongs to the Glanbia group.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Hewlett-Packard has operated a large plant in Boise since the 1970s, which is devoted primarily to LaserJet printers production.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Idaho has a state gambling lottery, which contributed $333.5 million in payments to all Idaho public schools and Idaho higher education from 1990 to 2006.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Tax is collected by the Idaho State Tax Commission.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The state personal income tax is a flat 5.8%. Idahoans may apply for state tax credits for taxes paid to other states, as well as for donations to Idaho state educational entities and some nonprofit youth and rehabilitation facilities.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The state sales tax is 6% with a very limited, selective local option up to 6.5%. Sales tax applies to the sale, rental or lease of tangible personal property and some services. Food is taxed, but prescription drugs are not. Hotel, motel, and campground accommodations are taxed at a higher rate (7% to 11%). Some jurisdictions impose local option sales tax.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The sales tax was introduced at 3% in 1965, easily approved by voters, where it remained at 3% until 1983.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Idaho has a regulated electricity market, with the Idaho Public Utilities Commission regulating the three major utilities of Avista Utilities, Idaho Power, and Rocky Mountain Power.",
"title": "Energy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Idaho consumes almost four times more energy that it produces. In 2022, renewable energy sources accounted for 75% of the total electricity generated in the state, the fourth-highest share of renewable electricity for any state. In 2022, half of Idaho's utility-scale (1 megawatt or larger) electricity generating capacity is at hydroelectric power plants, 25% from natural gas, 17% of the state's total in-state electricity net generation came from wind facilities, 4% from solar and 1% from geothermal. Washington State provides most of the natural gas used in Idaho through one of the two major pipeline systems supplying the state.",
"title": "Energy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Idaho has an upper-boundary estimate of development potential to generate 44,320 GWh/year from 18,076 MW of wind power, and 7,467,000 GWh/year from solar power using 2,061,000 MW of photovoltaics (PV), including 3,224 MW of rooftop photovoltaics, and 1,267,000 MW of concentrated solar power. Idaho had 973 MW of installed wind power as of 2020.",
"title": "Energy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Idaho Transportation Department is the government agency responsible for Idaho's transportation infrastructure, including operations and maintenance, as well as planning for future needs. The agency is also responsible for overseeing the disbursement of federal, state, and grant funding for the transportation programs of the state.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Major federal aid highways in Idaho:",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Major airports include the Boise Airport which serves the southwest region of Idaho and the Spokane International Airport (in Spokane, Washington) which serves northern Idaho. Other airports with scheduled service are the Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport serving the Palouse; the Lewiston-Nez Perce County Airport, serving the Lewis-Clark Valley and north central and west central Idaho; The Magic Valley Regional Airport in Twin Falls; Friedman Memorial Airport in Hailey; the Idaho Falls Regional Airport; and the Pocatello Regional Airport.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Idaho is served by three transcontinental railroads. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) connects the Idaho Panhandle with Seattle, Portland, and Spokane to the west, and Minneapolis and Chicago to the east. The BNSF travels through Kootenai, Bonner, and Boundary counties. The Union Pacific Railroad crosses North Idaho, entering from Canada through Boundary and Bonner, and proceeding to Spokane. Canadian Pacific Railway uses Union Pacific Railroad tracks in North Idaho, carrying products from Alberta to Spokane and Portland, Oregon. Amtrak's Empire Builder crosses northern Idaho, with its only stop being in Sandpoint. Montana Rail Link also operates between Billings, Montana, and Sandpoint, Idaho.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Union Pacific Railroad also crosses southern Idaho traveling between Portland, Oregon, Green River, Wyoming, and Ogden, Utah, and serves Boise, Nampa, Twin Falls, and Pocatello.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Port of Lewiston is the farthest inland Pacific port on the west coast. A series of dams and locks on the Snake River and Columbia River facilitate barge travel from Lewiston to Portland, where goods are loaded on ocean-going vessels.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The constitution of Idaho is roughly modeled on the national constitution, with several additions. The constitution defines the form and functions of the state government, and may be amended through plebiscite. The state constitution presently requires the state government to maintain a balanced budget.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "All of Idaho's state laws are contained in the Idaho Code and Statutes. The code is amended through the legislature with the approval of the governor. Idaho still operates under its original (1889) state constitution.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Idaho has one of the strictest abortion laws in the nation. In April 2023, the Idaho became the first state to restrict interstate travel for abortion services. Nearly all abortions are banned and private citizens can sue abortion providers. The Idaho Supreme Court has ruled there is no constitutional right to abortion. A federal judge ruled in 2022 that doctors cannot be punished for performing an abortion to protect a patient's health. The state abortion laws have led to an outmigration of physicians who specialize in maternal/fetal care.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The constitution of Idaho provides for three branches of government: the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Idaho has a bicameral legislature, elected from 35 legislative districts, each represented by one senator and two representatives.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Since 1946, statewide elected constitutional officers have been elected to four-year terms. They include: Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Idaho state controller (Auditor before 1994), Treasurer, Attorney General, and Superintendent of Public Instruction.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Last contested in 1966, Inspector of Mines was an originally elected constitutional office. Afterward it was an appointed position and ultimately done away with entirely in 1974.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Idaho's government has an alcohol monopoly; the Idaho State Liquor Division.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The governor of Idaho serves a four-year term, and is elected during what is nationally referred to as midterm elections. As such, the governor is not elected in the same election year as the president of the United States. The current governor is Republican Brad Little, who was first elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. There are no term limits for governor of Idaho.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Idaho's legislature is part-time. Because of this, Idaho's legislators are considered \"citizen legislators\", meaning their position as a legislator is not their main occupation. However, the session may be extended if necessary, and often is.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Terms for both the Senate and House of Representatives are two years. Legislative elections occur every even numbered year.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Both of Idaho's state legislative chambers have been continuously controlled by Republicans since 1961, although Democratic legislators are routinely elected from Boise, Pocatello, Blaine County and the northern Panhandle.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The highest court in Idaho is the Idaho Supreme Court. There is also an intermediate appellate court, the Idaho Court of Appeals, which hears cases assigned to it from the Supreme Court. The state's District Courts serve seven judicial districts.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "After the Civil War, many Midwestern and Southern Democrats moved to the Idaho Territory. As a result, the early territorial legislatures were solidly Democrat-controlled. In contrast, most of the territorial governors were appointed by Republican presidents and were Republicans. This led to sometimes-bitter clashes between the two parties, including a range war with the Democrats backing the sheepherders and the Republicans the cattlemen, which ended in the \"Diamondfield\" Jack Davis murder trial. In the 1880s, Republicans became more prominent in local politics.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In 1864, Clinton DeWitt Smith removed the territorial seal and the state constitution from a locked safe, and took them to Boise. This effectively moved the capital from where they were stored (Lewiston, Idaho) to the current capital, Boise.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Since statehood, the Republican Party has usually been the dominant party in Idaho. At one time, Idaho had two Democratic parties, one being the mainstream and the other called the Anti-Mormon Democrats, lasting into the early 20th century. In the 1890s and early 1900s, the Populist Party enjoyed prominence, while the Democratic Party maintained a brief dominance in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Since World War II, most statewide-elected officials have been Republicans, though the Democrats did hold the majority in the House (by one seat) in 1958 and the governorship from 1971 to 1995.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Idaho Congressional delegations have also been generally Republican since statehood. Several Idaho Democrats have had electoral success in the U.S. House of Representatives over the years, but the Senate delegation has been a Republican stronghold for decades. Several Idaho Republicans, including current Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, have won reelection to the Senate, but only Frank Church has won reelection as a Democrat. Church's 1974 victory was the last win for his party for either Senate seat, and Walt Minnick's 2008 victory in the 1st congressional district was the last Democratic win in any congressional race.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In modern times, Idaho has been a reliably Republican state in presidential politics. It has not supported a Democrat for president since 1964. Even in that election, Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the state by fewer than two percentage points, compared to a landslide nationally. In 2004, Republican George W. Bush carried Idaho by a margin of 38 percentage points and with 68.4% of the vote, winning in 43 of 44 counties. Only Blaine County, which contains the Sun Valley ski resort, supported John Kerry, who owns a home in the area. In 2008 Barack Obama's 36.1 percent showing was the best for a Democratic presidential candidate in Idaho since 1976. However, Republican margins were narrower in 1992 and 1976.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In the 2006 elections, Republicans, led by gubernatorial candidate Butch Otter, won all the state's constitutional offices and retained both of the state's seats in the House. However, Democrats picked up several seats in the Idaho Legislature, notably in the Boise area.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Republicans lost one of the House seats in 2008 to Minnick, but Republican Jim Risch retained Larry Craig's Senate seat for the GOP by a comfortable margin. Minnick lost his seat in the 2010 election to Republican State Rep. Raul Labrador.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Idaho retains the death penalty. Pending the outcome of a legal challenge on a bill passed on 20 March 2023, authorized methods of execution include the Firing Squad.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "As of January 2020, the State of Idaho contains 105 school districts and 62 charter schools. The school districts range in enrollment from two to 39,507 students.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Idaho school districts are governed by elected school boards, which are elected in November of odd-numbered years, except for the Boise School District, whose elections are held in September.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The Idaho State Board of Education oversees three comprehensive universities. The University of Idaho in Moscow was the first university in the state (founded in 1889). It opened its doors in 1892 and is the land-grant institution and primary research university of the state. Idaho State University in Pocatello opened in 1901 as the Academy of Idaho, attained four-year status in 1947 and university status in 1963. Boise State University is the most recent school to attain university status in Idaho. The school opened in 1932 as Boise Junior College and became Boise State University in 1974. Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston is the only public, non-university four-year college in Idaho. It opened as a normal school in 1893.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Idaho has four regional community colleges: North Idaho College in Coeur d'Alene; College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls; College of Western Idaho in Nampa, which opened in 2009, College of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls, which transitioned from a technical college in 2017.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Private institutions in Idaho are Boise Bible College, affiliated with congregations of the Christian churches and churches of Christ; Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg, which is affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a sister college to Brigham Young University; The College of Idaho in Caldwell, which still maintains a loose affiliation with the Presbyterian Church; Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa; and New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, of reformed Christian theological background. McCall College is a non-affiliated two-year private college in McCall, which was founded in 2011 and later opened in 2013.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Central Idaho is home to one of North America's oldest ski resorts, Sun Valley, where the world's first chairlift was installed in 1936. Other noted outdoor sites include Hells Canyon, the Salmon River, and its embarkation point of Riggins.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The Boise Open professional golf tournament has been played at Hillcrest Country Club since 1990 as part of the Korn Ferry Tour. The Open has been part of the Korn Ferry Tour Finals since 2016.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "High school sports are overseen by the Idaho High School Activities Association (IHSAA).",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "In 2016, Meridian's Michael Slagowski ran 800 meters in 1:48.70. That is one of the 35 fastest 800-meter times ever run by a high school boy in the United States.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The 1980 film Bronco Billy filmed in Boise, Idaho for two months. The 1985 film Pale Rider was primarily filmed in the Boulder Mountains and the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in central Idaho, just north of Sun Valley. River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves starred in the 1991 movie My Own Private Idaho, portions of which take place in Idaho. The 2004 cult film Napoleon Dynamite takes place in Preston, Idaho; the film's director, Jared Hess, attended Preston High School.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "45°N 115°W / 45°N 115°W / 45; -115 (State of Idaho)",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Idaho is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Montana and Wyoming to the east, Nevada and Utah to the south, and Washington and Oregon to the west. The state's capital and largest city is Boise. With an area of 83,570 square miles (216,400 km2), Idaho is the 14th largest state by land area, but with a population of approximately 1.8 million, it ranks as the 13th least populous and the 6th least densely populated of the 50 U.S. states. For thousands of years, and prior to European colonization, Idaho has been inhabited by native peoples. In the early 19th century, Idaho was considered part of the Oregon Country, an area of dispute between the U.S. and the British Empire. It officially became a U.S. territory with the signing of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, but a separate Idaho Territory was not organized until 1863, instead being included for periods in Oregon Territory and Washington Territory. Idaho was eventually admitted to the Union on July 3, 1890, becoming the 43rd state. Forming part of the Pacific Northwest, Idaho is divided into several distinct geographic and climatic regions. The state's north, the relatively isolated Idaho Panhandle, is closely linked with Eastern Washington, with which it shares the Pacific Time Zone—the rest of the state uses the Mountain Time Zone. The state's south includes the Snake River Plain, and the southeast incorporates part of the Great Basin. Idaho is quite mountainous and contains several stretches of the Rocky Mountains. The United States Forest Service holds about 38% of Idaho's land, the highest proportion of any state. Industries significant for the state economy include manufacturing, agriculture, mining, forestry, and tourism. Several science and technology firms are either headquartered in Idaho or have factories there, and the state also contains the Idaho National Laboratory, which is the country's largest Department of Energy facility. Idaho's agricultural sector supplies many products, but the state is best known for its potato crop, which comprises around one-third of the nationwide yield. The official state nickname is the "Gem State", a figurative expression which references Idaho's natural beauty. | 2001-04-11T22:21:15Z | 2023-12-31T18:29:10Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho |
14,611 | Italian | Italian(s) may refer to: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Italian(s) may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
]
| Italian(s) may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
Italians, an Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
Italian language, a Romance language
Regional Italian, regional variants of the Italian language
Languages of Italy, languages and dialects spoken in Italy
Italian culture, cultural features of Italy
Italian cuisine, traditional foods
Folklore of Italy, the folklore and urban legends of Italy
Mythology of Italy, traditional religion and beliefs | 2023-06-20T15:16:50Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian |
|
14,612 | Interrogatories | In law, interrogatories (also known as requests for further information) are a formal set of written questions propounded by one litigant and required to be answered by an adversary in order to clarify matters of fact and help to determine in advance what facts will be presented at any trial in the case.
Interrogatories are used to gain information from the other party relevant to the issues in a lawsuit. The law and issues will differ depending upon the facts of a case and the laws of the jurisdiction in which a lawsuit is filed. For some types of cases there are standard sets of interrogatories available that cover the essential facts, and may be modified for the case in which they are used.
When a lawsuit is filed, the pleadings filed by the parties are intended to let the other parties know what each side intends to prove at trial, and what legal case they have to answer. However, in most cases, the parties will require additional information to fully understand each other's legal and factual claims. The discovery process, including the use of interrogatories, can help the parties obtain that information from each other.
For an example of how interrogatories may be used, in a motor vehicle accident lawsuit, an injured plaintiff typically asserts that the defendant driver committed the tort of negligence in causing the accident. To prove negligence, the law requires the injured plaintiff to show that the driver owed them a duty of care and breached it, causing the injury. Assuming that the defendant did not dispute driving a vehicle that was involved in the accident that injured the plaintiff, the case would come down to whether the driver drove in accordance with the standard of a reasonable driver, and whether the injured person's injuries are a foreseeable consequence of the driving.
The parties may use interrogatories to seek information, including concessions as to how the accident occurred, from each other. The injured plaintiff might serve interrogatories on the defendant driver seeking information that would support the plaintiff's theory of the case. If the plaintiff is alleging that the defendant was speeding, the plaintiff might ask the defendant to state the speed of the defendant's vehicle at the time of the accident. If the plaintiff alleges that the defendant failed to control the car properly or failed to pay proper attention to the road and other vehicles, the plaintiff could ask interrogatory questions that would help prove those allegations or require disclosure of the basis of any denial of negligence by the defendant. The driver may have a defense to those allegations, perhaps if the accident occurred at low speed, and was unavoidable (maybe due to some third party intervention). The injured person may, however, argue that the driver was still responsible (perhaps the driver should have used the horn of the vehicle to alert the third party), or there may be other allegations.
The defense may similarly use interrogatories to help build legal and factual defenses to the plaintiff's case. Continuing with the example of a car accident, the defendant may seek information or concessions from the plaintiff that would suggest that a different driver was partially or wholly responsible for the accident, or that under the facts the accident was unavoidable despite the proper exercise of care.
In England and Wales, this procedure is governed by Part 18 of the Civil Procedure Rules. It is known as a Request for Further Information.
In the Request for Further Information procedure, use of standard pre-printed forms is not common, and any such request would almost certainly be looked upon critically by the courts, as use of standard forms rather than requests tailored specifically to the case is likely to offend against the 'Overriding Objective' in that it is unlikely to be proportionate to the case, and instead result in the parties or their lawyers having to spend time, money and resources in answering the questions. The way the rules work, this could easily result in the party making the request having to pay both their own costs and the costs of the opponent - even if they win the case at the end.
In England and Wales, firstly the person wanting to know the information requests it in writing, either in letter form or, more usually, on a blank document with the questions on one side of the page and space for the answers on the other side. A deadline is set for the opponent to answer the request. If they fail to answer, the person requesting can make an Application on Notice to the court and ask the procedural judge to make an order compelling the opponent to answer the questions. Whether the judge will make an order is discretionary and will be determined in accordance with the overriding objective, and in the context of the questions asked.
In particular, the procedure is not intended to be used to ask questions that would ordinarily be dealt with at trial.
In the United States, use of interrogatories is governed by the law where the case has been filed. All federal courts operate under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which places various limitations on the use of this device, permitting individual jurisdictions to limit interrogatories to twenty-five questions per party. Interrogatories are typically "verified", meaning that the response will include an affidavit and will therefore be under oath. The affidavit may distinguish interrogatories from requests for admission, which are not normally answered under oath.
California, on the other hand, operates under the Civil Discovery Act of 1986 (a revision of an older 1957 act), which is codified in the California Code of Civil Procedure. The Discovery Act allows up to thirty-five specially prepared interrogatories per party, but this limit may be exceeded simply by executing and serving a declaration of necessity with the interrogatories. However, because the declaration of necessity must be executed under penalty of perjury, it can expose an attorney to personal sanctions for propounding an excessive number of harassing and burdensome interrogatories.
In nearly all U.S. jurisdictions, interrogatories are called just that and are supposed to be custom-written, although many questions can be reused from one case to the next. In the U.S. states of California, New Jersey, and Florida, the courts have promulgated standard "form" interrogatories. In California these come on an official court form promulgated by the Judicial Council of California and a party may ask another party to answer any of them by checking the appropriate boxes. The advantage of the California form interrogatories is that they do not count against the limit of 35 (except when used in limited civil cases); the disadvantage is that they are written in a very generic fashion, so about half of the questions are useful only in the simplest cases. In turn, California calls custom-written interrogatories "specially prepared interrogatories."
Because interrogatories are so heavily used in American discovery, there are two major compilations of generic interrogatories covering almost every conceivable type of legal case: Bender's Forms of Discovery: Interrogatories (published by LexisNexis) and Pattern Discovery (published by West). | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In law, interrogatories (also known as requests for further information) are a formal set of written questions propounded by one litigant and required to be answered by an adversary in order to clarify matters of fact and help to determine in advance what facts will be presented at any trial in the case.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Interrogatories are used to gain information from the other party relevant to the issues in a lawsuit. The law and issues will differ depending upon the facts of a case and the laws of the jurisdiction in which a lawsuit is filed. For some types of cases there are standard sets of interrogatories available that cover the essential facts, and may be modified for the case in which they are used.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
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"text": "When a lawsuit is filed, the pleadings filed by the parties are intended to let the other parties know what each side intends to prove at trial, and what legal case they have to answer. However, in most cases, the parties will require additional information to fully understand each other's legal and factual claims. The discovery process, including the use of interrogatories, can help the parties obtain that information from each other.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
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"text": "For an example of how interrogatories may be used, in a motor vehicle accident lawsuit, an injured plaintiff typically asserts that the defendant driver committed the tort of negligence in causing the accident. To prove negligence, the law requires the injured plaintiff to show that the driver owed them a duty of care and breached it, causing the injury. Assuming that the defendant did not dispute driving a vehicle that was involved in the accident that injured the plaintiff, the case would come down to whether the driver drove in accordance with the standard of a reasonable driver, and whether the injured person's injuries are a foreseeable consequence of the driving.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The parties may use interrogatories to seek information, including concessions as to how the accident occurred, from each other. The injured plaintiff might serve interrogatories on the defendant driver seeking information that would support the plaintiff's theory of the case. If the plaintiff is alleging that the defendant was speeding, the plaintiff might ask the defendant to state the speed of the defendant's vehicle at the time of the accident. If the plaintiff alleges that the defendant failed to control the car properly or failed to pay proper attention to the road and other vehicles, the plaintiff could ask interrogatory questions that would help prove those allegations or require disclosure of the basis of any denial of negligence by the defendant. The driver may have a defense to those allegations, perhaps if the accident occurred at low speed, and was unavoidable (maybe due to some third party intervention). The injured person may, however, argue that the driver was still responsible (perhaps the driver should have used the horn of the vehicle to alert the third party), or there may be other allegations.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The defense may similarly use interrogatories to help build legal and factual defenses to the plaintiff's case. Continuing with the example of a car accident, the defendant may seek information or concessions from the plaintiff that would suggest that a different driver was partially or wholly responsible for the accident, or that under the facts the accident was unavoidable despite the proper exercise of care.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In England and Wales, this procedure is governed by Part 18 of the Civil Procedure Rules. It is known as a Request for Further Information.",
"title": "Specific jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the Request for Further Information procedure, use of standard pre-printed forms is not common, and any such request would almost certainly be looked upon critically by the courts, as use of standard forms rather than requests tailored specifically to the case is likely to offend against the 'Overriding Objective' in that it is unlikely to be proportionate to the case, and instead result in the parties or their lawyers having to spend time, money and resources in answering the questions. The way the rules work, this could easily result in the party making the request having to pay both their own costs and the costs of the opponent - even if they win the case at the end.",
"title": "Specific jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In England and Wales, firstly the person wanting to know the information requests it in writing, either in letter form or, more usually, on a blank document with the questions on one side of the page and space for the answers on the other side. A deadline is set for the opponent to answer the request. If they fail to answer, the person requesting can make an Application on Notice to the court and ask the procedural judge to make an order compelling the opponent to answer the questions. Whether the judge will make an order is discretionary and will be determined in accordance with the overriding objective, and in the context of the questions asked.",
"title": "Specific jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In particular, the procedure is not intended to be used to ask questions that would ordinarily be dealt with at trial.",
"title": "Specific jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the United States, use of interrogatories is governed by the law where the case has been filed. All federal courts operate under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which places various limitations on the use of this device, permitting individual jurisdictions to limit interrogatories to twenty-five questions per party. Interrogatories are typically \"verified\", meaning that the response will include an affidavit and will therefore be under oath. The affidavit may distinguish interrogatories from requests for admission, which are not normally answered under oath.",
"title": "Specific jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "California, on the other hand, operates under the Civil Discovery Act of 1986 (a revision of an older 1957 act), which is codified in the California Code of Civil Procedure. The Discovery Act allows up to thirty-five specially prepared interrogatories per party, but this limit may be exceeded simply by executing and serving a declaration of necessity with the interrogatories. However, because the declaration of necessity must be executed under penalty of perjury, it can expose an attorney to personal sanctions for propounding an excessive number of harassing and burdensome interrogatories.",
"title": "Specific jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In nearly all U.S. jurisdictions, interrogatories are called just that and are supposed to be custom-written, although many questions can be reused from one case to the next. In the U.S. states of California, New Jersey, and Florida, the courts have promulgated standard \"form\" interrogatories. In California these come on an official court form promulgated by the Judicial Council of California and a party may ask another party to answer any of them by checking the appropriate boxes. The advantage of the California form interrogatories is that they do not count against the limit of 35 (except when used in limited civil cases); the disadvantage is that they are written in a very generic fashion, so about half of the questions are useful only in the simplest cases. In turn, California calls custom-written interrogatories \"specially prepared interrogatories.\"",
"title": "Specific jurisdictions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Because interrogatories are so heavily used in American discovery, there are two major compilations of generic interrogatories covering almost every conceivable type of legal case: Bender's Forms of Discovery: Interrogatories (published by LexisNexis) and Pattern Discovery (published by West).",
"title": "Specific jurisdictions"
}
]
| In law, interrogatories are a formal set of written questions propounded by one litigant and required to be answered by an adversary in order to clarify matters of fact and help to determine in advance what facts will be presented at any trial in the case. | 2023-02-02T22:48:56Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrogatories |
|
14,613 | List of infectious diseases | This is a list of infectious diseases arranged by name, along with the infectious agents that cause them, the vaccines that can prevent or cure them when they exist and their current status. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "This is a list of infectious diseases arranged by name, along with the infectious agents that cause them, the vaccines that can prevent or cure them when they exist and their current status.",
"title": ""
}
]
| This is a list of infectious diseases arranged by name, along with the infectious agents that cause them, the vaccines that can prevent or cure them when they exist and their current status. | 2001-06-08T13:10:06Z | 2023-12-28T01:37:00Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_infectious_diseases |
14,617 | Intel | Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is one of the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 45 in the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years.
Intel supplies microprocessors for most computer system manufacturers. It also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing.
Intel (Integrated electronics) was founded on July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore's law), Robert Noyce (1927–1990), Arthur Rock (venture capitalist) and is associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove. Intel was a key component of the rise of Silicon Valley as a high-tech center. Noyce was a key inventor of the integrated circuit (microchip). Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, which represented the majority of its business until 1981. Although Intel created the world's first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became its primary business.
During the 1990s, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs fostering the rapid growth of the computer industry. During this period, Intel became the dominant supplier of PC microprocessors and was known for aggressive and anti-competitive tactics in defense of its market position, particularly against AMD, as well as a struggle with Microsoft for control over the direction of the PC industry.
The Open Source Technology Center at Intel hosts PowerTOP and LatencyTOP, and supports other open-source projects such as Wayland, Mesa, Threading Building Blocks (TBB), and Xen.
In 2022, Dell accounted for about 19% of Intel's total revenues, Lenovo accounted for 12% of total revenues, and HP Inc. accounted for 11% of total revenues. As of August 2021, the US Department of Defense is another large customer for Intel.
According to IDC, while Intel enjoyed the biggest market share in both the overall worldwide PC microprocessor market (73.3%) and the mobile PC microprocessor (80.4%) in the second quarter of 2011, the numbers decreased by 1.5% and 1.9% compared to the first quarter of 2011.
Intel's market share decreased significantly in the enthusiast market as of 2019, and they have faced delays for their 10 nm products. According to former Intel CEO Bob Swan, the delay was caused by the company's overly aggressive strategy for moving to its next node.
In the 1980s, Intel was among the world's top ten sellers of semiconductors (10th in 1987). Along with Microsoft Windows , it was part of the "Wintel" personal computer domination in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 1992, Intel became the biggest chip maker by revenue and held the position until 2018 when Samsung surpassed it, but Intel returned to its former position the year after. Other major semiconductor companies include TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, STMicroelectronics, United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), Micron, SK Hynix, Kioxia, and SMIC.
Intel's competitors in PC chipsets included AMD, VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems, and Nvidia. Intel's competitors in networking include NXP Semiconductors, Infineon, Broadcom Limited, Marvell Technology Group and Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, and competitors in flash memory included Spansion, Samsung Electronics, Qimonda, Kioxia, STMicroelectronics, Micron, and SK Hynix.
The only major competitor in the x86 processor market is AMD, with which Intel has had full cross-licensing agreements since 1976: each partner can use the other's patented technological innovations without charge after a certain time. However, the cross-licensing agreement is canceled in the event of an AMD bankruptcy or takeover.
Some smaller competitors, such as VIA Technologies, produce low-power x86 processors for small factor computers and portable equipment. However, the advent of such mobile computing devices, in particular, smartphones, has in recent years led to a decline in PC sales. Since over 95% of the world's smartphones currently use processors cores designed by Arm, using the Arm instruction set, Arm has become a major competitor for Intel's processor market. Arm is also planning to make attempts at setting foot into the PC and server market, with Ampere and IBM each individually designing CPUs for servers and supercomputers. The only other major competitor in processor instruction sets is RISC-V, which is an open-source CPU instruction set. The major Chinese phone and telecommunications manufacturer Huawei has released chips based on the RISC-V instruction set due to US sanctions.
Intel has been involved in several disputes regarding the violation of antitrust laws, which are noted below.
Intel reported total CO2e emissions (direct + indirect) for the twelve months ending 31 December 2020 at 2,882 Kt (+94/+3.4% y-o-y). Intel plans to reduce carbon emissions 10% by 2030 from a 2020 base year.
Intel has self-reported that they have wafer fabs in the United States, Ireland, and Israel. They have also self-reported that they have assembly and testing sites mostly in China, Costa Rica, Malaysia, and Vietnam, with only one assembly and/or testing site in the United States.
Intel was incorporated in Mountain View, California, on July 18, 1968, by Gordon E. Moore (known for "Moore's law"), a chemist, Robert Noyce, a physicist and co-inventor of the integrated circuit and Arthur Rock, an investor and venture capitalist Moore and Noyce had left Fairchild Semiconductor and were part of the "traitorous eight". There were originally 500,000 shares outstanding of which Dr. Noyce bought 245,000 shares, Dr. Moore 245,000 shares, and Mr. Rock 10,000 shares; all at $1 per share. Rock offered $2,500,000 of convertible debentures to a limited group of private investors (equivalent to $21 million in 2022), convertible at $5 per share. Just 2 years later, Intel became a public company via an initial public offering (IPO), raising $6.8 million ($23.50 per share). Intel's third employee was Andy Grove, a chemical engineer, who later ran the company through much of the 1980s and the high-growth 1990s.
In deciding on a name, Moore and Noyce quickly rejected "Moore Noyce", near homophone for "more noise" – an ill-suited name for an electronics company, since noise in electronics is usually undesirable and typically associated with bad interference. Instead, they founded the company as NM Electronics (or MN Electronics) on July 18, 1968, but by the end of the month had changed the name to Intel which stood for Integrated Electronics. Since "Intel" was already trademarked by the hotel chain Intelco, they had to buy the rights for the name.
At its founding, Intel was distinguished by its ability to make logic circuits using semiconductor devices. The founders' goal was the semiconductor memory market, widely predicted to replace magnetic-core memory. Its first product, a quick entry into the small, high-speed memory market in 1969, was the 3101 Schottky TTL bipolar 64-bit static random-access memory (SRAM), which was nearly twice as fast as earlier Schottky diode implementations by Fairchild and the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan. In the same year, Intel also produced the 3301 Schottky bipolar 1024-bit read-only memory (ROM) and the first commercial metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) silicon gate SRAM chip, the 256-bit 1101.
While the 1101 was a significant advance, its complex static cell structure made it too slow and costly for mainframe memories. The three-transistor cell implemented in the first commercially available dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the 1103 released in 1970, solved these issues. The 1103 was the bestselling semiconductor memory chip in the world by 1972, as it replaced core memory in many applications. Intel's business grew during the 1970s as it expanded and improved its manufacturing processes and produced a wider range of products, still dominated by various memory devices.
Intel created the first commercially available microprocessor (Intel 4004) in 1971. The microprocessor represented a notable advance in the technology of integrated circuitry, as it miniaturized the central processing unit of a computer, which then made it possible for small machines to perform calculations that in the past only very large machines could do. Considerable technological innovation was needed before the microprocessor could actually become the basis of what was first known as a "mini computer" and then known as a "personal computer". Intel also created one of the first microcomputers in 1973.
Intel opened its first international manufacturing facility in 1972, in Malaysia, which would host multiple Intel operations, before opening assembly facilities and semiconductor plants in Singapore and Jerusalem in the early 1980s, and manufacturing and development centers in China, India, and Costa Rica in the 1990s. By the early 1980s, its business was dominated by dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips. However, increased competition from Japanese semiconductor manufacturers had, by 1983, dramatically reduced the profitability of this market. The growing success of the IBM personal computer, based on an Intel microprocessor, was among factors that convinced Gordon Moore (CEO since 1975) to shift the company's focus to microprocessors and to change fundamental aspects of that business model. Moore's decision to sole-source Intel's 386 chip played into the company's continuing success.
By the end of the 1980s, buoyed by its fortuitous position as microprocessor supplier to IBM and IBM's competitors within the rapidly growing personal computer market, Intel embarked on a 10-year period of unprecedented growth as the primary (and most profitable) hardware supplier to the PC industry, part of the winning 'Wintel' combination. Moore handed over his position as CEO to Andy Grove in 1987. By launching its Intel Inside marketing campaign in 1991, Intel was able to associate brand loyalty with consumer selection, so that by the end of the 1990s, its line of Pentium processors had become a household name.
After 2000, growth in demand for high-end microprocessors slowed. Competitors, most notably AMD (Intel's largest competitor in its primary x86 architecture market), garnered significant market share, initially in low-end and mid-range processors but ultimately across the product range, and Intel's dominant position in its core market was greatly reduced, mostly due to controversial NetBurst microarchitecture. In the early 2000s then-CEO, Craig Barrett attempted to diversify the company's business beyond semiconductors, but few of these activities were ultimately successful.
Intel had also for a number of years been embroiled in litigation. US law did not initially recognize intellectual property rights related to microprocessor topology (circuit layouts), until the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984, a law sought by Intel and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). During the late 1980s and 1990s (after this law was passed), Intel also sued companies that tried to develop competitor chips to the 80386 CPU. The lawsuits were noted to significantly burden the competition with legal bills, even if Intel lost the suits. Antitrust allegations had been simmering since the early 1990s and had been the cause of one lawsuit against Intel in 1991. In 2004 and 2005, AMD brought further claims against Intel related to unfair competition.
In 2005, CEO Paul Otellini reorganized the company to refocus its core processor and chipset business on platforms (enterprise, digital home, digital health, and mobility).
On June 6, 2005, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, announced that Apple would be using Intel's x86 processors for its Macintosh computers, switching from the PowerPC architecture developed by the AIM alliance. This was seen as win for Intel; An analyst called the move "risky" and "foolish", as Intel's current offerings at the time were considered to be behind those of AMD and IBM.
In 2006, Intel unveiled its Core microarchitecture to widespread critical acclaim; the product range was perceived as an exceptional leap in processor performance that at a stroke regained much of its leadership of the field. In 2008, Intel had another "tick" when it introduced the Penryn microarchitecture, fabricated using the 45 nm process node. Later that year, Intel released a processor with the Nehalem architecture to positive reception.
On June 27, 2006, the sale of Intel's XScale assets was announced. Intel agreed to sell the XScale processor business to Marvell Technology Group for an estimated $600 million and the assumption of unspecified liabilities. The move was intended to permit Intel to focus its resources on its core x86 and server businesses, and the acquisition completed on November 9, 2006.
In 2008, Intel spun off key assets of a solar startup business effort to form an independent company, SpectraWatt Inc. In 2011, SpectraWatt filed for bankruptcy.
In February 2011, Intel began to build a new microprocessor manufacturing facility in Chandler, Arizona, completed in 2013 at a cost of $5 billion. The building is now the 10 nm-certified Fab 42 and is connected to the other Fabs (12, 22, 32) on Ocotillo Campus via an enclosed bridge known as the Link. The company produces three-quarters of its products in the United States, although three-quarters of its revenue come from overseas.
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was launched in October 2013 and Intel is part of the coalition of public and private organizations that also includes Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the A4AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Google will help to decrease Internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income.
In April 2011, Intel began a pilot project with ZTE Corporation to produce smartphones using the Intel Atom processor for China's domestic market. In December 2011, Intel announced that it reorganized several of its business units into a new mobile and communications group that would be responsible for the company's smartphone, tablet, and wireless efforts. Intel planned to introduce Medfield – a processor for tablets and smartphones – to the market in 2012, as an effort to compete with Arm. As a 32-nanometer processor, Medfield is designed to be energy-efficient, which is one of the core features in Arm's chips.
At the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) 2011 in San Francisco, Intel's partnership with Google was announced. In January 2012, Google announced Android 2.3, supporting Intel's Atom microprocessor. In 2013, Intel's Kirk Skaugen said that Intel's exclusive focus on Microsoft platforms was a thing of the past and that they would now support all "tier-one operating systems" such as Linux, Android, iOS, and Chrome.
In 2014, Intel cut thousands of employees in response to "evolving market trends", and offered to subsidize manufacturers for the extra costs involved in using Intel chips in their tablets. In April 2016, Intel cancelled the SoFIA platform and the Broxton Atom SoC for smartphones, effectively leaving the smartphone market.
Finding itself with excess fab capacity after the failure of the Ultrabook to gain market traction and with PC sales declining, in 2013 Intel reached a foundry agreement to produce chips for Altera using a 14nm process. General Manager of Intel's custom foundry division Sunit Rikhi indicated that Intel would pursue further such deals in the future. This was after poor sales of Windows 8 hardware caused a major retrenchment for most of the major semiconductor manufacturers, except for Qualcomm, which continued to see healthy purchases from its largest customer, Apple.
As of July 2013, five companies were using Intel's fabs via the Intel Custom Foundry division: Achronix, Tabula, Netronome, Microsemi, and Panasonic – most are field-programmable gate array (FPGA) makers, but Netronome designs network processors. Only Achronix began shipping chips made by Intel using the 22nm Tri-Gate process. Several other customers also exist but were not announced at the time.
The foundry business was closed in 2018 due to Intel's issues with its manufacturing.
Intel continued its tick-tock model of a microarchitecture change followed by a die shrink until the 6th generation Core family based on the Skylake microarchitecture. This model was deprecated in 2016, with the release of the seventh generation Core family (codenamed Kaby Lake), ushering in the process–architecture–optimization model. As Intel struggled to shrink their process node from 14 nm to 10 nm, processor development slowed down and the company continued to use the Skylake microarchitecture until 2020, albeit with optimizations.
While Intel originally planned to introduce 10 nm products in 2016, it later became apparent that there were manufacturing issues with the node. The first microprocessor under that node, Cannon Lake (marketed as 8th generation Core), was released in small quantities in 2018. The company first delayed the mass production of their 10 nm products to 2017. They later delayed mass production to 2018, and then to 2019. Despite rumors of the process being cancelled, Intel finally introduced mass-produced 10 nm 10th generation Intel Core mobile processors (codenamed "Ice Lake") in September 2019.
Intel later acknowledged that their strategy to shrink to 10 nm was too aggressive. While other foundries used up to four steps in 10 nm or 7 nm processes, the company's 10 nm process required up to five or six multi-pattern steps. In addition, Intel's 10 nm process is denser than its counterpart processes from other foundries. Since Intel's microarchitecture and process node development were coupled, processor development stagnated.
In early January 2018, it was reported that all Intel processors made since 1995, excluding Intel Itanium and pre-2013 Intel Atom processors, have been subject to two security flaws dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. It is believed that "hundreds of millions" of systems could be affected by these flaws. More security flaws were disclosed on May 3, 2018, on August 14, 2018, on January 18, 2019, and on March 5, 2020.
On March 15, 2018, Intel reported that it will redesign its CPUs to protect against the Spectre security vulnerability, the redesigned processors were sold later in 2018. Existing chips vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre can be fixed with a software patch at a cost to performance.
Due to Intel's issues with its 10 nm process node and the company's slow processor development, the company now found itself in a market with intense competition. The company's main competitor, AMD, introduced the Zen microarchitecture and a new chiplet based design to critical acclaim. Since its introduction, AMD, once unable to compete with Intel in the high-end CPU market, has undergone a resurgence, and Intel's dominance and market share have considerably decreased. In addition, Apple began to transition away from the x86 architecture and Intel processors to their own Apple silicon for their Macintosh computers in 2020. The transition is expected to affect Intel minimally; however, it might prompt other PC manufacturers to reevaluate their reliance on Intel and the x86 architecture.
On March 23, 2021, CEO Pat Gelsinger laid out new plans for the company. These include a new strategy, called IDM 2.0, that includes investments in manufacturing facilities, use of both internal and external foundries, and a new foundry business called Intel Foundry Services (IFS), a standalone business unit. Unlike Intel Custom Foundry, IFS will offer a combination of packaging and process technology, and Intel's IP portfolio including x86 cores. Other plans for the company include a partnership with IBM and a new event for developers and engineers, called "Intel ON". Gelsinger also confirmed that Intel's 7 nm process is on track, and that the first products using their 7 nm process (also known as Intel 4) are Ponte Vecchio and Meteor Lake.
In January 2022, Intel reportedly selected New Albany, Ohio, near Columbus, Ohio, as the site for a major new manufacturing facility. The facility will cost at least $20 billion. The company expects the facility to begin producing chips by 2025. The same year Intel also choose Magdeburg, Germany, as a site for two new chip mega factories for €17 billion (topping Tesla's investment in Brandenburg). Groundbreaking is planned for 2023, while production start is planned for 2027. Including subcontractors this would create 10.000 new jobs.
In August 2022, Intel signed a $30 billion partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to fund its recent factory expansions. As part of the deal, Intel would have a controlling stake by funding 51% of the cost of building new chip-making facilities in Chandler, with Brookfield owning the remaining 49% stake, allowing the companies to split the revenue from those facilities.
On January 31, 2023, as part of $3 billion in cost reductions, Intel announced pay cuts affecting employees above midlevel, ranging from 5% upwards. It also suspended bonuses and merit pay increases, while reducing retirement plan matching. These cost reductions followed layoffs announced in the fall of 2022.
In October 2023, Intel confirmed it would be the first commercial user of high-NA EUV lithography tool, as part of its plan to regard process leadership from TSMC.
In December 2023 Intel unveiled Gaudi3, an artificial intelligence chip for generative AI software which will launch in 2024 and compete with rival chips from Nvidia and AMD.
Intel's first products were shift register memory and random-access memory integrated circuits, and Intel grew to be a leader in the fiercely competitive DRAM, SRAM, and ROM markets throughout the 1970s. Concurrently, Intel engineers Marcian Hoff, Federico Faggin, Stanley Mazor, and Masatoshi Shima invented Intel's first microprocessor. Originally developed for the Japanese company Busicom to replace a number of ASICs in a calculator already produced by Busicom, the Intel 4004 was introduced to the mass market on November 15, 1971, though the microprocessor did not become the core of Intel's business until the mid-1980s. (Note: Intel is usually given credit with Texas Instruments for the almost-simultaneous invention of the microprocessor)
In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer era, Intel's profits came under increased pressure from Japanese memory-chip manufacturers, and then-president Andy Grove focused the company on microprocessors. Grove described this transition in the book Only the Paranoid Survive. A key element of his plan was the notion, then considered radical, of becoming the single source for successors to the popular 8086 microprocessor.
Until then, the manufacture of complex integrated circuits was not reliable enough for customers to depend on a single supplier, but Grove began producing processors in three geographically distinct factories, and ceased licensing the chip designs to competitors such as AMD. When the PC industry boomed in the late 1980s and 1990s, Intel was one of the primary beneficiaries.
Despite the ultimate importance of the microprocessor, the 4004 and its successors the 8008 and the 8080 were never major revenue contributors at Intel. As the next processor, the 8086 (and its variant the 8088) was completed in 1978, Intel embarked on a major marketing and sales campaign for that chip nicknamed "Operation Crush", and intended to win as many customers for the processor as possible. One design win was the newly created IBM PC division, though the importance of this was not fully realized at the time.
IBM introduced its personal computer in 1981, and it was rapidly successful. In 1982, Intel created the 80286 microprocessor, which, two years later, was used in the IBM PC/AT. Compaq, the first IBM PC "clone" manufacturer, produced a desktop system based on the faster 80286 processor in 1985 and in 1986 quickly followed with the first 80386-based system, beating IBM and establishing a competitive market for PC-compatible systems and setting up Intel as a key component supplier.
In 1975, the company had started a project to develop a highly advanced 32-bit microprocessor, finally released in 1981 as the Intel iAPX 432. The project was too ambitious and the processor was never able to meet its performance objectives, and it failed in the marketplace. Intel extended the x86 architecture to 32 bits instead.
During this period Andrew Grove dramatically redirected the company, closing much of its DRAM business and directing resources to the microprocessor business. Of perhaps greater importance was his decision to "single-source" the 386 microprocessor. Prior to this, microprocessor manufacturing was in its infancy, and manufacturing problems frequently reduced or stopped production, interrupting supplies to customers. To mitigate this risk, these customers typically insisted that multiple manufacturers produce chips they could use to ensure a consistent supply. The 8080 and 8086-series microprocessors were produced by several companies, notably AMD, with which Intel had a technology-sharing contract.
Grove made the decision not to license the 386 design to other manufacturers, instead, producing it in three geographically distinct factories: Santa Clara, California; Hillsboro, Oregon; and Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. He convinced customers that this would ensure consistent delivery. In doing this, Intel breached its contract with AMD, which sued and was paid millions of dollars in damages but could not manufacture new Intel CPU designs any longer. (Instead, AMD started to develop and manufacture its own competing x86 designs.)
As the success of Compaq's Deskpro 386 established the 386 as the dominant CPU choice, Intel achieved a position of near-exclusive dominance as its supplier. Profits from this funded rapid development of both higher-performance chip designs and higher-performance manufacturing capabilities, propelling Intel to a position of unquestioned leadership by the early 1990s.
Intel introduced the 486 microprocessor in 1989, and in 1990 established a second design team, designing the processors code-named "P5" and "P6" in parallel and committing to a major new processor every two years, versus the four or more years such designs had previously taken. Engineers Vinod Dham and Rajeev Chandrasekhar (Member of Parliament, India) were key figures on the core team that invented the 486 chip and later, Intel's signature Pentium chip. The P5 project was earlier known as "Operation Bicycle", referring to the cycles of the processor through two parallel execution pipelines. The P5 was introduced in 1993 as the Intel Pentium, substituting a registered trademark name for the former part number (numbers, such as 486, cannot be legally registered as trademarks in the United States). The P6 followed in 1995 as the Pentium Pro and improved into the Pentium II in 1997. New architectures were developed alternately in Santa Clara, California and Hillsboro, Oregon.
The Santa Clara design team embarked in 1993 on a successor to the x86 architecture, codenamed "P7". The first attempt was dropped a year later but quickly revived in a cooperative program with Hewlett-Packard engineers, though Intel soon took over primary design responsibility. The resulting implementation of the IA-64 64-bit architecture was the Itanium, finally introduced in June 2001. The Itanium's performance running legacy x86 code did not meet expectations, and it failed to compete effectively with x86-64, which was AMD's 64-bit extension of the 32-bit x86 architecture (Intel uses the name Intel 64, previously EM64T). In 2017, Intel announced that the Itanium 9700 series (Kittson) would be the last Itanium chips produced.
The Hillsboro team designed the Willamette processors (initially code-named P68), which were marketed as the Pentium 4.
During this period, Intel undertook two major supporting advertising campaigns. The first campaign, the 1991 "Intel Inside" marketing and branding campaign, is widely known and has become synonymous with Intel itself. The idea of "ingredient branding" was new at the time, with only NutraSweet and a few others making attempts to do so. One of the key architects of the marketing team was the head of the microprocessor division, David House. He coined the slogan "Intel Inside". This campaign established Intel, which had been a component supplier little-known outside the PC industry, as a household name.
The second campaign, Intel's Systems Group, which began in the early 1990s, showcased manufacturing of PC motherboards, the main board component of a personal computer, and the one into which the processor (CPU) and memory (RAM) chips are plugged. The Systems Group campaign was lesser known than the Intel Inside campaign.
Shortly after, Intel began manufacturing fully configured "white box" systems for the dozens of PC clone companies that rapidly sprang up. At its peak in the mid-1990s, Intel manufactured over 15% of all PCs, making it the third-largest supplier at the time.
During the 1990s, Intel Architecture Labs (IAL) was responsible for many of the hardware innovations for the PC, including the PCI Bus, the PCI Express (PCIe) bus, and Universal Serial Bus (USB). IAL's software efforts met with a more mixed fate; its video and graphics software was important in the development of software digital video, but later its efforts were largely overshadowed by competition from Microsoft. The competition between Intel and Microsoft was revealed in testimony by then IAL Vice-president Steven McGeady at the Microsoft antitrust trial (United States v. Microsoft Corp.).
In June 1994, Intel engineers discovered a flaw in the floating-point math subsection of the P5 Pentium microprocessor. Under certain data-dependent conditions, the low-order bits of the result of a floating-point division would be incorrect. The error could compound in subsequent calculations. Intel corrected the error in a future chip revision, and under public pressure it issued a total recall and replaced the defective Pentium CPUs (which were limited to some 60, 66, 75, 90, and 100 MHz models) on customer request.
The bug was discovered independently in October 1994 by Thomas Nicely, Professor of Mathematics at Lynchburg College. He contacted Intel but received no response. On October 30, he posted a message about his finding on the Internet. Word of the bug spread quickly and reached the industry press. The bug was easy to replicate; a user could enter specific numbers into the calculator on the operating system. Consequently, many users did not accept Intel's statements that the error was minor and "not even an erratum". During Thanksgiving, in 1994, The New York Times ran a piece by journalist John Markoff spotlighting the error. Intel changed its position and offered to replace every chip, quickly putting in place a large end-user support organization. This resulted in a $475 million charge against Intel's 1994 revenue. Dr. Nicely later learned that Intel had discovered the FDIV bug in its own testing a few months before him (but had decided not to inform customers).
The "Pentium flaw" incident, Intel's response to it, and the surrounding media coverage propelled Intel from being a technology supplier generally unknown to most computer users to a household name. Dovetailing with an uptick in the "Intel Inside" campaign, the episode is considered to have been a positive event for Intel, changing some of its business practices to be more end-user focused and generating substantial public awareness, while avoiding a lasting negative impression.
The Intel Core line originated from the original Core brand, with the release of the 32-bit Yonah CPU, Intel's first dual-core mobile (low-power) processor. Derived from the Pentium M, the processor family used an enhanced version of the P6 microarchitecture. Its successor, the Core 2 family, was released on July 27, 2006. This was based on the Intel Core microarchitecture, and was a 64-bit design. Instead of focusing on higher clock rates, the Core microarchitecture emphasized power efficiency and a return to lower clock speeds. It also provided more efficient decoding stages, execution units, caches, and buses, reducing the power consumption of Core 2-branded CPUs while increasing their processing capacity.
In November 2008, Intel released the first generation Core processors based on the Nehalem microarchitecture. Intel also introduced a new naming scheme, with the three variants now named Core i3, i5, and i7 (as well as i9 from 7th generation onwards). Unlike the previous naming scheme, these names no longer correspond to specific technical features. It was succeeded by the Westmere microarchitecture in 2010, with a die shrink to 32 nm and included Intel HD Graphics.
In 2011, Intel released the Sandy Bridge-based 2nd generation Core processor family. This generation featured an 11% performance increase over Nehalem. It was succeeded by Ivy Bridge-based 3rd generation Core, introduced at the 2012 Intel Developer Forum. Ivy Bridge featured a die shrink to 22 nm, and supported both DDR3 memory and DDR3L chips.
Intel continued its tick-tock model of a microarchitecture change followed by a die shrink until the 6th generation Core family based on the Skylake microarchitecture. This model was deprecated in 2016, with the release of the seventh generation Core family based on Kaby Lake, ushering in the process–architecture–optimization model. From 2016 until 2021, Intel later released more optimizations on the Skylake microarchitecture with Kaby Lake R, Amber Lake, Whiskey Lake, Coffee Lake, Coffee Lake R, and Comet Lake. Intel struggled to shrink their process node from 14 nm to 10 nm, with the first microarchitecture under that node, Cannon Lake (marketed as 8th generation Core), only being released in small quantities in 2018.
In 2019, Intel released the 10th generation of Core processors, codenamed "Amber Lake", "Comet Lake", and "Ice Lake". Ice Lake, based on the Sunny Cove microarchitecture, was produced on the 10 nm process and was limited to low-power mobile processors. Both Amber Lake and Comet Lake were based on a refined 14 nm node, with the latter being used for desktop and high performance mobile products and the former used for low-power mobile products.
In September 2020, 11th generation Core mobile processors, codenamed Tiger Lake, were launched. Tiger Lake is based on the Willow Cove microarchitecture and a refined 10 nm node. Intel later released 11th generation Core desktop processors (codenamed "Rocket Lake"), fabricated using Intel's 14 nm process and based on the Cypress Cove microarchitecture, on March 30, 2021. It replaced Comet Lake desktop processors. All 11th generation Core processors feature new integrated graphics based on the Intel Xe microarchitecture.
Both desktop and mobile products were unified under a single process node with the release of 12th generation Intel Core processors (codenamed "Alder Lake") in late 2021. This generation will be fabricated using Intel's 7 nm process, called Intel 7, for both desktop and mobile processors, and is based on a hybrid architecture utilizing high-performance Golden Cove cores and high-efficiency Gracemont (Atom) cores.
In early January 2018, it was reported that all Intel processors made since 1995 (besides Intel Itanium and pre-2013 Intel Atom) have been subject to two security flaws dubbed Meltdown and Spectre.
The impact on performance resulting from software patches is "workload-dependent". Several procedures to help protect home computers and related devices from the Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities have been published. Spectre patches have been reported to significantly slow down performance, especially on older computers; on the newer 8th generation Core platforms, benchmark performance drops of 2–14 percent have been measured. Meltdown patches may also produce performance loss. It is believed that "hundreds of millions" of systems could be affected by these flaws.
On March 15, 2018, Intel reported that it will redesign its CPUs (performance losses to be determined) to protect against the Spectre security vulnerability, and expects to release the newly redesigned processors later in 2018.
On May 3, 2018, eight additional Spectre-class flaws were reported. Intel reported that they are preparing new patches to mitigate these flaws.
On August 14, 2018, Intel disclosed three additional chip flaws referred to as L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF). They reported that previously released microcode updates, along with new, pre-release microcode updates can be used to mitigate these flaws.
On January 18, 2019, Intel disclosed three new vulnerabilities affecting all Intel CPUs, named "Fallout", "RIDL", and "ZombieLoad", allowing a program to read information recently written, read data in the line-fill buffers and load ports, and leak information from other processes and virtual machines. Coffeelake-series CPUs are even more vulnerable, due to hardware mitigations for Spectre.
On March 5, 2020, computer security experts reported another Intel chip security flaw, besides the Meltdown and Spectre flaws, with the systematic name CVE-2019-0090 (or, "Intel CSME Bug"). This newly found flaw is not fixable with a firmware update, and affects nearly "all Intel chips released in the past five years".
On June 6, 2005, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, announced that Apple would be transitioning the Macintosh from its long favored PowerPC architecture to the Intel x86 architecture because the future PowerPC road map was unable to satisfy Apple's needs. This was seen as a win for Intel, although an analyst called the move "risky" and "foolish", as Intel's current offerings at the time were considered to be behind those of AMD and IBM. The first Mac computers containing Intel CPUs were announced on January 10, 2006, and Apple had its entire line of consumer Macs running on Intel processors by early August 2006. The Apple Xserve server was updated to Intel Xeon processors from November 2006 and was offered in a configuration similar to Apple's Mac Pro.
Despite Apple's use of Intel products, relations between the two companies were strained at times. Rumors of Apple switching from Intel processors to their own designs began circulating as early as 2011. On June 22, 2020, during Apple's annual WWDC, Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, announced that it would be transitioning the company's entire Mac line from Intel CPUs to custom Apple-designed processors based on the Arm architecture over the course of the next two years. In the short term, this transition was estimated to have minimal effects on Intel, as Apple only accounted for 2% to 4% of its revenue. However, Apple's shift to its own chips might prompt other PC manufacturers to reassess their reliance on Intel and the x86 architecture. By November 2020, Apple unveiled the M1, its processor custom-designed for the Mac.
In 2008, Intel began shipping mainstream solid-state drives (SSDs) with up to 160 GB storage capacities. As with their CPUs, Intel develops SSD chips using ever-smaller nanometer processes. These SSDs make use of industry standards such as NAND flash, mSATA, PCIe, and NVMe. In 2017, Intel introduced SSDs based on 3D XPoint technology under the Optane brand name.
In 2021, SK Hynix acquired most of Intel's NAND memory business for $7 billion, with a remaining transaction worth $2 billion expected in 2025. Intel also discontinued its consumer Optane products in 2021. In July 2022, Intel disclosed in its Q2 earnings report that it would cease future product development within its Optane business, which in turn effectively discontinued the development of 3D XPoint as a whole.
The Intel Scientific Computers division was founded in 1984 by Justin Rattner, to design and produce parallel computers based on Intel microprocessors connected in hypercube internetwork topology. In 1992, the name was changed to the Intel Supercomputing Systems Division, and development of the iWarp architecture was also subsumed. The division designed several supercomputer systems, including the Intel iPSC/1, iPSC/2, iPSC/860, Paragon and ASCI Red. In November 2014, Intel stated that it was planning to use optical fibers to improve networking within supercomputers.
On November 19, 2015, Intel, alongside Arm, Dell, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and Princeton University, founded the OpenFog Consortium, to promote interests and development in fog computing. Intel's Chief Strategist for the IoT Strategy and Technology Office, Jeff Fedders, became the consortium's first president.
Intel is one of the biggest stakeholders in the self-driving car industry, having joined the race in mid 2017 after joining forces with Mobileye. The company is also one of the first in the sector to research consumer acceptance, after an AAA report quoted a 78% nonacceptance rate of the technology in the US.
Safety levels of autonomous driving technology, the thought of abandoning control to a machine, and psychological comfort of passengers in such situations were the major discussion topics initially. The commuters also stated that they did not want to see everything the car was doing. This was primarily a referral to the auto-steering wheel with no one sitting in the driving seat. Intel also learned that voice control regulator is vital, and the interface between the humans and machine eases the discomfort condition, and brings some sense of control back. It is important to mention that Intel included only 10 people in this study, which makes the study less credible. In a video posted on YouTube, Intel accepted this fact and called for further testing.
Intel formed a new business unit called the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) on completion of its Altera acquisition. Intel has since sold Stratix, Arria, and Cyclone FPGAs. In 2019, Intel released Agilex FPGAs: chips aimed at data centers, 5G applications, and other uses.
In October 2023, Intel announced it would be spinning off PSG into a separate company at the start of 2024, while maintaining majority ownership.
By the end of the 1990s, microprocessor performance had outstripped software demand for that CPU power. Aside from high-end server systems and software, whose demand dropped with the end of the "dot-com bubble", consumer systems ran effectively on increasingly low-cost systems after 2000.
Intel's strategy was to develop processors with better performance in a short time, from the appearance of one to the other, as seen with the appearance of the Pentium II in May 1997, the Pentium III in February 1999, and the Pentium 4 in the fall of 2000, making the strategy ineffective since the consumer did not see the innovation as essential, and leaving an opportunity for rapid gains by competitors, notably AMD. This, in turn, lowered the profitability of the processor line and ended an era of unprecedented dominance of the PC hardware by Intel.
Intel's dominance in the x86 microprocessor market led to numerous charges of antitrust violations over the years, including FTC investigations in both the late 1980s and in 1999, and civil actions such as the 1997 suit by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and a patent suit by Intergraph. Intel's market dominance (at one time it controlled over 85% of the market for 32-bit x86 microprocessors) combined with Intel's own hardball legal tactics (such as its infamous 338 patent suit versus PC manufacturers) made it an attractive target for litigation, culminating in Intel agreeing to pay AMD $1.25B and grant them a perpetual patent cross-license in 2009 as well as several anti-trust judgements in Europe, Korea, and Japan.
A case of industrial espionage arose in 1995 that involved both Intel and AMD. Bill Gaede, an Argentine formerly employed both at AMD and at Intel's Arizona plant, was arrested for attempting in 1993 to sell the i486 and P5 Pentium designs to AMD and to certain foreign powers. Gaede videotaped data from his computer screen at Intel and mailed it to AMD, which immediately alerted Intel and authorities, resulting in Gaede's arrest. Gaede was convicted and sentenced to 33 months in prison in June 1996.
Robert Noyce was Intel's CEO at its founding in 1968, followed by co-founder Gordon Moore in 1975. Andy Grove became the company's president in 1979 and added the CEO title in 1987 when Moore became chairman. In 1998, Grove succeeded Moore as chairman, and Craig Barrett, already company president, took over. On May 18, 2005, Barrett handed the reins of the company over to Paul Otellini, who had been the company president and COO and who was responsible for Intel's design win in the original IBM PC. The board of directors elected Otellini as president and CEO, and Barrett replaced Grove as Chairman of the Board. Grove stepped down as chairman but is retained as a special adviser. In May 2009, Barrett stepped down as chairman of the board and was succeeded by Jane Shaw. In May 2012, Intel vice chairman Andy Bryant, who had held the posts of CFO (1994) and Chief Administrative Officer (2007) at Intel, succeeded Shaw as executive chairman.
In November 2012, president and CEO Paul Otellini announced that he would step down in May 2013 at the age of 62, three years before the company's mandatory retirement age. During a six-month transition period, Intel's board of directors commenced a search process for the next CEO, in which it considered both internal managers and external candidates such as Sanjay Jha and Patrick Gelsinger. Financial results revealed that, under Otellini, Intel's revenue increased by 55.8 percent (US$34.2 to 53.3 billion), while its net income increased by 46.7% (US$7.5 billion to 11 billion), proving that his illegal business practices were more profitable than the fines levied against the company as punishment for employing them.
On May 2, 2013, Executive Vice President and COO Brian Krzanich was elected as Intel's sixth CEO, a selection that became effective on May 16, 2013, at the company's annual meeting. Reportedly, the board concluded that an insider could proceed with the role and exert an impact more quickly, without the need to learn Intel's processes, and Krzanich was selected on such a basis. Intel's software head Renée James was selected as president of the company, a role that is second to the CEO position.
As of May 2013, Intel's board of directors consists of Andy Bryant, John Donahoe, Frank Yeary, Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, Susan Decker, Reed Hundt, Paul Otellini, James Plummer, David Pottruck, and David Yoffie and Creative director will.i.am. The board was described by former Financial Times journalist Tom Foremski as "an exemplary example of corporate governance of the highest order" and received a rating of ten from GovernanceMetrics International, a form of recognition that has only been awarded to twenty-one other corporate boards worldwide.
On June 21, 2018, Intel announced the resignation of Brian Krzanich as CEO, with the exposure of a relationship he had with an employee. Bob Swan was named interim CEO, as the Board began a search for a permanent CEO.
On January 31, 2019, Swan transitioned from his role as CFO and interim CEO and was named by the Board as the seventh CEO to lead the company.
On January 13, 2021, Intel announced that Swan would be replaced as CEO by Pat Gelsinger, effective February 15. Gelsinger is a former Intel chief technology officer who had previously been head of VMWare.
In October 2023, Intel announced it would be spinning off its Programmable Solutions Group business unit into a separate company at the start of 2024, while maintaining majority ownership and intending to seek an IPO within three years to raise funds.
As of March 2023:
Intel has a mandatory retirement policy for its CEOs when they reach age 65. Andy Grove retired at 62, while both Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore retired at 58. Grove retired as chairman and as a member of the board of directors in 2005 at age 68.
Intel's headquarters are located in Santa Clara, California, and the company has operations around the world. Its largest workforce concentration anywhere is in Washington County, Oregon (in the Portland metropolitan area's "Silicon Forest"), with 18,600 employees at several facilities. Outside the United States, the company has facilities in China, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Israel, Ireland, India, Russia, Argentina and Vietnam, in 63 countries and regions internationally. In March 2022, because of International sanctions during the Russo-Ukrainian War, Intel stopped supplying Russian market. In the U.S. Intel employs significant numbers of people in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Washington and Utah. In Oregon, Intel is the state's largest private employer. The company is the largest industrial employer in New Mexico while in Arizona the company has 12,000 employees as of January 2020.
Intel invests heavily in research in China and about 100 researchers – or 10% of the total number of researchers from Intel – are located in Beijing.
In 2011, the Israeli government offered Intel $290 million to expand in the country. As a condition, Intel would employ 1,500 more workers in Kiryat Gat and between 600 and 1000 workers in the north.
In January 2014, it was reported that Intel would cut about 5,000 jobs from its work force of 107,000. The announcement was made a day after it reported earnings that missed analyst targets.
In March 2014, it was reported that Intel would embark upon a $6 billion plan to expand its activities in Israel. The plan calls for continued investment in existing and new Intel plants until 2030. As of 2014, Intel employs 10,000 workers at four development centers and two production plants in Israel.
Due to declining PC sales, in 2016 Intel cut 12,000 jobs. In 2021, Intel reversed course under new CEO Pat Gelsinger and started hiring thousands of engineers.
Intel has a Diversity Initiative, including employee diversity groups as well as supplier diversity programs. Like many companies with employee diversity groups, they include groups based on race and nationality as well as sexual identity and religion. In 1994, Intel sanctioned one of the earliest corporate Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender employee groups, and supports a Muslim employees group, a Jewish employees group, and a Bible-based Christian group.
Intel has received a 100% rating on numerous Corporate Equality Indices released by the Human Rights Campaign including the first one released in 2002. In addition, the company is frequently named one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers by Working Mother magazine.
In January 2015, Intel announced the investment of $300 million over the next five years to enhance gender and racial diversity in their own company as well as the technology industry as a whole.
In February 2016, Intel released its Global Diversity & Inclusion 2015 Annual Report. The male-female mix of US employees was reported as 75.2% men and 24.8% women. For US employees in technical roles, the mix was reported as 79.8% male and 20.1% female. NPR reports that Intel is facing a retention problem (particularly for African Americans), not just a pipeline problem.
In 2011, ECONorthwest conducted an economic impact analysis of Intel's economic contribution to the state of Oregon. The report found that in 2009 "the total economic impacts attributed to Intel's operations, capital spending, contributions and taxes amounted to almost $14.6 billion in activity, including $4.3 billion in personal income and 59,990 jobs". Through multiplier effects, every 10 Intel jobs supported, on average, was found to create 31 jobs in other sectors of the economy.
Intel has been operating in the State of Israel since Dov Frohman founded the Israeli branch of the company in 1974 in a small office in Haifa. Intel Israel currently has development centers in Haifa, Jerusalem and Petah Tikva, and has a manufacturing plant in the Kiryat Gat industrial park that develops and manufactures microprocessors and communications products. Intel employed about 10,000 employees in Israel in 2013. Maxine Fesberg has been the CEO of Intel Israel since 2007 and the Vice President of Intel Global. In December 2016, Fesberg announced her resignation, her position of chief executive officer (CEO) has been filled by Yaniv Gerti since January 2017.
In 2010, Intel purchased McAfee, a manufacturer of computer security technology, for $7.68 billion. As a condition for regulatory approval of the transaction, Intel agreed to provide rival security firms with all necessary information that would allow their products to use Intel's chips and personal computers. After the acquisition, Intel had about 90,000 employees, including about 12,000 software engineers. In September 2016, Intel sold a majority stake in its computer-security unit to TPG Capital, reversing the five-year-old McAfee acquisition.
In August 2010, Intel and Infineon Technologies announced that Intel would acquire Infineon's Wireless Solutions business. Intel planned to use Infineon's technology in laptops, smart phones, netbooks, tablets and embedded computers in consumer products, eventually integrating its wireless modem into Intel's silicon chips.
In March 2011, Intel bought most of the assets of Cairo-based SySDSoft.
In July 2011, Intel announced that it had agreed to acquire Fulcrum Microsystems Inc., a company specializing in network switches. The company used to be included on the EE Times list of 60 Emerging Startups.
In October 2011, Intel reached a deal to acquire Telmap, an Israeli-based navigation software company. The purchase price was not disclosed, but Israeli media reported values around $300 million to $350 million.
In July 2012, Intel agreed to buy 10% of the shares of ASML Holding NV for $2.1 billion and another $1 billion for 5% of the shares that need shareholder approval to fund relevant research and development efforts, as part of a EUR3.3 billion ($4.1 billion) deal to accelerate the development of 450-millimeter wafer technology and extreme ultra-violet lithography by as much as two years.
In July 2013, Intel confirmed the acquisition of Omek Interactive, an Israeli company that makes technology for gesture-based interfaces, without disclosing the monetary value of the deal. An official statement from Intel read: "The acquisition of Omek Interactive will help increase Intel's capabilities in the delivery of more immersive perceptual computing experiences." One report estimated the value of the acquisition between US$30 million and $50 million.
The acquisition of a Spanish natural language recognition startup, Indisys was announced in September 2013. The terms of the deal were not disclosed but an email from an Intel representative stated: "Intel has acquired Indisys, a privately held company based in Seville, Spain. The majority of Indisys employees joined Intel. We signed the agreement to acquire the company on May 31 and the deal has been completed." Indysis explains that its artificial intelligence (AI) technology "is a human image, which converses fluently and with common sense in multiple languages and also works in different platforms".
In December 2014, Intel bought PasswordBox.
In January 2015, Intel purchased a 30% stake in Vuzix, a smart glasses manufacturer. The deal was worth $24.8 million.
In February 2015, Intel announced its agreement to purchase German network chipmaker Lantiq, to aid in its expansion of its range of chips in devices with Internet connection capability.
In June 2015, Intel announced its agreement to purchase FPGA design company Altera for $16.7 billion, in its largest acquisition to date. The acquisition completed in December 2015.
In October 2015, Intel bought cognitive computing company Saffron Technology for an undisclosed price.
In August 2016, Intel purchased deep-learning startup Nervana Systems for over $400 million.
In December 2016, Intel acquired computer vision startup Movidius for an undisclosed price.
In March 2017, Intel announced that they had agreed to purchase Mobileye, an Israeli developer of "autonomous driving" systems for US$15.3 billion.
In June 2017, Intel Corporation announced an investment of over ₹1,100 crore (US$140 million) for its upcoming Research and Development (R&D) centre in Bangalore, India.
In January 2019, Intel announced an investment of over $11 billion on a new Israeli chip plant, as told by the Israeli Finance Minister.
In November 2021, Intel recruited some of the employees of the Centaur Technology division from VIA Technologies, a deal worth $125 million, and effectively acquiring the talent and knowhow of their x86 division. VIA retained the x86 licence and associated patents, and its Zhaoxin CPU joint-venture continues.
In December 2021, Intel said it will invest $7.1 billion to build a new chip-packaging and testing factory in Malaysia. The new investment will expand the operations of its Malaysian subsidiary across Penang and Kulim, creating more than 4,000 new Intel jobs and more than 5,000 local construction jobs.
In December 2021, Intel announced its plan to take Mobileye automotive unit via an IPO of newly issued stock in 2022, maintaining its majority ownership of the company.
In February 2022, Intel agreed to acquire Israeli chip manufacturer Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion. In August 2023, Intel terminated the acquisition as it failed to obtain approval from Chinese regulators within the 18-month transaction deadline.
In May 2022, Intel announced that they have acquired Finnish graphics technology firm Siru innovations. The firm founded by ex-AMD Qualcomm mobile GPU engineers, is focused on developing software and silicon building blocks for GPU's made by other companies and is set to join Intel's fledgling Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group.
In May 2022, it was announced that Ericsson and Intel, are pooling research and development to create high-performing cloud RAN solutions. The organisations have pooled to launch a tech hub in California, US. The hub focuses on the benefits that Ericsson Cloud RAN and Intel technology can bring to: improving energy efficiency and network performance, reducing time to market, and monetizing new business opportunities such as enterprise applications.
In 2011, Intel Capital announced a new fund to support startups working on technologies in line with the company's concept for next generation notebooks. The company is setting aside a $300 million fund to be spent over the next three to four years in areas related to ultrabooks. Intel announced the ultrabook concept at Computex in 2011. The ultrabook is defined as a thin (less than 0.8 inches [~2 cm] thick) notebook that utilizes Intel processors and also incorporates tablet features such as a touch screen and long battery life.
At the Intel Developers Forum in 2011, four Taiwan ODMs showed prototype ultrabooks that used Intel's Ivy Bridge chips. Intel plans to improve power consumption of its chips for ultrabooks, like new Ivy Bridge processors in 2013, which will only have 10W default thermal design power.
Intel's goal for Ultrabook's price is below $1000; however, according to two presidents from Acer and Compaq, this goal will not be achieved if Intel does not lower the price of its chips.
Intel has a significant participation in the open source communities since 1999. For example, in 2006 Intel released MIT-licensed X.org drivers for their integrated graphic cards of the i965 family of chipsets. Intel released FreeBSD drivers for some networking cards, available under a BSD-compatible license, which were also ported to OpenBSD. Binary firmware files for non-wireless Ethernet devices were also released under a BSD licence allowing free redistribution. Intel ran the Moblin project until April 23, 2009, when they handed the project over to the Linux Foundation. Intel also runs the LessWatts.org campaigns.
However, after the release of the wireless products called Intel Pro/Wireless 2100, 2200BG/2225BG/2915ABG and 3945ABG in 2005, Intel was criticized for not granting free redistribution rights for the firmware that must be included in the operating system for the wireless devices to operate. As a result of this, Intel became a target of campaigns to allow free operating systems to include binary firmware on terms acceptable to the open source community. Linspire-Linux creator Michael Robertson outlined the difficult position that Intel was in releasing to open source, as Intel did not want to upset their large customer Microsoft. Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD also claimed that Intel is being "an Open Source fraud" after an Intel employee presented a distorted view of the situation at an open-source conference. In spite of the significant negative attention Intel received as a result of the wireless dealings, the binary firmware still has not gained a license compatible with free software principles.
Intel has also supported other open source projects such as Blender and Open 3D Engine.
In its history, Intel has had three logos. The first Intel logo featured the company's name stylized in all lowercase, with the letter e dropped below the other letters. The second logo was inspired by the "Intel Inside" campaign, featuring a swirl around the Intel brand name.
The third logo, introduced in 2020, was inspired by the previous logos. It removes the swirl as well as the classic blue color in almost all parts of the logo, except for the dot in the "i".
Intel has become one of the world's most recognizable computer brands following its long-running Intel Inside campaign. The idea for "Intel Inside" came out of a meeting between Intel and one of the major computer resellers, MicroAge.
In the late 1980s, Intel's market share was being seriously eroded by upstart competitors such as Advanced Micro Devices (now AMD), Zilog, and others who had started to sell their less expensive microprocessors to computer manufacturers. This was because, by using cheaper processors, manufacturers could make cheaper computers and gain more market share in an increasingly price-sensitive market. In 1989, Intel's Dennis Carter visited MicroAge's headquarters in Tempe, Arizona, to meet with MicroAge's VP of Marketing, Ron Mion. MicroAge had become one of the largest distributors of Compaq, IBM, HP, and others and thus was a primary – although indirect – driver of demand for microprocessors. Intel wanted MicroAge to petition its computer suppliers to favor Intel chips. However, Mion felt that the marketplace should decide which processors they wanted. Intel's counterargument was that it would be too difficult to educate PC buyers on why Intel microprocessors were worth paying more for.
Mion felt that the public did not really need to fully understand why Intel chips were better, they just needed to feel they were better. So Mion proposed a market test. Intel would pay for a MicroAge billboard somewhere saying, "If you're buying a personal computer, make sure it has Intel inside." In turn, MicroAge would put "Intel Inside" stickers on the Intel-based computers in their stores in that area. To make the test easier to monitor, Mion decided to do the test in Boulder, Colorado, where it had a single store. Virtually overnight, the sales of personal computers in that store dramatically shifted to Intel-based PCs. Intel very quickly adopted "Intel Inside" as its primary branding and rolled it out worldwide. As is often the case with computer lore, other tidbits have been combined to explain how things evolved. "Intel Inside" has not escaped that tendency and there are other "explanations" that had been floating around.
Intel's branding campaign started with "The Computer Inside" tagline in 1990 in the US and Europe. The Japan chapter of Intel proposed an "Intel in it" tagline and kicked off the Japanese campaign by hosting EKI-KON (meaning "Station Concert" in Japanese) at the Tokyo railway station dome on Christmas Day, December 25, 1990. Several months later, "The Computer Inside" incorporated the Japan idea to become "Intel Inside" which eventually elevated to the worldwide branding campaign in 1991, by Intel marketing manager Dennis Carter. A case study, "Inside Intel Inside", was put together by Harvard Business School. The five-note jingle was introduced in 1994 and by its tenth anniversary was being heard in 130 countries around the world. The initial branding agency for the "Intel Inside" campaign was DahlinSmithWhite Advertising of Salt Lake City. The Intel swirl logo was the work of DahlinSmithWhite art director Steve Grigg under the direction of Intel president and CEO Andy Grove.
The Intel Inside advertising campaign sought public brand loyalty and awareness of Intel processors in consumer computers. Intel paid some of the advertiser's costs for an ad that used the Intel Inside logo and xylo-marimba jingle.
In 2008, Intel planned to shift the emphasis of its Intel Inside campaign from traditional media such as television and print to newer media such as the Internet. Intel required that a minimum of 35% of the money it provided to the companies in its co-op program be used for online marketing. The Intel 2010 annual financial report indicated that $1.8 billion (6% of the gross margin and nearly 16% of the total net income) was allocated to all advertising with Intel Inside being part of that.
The D♭–D♭–G♭–D♭–A♭ xylophone/marimba jingle, known as the "Intel bong", used in Intel advertising was produced by Musikvergnuegen and written by Walter Werzowa, once a member of the Austrian 1980s sampling band Edelweiss. The Intel jingle was made in 1994 to coincide with the launch of the Pentium. It was modified in 1999 to coincide with the launch of the Pentium III, although it overlapped with the 1994 version which was phased out in 2004. Advertisements for products featuring Intel processors with prominent MMX branding featured a version of the jingle with an embellishment (shining sound) after the final note.
The jingle was remade a second time in 2004 to coincide with the new logo change. Again, it overlapped with the 1999 version and was not mainstreamed until the launch of the Core processors in 2006, with the melody unchanged.
Another remake of the jingle debuted with Intel's new visual identity. The company has made use of numerous variants since its rebranding in 2020 (while retaining the mainstream 2006 version).
In 2006, Intel expanded its promotion of open specification platforms beyond Centrino, to include the Viiv media center PC and the business desktop Intel vPro.
In mid-January 2006, Intel announced that they were dropping the long running Pentium name from their processors. The Pentium name was first used to refer to the P5 core Intel processors and was done to comply with court rulings that prevent the trademarking of a string of numbers, so competitors could not just call their processor the same name, as had been done with the prior 386 and 486 processors (both of which had copies manufactured by IBM and AMD). They phased out the Pentium names from mobile processors first, when the new Yonah chips, branded Core Solo and Core Duo, were released. The desktop processors changed when the Core 2 line of processors were released. By 2009, Intel was using a good–better–best strategy with Celeron being good, Pentium better, and the Intel Core family representing the best the company has to offer.
According to spokesman Bill Calder, Intel has maintained only the Celeron brand, the Atom brand for netbooks and the vPro lineup for businesses. Since late 2009, Intel's mainstream processors have been called Celeron, Pentium, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 in order of performance from lowest to highest. The first generation core products carry a 3 digit name, such as i5 750, and the second generation products carry a 4 digit name, such as the i5 2500, and from 10th generation onwards, Intel processors will have a 5 digit name, such as i9 10900K for desktop. In all cases, a 'K' at the end of it shows that it is an unlocked processor, enabling additional overclocking abilities (for instance, 2500K). vPro products will carry the Intel Core i7 vPro processor or the Intel Core i5 vPro processor name. In October 2011, Intel started to sell its Core i7-2700K "Sandy Bridge" chip to customers worldwide.
Since 2010, "Centrino" is only being applied to Intel's WiMAX and Wi-Fi technologies.
In 2022, Intel announced that they are dropping the Pentium and Celeron naming schemes for their desktop and laptop entry level processors. The "Intel Processor" branding will be replacing the old Pentium and Celeron naming schemes starting in 2023.
In 2023, Intel announced that they will be dropping the 'i' in their future processor markings. For example, products such as Core i9, will now be called Core 9. Ultra will be added to the endings of processors that are in the higher end, such as Core Ultra 9.
Neo Sans Intel is a customized version of Neo Sans based on the Neo Sans and Neo Tech, designed by Sebastian Lester in 2004. It was introduced alongside Intel's rebranding in 2006. Previously, Intel used Helvetica as its standard typeface in corporate marketing.
Intel Clear is a global font announced in 2014 designed for to be used across all communications. The font family was designed by Red Peek Branding and Dalton Maag Initially available in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts, it replaced Neo Sans Intel as the company's corporate typeface. Intel Clear Hebrew, Intel Clear Arabic were added by Dalton Maag Ltd. Neo Sans Intel remained in logo and to mark processor type and socket on the packaging of Intel's processors.
In 2020, as part of a new visual identity, a new typeface, Intel One, was designed. It replaced Intel Clear as the font used by the company in most of its branding, however, it is used alongside Intel Clear typeface. In logo, it replaced Neo Sans Intel typeface. However, it is still used to mark processor type and socket on the packaging of Intel's processors.
It is a book produced by Red Peak Branding as part of new brand identity campaign, celebrating Intel's achievements while setting the new standard for what Intel looks, feels and sounds like.
In November 2014, Intel designed a Paddington Bear statue—themed "Little Bear Blue"—one of fifty statues created by various celebrities and companies which were located around London. Created prior to the release of the film Paddington, the Intel designed statue was located outside Framestore in Chancery Lane, London, a British visual-effects company which uses Intel technology for films including Paddington. The statues were then auctioned to raise funds for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).
In October 2006, a Transmeta lawsuit was filed against Intel for patent infringement on computer architecture and power efficiency technologies. The lawsuit was settled in October 2007, with Intel agreeing to pay US$150 million initially and US$20 million per year for the next five years. Both companies agreed to drop lawsuits against each other, while Intel was granted a perpetual non-exclusive license to use current and future patented Transmeta technologies in its chips for 10 years.
In September 2005, Intel filed a response to an AMD lawsuit, disputing AMD's claims, and claiming that Intel's business practices are fair and lawful. In a rebuttal, Intel deconstructed AMD's offensive strategy and argued that AMD struggled largely as a result of its own bad business decisions, including underinvestment in essential manufacturing capacity and excessive reliance on contracting out chip foundries. Legal analysts predicted the lawsuit would drag on for a number of years, since Intel's initial response indicated its unwillingness to settle with AMD. In 2008, a court date was finally set.
On November 4, 2009, New York's attorney general filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel Corp, claiming the company used "illegal threats and collusion" to dominate the market for computer microprocessors.
On November 12, 2009, AMD agreed to drop the antitrust lawsuit against Intel in exchange for $1.25 billion. A joint press release published by the two chip makers stated "While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development."
An antitrust lawsuit and a class-action suit relating to cold calling employees of other companies has been settled.
In 2005, the local Fair Trade Commission found that Intel violated the Japanese Antimonopoly Act. The commission ordered Intel to eliminate discounts that had discriminated against AMD. To avoid a trial, Intel agreed to comply with the order.
In September 2007, South Korean regulators accused Intel of breaking antitrust law. The investigation began in February 2006, when officials raided Intel's South Korean offices. The company risked a penalty of up to 3% of its annual sales if found guilty. In June 2008, the Fair Trade Commission ordered Intel to pay a fine of US$25.5 million for taking advantage of its dominant position to offer incentives to major Korean PC manufacturers on the condition of not buying products from AMD.
New York started an investigation of Intel in January 2008 on whether the company violated antitrust laws in pricing and sales of its microprocessors. In June 2008, the Federal Trade Commission also began an antitrust investigation of the case. In December 2009, the FTC announced it would initiate an administrative proceeding against Intel in September 2010.
In November 2009, following a two-year investigation, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sued Intel, accusing them of bribery and coercion, claiming that Intel bribed computer makers to buy more of their chips than those of their rivals and threatened to withdraw these payments if the computer makers were perceived as working too closely with its competitors. Intel has denied these claims.
On July 22, 2010, Dell agreed to a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to pay $100M in penalties resulting from charges that Dell did not accurately disclose accounting information to investors. In particular, the SEC charged that from 2002 to 2006, Dell had an agreement with Intel to receive rebates in exchange for not using chips manufactured by AMD. These substantial rebates were not disclosed to investors, but were used to help meet investor expectations regarding the company's financial performance; "These exclusivity payments grew from 10 percent of Dell's operating income in FY 2003 to 38 percent in FY 2006, and peaked at 76 percent in the first quarter of FY 2007." Dell eventually did adopt AMD as a secondary supplier in 2006, and Intel subsequently stopped their rebates, causing Dell's financial performance to fall.
In July 2007, the European Commission accused Intel of anti-competitive practices, mostly against AMD. The allegations, going back to 2003, include giving preferential prices to computer makers buying most or all of their chips from Intel, paying computer makers to delay or cancel the launch of products using AMD chips, and providing chips at below standard cost to governments and educational institutions. Intel responded that the allegations were unfounded and instead qualified its market behavior as consumer-friendly. General counsel Bruce Sewell responded that the commission had misunderstood some factual assumptions regarding pricing and manufacturing costs.
In February 2008, Intel announced that its office in Munich had been raided by European Union regulators. Intel reported that it was cooperating with investigators. Intel faced a fine of up to 10% of its annual revenue if found guilty of stifling competition. AMD subsequently launched a website promoting these allegations. In June 2008, the EU filed new charges against Intel. In May 2009, the EU found that Intel had engaged in anti-competitive practices and subsequently fined Intel €1.06 billion (US$1.44 billion), a record amount. Intel was found to have paid companies, including Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC, to exclusively use Intel chips in their products, and therefore harmed other, less successful companies including AMD. The European Commission said that Intel had deliberately acted to keep competitors out of the computer chip market and in doing so had made a "serious and sustained violation of the EU's antitrust rules". In addition to the fine, Intel was ordered by the commission to immediately cease all illegal practices. Intel has said that they will appeal against the commission's verdict. In June 2014, the General Court, which sits below the European Court of Justice, rejected the appeal.
In 2022 the €1.06 billion fine was dropped, but was successively re-imposed in September 2023 as a €376.36 million fine.
Intel has been accused by some residents of Rio Rancho, New Mexico of allowing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to be released in excess of their pollution permit. One resident claimed that a release of 1.4 tons of carbon tetrachloride was measured from one acid scrubber during the fourth quarter of 2003 but an emission factor allowed Intel to report no carbon tetrachloride emissions for all of 2003.
Another resident alleges that Intel was responsible for the release of other VOCs from their Rio Rancho site and that a necropsy of lung tissue from two deceased dogs in the area indicated trace amounts of toluene, hexane, ethylbenzene, and xylene isomers, all of which are solvents used in industrial settings but also commonly found in gasoline, retail paint thinners and retail solvents. During a sub-committee meeting of the New Mexico Environment Improvement Board, a resident claimed that Intel's own reports documented more than 1,580 pounds (720 kg) of VOCs were released in June and July 2006.
Intel's environmental performance is published annually in their corporate responsibility report.
In 2009, Intel announced that it planned to undertake an effort to remove conflict resources—materials sourced from mines whose profits are used to fund armed militant groups, particularly within the Democratic Republic of the Congo—from its supply chain. Intel sought conflict-free sources of the precious metals common to electronics from within the country, using a system of first- and third-party audits, as well as input from the Enough Project and other organizations. During a keynote address at Consumer Electronics Show 2014, Intel CEO at the time, Brian Krzanich, announced that the company's microprocessors would henceforth be conflict free. In 2016, Intel stated that it had expected its entire supply chain to be conflict-free by the end of the year.
In its 2012 rankings on the progress of consumer electronics companies relating to conflict minerals, the Enough Project rated Intel the best of 24 companies, calling it a "Pioneer of progress". In 2014, chief executive Brian Krzanich urged the rest of the industry to follow Intel's lead by also shunning conflict minerals.
Intel has faced complaints of age discrimination in firing and layoffs. Intel was sued in 1993 by nine former employees, over allegations that they were laid off because they were over the age of 40.
A group called FACE Intel (Former and Current Employees of Intel) claims that Intel weeds out older employees. FACE Intel claims that more than 90 percent of people who have been laid off or fired from Intel are over the age of 40. Upside magazine requested data from Intel breaking out its hiring and firing by age, but the company declined to provide any. Intel has denied that age plays any role in Intel's employment practices. FACE Intel was founded by Ken Hamidi, who was fired from Intel in 1995 at the age of 47. Hamidi was blocked in a 1999 court decision from using Intel's email system to distribute criticism of the company to employees, which overturned in 2003 in Intel Corp. v. Hamidi.
In August 2016, Indian officials of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) parked garbage trucks on Intel's campus and threatened to dump them for evading payment of property taxes between 2007 and 2008, to the tune of ₹340 million (US$4.3 million). Intel had reportedly been paying taxes as a non-air-conditioned office, when the campus in fact had central air conditioning. Other factors, such as land acquisition and construction improvements, added to the tax burden. Previously, Intel had appealed the demand in the Karnataka high court in July, during which the court ordered Intel to pay BBMP half the owed amount of ₹170 million (US$2.1 million) plus arrears by August 28 of that year.
Intel-related biographical articles on Wikipedia | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is one of the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 45 in the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Intel supplies microprocessors for most computer system manufacturers. It also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Intel (Integrated electronics) was founded on July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore's law), Robert Noyce (1927–1990), Arthur Rock (venture capitalist) and is associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove. Intel was a key component of the rise of Silicon Valley as a high-tech center. Noyce was a key inventor of the integrated circuit (microchip). Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, which represented the majority of its business until 1981. Although Intel created the world's first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became its primary business.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "During the 1990s, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs fostering the rapid growth of the computer industry. During this period, Intel became the dominant supplier of PC microprocessors and was known for aggressive and anti-competitive tactics in defense of its market position, particularly against AMD, as well as a struggle with Microsoft for control over the direction of the PC industry.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Open Source Technology Center at Intel hosts PowerTOP and LatencyTOP, and supports other open-source projects such as Wayland, Mesa, Threading Building Blocks (TBB), and Xen.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 2022, Dell accounted for about 19% of Intel's total revenues, Lenovo accounted for 12% of total revenues, and HP Inc. accounted for 11% of total revenues. As of August 2021, the US Department of Defense is another large customer for Intel.",
"title": "Current operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "According to IDC, while Intel enjoyed the biggest market share in both the overall worldwide PC microprocessor market (73.3%) and the mobile PC microprocessor (80.4%) in the second quarter of 2011, the numbers decreased by 1.5% and 1.9% compared to the first quarter of 2011.",
"title": "Current operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Intel's market share decreased significantly in the enthusiast market as of 2019, and they have faced delays for their 10 nm products. According to former Intel CEO Bob Swan, the delay was caused by the company's overly aggressive strategy for moving to its next node.",
"title": "Current operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In the 1980s, Intel was among the world's top ten sellers of semiconductors (10th in 1987). Along with Microsoft Windows , it was part of the \"Wintel\" personal computer domination in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 1992, Intel became the biggest chip maker by revenue and held the position until 2018 when Samsung surpassed it, but Intel returned to its former position the year after. Other major semiconductor companies include TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, STMicroelectronics, United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), Micron, SK Hynix, Kioxia, and SMIC.",
"title": "Current operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Intel's competitors in PC chipsets included AMD, VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems, and Nvidia. Intel's competitors in networking include NXP Semiconductors, Infineon, Broadcom Limited, Marvell Technology Group and Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, and competitors in flash memory included Spansion, Samsung Electronics, Qimonda, Kioxia, STMicroelectronics, Micron, and SK Hynix.",
"title": "Current operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The only major competitor in the x86 processor market is AMD, with which Intel has had full cross-licensing agreements since 1976: each partner can use the other's patented technological innovations without charge after a certain time. However, the cross-licensing agreement is canceled in the event of an AMD bankruptcy or takeover.",
"title": "Current operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Some smaller competitors, such as VIA Technologies, produce low-power x86 processors for small factor computers and portable equipment. However, the advent of such mobile computing devices, in particular, smartphones, has in recent years led to a decline in PC sales. Since over 95% of the world's smartphones currently use processors cores designed by Arm, using the Arm instruction set, Arm has become a major competitor for Intel's processor market. Arm is also planning to make attempts at setting foot into the PC and server market, with Ampere and IBM each individually designing CPUs for servers and supercomputers. The only other major competitor in processor instruction sets is RISC-V, which is an open-source CPU instruction set. The major Chinese phone and telecommunications manufacturer Huawei has released chips based on the RISC-V instruction set due to US sanctions.",
"title": "Current operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Intel has been involved in several disputes regarding the violation of antitrust laws, which are noted below.",
"title": "Current operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Intel reported total CO2e emissions (direct + indirect) for the twelve months ending 31 December 2020 at 2,882 Kt (+94/+3.4% y-o-y). Intel plans to reduce carbon emissions 10% by 2030 from a 2020 base year.",
"title": "Current operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Intel has self-reported that they have wafer fabs in the United States, Ireland, and Israel. They have also self-reported that they have assembly and testing sites mostly in China, Costa Rica, Malaysia, and Vietnam, with only one assembly and/or testing site in the United States.",
"title": "Current operations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Intel was incorporated in Mountain View, California, on July 18, 1968, by Gordon E. Moore (known for \"Moore's law\"), a chemist, Robert Noyce, a physicist and co-inventor of the integrated circuit and Arthur Rock, an investor and venture capitalist Moore and Noyce had left Fairchild Semiconductor and were part of the \"traitorous eight\". There were originally 500,000 shares outstanding of which Dr. Noyce bought 245,000 shares, Dr. Moore 245,000 shares, and Mr. Rock 10,000 shares; all at $1 per share. Rock offered $2,500,000 of convertible debentures to a limited group of private investors (equivalent to $21 million in 2022), convertible at $5 per share. Just 2 years later, Intel became a public company via an initial public offering (IPO), raising $6.8 million ($23.50 per share). Intel's third employee was Andy Grove, a chemical engineer, who later ran the company through much of the 1980s and the high-growth 1990s.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In deciding on a name, Moore and Noyce quickly rejected \"Moore Noyce\", near homophone for \"more noise\" – an ill-suited name for an electronics company, since noise in electronics is usually undesirable and typically associated with bad interference. Instead, they founded the company as NM Electronics (or MN Electronics) on July 18, 1968, but by the end of the month had changed the name to Intel which stood for Integrated Electronics. Since \"Intel\" was already trademarked by the hotel chain Intelco, they had to buy the rights for the name.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "At its founding, Intel was distinguished by its ability to make logic circuits using semiconductor devices. The founders' goal was the semiconductor memory market, widely predicted to replace magnetic-core memory. Its first product, a quick entry into the small, high-speed memory market in 1969, was the 3101 Schottky TTL bipolar 64-bit static random-access memory (SRAM), which was nearly twice as fast as earlier Schottky diode implementations by Fairchild and the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan. In the same year, Intel also produced the 3301 Schottky bipolar 1024-bit read-only memory (ROM) and the first commercial metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) silicon gate SRAM chip, the 256-bit 1101.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "While the 1101 was a significant advance, its complex static cell structure made it too slow and costly for mainframe memories. The three-transistor cell implemented in the first commercially available dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the 1103 released in 1970, solved these issues. The 1103 was the bestselling semiconductor memory chip in the world by 1972, as it replaced core memory in many applications. Intel's business grew during the 1970s as it expanded and improved its manufacturing processes and produced a wider range of products, still dominated by various memory devices.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Intel created the first commercially available microprocessor (Intel 4004) in 1971. The microprocessor represented a notable advance in the technology of integrated circuitry, as it miniaturized the central processing unit of a computer, which then made it possible for small machines to perform calculations that in the past only very large machines could do. Considerable technological innovation was needed before the microprocessor could actually become the basis of what was first known as a \"mini computer\" and then known as a \"personal computer\". Intel also created one of the first microcomputers in 1973.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Intel opened its first international manufacturing facility in 1972, in Malaysia, which would host multiple Intel operations, before opening assembly facilities and semiconductor plants in Singapore and Jerusalem in the early 1980s, and manufacturing and development centers in China, India, and Costa Rica in the 1990s. By the early 1980s, its business was dominated by dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips. However, increased competition from Japanese semiconductor manufacturers had, by 1983, dramatically reduced the profitability of this market. The growing success of the IBM personal computer, based on an Intel microprocessor, was among factors that convinced Gordon Moore (CEO since 1975) to shift the company's focus to microprocessors and to change fundamental aspects of that business model. Moore's decision to sole-source Intel's 386 chip played into the company's continuing success.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "By the end of the 1980s, buoyed by its fortuitous position as microprocessor supplier to IBM and IBM's competitors within the rapidly growing personal computer market, Intel embarked on a 10-year period of unprecedented growth as the primary (and most profitable) hardware supplier to the PC industry, part of the winning 'Wintel' combination. Moore handed over his position as CEO to Andy Grove in 1987. By launching its Intel Inside marketing campaign in 1991, Intel was able to associate brand loyalty with consumer selection, so that by the end of the 1990s, its line of Pentium processors had become a household name.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "After 2000, growth in demand for high-end microprocessors slowed. Competitors, most notably AMD (Intel's largest competitor in its primary x86 architecture market), garnered significant market share, initially in low-end and mid-range processors but ultimately across the product range, and Intel's dominant position in its core market was greatly reduced, mostly due to controversial NetBurst microarchitecture. In the early 2000s then-CEO, Craig Barrett attempted to diversify the company's business beyond semiconductors, but few of these activities were ultimately successful.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Intel had also for a number of years been embroiled in litigation. US law did not initially recognize intellectual property rights related to microprocessor topology (circuit layouts), until the Semiconductor Chip Protection Act of 1984, a law sought by Intel and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). During the late 1980s and 1990s (after this law was passed), Intel also sued companies that tried to develop competitor chips to the 80386 CPU. The lawsuits were noted to significantly burden the competition with legal bills, even if Intel lost the suits. Antitrust allegations had been simmering since the early 1990s and had been the cause of one lawsuit against Intel in 1991. In 2004 and 2005, AMD brought further claims against Intel related to unfair competition.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 2005, CEO Paul Otellini reorganized the company to refocus its core processor and chipset business on platforms (enterprise, digital home, digital health, and mobility).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On June 6, 2005, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, announced that Apple would be using Intel's x86 processors for its Macintosh computers, switching from the PowerPC architecture developed by the AIM alliance. This was seen as win for Intel; An analyst called the move \"risky\" and \"foolish\", as Intel's current offerings at the time were considered to be behind those of AMD and IBM.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 2006, Intel unveiled its Core microarchitecture to widespread critical acclaim; the product range was perceived as an exceptional leap in processor performance that at a stroke regained much of its leadership of the field. In 2008, Intel had another \"tick\" when it introduced the Penryn microarchitecture, fabricated using the 45 nm process node. Later that year, Intel released a processor with the Nehalem architecture to positive reception.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "On June 27, 2006, the sale of Intel's XScale assets was announced. Intel agreed to sell the XScale processor business to Marvell Technology Group for an estimated $600 million and the assumption of unspecified liabilities. The move was intended to permit Intel to focus its resources on its core x86 and server businesses, and the acquisition completed on November 9, 2006.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In 2008, Intel spun off key assets of a solar startup business effort to form an independent company, SpectraWatt Inc. In 2011, SpectraWatt filed for bankruptcy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In February 2011, Intel began to build a new microprocessor manufacturing facility in Chandler, Arizona, completed in 2013 at a cost of $5 billion. The building is now the 10 nm-certified Fab 42 and is connected to the other Fabs (12, 22, 32) on Ocotillo Campus via an enclosed bridge known as the Link. The company produces three-quarters of its products in the United States, although three-quarters of its revenue come from overseas.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was launched in October 2013 and Intel is part of the coalition of public and private organizations that also includes Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the A4AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Google will help to decrease Internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In April 2011, Intel began a pilot project with ZTE Corporation to produce smartphones using the Intel Atom processor for China's domestic market. In December 2011, Intel announced that it reorganized several of its business units into a new mobile and communications group that would be responsible for the company's smartphone, tablet, and wireless efforts. Intel planned to introduce Medfield – a processor for tablets and smartphones – to the market in 2012, as an effort to compete with Arm. As a 32-nanometer processor, Medfield is designed to be energy-efficient, which is one of the core features in Arm's chips.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "At the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) 2011 in San Francisco, Intel's partnership with Google was announced. In January 2012, Google announced Android 2.3, supporting Intel's Atom microprocessor. In 2013, Intel's Kirk Skaugen said that Intel's exclusive focus on Microsoft platforms was a thing of the past and that they would now support all \"tier-one operating systems\" such as Linux, Android, iOS, and Chrome.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 2014, Intel cut thousands of employees in response to \"evolving market trends\", and offered to subsidize manufacturers for the extra costs involved in using Intel chips in their tablets. In April 2016, Intel cancelled the SoFIA platform and the Broxton Atom SoC for smartphones, effectively leaving the smartphone market.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Finding itself with excess fab capacity after the failure of the Ultrabook to gain market traction and with PC sales declining, in 2013 Intel reached a foundry agreement to produce chips for Altera using a 14nm process. General Manager of Intel's custom foundry division Sunit Rikhi indicated that Intel would pursue further such deals in the future. This was after poor sales of Windows 8 hardware caused a major retrenchment for most of the major semiconductor manufacturers, except for Qualcomm, which continued to see healthy purchases from its largest customer, Apple.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "As of July 2013, five companies were using Intel's fabs via the Intel Custom Foundry division: Achronix, Tabula, Netronome, Microsemi, and Panasonic – most are field-programmable gate array (FPGA) makers, but Netronome designs network processors. Only Achronix began shipping chips made by Intel using the 22nm Tri-Gate process. Several other customers also exist but were not announced at the time.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The foundry business was closed in 2018 due to Intel's issues with its manufacturing.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Intel continued its tick-tock model of a microarchitecture change followed by a die shrink until the 6th generation Core family based on the Skylake microarchitecture. This model was deprecated in 2016, with the release of the seventh generation Core family (codenamed Kaby Lake), ushering in the process–architecture–optimization model. As Intel struggled to shrink their process node from 14 nm to 10 nm, processor development slowed down and the company continued to use the Skylake microarchitecture until 2020, albeit with optimizations.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "While Intel originally planned to introduce 10 nm products in 2016, it later became apparent that there were manufacturing issues with the node. The first microprocessor under that node, Cannon Lake (marketed as 8th generation Core), was released in small quantities in 2018. The company first delayed the mass production of their 10 nm products to 2017. They later delayed mass production to 2018, and then to 2019. Despite rumors of the process being cancelled, Intel finally introduced mass-produced 10 nm 10th generation Intel Core mobile processors (codenamed \"Ice Lake\") in September 2019.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Intel later acknowledged that their strategy to shrink to 10 nm was too aggressive. While other foundries used up to four steps in 10 nm or 7 nm processes, the company's 10 nm process required up to five or six multi-pattern steps. In addition, Intel's 10 nm process is denser than its counterpart processes from other foundries. Since Intel's microarchitecture and process node development were coupled, processor development stagnated.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In early January 2018, it was reported that all Intel processors made since 1995, excluding Intel Itanium and pre-2013 Intel Atom processors, have been subject to two security flaws dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. It is believed that \"hundreds of millions\" of systems could be affected by these flaws. More security flaws were disclosed on May 3, 2018, on August 14, 2018, on January 18, 2019, and on March 5, 2020.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "On March 15, 2018, Intel reported that it will redesign its CPUs to protect against the Spectre security vulnerability, the redesigned processors were sold later in 2018. Existing chips vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre can be fixed with a software patch at a cost to performance.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Due to Intel's issues with its 10 nm process node and the company's slow processor development, the company now found itself in a market with intense competition. The company's main competitor, AMD, introduced the Zen microarchitecture and a new chiplet based design to critical acclaim. Since its introduction, AMD, once unable to compete with Intel in the high-end CPU market, has undergone a resurgence, and Intel's dominance and market share have considerably decreased. In addition, Apple began to transition away from the x86 architecture and Intel processors to their own Apple silicon for their Macintosh computers in 2020. The transition is expected to affect Intel minimally; however, it might prompt other PC manufacturers to reevaluate their reliance on Intel and the x86 architecture.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "On March 23, 2021, CEO Pat Gelsinger laid out new plans for the company. These include a new strategy, called IDM 2.0, that includes investments in manufacturing facilities, use of both internal and external foundries, and a new foundry business called Intel Foundry Services (IFS), a standalone business unit. Unlike Intel Custom Foundry, IFS will offer a combination of packaging and process technology, and Intel's IP portfolio including x86 cores. Other plans for the company include a partnership with IBM and a new event for developers and engineers, called \"Intel ON\". Gelsinger also confirmed that Intel's 7 nm process is on track, and that the first products using their 7 nm process (also known as Intel 4) are Ponte Vecchio and Meteor Lake.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In January 2022, Intel reportedly selected New Albany, Ohio, near Columbus, Ohio, as the site for a major new manufacturing facility. The facility will cost at least $20 billion. The company expects the facility to begin producing chips by 2025. The same year Intel also choose Magdeburg, Germany, as a site for two new chip mega factories for €17 billion (topping Tesla's investment in Brandenburg). Groundbreaking is planned for 2023, while production start is planned for 2027. Including subcontractors this would create 10.000 new jobs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In August 2022, Intel signed a $30 billion partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to fund its recent factory expansions. As part of the deal, Intel would have a controlling stake by funding 51% of the cost of building new chip-making facilities in Chandler, with Brookfield owning the remaining 49% stake, allowing the companies to split the revenue from those facilities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "On January 31, 2023, as part of $3 billion in cost reductions, Intel announced pay cuts affecting employees above midlevel, ranging from 5% upwards. It also suspended bonuses and merit pay increases, while reducing retirement plan matching. These cost reductions followed layoffs announced in the fall of 2022.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In October 2023, Intel confirmed it would be the first commercial user of high-NA EUV lithography tool, as part of its plan to regard process leadership from TSMC.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In December 2023 Intel unveiled Gaudi3, an artificial intelligence chip for generative AI software which will launch in 2024 and compete with rival chips from Nvidia and AMD.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Intel's first products were shift register memory and random-access memory integrated circuits, and Intel grew to be a leader in the fiercely competitive DRAM, SRAM, and ROM markets throughout the 1970s. Concurrently, Intel engineers Marcian Hoff, Federico Faggin, Stanley Mazor, and Masatoshi Shima invented Intel's first microprocessor. Originally developed for the Japanese company Busicom to replace a number of ASICs in a calculator already produced by Busicom, the Intel 4004 was introduced to the mass market on November 15, 1971, though the microprocessor did not become the core of Intel's business until the mid-1980s. (Note: Intel is usually given credit with Texas Instruments for the almost-simultaneous invention of the microprocessor)",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In 1983, at the dawn of the personal computer era, Intel's profits came under increased pressure from Japanese memory-chip manufacturers, and then-president Andy Grove focused the company on microprocessors. Grove described this transition in the book Only the Paranoid Survive. A key element of his plan was the notion, then considered radical, of becoming the single source for successors to the popular 8086 microprocessor.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Until then, the manufacture of complex integrated circuits was not reliable enough for customers to depend on a single supplier, but Grove began producing processors in three geographically distinct factories, and ceased licensing the chip designs to competitors such as AMD. When the PC industry boomed in the late 1980s and 1990s, Intel was one of the primary beneficiaries.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Despite the ultimate importance of the microprocessor, the 4004 and its successors the 8008 and the 8080 were never major revenue contributors at Intel. As the next processor, the 8086 (and its variant the 8088) was completed in 1978, Intel embarked on a major marketing and sales campaign for that chip nicknamed \"Operation Crush\", and intended to win as many customers for the processor as possible. One design win was the newly created IBM PC division, though the importance of this was not fully realized at the time.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "IBM introduced its personal computer in 1981, and it was rapidly successful. In 1982, Intel created the 80286 microprocessor, which, two years later, was used in the IBM PC/AT. Compaq, the first IBM PC \"clone\" manufacturer, produced a desktop system based on the faster 80286 processor in 1985 and in 1986 quickly followed with the first 80386-based system, beating IBM and establishing a competitive market for PC-compatible systems and setting up Intel as a key component supplier.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In 1975, the company had started a project to develop a highly advanced 32-bit microprocessor, finally released in 1981 as the Intel iAPX 432. The project was too ambitious and the processor was never able to meet its performance objectives, and it failed in the marketplace. Intel extended the x86 architecture to 32 bits instead.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "During this period Andrew Grove dramatically redirected the company, closing much of its DRAM business and directing resources to the microprocessor business. Of perhaps greater importance was his decision to \"single-source\" the 386 microprocessor. Prior to this, microprocessor manufacturing was in its infancy, and manufacturing problems frequently reduced or stopped production, interrupting supplies to customers. To mitigate this risk, these customers typically insisted that multiple manufacturers produce chips they could use to ensure a consistent supply. The 8080 and 8086-series microprocessors were produced by several companies, notably AMD, with which Intel had a technology-sharing contract.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Grove made the decision not to license the 386 design to other manufacturers, instead, producing it in three geographically distinct factories: Santa Clara, California; Hillsboro, Oregon; and Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. He convinced customers that this would ensure consistent delivery. In doing this, Intel breached its contract with AMD, which sued and was paid millions of dollars in damages but could not manufacture new Intel CPU designs any longer. (Instead, AMD started to develop and manufacture its own competing x86 designs.)",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "As the success of Compaq's Deskpro 386 established the 386 as the dominant CPU choice, Intel achieved a position of near-exclusive dominance as its supplier. Profits from this funded rapid development of both higher-performance chip designs and higher-performance manufacturing capabilities, propelling Intel to a position of unquestioned leadership by the early 1990s.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Intel introduced the 486 microprocessor in 1989, and in 1990 established a second design team, designing the processors code-named \"P5\" and \"P6\" in parallel and committing to a major new processor every two years, versus the four or more years such designs had previously taken. Engineers Vinod Dham and Rajeev Chandrasekhar (Member of Parliament, India) were key figures on the core team that invented the 486 chip and later, Intel's signature Pentium chip. The P5 project was earlier known as \"Operation Bicycle\", referring to the cycles of the processor through two parallel execution pipelines. The P5 was introduced in 1993 as the Intel Pentium, substituting a registered trademark name for the former part number (numbers, such as 486, cannot be legally registered as trademarks in the United States). The P6 followed in 1995 as the Pentium Pro and improved into the Pentium II in 1997. New architectures were developed alternately in Santa Clara, California and Hillsboro, Oregon.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Santa Clara design team embarked in 1993 on a successor to the x86 architecture, codenamed \"P7\". The first attempt was dropped a year later but quickly revived in a cooperative program with Hewlett-Packard engineers, though Intel soon took over primary design responsibility. The resulting implementation of the IA-64 64-bit architecture was the Itanium, finally introduced in June 2001. The Itanium's performance running legacy x86 code did not meet expectations, and it failed to compete effectively with x86-64, which was AMD's 64-bit extension of the 32-bit x86 architecture (Intel uses the name Intel 64, previously EM64T). In 2017, Intel announced that the Itanium 9700 series (Kittson) would be the last Itanium chips produced.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Hillsboro team designed the Willamette processors (initially code-named P68), which were marketed as the Pentium 4.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "During this period, Intel undertook two major supporting advertising campaigns. The first campaign, the 1991 \"Intel Inside\" marketing and branding campaign, is widely known and has become synonymous with Intel itself. The idea of \"ingredient branding\" was new at the time, with only NutraSweet and a few others making attempts to do so. One of the key architects of the marketing team was the head of the microprocessor division, David House. He coined the slogan \"Intel Inside\". This campaign established Intel, which had been a component supplier little-known outside the PC industry, as a household name.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The second campaign, Intel's Systems Group, which began in the early 1990s, showcased manufacturing of PC motherboards, the main board component of a personal computer, and the one into which the processor (CPU) and memory (RAM) chips are plugged. The Systems Group campaign was lesser known than the Intel Inside campaign.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Shortly after, Intel began manufacturing fully configured \"white box\" systems for the dozens of PC clone companies that rapidly sprang up. At its peak in the mid-1990s, Intel manufactured over 15% of all PCs, making it the third-largest supplier at the time.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "During the 1990s, Intel Architecture Labs (IAL) was responsible for many of the hardware innovations for the PC, including the PCI Bus, the PCI Express (PCIe) bus, and Universal Serial Bus (USB). IAL's software efforts met with a more mixed fate; its video and graphics software was important in the development of software digital video, but later its efforts were largely overshadowed by competition from Microsoft. The competition between Intel and Microsoft was revealed in testimony by then IAL Vice-president Steven McGeady at the Microsoft antitrust trial (United States v. Microsoft Corp.).",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In June 1994, Intel engineers discovered a flaw in the floating-point math subsection of the P5 Pentium microprocessor. Under certain data-dependent conditions, the low-order bits of the result of a floating-point division would be incorrect. The error could compound in subsequent calculations. Intel corrected the error in a future chip revision, and under public pressure it issued a total recall and replaced the defective Pentium CPUs (which were limited to some 60, 66, 75, 90, and 100 MHz models) on customer request.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The bug was discovered independently in October 1994 by Thomas Nicely, Professor of Mathematics at Lynchburg College. He contacted Intel but received no response. On October 30, he posted a message about his finding on the Internet. Word of the bug spread quickly and reached the industry press. The bug was easy to replicate; a user could enter specific numbers into the calculator on the operating system. Consequently, many users did not accept Intel's statements that the error was minor and \"not even an erratum\". During Thanksgiving, in 1994, The New York Times ran a piece by journalist John Markoff spotlighting the error. Intel changed its position and offered to replace every chip, quickly putting in place a large end-user support organization. This resulted in a $475 million charge against Intel's 1994 revenue. Dr. Nicely later learned that Intel had discovered the FDIV bug in its own testing a few months before him (but had decided not to inform customers).",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The \"Pentium flaw\" incident, Intel's response to it, and the surrounding media coverage propelled Intel from being a technology supplier generally unknown to most computer users to a household name. Dovetailing with an uptick in the \"Intel Inside\" campaign, the episode is considered to have been a positive event for Intel, changing some of its business practices to be more end-user focused and generating substantial public awareness, while avoiding a lasting negative impression.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Intel Core line originated from the original Core brand, with the release of the 32-bit Yonah CPU, Intel's first dual-core mobile (low-power) processor. Derived from the Pentium M, the processor family used an enhanced version of the P6 microarchitecture. Its successor, the Core 2 family, was released on July 27, 2006. This was based on the Intel Core microarchitecture, and was a 64-bit design. Instead of focusing on higher clock rates, the Core microarchitecture emphasized power efficiency and a return to lower clock speeds. It also provided more efficient decoding stages, execution units, caches, and buses, reducing the power consumption of Core 2-branded CPUs while increasing their processing capacity.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In November 2008, Intel released the first generation Core processors based on the Nehalem microarchitecture. Intel also introduced a new naming scheme, with the three variants now named Core i3, i5, and i7 (as well as i9 from 7th generation onwards). Unlike the previous naming scheme, these names no longer correspond to specific technical features. It was succeeded by the Westmere microarchitecture in 2010, with a die shrink to 32 nm and included Intel HD Graphics.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In 2011, Intel released the Sandy Bridge-based 2nd generation Core processor family. This generation featured an 11% performance increase over Nehalem. It was succeeded by Ivy Bridge-based 3rd generation Core, introduced at the 2012 Intel Developer Forum. Ivy Bridge featured a die shrink to 22 nm, and supported both DDR3 memory and DDR3L chips.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Intel continued its tick-tock model of a microarchitecture change followed by a die shrink until the 6th generation Core family based on the Skylake microarchitecture. This model was deprecated in 2016, with the release of the seventh generation Core family based on Kaby Lake, ushering in the process–architecture–optimization model. From 2016 until 2021, Intel later released more optimizations on the Skylake microarchitecture with Kaby Lake R, Amber Lake, Whiskey Lake, Coffee Lake, Coffee Lake R, and Comet Lake. Intel struggled to shrink their process node from 14 nm to 10 nm, with the first microarchitecture under that node, Cannon Lake (marketed as 8th generation Core), only being released in small quantities in 2018.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In 2019, Intel released the 10th generation of Core processors, codenamed \"Amber Lake\", \"Comet Lake\", and \"Ice Lake\". Ice Lake, based on the Sunny Cove microarchitecture, was produced on the 10 nm process and was limited to low-power mobile processors. Both Amber Lake and Comet Lake were based on a refined 14 nm node, with the latter being used for desktop and high performance mobile products and the former used for low-power mobile products.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In September 2020, 11th generation Core mobile processors, codenamed Tiger Lake, were launched. Tiger Lake is based on the Willow Cove microarchitecture and a refined 10 nm node. Intel later released 11th generation Core desktop processors (codenamed \"Rocket Lake\"), fabricated using Intel's 14 nm process and based on the Cypress Cove microarchitecture, on March 30, 2021. It replaced Comet Lake desktop processors. All 11th generation Core processors feature new integrated graphics based on the Intel Xe microarchitecture.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Both desktop and mobile products were unified under a single process node with the release of 12th generation Intel Core processors (codenamed \"Alder Lake\") in late 2021. This generation will be fabricated using Intel's 7 nm process, called Intel 7, for both desktop and mobile processors, and is based on a hybrid architecture utilizing high-performance Golden Cove cores and high-efficiency Gracemont (Atom) cores.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In early January 2018, it was reported that all Intel processors made since 1995 (besides Intel Itanium and pre-2013 Intel Atom) have been subject to two security flaws dubbed Meltdown and Spectre.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The impact on performance resulting from software patches is \"workload-dependent\". Several procedures to help protect home computers and related devices from the Spectre and Meltdown security vulnerabilities have been published. Spectre patches have been reported to significantly slow down performance, especially on older computers; on the newer 8th generation Core platforms, benchmark performance drops of 2–14 percent have been measured. Meltdown patches may also produce performance loss. It is believed that \"hundreds of millions\" of systems could be affected by these flaws.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "On March 15, 2018, Intel reported that it will redesign its CPUs (performance losses to be determined) to protect against the Spectre security vulnerability, and expects to release the newly redesigned processors later in 2018.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "On May 3, 2018, eight additional Spectre-class flaws were reported. Intel reported that they are preparing new patches to mitigate these flaws.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "On August 14, 2018, Intel disclosed three additional chip flaws referred to as L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF). They reported that previously released microcode updates, along with new, pre-release microcode updates can be used to mitigate these flaws.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "On January 18, 2019, Intel disclosed three new vulnerabilities affecting all Intel CPUs, named \"Fallout\", \"RIDL\", and \"ZombieLoad\", allowing a program to read information recently written, read data in the line-fill buffers and load ports, and leak information from other processes and virtual machines. Coffeelake-series CPUs are even more vulnerable, due to hardware mitigations for Spectre.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "On March 5, 2020, computer security experts reported another Intel chip security flaw, besides the Meltdown and Spectre flaws, with the systematic name CVE-2019-0090 (or, \"Intel CSME Bug\"). This newly found flaw is not fixable with a firmware update, and affects nearly \"all Intel chips released in the past five years\".",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "On June 6, 2005, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, announced that Apple would be transitioning the Macintosh from its long favored PowerPC architecture to the Intel x86 architecture because the future PowerPC road map was unable to satisfy Apple's needs. This was seen as a win for Intel, although an analyst called the move \"risky\" and \"foolish\", as Intel's current offerings at the time were considered to be behind those of AMD and IBM. The first Mac computers containing Intel CPUs were announced on January 10, 2006, and Apple had its entire line of consumer Macs running on Intel processors by early August 2006. The Apple Xserve server was updated to Intel Xeon processors from November 2006 and was offered in a configuration similar to Apple's Mac Pro.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Despite Apple's use of Intel products, relations between the two companies were strained at times. Rumors of Apple switching from Intel processors to their own designs began circulating as early as 2011. On June 22, 2020, during Apple's annual WWDC, Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, announced that it would be transitioning the company's entire Mac line from Intel CPUs to custom Apple-designed processors based on the Arm architecture over the course of the next two years. In the short term, this transition was estimated to have minimal effects on Intel, as Apple only accounted for 2% to 4% of its revenue. However, Apple's shift to its own chips might prompt other PC manufacturers to reassess their reliance on Intel and the x86 architecture. By November 2020, Apple unveiled the M1, its processor custom-designed for the Mac.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In 2008, Intel began shipping mainstream solid-state drives (SSDs) with up to 160 GB storage capacities. As with their CPUs, Intel develops SSD chips using ever-smaller nanometer processes. These SSDs make use of industry standards such as NAND flash, mSATA, PCIe, and NVMe. In 2017, Intel introduced SSDs based on 3D XPoint technology under the Optane brand name.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In 2021, SK Hynix acquired most of Intel's NAND memory business for $7 billion, with a remaining transaction worth $2 billion expected in 2025. Intel also discontinued its consumer Optane products in 2021. In July 2022, Intel disclosed in its Q2 earnings report that it would cease future product development within its Optane business, which in turn effectively discontinued the development of 3D XPoint as a whole.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The Intel Scientific Computers division was founded in 1984 by Justin Rattner, to design and produce parallel computers based on Intel microprocessors connected in hypercube internetwork topology. In 1992, the name was changed to the Intel Supercomputing Systems Division, and development of the iWarp architecture was also subsumed. The division designed several supercomputer systems, including the Intel iPSC/1, iPSC/2, iPSC/860, Paragon and ASCI Red. In November 2014, Intel stated that it was planning to use optical fibers to improve networking within supercomputers.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "On November 19, 2015, Intel, alongside Arm, Dell, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and Princeton University, founded the OpenFog Consortium, to promote interests and development in fog computing. Intel's Chief Strategist for the IoT Strategy and Technology Office, Jeff Fedders, became the consortium's first president.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Intel is one of the biggest stakeholders in the self-driving car industry, having joined the race in mid 2017 after joining forces with Mobileye. The company is also one of the first in the sector to research consumer acceptance, after an AAA report quoted a 78% nonacceptance rate of the technology in the US.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Safety levels of autonomous driving technology, the thought of abandoning control to a machine, and psychological comfort of passengers in such situations were the major discussion topics initially. The commuters also stated that they did not want to see everything the car was doing. This was primarily a referral to the auto-steering wheel with no one sitting in the driving seat. Intel also learned that voice control regulator is vital, and the interface between the humans and machine eases the discomfort condition, and brings some sense of control back. It is important to mention that Intel included only 10 people in this study, which makes the study less credible. In a video posted on YouTube, Intel accepted this fact and called for further testing.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Intel formed a new business unit called the Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) on completion of its Altera acquisition. Intel has since sold Stratix, Arria, and Cyclone FPGAs. In 2019, Intel released Agilex FPGAs: chips aimed at data centers, 5G applications, and other uses.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "In October 2023, Intel announced it would be spinning off PSG into a separate company at the start of 2024, while maintaining majority ownership.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "By the end of the 1990s, microprocessor performance had outstripped software demand for that CPU power. Aside from high-end server systems and software, whose demand dropped with the end of the \"dot-com bubble\", consumer systems ran effectively on increasingly low-cost systems after 2000.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Intel's strategy was to develop processors with better performance in a short time, from the appearance of one to the other, as seen with the appearance of the Pentium II in May 1997, the Pentium III in February 1999, and the Pentium 4 in the fall of 2000, making the strategy ineffective since the consumer did not see the innovation as essential, and leaving an opportunity for rapid gains by competitors, notably AMD. This, in turn, lowered the profitability of the processor line and ended an era of unprecedented dominance of the PC hardware by Intel.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Intel's dominance in the x86 microprocessor market led to numerous charges of antitrust violations over the years, including FTC investigations in both the late 1980s and in 1999, and civil actions such as the 1997 suit by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and a patent suit by Intergraph. Intel's market dominance (at one time it controlled over 85% of the market for 32-bit x86 microprocessors) combined with Intel's own hardball legal tactics (such as its infamous 338 patent suit versus PC manufacturers) made it an attractive target for litigation, culminating in Intel agreeing to pay AMD $1.25B and grant them a perpetual patent cross-license in 2009 as well as several anti-trust judgements in Europe, Korea, and Japan.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "A case of industrial espionage arose in 1995 that involved both Intel and AMD. Bill Gaede, an Argentine formerly employed both at AMD and at Intel's Arizona plant, was arrested for attempting in 1993 to sell the i486 and P5 Pentium designs to AMD and to certain foreign powers. Gaede videotaped data from his computer screen at Intel and mailed it to AMD, which immediately alerted Intel and authorities, resulting in Gaede's arrest. Gaede was convicted and sentenced to 33 months in prison in June 1996.",
"title": "Product and market history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Robert Noyce was Intel's CEO at its founding in 1968, followed by co-founder Gordon Moore in 1975. Andy Grove became the company's president in 1979 and added the CEO title in 1987 when Moore became chairman. In 1998, Grove succeeded Moore as chairman, and Craig Barrett, already company president, took over. On May 18, 2005, Barrett handed the reins of the company over to Paul Otellini, who had been the company president and COO and who was responsible for Intel's design win in the original IBM PC. The board of directors elected Otellini as president and CEO, and Barrett replaced Grove as Chairman of the Board. Grove stepped down as chairman but is retained as a special adviser. In May 2009, Barrett stepped down as chairman of the board and was succeeded by Jane Shaw. In May 2012, Intel vice chairman Andy Bryant, who had held the posts of CFO (1994) and Chief Administrative Officer (2007) at Intel, succeeded Shaw as executive chairman.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "In November 2012, president and CEO Paul Otellini announced that he would step down in May 2013 at the age of 62, three years before the company's mandatory retirement age. During a six-month transition period, Intel's board of directors commenced a search process for the next CEO, in which it considered both internal managers and external candidates such as Sanjay Jha and Patrick Gelsinger. Financial results revealed that, under Otellini, Intel's revenue increased by 55.8 percent (US$34.2 to 53.3 billion), while its net income increased by 46.7% (US$7.5 billion to 11 billion), proving that his illegal business practices were more profitable than the fines levied against the company as punishment for employing them.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "On May 2, 2013, Executive Vice President and COO Brian Krzanich was elected as Intel's sixth CEO, a selection that became effective on May 16, 2013, at the company's annual meeting. Reportedly, the board concluded that an insider could proceed with the role and exert an impact more quickly, without the need to learn Intel's processes, and Krzanich was selected on such a basis. Intel's software head Renée James was selected as president of the company, a role that is second to the CEO position.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "As of May 2013, Intel's board of directors consists of Andy Bryant, John Donahoe, Frank Yeary, Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, Susan Decker, Reed Hundt, Paul Otellini, James Plummer, David Pottruck, and David Yoffie and Creative director will.i.am. The board was described by former Financial Times journalist Tom Foremski as \"an exemplary example of corporate governance of the highest order\" and received a rating of ten from GovernanceMetrics International, a form of recognition that has only been awarded to twenty-one other corporate boards worldwide.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "On June 21, 2018, Intel announced the resignation of Brian Krzanich as CEO, with the exposure of a relationship he had with an employee. Bob Swan was named interim CEO, as the Board began a search for a permanent CEO.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "On January 31, 2019, Swan transitioned from his role as CFO and interim CEO and was named by the Board as the seventh CEO to lead the company.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "On January 13, 2021, Intel announced that Swan would be replaced as CEO by Pat Gelsinger, effective February 15. Gelsinger is a former Intel chief technology officer who had previously been head of VMWare.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "In October 2023, Intel announced it would be spinning off its Programmable Solutions Group business unit into a separate company at the start of 2024, while maintaining majority ownership and intending to seek an IPO within three years to raise funds.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "As of March 2023:",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Intel has a mandatory retirement policy for its CEOs when they reach age 65. Andy Grove retired at 62, while both Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore retired at 58. Grove retired as chairman and as a member of the board of directors in 2005 at age 68.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Intel's headquarters are located in Santa Clara, California, and the company has operations around the world. Its largest workforce concentration anywhere is in Washington County, Oregon (in the Portland metropolitan area's \"Silicon Forest\"), with 18,600 employees at several facilities. Outside the United States, the company has facilities in China, Costa Rica, Malaysia, Israel, Ireland, India, Russia, Argentina and Vietnam, in 63 countries and regions internationally. In March 2022, because of International sanctions during the Russo-Ukrainian War, Intel stopped supplying Russian market. In the U.S. Intel employs significant numbers of people in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Washington and Utah. In Oregon, Intel is the state's largest private employer. The company is the largest industrial employer in New Mexico while in Arizona the company has 12,000 employees as of January 2020.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Intel invests heavily in research in China and about 100 researchers – or 10% of the total number of researchers from Intel – are located in Beijing.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "In 2011, the Israeli government offered Intel $290 million to expand in the country. As a condition, Intel would employ 1,500 more workers in Kiryat Gat and between 600 and 1000 workers in the north.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "In January 2014, it was reported that Intel would cut about 5,000 jobs from its work force of 107,000. The announcement was made a day after it reported earnings that missed analyst targets.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "In March 2014, it was reported that Intel would embark upon a $6 billion plan to expand its activities in Israel. The plan calls for continued investment in existing and new Intel plants until 2030. As of 2014, Intel employs 10,000 workers at four development centers and two production plants in Israel.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Due to declining PC sales, in 2016 Intel cut 12,000 jobs. In 2021, Intel reversed course under new CEO Pat Gelsinger and started hiring thousands of engineers.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Intel has a Diversity Initiative, including employee diversity groups as well as supplier diversity programs. Like many companies with employee diversity groups, they include groups based on race and nationality as well as sexual identity and religion. In 1994, Intel sanctioned one of the earliest corporate Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender employee groups, and supports a Muslim employees group, a Jewish employees group, and a Bible-based Christian group.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Intel has received a 100% rating on numerous Corporate Equality Indices released by the Human Rights Campaign including the first one released in 2002. In addition, the company is frequently named one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers by Working Mother magazine.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "In January 2015, Intel announced the investment of $300 million over the next five years to enhance gender and racial diversity in their own company as well as the technology industry as a whole.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "In February 2016, Intel released its Global Diversity & Inclusion 2015 Annual Report. The male-female mix of US employees was reported as 75.2% men and 24.8% women. For US employees in technical roles, the mix was reported as 79.8% male and 20.1% female. NPR reports that Intel is facing a retention problem (particularly for African Americans), not just a pipeline problem.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "In 2011, ECONorthwest conducted an economic impact analysis of Intel's economic contribution to the state of Oregon. The report found that in 2009 \"the total economic impacts attributed to Intel's operations, capital spending, contributions and taxes amounted to almost $14.6 billion in activity, including $4.3 billion in personal income and 59,990 jobs\". Through multiplier effects, every 10 Intel jobs supported, on average, was found to create 31 jobs in other sectors of the economy.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Intel has been operating in the State of Israel since Dov Frohman founded the Israeli branch of the company in 1974 in a small office in Haifa. Intel Israel currently has development centers in Haifa, Jerusalem and Petah Tikva, and has a manufacturing plant in the Kiryat Gat industrial park that develops and manufactures microprocessors and communications products. Intel employed about 10,000 employees in Israel in 2013. Maxine Fesberg has been the CEO of Intel Israel since 2007 and the Vice President of Intel Global. In December 2016, Fesberg announced her resignation, her position of chief executive officer (CEO) has been filled by Yaniv Gerti since January 2017.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "In 2010, Intel purchased McAfee, a manufacturer of computer security technology, for $7.68 billion. As a condition for regulatory approval of the transaction, Intel agreed to provide rival security firms with all necessary information that would allow their products to use Intel's chips and personal computers. After the acquisition, Intel had about 90,000 employees, including about 12,000 software engineers. In September 2016, Intel sold a majority stake in its computer-security unit to TPG Capital, reversing the five-year-old McAfee acquisition.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "In August 2010, Intel and Infineon Technologies announced that Intel would acquire Infineon's Wireless Solutions business. Intel planned to use Infineon's technology in laptops, smart phones, netbooks, tablets and embedded computers in consumer products, eventually integrating its wireless modem into Intel's silicon chips.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "In March 2011, Intel bought most of the assets of Cairo-based SySDSoft.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "In July 2011, Intel announced that it had agreed to acquire Fulcrum Microsystems Inc., a company specializing in network switches. The company used to be included on the EE Times list of 60 Emerging Startups.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "In October 2011, Intel reached a deal to acquire Telmap, an Israeli-based navigation software company. The purchase price was not disclosed, but Israeli media reported values around $300 million to $350 million.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "In July 2012, Intel agreed to buy 10% of the shares of ASML Holding NV for $2.1 billion and another $1 billion for 5% of the shares that need shareholder approval to fund relevant research and development efforts, as part of a EUR3.3 billion ($4.1 billion) deal to accelerate the development of 450-millimeter wafer technology and extreme ultra-violet lithography by as much as two years.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "In July 2013, Intel confirmed the acquisition of Omek Interactive, an Israeli company that makes technology for gesture-based interfaces, without disclosing the monetary value of the deal. An official statement from Intel read: \"The acquisition of Omek Interactive will help increase Intel's capabilities in the delivery of more immersive perceptual computing experiences.\" One report estimated the value of the acquisition between US$30 million and $50 million.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "The acquisition of a Spanish natural language recognition startup, Indisys was announced in September 2013. The terms of the deal were not disclosed but an email from an Intel representative stated: \"Intel has acquired Indisys, a privately held company based in Seville, Spain. The majority of Indisys employees joined Intel. We signed the agreement to acquire the company on May 31 and the deal has been completed.\" Indysis explains that its artificial intelligence (AI) technology \"is a human image, which converses fluently and with common sense in multiple languages and also works in different platforms\".",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "In December 2014, Intel bought PasswordBox.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "In January 2015, Intel purchased a 30% stake in Vuzix, a smart glasses manufacturer. The deal was worth $24.8 million.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "In February 2015, Intel announced its agreement to purchase German network chipmaker Lantiq, to aid in its expansion of its range of chips in devices with Internet connection capability.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "In June 2015, Intel announced its agreement to purchase FPGA design company Altera for $16.7 billion, in its largest acquisition to date. The acquisition completed in December 2015.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "In October 2015, Intel bought cognitive computing company Saffron Technology for an undisclosed price.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "In August 2016, Intel purchased deep-learning startup Nervana Systems for over $400 million.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "In December 2016, Intel acquired computer vision startup Movidius for an undisclosed price.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "In March 2017, Intel announced that they had agreed to purchase Mobileye, an Israeli developer of \"autonomous driving\" systems for US$15.3 billion.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "In June 2017, Intel Corporation announced an investment of over ₹1,100 crore (US$140 million) for its upcoming Research and Development (R&D) centre in Bangalore, India.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "In January 2019, Intel announced an investment of over $11 billion on a new Israeli chip plant, as told by the Israeli Finance Minister.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "In November 2021, Intel recruited some of the employees of the Centaur Technology division from VIA Technologies, a deal worth $125 million, and effectively acquiring the talent and knowhow of their x86 division. VIA retained the x86 licence and associated patents, and its Zhaoxin CPU joint-venture continues.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "In December 2021, Intel said it will invest $7.1 billion to build a new chip-packaging and testing factory in Malaysia. The new investment will expand the operations of its Malaysian subsidiary across Penang and Kulim, creating more than 4,000 new Intel jobs and more than 5,000 local construction jobs.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "In December 2021, Intel announced its plan to take Mobileye automotive unit via an IPO of newly issued stock in 2022, maintaining its majority ownership of the company.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "In February 2022, Intel agreed to acquire Israeli chip manufacturer Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion. In August 2023, Intel terminated the acquisition as it failed to obtain approval from Chinese regulators within the 18-month transaction deadline.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "In May 2022, Intel announced that they have acquired Finnish graphics technology firm Siru innovations. The firm founded by ex-AMD Qualcomm mobile GPU engineers, is focused on developing software and silicon building blocks for GPU's made by other companies and is set to join Intel's fledgling Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "In May 2022, it was announced that Ericsson and Intel, are pooling research and development to create high-performing cloud RAN solutions. The organisations have pooled to launch a tech hub in California, US. The hub focuses on the benefits that Ericsson Cloud RAN and Intel technology can bring to: improving energy efficiency and network performance, reducing time to market, and monetizing new business opportunities such as enterprise applications.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "In 2011, Intel Capital announced a new fund to support startups working on technologies in line with the company's concept for next generation notebooks. The company is setting aside a $300 million fund to be spent over the next three to four years in areas related to ultrabooks. Intel announced the ultrabook concept at Computex in 2011. The ultrabook is defined as a thin (less than 0.8 inches [~2 cm] thick) notebook that utilizes Intel processors and also incorporates tablet features such as a touch screen and long battery life.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "At the Intel Developers Forum in 2011, four Taiwan ODMs showed prototype ultrabooks that used Intel's Ivy Bridge chips. Intel plans to improve power consumption of its chips for ultrabooks, like new Ivy Bridge processors in 2013, which will only have 10W default thermal design power.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "Intel's goal for Ultrabook's price is below $1000; however, according to two presidents from Acer and Compaq, this goal will not be achieved if Intel does not lower the price of its chips.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Intel has a significant participation in the open source communities since 1999. For example, in 2006 Intel released MIT-licensed X.org drivers for their integrated graphic cards of the i965 family of chipsets. Intel released FreeBSD drivers for some networking cards, available under a BSD-compatible license, which were also ported to OpenBSD. Binary firmware files for non-wireless Ethernet devices were also released under a BSD licence allowing free redistribution. Intel ran the Moblin project until April 23, 2009, when they handed the project over to the Linux Foundation. Intel also runs the LessWatts.org campaigns.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "However, after the release of the wireless products called Intel Pro/Wireless 2100, 2200BG/2225BG/2915ABG and 3945ABG in 2005, Intel was criticized for not granting free redistribution rights for the firmware that must be included in the operating system for the wireless devices to operate. As a result of this, Intel became a target of campaigns to allow free operating systems to include binary firmware on terms acceptable to the open source community. Linspire-Linux creator Michael Robertson outlined the difficult position that Intel was in releasing to open source, as Intel did not want to upset their large customer Microsoft. Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD also claimed that Intel is being \"an Open Source fraud\" after an Intel employee presented a distorted view of the situation at an open-source conference. In spite of the significant negative attention Intel received as a result of the wireless dealings, the binary firmware still has not gained a license compatible with free software principles.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "Intel has also supported other open source projects such as Blender and Open 3D Engine.",
"title": "Corporate affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "In its history, Intel has had three logos. The first Intel logo featured the company's name stylized in all lowercase, with the letter e dropped below the other letters. The second logo was inspired by the \"Intel Inside\" campaign, featuring a swirl around the Intel brand name.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "The third logo, introduced in 2020, was inspired by the previous logos. It removes the swirl as well as the classic blue color in almost all parts of the logo, except for the dot in the \"i\".",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "Intel has become one of the world's most recognizable computer brands following its long-running Intel Inside campaign. The idea for \"Intel Inside\" came out of a meeting between Intel and one of the major computer resellers, MicroAge.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "In the late 1980s, Intel's market share was being seriously eroded by upstart competitors such as Advanced Micro Devices (now AMD), Zilog, and others who had started to sell their less expensive microprocessors to computer manufacturers. This was because, by using cheaper processors, manufacturers could make cheaper computers and gain more market share in an increasingly price-sensitive market. In 1989, Intel's Dennis Carter visited MicroAge's headquarters in Tempe, Arizona, to meet with MicroAge's VP of Marketing, Ron Mion. MicroAge had become one of the largest distributors of Compaq, IBM, HP, and others and thus was a primary – although indirect – driver of demand for microprocessors. Intel wanted MicroAge to petition its computer suppliers to favor Intel chips. However, Mion felt that the marketplace should decide which processors they wanted. Intel's counterargument was that it would be too difficult to educate PC buyers on why Intel microprocessors were worth paying more for.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "Mion felt that the public did not really need to fully understand why Intel chips were better, they just needed to feel they were better. So Mion proposed a market test. Intel would pay for a MicroAge billboard somewhere saying, \"If you're buying a personal computer, make sure it has Intel inside.\" In turn, MicroAge would put \"Intel Inside\" stickers on the Intel-based computers in their stores in that area. To make the test easier to monitor, Mion decided to do the test in Boulder, Colorado, where it had a single store. Virtually overnight, the sales of personal computers in that store dramatically shifted to Intel-based PCs. Intel very quickly adopted \"Intel Inside\" as its primary branding and rolled it out worldwide. As is often the case with computer lore, other tidbits have been combined to explain how things evolved. \"Intel Inside\" has not escaped that tendency and there are other \"explanations\" that had been floating around.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "Intel's branding campaign started with \"The Computer Inside\" tagline in 1990 in the US and Europe. The Japan chapter of Intel proposed an \"Intel in it\" tagline and kicked off the Japanese campaign by hosting EKI-KON (meaning \"Station Concert\" in Japanese) at the Tokyo railway station dome on Christmas Day, December 25, 1990. Several months later, \"The Computer Inside\" incorporated the Japan idea to become \"Intel Inside\" which eventually elevated to the worldwide branding campaign in 1991, by Intel marketing manager Dennis Carter. A case study, \"Inside Intel Inside\", was put together by Harvard Business School. The five-note jingle was introduced in 1994 and by its tenth anniversary was being heard in 130 countries around the world. The initial branding agency for the \"Intel Inside\" campaign was DahlinSmithWhite Advertising of Salt Lake City. The Intel swirl logo was the work of DahlinSmithWhite art director Steve Grigg under the direction of Intel president and CEO Andy Grove.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "The Intel Inside advertising campaign sought public brand loyalty and awareness of Intel processors in consumer computers. Intel paid some of the advertiser's costs for an ad that used the Intel Inside logo and xylo-marimba jingle.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "In 2008, Intel planned to shift the emphasis of its Intel Inside campaign from traditional media such as television and print to newer media such as the Internet. Intel required that a minimum of 35% of the money it provided to the companies in its co-op program be used for online marketing. The Intel 2010 annual financial report indicated that $1.8 billion (6% of the gross margin and nearly 16% of the total net income) was allocated to all advertising with Intel Inside being part of that.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 156,
"text": "The D♭–D♭–G♭–D♭–A♭ xylophone/marimba jingle, known as the \"Intel bong\", used in Intel advertising was produced by Musikvergnuegen and written by Walter Werzowa, once a member of the Austrian 1980s sampling band Edelweiss. The Intel jingle was made in 1994 to coincide with the launch of the Pentium. It was modified in 1999 to coincide with the launch of the Pentium III, although it overlapped with the 1994 version which was phased out in 2004. Advertisements for products featuring Intel processors with prominent MMX branding featured a version of the jingle with an embellishment (shining sound) after the final note.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 157,
"text": "The jingle was remade a second time in 2004 to coincide with the new logo change. Again, it overlapped with the 1999 version and was not mainstreamed until the launch of the Core processors in 2006, with the melody unchanged.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 158,
"text": "Another remake of the jingle debuted with Intel's new visual identity. The company has made use of numerous variants since its rebranding in 2020 (while retaining the mainstream 2006 version).",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 159,
"text": "In 2006, Intel expanded its promotion of open specification platforms beyond Centrino, to include the Viiv media center PC and the business desktop Intel vPro.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 160,
"text": "In mid-January 2006, Intel announced that they were dropping the long running Pentium name from their processors. The Pentium name was first used to refer to the P5 core Intel processors and was done to comply with court rulings that prevent the trademarking of a string of numbers, so competitors could not just call their processor the same name, as had been done with the prior 386 and 486 processors (both of which had copies manufactured by IBM and AMD). They phased out the Pentium names from mobile processors first, when the new Yonah chips, branded Core Solo and Core Duo, were released. The desktop processors changed when the Core 2 line of processors were released. By 2009, Intel was using a good–better–best strategy with Celeron being good, Pentium better, and the Intel Core family representing the best the company has to offer.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 161,
"text": "According to spokesman Bill Calder, Intel has maintained only the Celeron brand, the Atom brand for netbooks and the vPro lineup for businesses. Since late 2009, Intel's mainstream processors have been called Celeron, Pentium, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 in order of performance from lowest to highest. The first generation core products carry a 3 digit name, such as i5 750, and the second generation products carry a 4 digit name, such as the i5 2500, and from 10th generation onwards, Intel processors will have a 5 digit name, such as i9 10900K for desktop. In all cases, a 'K' at the end of it shows that it is an unlocked processor, enabling additional overclocking abilities (for instance, 2500K). vPro products will carry the Intel Core i7 vPro processor or the Intel Core i5 vPro processor name. In October 2011, Intel started to sell its Core i7-2700K \"Sandy Bridge\" chip to customers worldwide.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 162,
"text": "Since 2010, \"Centrino\" is only being applied to Intel's WiMAX and Wi-Fi technologies.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 163,
"text": "In 2022, Intel announced that they are dropping the Pentium and Celeron naming schemes for their desktop and laptop entry level processors. The \"Intel Processor\" branding will be replacing the old Pentium and Celeron naming schemes starting in 2023.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 164,
"text": "In 2023, Intel announced that they will be dropping the 'i' in their future processor markings. For example, products such as Core i9, will now be called Core 9. Ultra will be added to the endings of processors that are in the higher end, such as Core Ultra 9.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 165,
"text": "Neo Sans Intel is a customized version of Neo Sans based on the Neo Sans and Neo Tech, designed by Sebastian Lester in 2004. It was introduced alongside Intel's rebranding in 2006. Previously, Intel used Helvetica as its standard typeface in corporate marketing.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 166,
"text": "Intel Clear is a global font announced in 2014 designed for to be used across all communications. The font family was designed by Red Peek Branding and Dalton Maag Initially available in Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts, it replaced Neo Sans Intel as the company's corporate typeface. Intel Clear Hebrew, Intel Clear Arabic were added by Dalton Maag Ltd. Neo Sans Intel remained in logo and to mark processor type and socket on the packaging of Intel's processors.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 167,
"text": "In 2020, as part of a new visual identity, a new typeface, Intel One, was designed. It replaced Intel Clear as the font used by the company in most of its branding, however, it is used alongside Intel Clear typeface. In logo, it replaced Neo Sans Intel typeface. However, it is still used to mark processor type and socket on the packaging of Intel's processors.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 168,
"text": "It is a book produced by Red Peak Branding as part of new brand identity campaign, celebrating Intel's achievements while setting the new standard for what Intel looks, feels and sounds like.",
"title": "Corporate identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 169,
"text": "In November 2014, Intel designed a Paddington Bear statue—themed \"Little Bear Blue\"—one of fifty statues created by various celebrities and companies which were located around London. Created prior to the release of the film Paddington, the Intel designed statue was located outside Framestore in Chancery Lane, London, a British visual-effects company which uses Intel technology for films including Paddington. The statues were then auctioned to raise funds for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC).",
"title": "Charity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 170,
"text": "In October 2006, a Transmeta lawsuit was filed against Intel for patent infringement on computer architecture and power efficiency technologies. The lawsuit was settled in October 2007, with Intel agreeing to pay US$150 million initially and US$20 million per year for the next five years. Both companies agreed to drop lawsuits against each other, while Intel was granted a perpetual non-exclusive license to use current and future patented Transmeta technologies in its chips for 10 years.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 171,
"text": "In September 2005, Intel filed a response to an AMD lawsuit, disputing AMD's claims, and claiming that Intel's business practices are fair and lawful. In a rebuttal, Intel deconstructed AMD's offensive strategy and argued that AMD struggled largely as a result of its own bad business decisions, including underinvestment in essential manufacturing capacity and excessive reliance on contracting out chip foundries. Legal analysts predicted the lawsuit would drag on for a number of years, since Intel's initial response indicated its unwillingness to settle with AMD. In 2008, a court date was finally set.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 172,
"text": "On November 4, 2009, New York's attorney general filed an antitrust lawsuit against Intel Corp, claiming the company used \"illegal threats and collusion\" to dominate the market for computer microprocessors.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 173,
"text": "On November 12, 2009, AMD agreed to drop the antitrust lawsuit against Intel in exchange for $1.25 billion. A joint press release published by the two chip makers stated \"While the relationship between the two companies has been difficult in the past, this agreement ends the legal disputes and enables the companies to focus all of our efforts on product innovation and development.\"",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 174,
"text": "An antitrust lawsuit and a class-action suit relating to cold calling employees of other companies has been settled.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 175,
"text": "In 2005, the local Fair Trade Commission found that Intel violated the Japanese Antimonopoly Act. The commission ordered Intel to eliminate discounts that had discriminated against AMD. To avoid a trial, Intel agreed to comply with the order.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 176,
"text": "In September 2007, South Korean regulators accused Intel of breaking antitrust law. The investigation began in February 2006, when officials raided Intel's South Korean offices. The company risked a penalty of up to 3% of its annual sales if found guilty. In June 2008, the Fair Trade Commission ordered Intel to pay a fine of US$25.5 million for taking advantage of its dominant position to offer incentives to major Korean PC manufacturers on the condition of not buying products from AMD.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 177,
"text": "New York started an investigation of Intel in January 2008 on whether the company violated antitrust laws in pricing and sales of its microprocessors. In June 2008, the Federal Trade Commission also began an antitrust investigation of the case. In December 2009, the FTC announced it would initiate an administrative proceeding against Intel in September 2010.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 178,
"text": "In November 2009, following a two-year investigation, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sued Intel, accusing them of bribery and coercion, claiming that Intel bribed computer makers to buy more of their chips than those of their rivals and threatened to withdraw these payments if the computer makers were perceived as working too closely with its competitors. Intel has denied these claims.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 179,
"text": "On July 22, 2010, Dell agreed to a settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to pay $100M in penalties resulting from charges that Dell did not accurately disclose accounting information to investors. In particular, the SEC charged that from 2002 to 2006, Dell had an agreement with Intel to receive rebates in exchange for not using chips manufactured by AMD. These substantial rebates were not disclosed to investors, but were used to help meet investor expectations regarding the company's financial performance; \"These exclusivity payments grew from 10 percent of Dell's operating income in FY 2003 to 38 percent in FY 2006, and peaked at 76 percent in the first quarter of FY 2007.\" Dell eventually did adopt AMD as a secondary supplier in 2006, and Intel subsequently stopped their rebates, causing Dell's financial performance to fall.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 180,
"text": "In July 2007, the European Commission accused Intel of anti-competitive practices, mostly against AMD. The allegations, going back to 2003, include giving preferential prices to computer makers buying most or all of their chips from Intel, paying computer makers to delay or cancel the launch of products using AMD chips, and providing chips at below standard cost to governments and educational institutions. Intel responded that the allegations were unfounded and instead qualified its market behavior as consumer-friendly. General counsel Bruce Sewell responded that the commission had misunderstood some factual assumptions regarding pricing and manufacturing costs.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 181,
"text": "In February 2008, Intel announced that its office in Munich had been raided by European Union regulators. Intel reported that it was cooperating with investigators. Intel faced a fine of up to 10% of its annual revenue if found guilty of stifling competition. AMD subsequently launched a website promoting these allegations. In June 2008, the EU filed new charges against Intel. In May 2009, the EU found that Intel had engaged in anti-competitive practices and subsequently fined Intel €1.06 billion (US$1.44 billion), a record amount. Intel was found to have paid companies, including Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC, to exclusively use Intel chips in their products, and therefore harmed other, less successful companies including AMD. The European Commission said that Intel had deliberately acted to keep competitors out of the computer chip market and in doing so had made a \"serious and sustained violation of the EU's antitrust rules\". In addition to the fine, Intel was ordered by the commission to immediately cease all illegal practices. Intel has said that they will appeal against the commission's verdict. In June 2014, the General Court, which sits below the European Court of Justice, rejected the appeal.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 182,
"text": "In 2022 the €1.06 billion fine was dropped, but was successively re-imposed in September 2023 as a €376.36 million fine.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 183,
"text": "Intel has been accused by some residents of Rio Rancho, New Mexico of allowing volatile organic compounds (VOCs) to be released in excess of their pollution permit. One resident claimed that a release of 1.4 tons of carbon tetrachloride was measured from one acid scrubber during the fourth quarter of 2003 but an emission factor allowed Intel to report no carbon tetrachloride emissions for all of 2003.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 184,
"text": "Another resident alleges that Intel was responsible for the release of other VOCs from their Rio Rancho site and that a necropsy of lung tissue from two deceased dogs in the area indicated trace amounts of toluene, hexane, ethylbenzene, and xylene isomers, all of which are solvents used in industrial settings but also commonly found in gasoline, retail paint thinners and retail solvents. During a sub-committee meeting of the New Mexico Environment Improvement Board, a resident claimed that Intel's own reports documented more than 1,580 pounds (720 kg) of VOCs were released in June and July 2006.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 185,
"text": "Intel's environmental performance is published annually in their corporate responsibility report.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 186,
"text": "In 2009, Intel announced that it planned to undertake an effort to remove conflict resources—materials sourced from mines whose profits are used to fund armed militant groups, particularly within the Democratic Republic of the Congo—from its supply chain. Intel sought conflict-free sources of the precious metals common to electronics from within the country, using a system of first- and third-party audits, as well as input from the Enough Project and other organizations. During a keynote address at Consumer Electronics Show 2014, Intel CEO at the time, Brian Krzanich, announced that the company's microprocessors would henceforth be conflict free. In 2016, Intel stated that it had expected its entire supply chain to be conflict-free by the end of the year.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 187,
"text": "In its 2012 rankings on the progress of consumer electronics companies relating to conflict minerals, the Enough Project rated Intel the best of 24 companies, calling it a \"Pioneer of progress\". In 2014, chief executive Brian Krzanich urged the rest of the industry to follow Intel's lead by also shunning conflict minerals.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 188,
"text": "Intel has faced complaints of age discrimination in firing and layoffs. Intel was sued in 1993 by nine former employees, over allegations that they were laid off because they were over the age of 40.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 189,
"text": "A group called FACE Intel (Former and Current Employees of Intel) claims that Intel weeds out older employees. FACE Intel claims that more than 90 percent of people who have been laid off or fired from Intel are over the age of 40. Upside magazine requested data from Intel breaking out its hiring and firing by age, but the company declined to provide any. Intel has denied that age plays any role in Intel's employment practices. FACE Intel was founded by Ken Hamidi, who was fired from Intel in 1995 at the age of 47. Hamidi was blocked in a 1999 court decision from using Intel's email system to distribute criticism of the company to employees, which overturned in 2003 in Intel Corp. v. Hamidi.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 190,
"text": "In August 2016, Indian officials of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) parked garbage trucks on Intel's campus and threatened to dump them for evading payment of property taxes between 2007 and 2008, to the tune of ₹340 million (US$4.3 million). Intel had reportedly been paying taxes as a non-air-conditioned office, when the campus in fact had central air conditioning. Other factors, such as land acquisition and construction improvements, added to the tax burden. Previously, Intel had appealed the demand in the Karnataka high court in July, during which the court ordered Intel to pay BBMP half the owed amount of ₹170 million (US$2.1 million) plus arrears by August 28 of that year.",
"title": "Litigations and regulatory disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 191,
"text": "Intel-related biographical articles on Wikipedia",
"title": "See also"
}
]
| Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is one of the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series of instruction sets found in most personal computers (PCs). Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 45 in the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years. Intel supplies microprocessors for most computer system manufacturers. It also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing. Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce (1927–1990), Arthur Rock and is associated with the executive leadership and vision of Andrew Grove. Intel was a key component of the rise of Silicon Valley as a high-tech center. Noyce was a key inventor of the integrated circuit (microchip). Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, which represented the majority of its business until 1981. Although Intel created the world's first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, it was not until the success of the personal computer (PC) that this became its primary business. During the 1990s, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs fostering the rapid growth of the computer industry. During this period, Intel became the dominant supplier of PC microprocessors and was known for aggressive and anti-competitive tactics in defense of its market position, particularly against AMD, as well as a struggle with Microsoft for control over the direction of the PC industry. The Open Source Technology Center at Intel hosts PowerTOP and LatencyTOP, and supports other open-source projects such as Wayland, Mesa, Threading Building Blocks (TBB), and Xen. | 2001-11-05T14:49:56Z | 2023-12-30T21:26:40Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel |
14,618 | İsmet İnönü | Mustafa İsmet İnönü (Turkish pronunciation: [isˈmet ˈinœny]; 24 September 1884 – 25 December 1973) was a Turkish army officer and statesman who served as the second president of Turkey from 11 November 1938 to 22 May 1950, and as its prime minister three times: from 1923 to 1924, 1925 to 1937, and 1961 to 1965.
İnönü is acknowledged by many as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's right-hand man, with their friendship going back to the Caucasus campaign. In the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, he served as the first chief of the General Staff from 1922 to 1924 for the regular Turkish army, during which he commanded forces during the First and Second Battles of İnönü. Atatürk bestowed İsmet with the surname İnönü, the site of the battles, when the 1934 Surname Law was adopted. He was also chief negotiator in the Mudanya and Lausanne conferences for the Ankara government, successfully negotiating away the Sevre treaty for the Treaty of Lausanne. As his prime minister for most of his presidency, İnönü executed many of Atatürk's modernizing and nationalist reforms. İnönü gave the orders to carry out the Zilan Massacre.
İnönü succeeded Atatürk as president of Turkey after his death in 1938, and was granted the official title of Millî Şef ("National Chief") by the parliament. As president and chairman of the Republican People's Party (CHP), İnönü initially continued Turkey's one party state. Kemalist style programs continued with great strides in education by supporting projects such as Village Institutes. His governments implemented notably heavy statist economic policies. The Hatay State was annexed in 1939, and Turkey was able to maintain an armed neutrality during World War II, joining the Allied powers only three months before the end of the European Theater. The Turkish Straits crisis prompted İnönü to build closer ties with the Western powers, with the country eventually joining NATO in 1952, though by then he was no longer president.
Factionalism between statists and liberals in the CHP lead to the creation of the Democrat Party in 1946. İnönü held the first multiparty elections in the Republic's history that year, beginning Turkey's multiparty period. 1950 saw a peaceful transfer of power to the Democrats when the CHP suffered defeat in the elections. For ten years, İnönü served as the leader of the opposition before returning to power as prime minister following the 1961 election, held after the 1960 coup-d'état. The 1960s saw İnönü reinvent the CHP as a political party which was "Left of Center" as a new party cadre led by Bülent Ecevit became more influential. İnönü remained leader of the CHP until 1972, whereupon he was defeated by Ecevit in a leadership contest. He died on 25 December 1973 of a heart attack, at the age of 89, and is interred opposite to Atatürk's mausoleum at Anıtkabir in Ankara.
İsmet İnönü (born Mustafa İsmet) was born in 1884 in Smyrna (İzmir) in the Aidin Vilayet to Hacı Reşit and Cevriye (later Cevriye Temelli). Hacı Reşit was retired after serving as director of the First Examinant Department of Legal Affairs Bureau of the War Ministry (Harbiye Nezareti Muhakemat Dairesi Birinci Mümeyyizliği). A member of the Kürümoğlu family of Bitlis, İnönü's father was born in Malatya. According to its members studying the ancestral background of the family, Kürümoğlus were of Turkish origin, while secondary sources refer to the family as of Kurdish descent. His mother was a daughter of Müderris Hasan Efendi who belonged to the ulema and was a member of a Turkish family of Razgrad (present-day Bulgaria). İsmet was the family's second child, he had three brothers including the family's first child, Ahmet Midhat, two younger brothers Hasan Rıza and Hayri (Temelli), as well as a sister Seniha (Otakan). Due to his father's assignments, the family moved from one city to another.
İnönü completed his primary education in Sivas and graduated from Sivas Military Junior High School (Sivas Askerî Rüştiyesi) in 1894. He then studied at Sivas School for Civil Servants (Sivas Mülkiye İdadisi) for a year. He graduated from the Imperial School of Military Engineering in 1903 as lieutenant gunnery officer, and entered the Military Academy to graduate as a first rank staff captain on September 26, 1906. İnönü started his duty in the Second Army based in Adrianople (Edirne) on October 2, 1906, in the 3rd Battery Command of the 8th Field Artillery Regiment. As part of his platoon officer staff internship, he gave lessons in military strategy and artillery. Captain İsmet was also part of the Ottoman–Bulgarian commissions.
Through Ali Fethi (Okyar), he briefly joined the Committee of Union and Progress in 1907, which wished to overthrow Sultan Abdul Hamid II. During the 31 March Incident, he was on the staff of the Second Cavalry Division, which was mobilized to join the Action Army and marched on Constantinople (İstanbul) to depose Abdul Hamid II. Returning to Adrianople following the suppression of the mutiny, İnönü left the committee in the summer of 1909.
He won his first military victory by suppressing Imam Yahya Muhammad Hamiddin's revolt in Yemen. İsmet eventually became chief of staff of the force sent to suppress the rebellion, and personally negotiated with Imam Yahya in Kaffet-ül-Uzer to bring Yemen back into the empire. For this, he was promoted to the rank of major. He returned to Constantinople in March 1913 to defend the capital from Bulgarian attack during the First Balkan War. İnönü was part of the Turkish delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Constantinople with the Bulgarians as a military adviser. He held a close relationship with Enver Pasha and played an active role in the reformation of the army.
İnönü began climbing the ranks during World War I, becoming lieutenant colonel on 29 November 1914 and then was appointed as the First Branch Manager of the General Headquarters on 2 December. He was appointed chief of staff of the Second Army on 9 October 1915 and was promoted to the rank of colonel on 14 December 1915.
Inönü married Emine Mevhibe Hanim on 13 April 1916, three weeks before he left for the front to return home only after the conclusion of Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918. Of which she later bore his three sons and one daughter. He began working with Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) Pasha as a corps commander on the Caucasian Front. İnönü was appointed to the IV Corps Command on 12 January 1917, upon the recommendation of Atatürk. He was recalled to Constantinople after a while, and returned to take part as a corps commander of Seventh Army. On 1 May, he was appointed to command XX Corps on the Palestine Front, and then III Corps on 20 June. He once again came in contact with Atatürk when he assumed the command of the Seventh Army. İnönü's forces received the brunt of Edmond Allenby's attack on Beersheba that ended the stalemate on the Sinai front. He was wounded in the Battle of Megiddo and was sent back to Constantinople, where he held various administrative positions in the War Ministry during the armistice period.
After the military occupation of Constantinople on 16 March 1920, İnönü decided to escape to Anatolia to join the Ankara government. He and his chief of staff major Saffet (Arıkan) escaped Maltepe in the evening of 19 March and arrived at Ankara on 9 April. He joined the Grand National Assembly (GNA) which was opened on 23 April 1920, as a deputy of Edirne. Like many others in the Turkish National Movement, he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Ottoman government on 6 June 1920. In May 1920, he was appointed chief of the general staff. The next year he was appointed commander of the Western Front of the Army of the GNA, a position in which he remained during the Turkish War of Independence. He was promoted to the rank of Mirliva (to that extent, Pasha) after winning the First and Second Battle of İnönü. When the 1934 Surname Law was adopted Atatürk bestowed İsmet Pasha with the surname İnönü, where the battles took place.
İnönü was replaced by Mustafa Fevzi Pasha (Çakmak), who was also the prime minister and minister of defense at the time, as the chief of staff after the Turkish forces lost major battles against the advancing Greek Army in July 1921, as a result of which the cities Afyonkarahisar, Kütahya and Eskişehir were temporarily lost. During the war İnönü's infant son İzzet died before his victory in Sakarya and this news was only delivered to him on the spring of 1922. His wife Emine Mevhibe hid the news and the severity of his son's sickness due to the intensity of the war. He participated as a staff officer (with the rank Brigadier General) in the later battles, including Dumlupınar.
After the War of Independence was won, İnönü was appointed as the chief negotiator of the Turkish delegation, both for the Armistice of Mudanya and for the Treaty of Lausanne.
The Lausanne conference convened in late 1922 to settle the terms of a new treaty that would take the place of the Treaty of Sèvres. İnönü became famous for his stubborn resolve in determining the position of Ankara as the legitimate, sovereign government of Turkey. After delivering his position, İsmet turned off his hearing aid during the speeches of British foreign secretary Lord Curzon. When Curzon had finished, İnönü reiterated his position as if Curzon had never said a word.
İsmet İnönü served as the prime minister of Turkey throughout Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's presidency, stepping down as prime minister for three months during Fethi Okyar's premiership, and in the last year of Atatürk's presidency when he was replaced by Celal Bayar. İnönü therefore helped to execute most of Atatürk's reformist programs. It was his suggestion to make Ankara the capital of Turkey, which was approved by the parliament. İnönü was also an important factor in the proclamation of the Republic and the abolition of the Caliphate and Evkaf Ministry. He resigned from the premiership for health reasons on 22 November 1924 for Fethi Okyar, but since he was not able to achieve a vote of confidence from parliament due to the Sheikh Said rebellion, İnönü returned to the prime ministry.
İnönü immediately banned all opposition parties (including the Progressive Republican Party) and press. Independence Tribunals were reestablished to prosecute the Kurdish rebels. In 1926 it allegedly came out that former members of the CUP attempted to assassinate Atatürk in the İzmir plot, which resulted in remaining CUP leaders being executed. İnönü retired his military command in 1927.
While dealing with the Sheikh Said revolt İnönü proclaimed a Turkish nationalist policy and encouraged the turkification of the non-Turkish population. Following the suppression of the Sheikh Said rebellion, he presided over the Reform Council for the East which prepared the Report for Reform in the East, which recommended to impede an establishment of a Kurdish elite, to forbid non-Turkish languages and the creation of regional administrative units called Inspectorates-General, which were to be governed with martial law. He stated the following in regards to the Kurds; "we're frankly nationalists and nationalism is our only factor of cohesion. Before the Turkish majority other elements have no kind of influence. At any price, we must turkify the inhabitants of our land, and we will annihilate those who oppose" Following this report, three Inspectorates-Generals were established in the Kurdish areas comprising several provinces. On the direct order of İnönü the Zilan massacre of thousands of Kurdish civilians was perpetrated by the Turkish Land Forces in the Zilan Valley of Van Province on 12/13 July 1930, during the Ararat rebellion. Nation building was codified into law when a new settlement regime was enacted in 1934, resettling Albanians, Abkhazians, Circassians, and Kurds in new areas in order to create a homogeneous Turkish state.
İnönü was responsible for most of the reformist legislation promulgated during Turkey's one party period. The Hat Law and the closure of Dervish lodges were enacted in 1925, in 1928 the Turkish alphabet switched to being written with Latin characters, and in 1934 titles such as Efendi, Bey, and Pasha were abolished, and certain articles of religious clothing were banned, though İnönü was and still is popularly known as İsmet Pasha. 1934 was also the year that the Surname Law was adopted, with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk bestowing İsmet with the surname İnönü, the location where İsmet won the battles against the Greek army in 1921. He was also a proponent of replacing foreign loan words with "Pure Turkish" words.
İnönü managed the economy with heavy-handed government intervention, especially during the Great Depression, by implementing an economic plan inspired by the Five Year Plan of the Soviet Union. In doing so, he took much private property under government control. Due to his efforts, to this day, more than 70% of land in Turkey is still owned by the state.
Desiring a more liberal economic system, Atatürk dissolved the government of İnönü in 1937 and appointed Celâl Bayar, the founder of the first Turkish commercial bank Türkiye İş Bankası, as prime minister, thus beginning a decades long rivalry between Bayar and İnönü.
After the death of Atatürk on 10 November 1938, İnönü was viewed as the most appropriate candidate to succeed him, and was unanimously elected the second president of the Republic of Turkey and leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP). He attempted to build himself a cult of personality by receiving the official title of Millî Şef, i.e., "National Chief".
One of his first actions was to annex in 1939 the Hatay State, which declared independence from French Syria. İnönü also wished to move on from one party rule by taking incremental steps to multiparty politics. He hoped to accomplish this through establishing the Independent Group as a force of opposition in the parliament, but they fell short of expectations under war-time conditions. İnönü dismissed Bayar's government because of differences between the two on economic policy in 1939. İnönü was an avowed statist, while Bayar wished for a more liberal economy. Turkey's early industrialization accelerated under İnönü but the onset of World War II disrupted economic growth.
Much reform in education was accomplished during İnönü's presidency through the efforts of Hasan Âli Yücel, who was minister of education throughout İnönü's governments. 1940 saw the establishment of the Village Institutes, in which well performing students from the country side were selected to train as teachers and return to their hometown to run community development programs.
World War II broke out in the first year of his presidency, and both the Allies and the Axis pressured İnönü to bring Turkey into the war on their side. The Germans sent Franz von Papen to Ankara in April 1939 while the British sent Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen and the French René Massigli. On 23 April 1939, Turkish Foreign Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu told Knatchbull-Hugessen of his nation's fears of Italian claims of the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum and German control of the Balkans, and suggested an Anglo-Soviet-Turkish alliance as the best way of countering the Axis. In May 1939, during the visit of Maxime Weygand to Turkey, İnönü told the French Ambassador René Massigli that he believed that the best way of stopping Germany was an alliance of Turkey, the Soviet Union, France and Britain; that if such an alliance came into being, the Turks would allow Soviet ground and air forces onto their soil; and that he wanted a major programme of French military aid to modernize the Turkish armed forces.
The signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939 drew Turkey away from the Allies; the Turks always believed that it was essential to have the Soviet Union as an ally to counter Germany, and thus the signing of the German-Soviet pact undercut completely the assumptions behind Turkish security policy. With the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, İnönü chose to be neutral in World War II as taking on Germany and the Soviet Union at the same time would be too much for Turkey, though he signed a tripartite treaty of alliance with Britain and France on 19 October 1939, obligating Turkey's entry into the war if fighting spread to the Mediterranean. However, with France's defeat in June 1940 İnönü abandoned the pro-Allied neutrality that he had followed since the beginning of the war. A major embarrassment for the Turks occurred in July 1940 when the Germans captured and published documents from the Quai d'Orsay in Paris showing the Turks were aware of Operation Pike—as the Anglo-French plan in the winter of 1939–40 to bomb the oil fields in the Soviet Union from Turkey was codenamed—which was intended by Berlin to worsen relations between Ankara and Moscow. In turn, worsening relations between the Soviet Union and Turkey were intended to drive Turkey into the arms of the Reich. After the publication of the French documents relating to Operation Pike, İnönü pulled out of the tripartide pact signed with Britain and France and signed the German–Turkish Treaty of Friendship and the Clodius Agreement, which placed Turkey within the German economic sphere of influence, but İnönü went no further towards the Axis.
In the first half of 1941, Germany which was intent upon invading the Soviet Union went out of its way to improve relations with Turkey as the Reich hoped for a benevolent Turkish neutrality when the German-Soviet war began. At the same time, the British had great hopes in the spring of 1941 when they dispatched an expeditionary force to Greece that İnönü could be persuaded to enter the war on the Allied side as the British leadership had high hopes of creating a Balkan front that would tie down German forces, and which thus led a major British diplomatic offensive with the Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden visiting Ankara several times to meet with İnönü. İnönü always told Eden that the Turks would not join the British forces in Greece, and the Turks would only enter the war if Germany attacked Turkey. For his part, Papen offered İnönü parts of Greece if Turkey were to enter the war on the Axis side, an offer İnönü declined. In May 1941 when the Germans dispatched an expeditionary force to Iraq to fight against the British, İnönü refused Papen's request that the German forces be allowed transit rights to Iraq. Another attempt by Hitler to woo Turkey came in February 1943, when Talaat Pasha's remains were returned to Turkey for a state burial.
Internal opposition to Turkish neutrality came from ultra-nationalist circles and factions of the military that wished to incorporate the Turkic populated areas in the Soviet Union by allying with Germany. This almost erupted into a coup d'état against the government. Leading pan-Turkists including Alparslan Türkeş, Nihal Atsız, and Şaik Gökyay were arrested and sentenced time in prison in the Racism-Turanism trials.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill traveled to Ankara in January 1943 for a conference with President İnönu, to urge Turkey's entry into the war on the allied side. Churchill met secretly with İnönü inside a railroad car at the Yenice Station near Adana. By 4–6 December 1943, İnönü felt confident enough about the outcome of the war, that he met openly with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Second Cairo Conference. Until 1941, both Roosevelt and Churchill had thought that Turkey's continuing neutrality would serve the interests of the Allies by blocking the Axis from reaching the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East. But the early victories of the Axis up to the end of 1942 caused Roosevelt and Churchill to re-evaluate a possible Turkish participation in the war on the side of the Allies. Turkey had maintained a decently-sized Army and Air Force throughout the war, and Churchill wanted the Turks to open a new front in the Balkans. Roosevelt, on the other hand, still believed that a Turkish attack would be too risky, and an eventual Turkish failure would have disastrous effects for the Allies.
İnönü knew very well the hardships which his country had suffered during decades of incessant war between 1908 and 1922 and was determined to keep Turkey out of another war as long as he could. The young Turkish Republic was still re-building, recovering from the losses due to earlier wars, and lacked any modern weapons and the infrastructure to enter a war to be fought along and possibly within its borders. İnönü based his neutrality policy during the Second World War on the premise that Western Allies and the Soviet Union would sooner or later have a falling out after the war. Thus, İnönu wanted assurances on financial and military aid for Turkey, as well as a guarantee that the United States and the United Kingdom would stand beside Turkey in the event of a Soviet invasion of the Turkish Straits after the war. In August 1944 İnönü broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and on 5 January 1945, İnönü severed diplomatic relations with Japan. Shortly afterwards, İnönü allowed Allied shipping to use the Turkish straits to send supplies to the Soviet Union and on 25 February 1945 he declared war on Germany and Japan. For this Turkey became a founding member of the United Nations.
The post-war tensions and arguments surrounding the Turkish Straits would come to be known as the Turkish Straits crisis. The fear of Soviet invasion and Joseph Stalin's unconcealed desire for Soviet military bases in the Turkish Straits eventually caused Turkey to give up its principle of neutrality in foreign relations and join NATO in February 1952.
Maintaining an armed neutrality proved to be disruptive for the young republic. The country existed in a practical state of war throughout the Second World War: military production was prioritized at the expense of peacetime goods, rationing and curfews were implemented, and high taxes were put in place, causing severe economic hardship for many. One such tax was the Wealth Tax (Varlık Vergisi), a discriminatory tax which demanded very high one-time payments from Turkey's non-Muslim minorities. This tax is seen by many to be a continuation of the Jizya tax paid by dhimmis during Ottoman times, or Millî İktisat (National Economy) economic policy implemented by the Committee of Union and Progress regime three decades ago. It was only repealed in 1944 under American and British pressure.
A famous story of İnönü happened in a meeting in Bursa for the 1969 general elections. A young man yelled at him; "You let us go without food!" İnönü replied him by saying "Yes, I let you go without food, but I did not let you become fatherless" by implying the death of millions of people from both sides of World War II.
For the Kemalists there was always a desire for Turkey to develop into a democracy. Before the Independent Group, Atatürk experimented with opposition through the Liberal Republican Party, which lasted three months before it had to be shut down when reactionaries threatened to hijack the party. In an opening speech to the Grand National Assembly on November 1, 1945, İnönü openly expressed the country's need for an opposition party. He welcomed Celal Bayar establishing the Democrat Party (DP), which separated from CHP. However, due to anti-Communist hysteria brought on by the new Soviet threat new leftist parties were swiftly banned and rural development initiatives such as the Village Institutes and People's Rooms were closed. Even with such pressure on the left, İnönü established the Ministry of Labour in 1945 and signed into law important protections for workers. Universities were given autonomy, and İnönü's title of "unchangeable chairman" of CHP was abolished.
İnönü allowed for Turkey's first multiparty elections to be held in 1946, however the elections were infamously not free and fair; voting was carried out under the gaze of onlookers who could determine which voters had voted for which parties, and where secrecy prevailed as to the subsequent counting of votes. Instead of inviting Şükrü Saraçoğlu to form another government, he assigned the CHP hardliner Recep Peker to the task, who contributed to a polarizing atmosphere in the parliament. İnönü had to act as a mediator several times between Peker and Bayar, who threatened to have the DP walk from parliament if they didn't have some of their demands met, such ensuring judicial review, secret ballots, and public counting for elections. On 12 July 1947 İsmet İnönü gave a speech broadcast on radio and newspapers that he would stand equal distance from the government and opposition, prompting Peker's resignation.
Free and fair national elections had to wait till 1950, and on that occasion İnönü's government was defeated. In the 1950 election campaign, the leading figures of the Democrat Party used the slogan: "Geldi İsmet, kesildi kısmet" ("İsmet arrived, [our] fortune left"). CHP lost the election with 41% of the vote against DP's 55%, but due to the winner-takes-all electoral system, DP received 85% of the seats in parliament. İnönü presided over the peaceful transfer of power to the DP leaders: Bayar and Adnan Menderes. Bayar would serve as Turkey's third president, and Menderes its first prime minister not from the CHP.
For ten years İnönü served as the leader of the opposition. In opposition, the CHP established its youth and women's branch. On 22 June 1953, the establishment of trade unions and vocational chambers was proposed, and the right to strike for workers was added to the party program. The CHP formed an electoral alliance with the Republican Nation Party and Liberty party for the 1957 election, which was blocked by the DP government.
In the lead up to the elections prepared for 1960, İnönü and CHP members faced regular harassment from the authorities and DP supporters to the point where he was almost lynched several times. In 1958, the DP mayor of Zile declared martial law and mobilized gendarme to prevent İnönü from conducting a rally in the city; a similar event happened in the city of Çankırı. In 1959, İnönü began a campaign tour which followed the same path he took thirty years ago as a Pasha from Uşak to İzmir that ended in victory for the Turkish nationalists. The DP minister of interior refused to promise protection to him. In Uşak a crowd blocked İnönü from going to his podium and he was hit in the head with a stone. Following his "Great Offensive" he flew to Istanbul, where he was almost lynched by a DP organized mob on the way to Topkapı Palace. He was also banned from speaking in rallies in Kayseri and Yeşilhisar.
İnönü was banned from 12 sessions of parliament. This coincided an authoritarian turn of the Democrat Party, which culminated in a military coup.
On 27 May 1960, the Turkish Armed Forces overthrew the government. After one year of junta rule in which the Democrat Party was banned and its top leaders executed in the Yassıada Trials, elections were held once the military returned to their barracks. İnönü returned to power as Prime Minister after the 1961 election, in which CHP won the election. Right-wing parties have since continuously attacked İnönü and the CHP for their perceived involvement in the hanging of prime minister Menderes, even though İnönü advocated for Menderes' pardoning.
İnönü's governments were defined by an effort to deescalate tensions between radical forces in the Turkish army wishing for extended junta rule and former Democrats that wished for amnesty. İnönü's CHP did not gain enough seats in the legislature to win a majority in the elections, so in an effort to create reconciliation he formed coalition governments with the neo-Democrat Justice Party and New Turkey Party and the Republican Villagers Nation Party until 1965. Forming coalitions with DP successor parties however provoked radical officers into action. Colonel Talat Aydemir [tr] twice attempted overthrowing the government in 1962 and 1963 [tr]. Aydemir was later executed for conducting both coups. Aydemir's 1962 coup had the most potential to succeed, when İnönü, President Cemal Gürsel and Chief of Staff Cevdet Sunay were held up in Çankaya Mansion by the putschists. Aydemir decided to let the group go, which foiled the coup.
While in coalition with the far-right Republican Villagers Nation Party, İnönü renounced the Greco-Turkish Treaty of Friendship of 1930 and took actions against the Greek minority. The Turkish government also strictly enforced a long‐overlooked law barring Greek nationals from 30 professions and occupations, for example Greeks could not be doctors, nurses, architects, shoemakers, tailors, plumbers, cabaret singers, ironsmiths, cooks, tourist guides, etc. and 50,000 more Greeks were deported. These actions were done because of the growing anti-Greek sentiment in Turkey after ethnic conflict in Cyprus flared up again. With invasion of the island imminent, American President Lyndon Johnson sent a memorandum to İnönü, effectively vetoing Turkish intervention. A subsequent meeting at the White House between İnönü and Johnson on 22 June 1964 meant Cyprus' status quo continued for another ten years. An event a couple years earlier also strained the other-wise amicable relationship İnönü held with Washington, that being the withdrawal of the nuclear armed PGM-19 Jupiter MRBMs briefly stationed in Turkey, which was undertaken in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. While Washington withdrew the MRBMs, some B61 nuclear bombs are still stored in İncirlik Air Base.
İnönü's governments established the National Security Council, Turkish Statistical Institute, and Turkey's leading research institute TÜBİTAK. Turkey signed the Ankara agreement, the first treaty of cooperation with the European Economic Community, and also increased ties with Iran and Pakistan. The army was modernized and the National Intelligence Organization was founded. İnönü was instrumental in establishing CHP as "Left of Center" on the political spectrum as a new left-wing party cadre led by his protégé Bülent Ecevit became more influential. İnönü survived an assassination attempt from a Menderes supporter in 1964.
İnönü returned to the opposition after losing both the 1965 and 1969 general elections to a much younger man, Justice Party leader Süleyman Demirel. He remained leader of CHP until 1972, whereupon an interparty crisis over his endorsement of the 1971 military memorandum lead to his defeat by Ecevit in the 5th extraordinary CHP convention. This was the first overthrow of a party leader in a leadership contest in the Republic's history. İnönü left his party and resigned his parliamentarianship afterwords. Being a former president he was a member of the Senate in the last year of his life.
On 25 December 1973 İsmet İnönü died of a heart attack at the age of 89. The parliament declared national mourning until his burial. He was interred at Anıtkabir opposite to Atatürk's mausoleum on 28 December. Following the 1980 coup, Kenan Evren transferred twelve graves from Anıtkabir, but kept İnönü's in place. İnönü's tomb took its present shape in January 1997.
İnönü University and Malatya İnönü Stadium in Malatya are named after him, as is the İnönü Stadium in Istanbul, home of the Beşiktaş football club. A highly educated man, İnönü was able to speak fluently in Arabic, English, French and German in addition to his native Turkish.
Australian actor Gerard Kennedy played Colonel Ismet Bey in 1987's The Lighthorsemen. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Mustafa İsmet İnönü (Turkish pronunciation: [isˈmet ˈinœny]; 24 September 1884 – 25 December 1973) was a Turkish army officer and statesman who served as the second president of Turkey from 11 November 1938 to 22 May 1950, and as its prime minister three times: from 1923 to 1924, 1925 to 1937, and 1961 to 1965.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "İnönü is acknowledged by many as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's right-hand man, with their friendship going back to the Caucasus campaign. In the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, he served as the first chief of the General Staff from 1922 to 1924 for the regular Turkish army, during which he commanded forces during the First and Second Battles of İnönü. Atatürk bestowed İsmet with the surname İnönü, the site of the battles, when the 1934 Surname Law was adopted. He was also chief negotiator in the Mudanya and Lausanne conferences for the Ankara government, successfully negotiating away the Sevre treaty for the Treaty of Lausanne. As his prime minister for most of his presidency, İnönü executed many of Atatürk's modernizing and nationalist reforms. İnönü gave the orders to carry out the Zilan Massacre.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "İnönü succeeded Atatürk as president of Turkey after his death in 1938, and was granted the official title of Millî Şef (\"National Chief\") by the parliament. As president and chairman of the Republican People's Party (CHP), İnönü initially continued Turkey's one party state. Kemalist style programs continued with great strides in education by supporting projects such as Village Institutes. His governments implemented notably heavy statist economic policies. The Hatay State was annexed in 1939, and Turkey was able to maintain an armed neutrality during World War II, joining the Allied powers only three months before the end of the European Theater. The Turkish Straits crisis prompted İnönü to build closer ties with the Western powers, with the country eventually joining NATO in 1952, though by then he was no longer president.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Factionalism between statists and liberals in the CHP lead to the creation of the Democrat Party in 1946. İnönü held the first multiparty elections in the Republic's history that year, beginning Turkey's multiparty period. 1950 saw a peaceful transfer of power to the Democrats when the CHP suffered defeat in the elections. For ten years, İnönü served as the leader of the opposition before returning to power as prime minister following the 1961 election, held after the 1960 coup-d'état. The 1960s saw İnönü reinvent the CHP as a political party which was \"Left of Center\" as a new party cadre led by Bülent Ecevit became more influential. İnönü remained leader of the CHP until 1972, whereupon he was defeated by Ecevit in a leadership contest. He died on 25 December 1973 of a heart attack, at the age of 89, and is interred opposite to Atatürk's mausoleum at Anıtkabir in Ankara.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "İsmet İnönü (born Mustafa İsmet) was born in 1884 in Smyrna (İzmir) in the Aidin Vilayet to Hacı Reşit and Cevriye (later Cevriye Temelli). Hacı Reşit was retired after serving as director of the First Examinant Department of Legal Affairs Bureau of the War Ministry (Harbiye Nezareti Muhakemat Dairesi Birinci Mümeyyizliği). A member of the Kürümoğlu family of Bitlis, İnönü's father was born in Malatya. According to its members studying the ancestral background of the family, Kürümoğlus were of Turkish origin, while secondary sources refer to the family as of Kurdish descent. His mother was a daughter of Müderris Hasan Efendi who belonged to the ulema and was a member of a Turkish family of Razgrad (present-day Bulgaria). İsmet was the family's second child, he had three brothers including the family's first child, Ahmet Midhat, two younger brothers Hasan Rıza and Hayri (Temelli), as well as a sister Seniha (Otakan). Due to his father's assignments, the family moved from one city to another.",
"title": "Early life (1884–1903)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "İnönü completed his primary education in Sivas and graduated from Sivas Military Junior High School (Sivas Askerî Rüştiyesi) in 1894. He then studied at Sivas School for Civil Servants (Sivas Mülkiye İdadisi) for a year. He graduated from the Imperial School of Military Engineering in 1903 as lieutenant gunnery officer, and entered the Military Academy to graduate as a first rank staff captain on September 26, 1906. İnönü started his duty in the Second Army based in Adrianople (Edirne) on October 2, 1906, in the 3rd Battery Command of the 8th Field Artillery Regiment. As part of his platoon officer staff internship, he gave lessons in military strategy and artillery. Captain İsmet was also part of the Ottoman–Bulgarian commissions.",
"title": "Military career (1903–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Through Ali Fethi (Okyar), he briefly joined the Committee of Union and Progress in 1907, which wished to overthrow Sultan Abdul Hamid II. During the 31 March Incident, he was on the staff of the Second Cavalry Division, which was mobilized to join the Action Army and marched on Constantinople (İstanbul) to depose Abdul Hamid II. Returning to Adrianople following the suppression of the mutiny, İnönü left the committee in the summer of 1909.",
"title": "Military career (1903–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "He won his first military victory by suppressing Imam Yahya Muhammad Hamiddin's revolt in Yemen. İsmet eventually became chief of staff of the force sent to suppress the rebellion, and personally negotiated with Imam Yahya in Kaffet-ül-Uzer to bring Yemen back into the empire. For this, he was promoted to the rank of major. He returned to Constantinople in March 1913 to defend the capital from Bulgarian attack during the First Balkan War. İnönü was part of the Turkish delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Constantinople with the Bulgarians as a military adviser. He held a close relationship with Enver Pasha and played an active role in the reformation of the army.",
"title": "Military career (1903–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "İnönü began climbing the ranks during World War I, becoming lieutenant colonel on 29 November 1914 and then was appointed as the First Branch Manager of the General Headquarters on 2 December. He was appointed chief of staff of the Second Army on 9 October 1915 and was promoted to the rank of colonel on 14 December 1915.",
"title": "Military career (1903–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Inönü married Emine Mevhibe Hanim on 13 April 1916, three weeks before he left for the front to return home only after the conclusion of Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918. Of which she later bore his three sons and one daughter. He began working with Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) Pasha as a corps commander on the Caucasian Front. İnönü was appointed to the IV Corps Command on 12 January 1917, upon the recommendation of Atatürk. He was recalled to Constantinople after a while, and returned to take part as a corps commander of Seventh Army. On 1 May, he was appointed to command XX Corps on the Palestine Front, and then III Corps on 20 June. He once again came in contact with Atatürk when he assumed the command of the Seventh Army. İnönü's forces received the brunt of Edmond Allenby's attack on Beersheba that ended the stalemate on the Sinai front. He was wounded in the Battle of Megiddo and was sent back to Constantinople, where he held various administrative positions in the War Ministry during the armistice period.",
"title": "Military career (1903–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "After the military occupation of Constantinople on 16 March 1920, İnönü decided to escape to Anatolia to join the Ankara government. He and his chief of staff major Saffet (Arıkan) escaped Maltepe in the evening of 19 March and arrived at Ankara on 9 April. He joined the Grand National Assembly (GNA) which was opened on 23 April 1920, as a deputy of Edirne. Like many others in the Turkish National Movement, he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Ottoman government on 6 June 1920. In May 1920, he was appointed chief of the general staff. The next year he was appointed commander of the Western Front of the Army of the GNA, a position in which he remained during the Turkish War of Independence. He was promoted to the rank of Mirliva (to that extent, Pasha) after winning the First and Second Battle of İnönü. When the 1934 Surname Law was adopted Atatürk bestowed İsmet Pasha with the surname İnönü, where the battles took place.",
"title": "Military career (1903–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "İnönü was replaced by Mustafa Fevzi Pasha (Çakmak), who was also the prime minister and minister of defense at the time, as the chief of staff after the Turkish forces lost major battles against the advancing Greek Army in July 1921, as a result of which the cities Afyonkarahisar, Kütahya and Eskişehir were temporarily lost. During the war İnönü's infant son İzzet died before his victory in Sakarya and this news was only delivered to him on the spring of 1922. His wife Emine Mevhibe hid the news and the severity of his son's sickness due to the intensity of the war. He participated as a staff officer (with the rank Brigadier General) in the later battles, including Dumlupınar.",
"title": "Military career (1903–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "After the War of Independence was won, İnönü was appointed as the chief negotiator of the Turkish delegation, both for the Armistice of Mudanya and for the Treaty of Lausanne.",
"title": "Military career (1903–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Lausanne conference convened in late 1922 to settle the terms of a new treaty that would take the place of the Treaty of Sèvres. İnönü became famous for his stubborn resolve in determining the position of Ankara as the legitimate, sovereign government of Turkey. After delivering his position, İsmet turned off his hearing aid during the speeches of British foreign secretary Lord Curzon. When Curzon had finished, İnönü reiterated his position as if Curzon had never said a word.",
"title": "Military career (1903–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "İsmet İnönü served as the prime minister of Turkey throughout Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's presidency, stepping down as prime minister for three months during Fethi Okyar's premiership, and in the last year of Atatürk's presidency when he was replaced by Celal Bayar. İnönü therefore helped to execute most of Atatürk's reformist programs. It was his suggestion to make Ankara the capital of Turkey, which was approved by the parliament. İnönü was also an important factor in the proclamation of the Republic and the abolition of the Caliphate and Evkaf Ministry. He resigned from the premiership for health reasons on 22 November 1924 for Fethi Okyar, but since he was not able to achieve a vote of confidence from parliament due to the Sheikh Said rebellion, İnönü returned to the prime ministry.",
"title": "Prime minister ship (1923–1937)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "İnönü immediately banned all opposition parties (including the Progressive Republican Party) and press. Independence Tribunals were reestablished to prosecute the Kurdish rebels. In 1926 it allegedly came out that former members of the CUP attempted to assassinate Atatürk in the İzmir plot, which resulted in remaining CUP leaders being executed. İnönü retired his military command in 1927.",
"title": "Prime minister ship (1923–1937)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "While dealing with the Sheikh Said revolt İnönü proclaimed a Turkish nationalist policy and encouraged the turkification of the non-Turkish population. Following the suppression of the Sheikh Said rebellion, he presided over the Reform Council for the East which prepared the Report for Reform in the East, which recommended to impede an establishment of a Kurdish elite, to forbid non-Turkish languages and the creation of regional administrative units called Inspectorates-General, which were to be governed with martial law. He stated the following in regards to the Kurds; \"we're frankly nationalists and nationalism is our only factor of cohesion. Before the Turkish majority other elements have no kind of influence. At any price, we must turkify the inhabitants of our land, and we will annihilate those who oppose\" Following this report, three Inspectorates-Generals were established in the Kurdish areas comprising several provinces. On the direct order of İnönü the Zilan massacre of thousands of Kurdish civilians was perpetrated by the Turkish Land Forces in the Zilan Valley of Van Province on 12/13 July 1930, during the Ararat rebellion. Nation building was codified into law when a new settlement regime was enacted in 1934, resettling Albanians, Abkhazians, Circassians, and Kurds in new areas in order to create a homogeneous Turkish state.",
"title": "Prime minister ship (1923–1937)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "İnönü was responsible for most of the reformist legislation promulgated during Turkey's one party period. The Hat Law and the closure of Dervish lodges were enacted in 1925, in 1928 the Turkish alphabet switched to being written with Latin characters, and in 1934 titles such as Efendi, Bey, and Pasha were abolished, and certain articles of religious clothing were banned, though İnönü was and still is popularly known as İsmet Pasha. 1934 was also the year that the Surname Law was adopted, with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk bestowing İsmet with the surname İnönü, the location where İsmet won the battles against the Greek army in 1921. He was also a proponent of replacing foreign loan words with \"Pure Turkish\" words.",
"title": "Prime minister ship (1923–1937)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "İnönü managed the economy with heavy-handed government intervention, especially during the Great Depression, by implementing an economic plan inspired by the Five Year Plan of the Soviet Union. In doing so, he took much private property under government control. Due to his efforts, to this day, more than 70% of land in Turkey is still owned by the state.",
"title": "Prime minister ship (1923–1937)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Desiring a more liberal economic system, Atatürk dissolved the government of İnönü in 1937 and appointed Celâl Bayar, the founder of the first Turkish commercial bank Türkiye İş Bankası, as prime minister, thus beginning a decades long rivalry between Bayar and İnönü.",
"title": "Prime minister ship (1923–1937)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "After the death of Atatürk on 10 November 1938, İnönü was viewed as the most appropriate candidate to succeed him, and was unanimously elected the second president of the Republic of Turkey and leader of the Republican People's Party (CHP). He attempted to build himself a cult of personality by receiving the official title of Millî Şef, i.e., \"National Chief\".",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "One of his first actions was to annex in 1939 the Hatay State, which declared independence from French Syria. İnönü also wished to move on from one party rule by taking incremental steps to multiparty politics. He hoped to accomplish this through establishing the Independent Group as a force of opposition in the parliament, but they fell short of expectations under war-time conditions. İnönü dismissed Bayar's government because of differences between the two on economic policy in 1939. İnönü was an avowed statist, while Bayar wished for a more liberal economy. Turkey's early industrialization accelerated under İnönü but the onset of World War II disrupted economic growth.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Much reform in education was accomplished during İnönü's presidency through the efforts of Hasan Âli Yücel, who was minister of education throughout İnönü's governments. 1940 saw the establishment of the Village Institutes, in which well performing students from the country side were selected to train as teachers and return to their hometown to run community development programs.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "World War II broke out in the first year of his presidency, and both the Allies and the Axis pressured İnönü to bring Turkey into the war on their side. The Germans sent Franz von Papen to Ankara in April 1939 while the British sent Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen and the French René Massigli. On 23 April 1939, Turkish Foreign Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu told Knatchbull-Hugessen of his nation's fears of Italian claims of the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum and German control of the Balkans, and suggested an Anglo-Soviet-Turkish alliance as the best way of countering the Axis. In May 1939, during the visit of Maxime Weygand to Turkey, İnönü told the French Ambassador René Massigli that he believed that the best way of stopping Germany was an alliance of Turkey, the Soviet Union, France and Britain; that if such an alliance came into being, the Turks would allow Soviet ground and air forces onto their soil; and that he wanted a major programme of French military aid to modernize the Turkish armed forces.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939 drew Turkey away from the Allies; the Turks always believed that it was essential to have the Soviet Union as an ally to counter Germany, and thus the signing of the German-Soviet pact undercut completely the assumptions behind Turkish security policy. With the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, İnönü chose to be neutral in World War II as taking on Germany and the Soviet Union at the same time would be too much for Turkey, though he signed a tripartite treaty of alliance with Britain and France on 19 October 1939, obligating Turkey's entry into the war if fighting spread to the Mediterranean. However, with France's defeat in June 1940 İnönü abandoned the pro-Allied neutrality that he had followed since the beginning of the war. A major embarrassment for the Turks occurred in July 1940 when the Germans captured and published documents from the Quai d'Orsay in Paris showing the Turks were aware of Operation Pike—as the Anglo-French plan in the winter of 1939–40 to bomb the oil fields in the Soviet Union from Turkey was codenamed—which was intended by Berlin to worsen relations between Ankara and Moscow. In turn, worsening relations between the Soviet Union and Turkey were intended to drive Turkey into the arms of the Reich. After the publication of the French documents relating to Operation Pike, İnönü pulled out of the tripartide pact signed with Britain and France and signed the German–Turkish Treaty of Friendship and the Clodius Agreement, which placed Turkey within the German economic sphere of influence, but İnönü went no further towards the Axis.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In the first half of 1941, Germany which was intent upon invading the Soviet Union went out of its way to improve relations with Turkey as the Reich hoped for a benevolent Turkish neutrality when the German-Soviet war began. At the same time, the British had great hopes in the spring of 1941 when they dispatched an expeditionary force to Greece that İnönü could be persuaded to enter the war on the Allied side as the British leadership had high hopes of creating a Balkan front that would tie down German forces, and which thus led a major British diplomatic offensive with the Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden visiting Ankara several times to meet with İnönü. İnönü always told Eden that the Turks would not join the British forces in Greece, and the Turks would only enter the war if Germany attacked Turkey. For his part, Papen offered İnönü parts of Greece if Turkey were to enter the war on the Axis side, an offer İnönü declined. In May 1941 when the Germans dispatched an expeditionary force to Iraq to fight against the British, İnönü refused Papen's request that the German forces be allowed transit rights to Iraq. Another attempt by Hitler to woo Turkey came in February 1943, when Talaat Pasha's remains were returned to Turkey for a state burial.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Internal opposition to Turkish neutrality came from ultra-nationalist circles and factions of the military that wished to incorporate the Turkic populated areas in the Soviet Union by allying with Germany. This almost erupted into a coup d'état against the government. Leading pan-Turkists including Alparslan Türkeş, Nihal Atsız, and Şaik Gökyay were arrested and sentenced time in prison in the Racism-Turanism trials.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "British Prime Minister Winston Churchill traveled to Ankara in January 1943 for a conference with President İnönu, to urge Turkey's entry into the war on the allied side. Churchill met secretly with İnönü inside a railroad car at the Yenice Station near Adana. By 4–6 December 1943, İnönü felt confident enough about the outcome of the war, that he met openly with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Second Cairo Conference. Until 1941, both Roosevelt and Churchill had thought that Turkey's continuing neutrality would serve the interests of the Allies by blocking the Axis from reaching the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East. But the early victories of the Axis up to the end of 1942 caused Roosevelt and Churchill to re-evaluate a possible Turkish participation in the war on the side of the Allies. Turkey had maintained a decently-sized Army and Air Force throughout the war, and Churchill wanted the Turks to open a new front in the Balkans. Roosevelt, on the other hand, still believed that a Turkish attack would be too risky, and an eventual Turkish failure would have disastrous effects for the Allies.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "İnönü knew very well the hardships which his country had suffered during decades of incessant war between 1908 and 1922 and was determined to keep Turkey out of another war as long as he could. The young Turkish Republic was still re-building, recovering from the losses due to earlier wars, and lacked any modern weapons and the infrastructure to enter a war to be fought along and possibly within its borders. İnönü based his neutrality policy during the Second World War on the premise that Western Allies and the Soviet Union would sooner or later have a falling out after the war. Thus, İnönu wanted assurances on financial and military aid for Turkey, as well as a guarantee that the United States and the United Kingdom would stand beside Turkey in the event of a Soviet invasion of the Turkish Straits after the war. In August 1944 İnönü broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and on 5 January 1945, İnönü severed diplomatic relations with Japan. Shortly afterwards, İnönü allowed Allied shipping to use the Turkish straits to send supplies to the Soviet Union and on 25 February 1945 he declared war on Germany and Japan. For this Turkey became a founding member of the United Nations.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The post-war tensions and arguments surrounding the Turkish Straits would come to be known as the Turkish Straits crisis. The fear of Soviet invasion and Joseph Stalin's unconcealed desire for Soviet military bases in the Turkish Straits eventually caused Turkey to give up its principle of neutrality in foreign relations and join NATO in February 1952.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Maintaining an armed neutrality proved to be disruptive for the young republic. The country existed in a practical state of war throughout the Second World War: military production was prioritized at the expense of peacetime goods, rationing and curfews were implemented, and high taxes were put in place, causing severe economic hardship for many. One such tax was the Wealth Tax (Varlık Vergisi), a discriminatory tax which demanded very high one-time payments from Turkey's non-Muslim minorities. This tax is seen by many to be a continuation of the Jizya tax paid by dhimmis during Ottoman times, or Millî İktisat (National Economy) economic policy implemented by the Committee of Union and Progress regime three decades ago. It was only repealed in 1944 under American and British pressure.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "A famous story of İnönü happened in a meeting in Bursa for the 1969 general elections. A young man yelled at him; \"You let us go without food!\" İnönü replied him by saying \"Yes, I let you go without food, but I did not let you become fatherless\" by implying the death of millions of people from both sides of World War II.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "For the Kemalists there was always a desire for Turkey to develop into a democracy. Before the Independent Group, Atatürk experimented with opposition through the Liberal Republican Party, which lasted three months before it had to be shut down when reactionaries threatened to hijack the party. In an opening speech to the Grand National Assembly on November 1, 1945, İnönü openly expressed the country's need for an opposition party. He welcomed Celal Bayar establishing the Democrat Party (DP), which separated from CHP. However, due to anti-Communist hysteria brought on by the new Soviet threat new leftist parties were swiftly banned and rural development initiatives such as the Village Institutes and People's Rooms were closed. Even with such pressure on the left, İnönü established the Ministry of Labour in 1945 and signed into law important protections for workers. Universities were given autonomy, and İnönü's title of \"unchangeable chairman\" of CHP was abolished.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "İnönü allowed for Turkey's first multiparty elections to be held in 1946, however the elections were infamously not free and fair; voting was carried out under the gaze of onlookers who could determine which voters had voted for which parties, and where secrecy prevailed as to the subsequent counting of votes. Instead of inviting Şükrü Saraçoğlu to form another government, he assigned the CHP hardliner Recep Peker to the task, who contributed to a polarizing atmosphere in the parliament. İnönü had to act as a mediator several times between Peker and Bayar, who threatened to have the DP walk from parliament if they didn't have some of their demands met, such ensuring judicial review, secret ballots, and public counting for elections. On 12 July 1947 İsmet İnönü gave a speech broadcast on radio and newspapers that he would stand equal distance from the government and opposition, prompting Peker's resignation.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Free and fair national elections had to wait till 1950, and on that occasion İnönü's government was defeated. In the 1950 election campaign, the leading figures of the Democrat Party used the slogan: \"Geldi İsmet, kesildi kısmet\" (\"İsmet arrived, [our] fortune left\"). CHP lost the election with 41% of the vote against DP's 55%, but due to the winner-takes-all electoral system, DP received 85% of the seats in parliament. İnönü presided over the peaceful transfer of power to the DP leaders: Bayar and Adnan Menderes. Bayar would serve as Turkey's third president, and Menderes its first prime minister not from the CHP.",
"title": "Presidency (1938–1950)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "For ten years İnönü served as the leader of the opposition. In opposition, the CHP established its youth and women's branch. On 22 June 1953, the establishment of trade unions and vocational chambers was proposed, and the right to strike for workers was added to the party program. The CHP formed an electoral alliance with the Republican Nation Party and Liberty party for the 1957 election, which was blocked by the DP government.",
"title": "Leader of the opposition (1950–1960)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the lead up to the elections prepared for 1960, İnönü and CHP members faced regular harassment from the authorities and DP supporters to the point where he was almost lynched several times. In 1958, the DP mayor of Zile declared martial law and mobilized gendarme to prevent İnönü from conducting a rally in the city; a similar event happened in the city of Çankırı. In 1959, İnönü began a campaign tour which followed the same path he took thirty years ago as a Pasha from Uşak to İzmir that ended in victory for the Turkish nationalists. The DP minister of interior refused to promise protection to him. In Uşak a crowd blocked İnönü from going to his podium and he was hit in the head with a stone. Following his \"Great Offensive\" he flew to Istanbul, where he was almost lynched by a DP organized mob on the way to Topkapı Palace. He was also banned from speaking in rallies in Kayseri and Yeşilhisar.",
"title": "Leader of the opposition (1950–1960)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "İnönü was banned from 12 sessions of parliament. This coincided an authoritarian turn of the Democrat Party, which culminated in a military coup.",
"title": "Leader of the opposition (1950–1960)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "On 27 May 1960, the Turkish Armed Forces overthrew the government. After one year of junta rule in which the Democrat Party was banned and its top leaders executed in the Yassıada Trials, elections were held once the military returned to their barracks. İnönü returned to power as Prime Minister after the 1961 election, in which CHP won the election. Right-wing parties have since continuously attacked İnönü and the CHP for their perceived involvement in the hanging of prime minister Menderes, even though İnönü advocated for Menderes' pardoning.",
"title": "Later life (1961–1973)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "İnönü's governments were defined by an effort to deescalate tensions between radical forces in the Turkish army wishing for extended junta rule and former Democrats that wished for amnesty. İnönü's CHP did not gain enough seats in the legislature to win a majority in the elections, so in an effort to create reconciliation he formed coalition governments with the neo-Democrat Justice Party and New Turkey Party and the Republican Villagers Nation Party until 1965. Forming coalitions with DP successor parties however provoked radical officers into action. Colonel Talat Aydemir [tr] twice attempted overthrowing the government in 1962 and 1963 [tr]. Aydemir was later executed for conducting both coups. Aydemir's 1962 coup had the most potential to succeed, when İnönü, President Cemal Gürsel and Chief of Staff Cevdet Sunay were held up in Çankaya Mansion by the putschists. Aydemir decided to let the group go, which foiled the coup.",
"title": "Later life (1961–1973)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "While in coalition with the far-right Republican Villagers Nation Party, İnönü renounced the Greco-Turkish Treaty of Friendship of 1930 and took actions against the Greek minority. The Turkish government also strictly enforced a long‐overlooked law barring Greek nationals from 30 professions and occupations, for example Greeks could not be doctors, nurses, architects, shoemakers, tailors, plumbers, cabaret singers, ironsmiths, cooks, tourist guides, etc. and 50,000 more Greeks were deported. These actions were done because of the growing anti-Greek sentiment in Turkey after ethnic conflict in Cyprus flared up again. With invasion of the island imminent, American President Lyndon Johnson sent a memorandum to İnönü, effectively vetoing Turkish intervention. A subsequent meeting at the White House between İnönü and Johnson on 22 June 1964 meant Cyprus' status quo continued for another ten years. An event a couple years earlier also strained the other-wise amicable relationship İnönü held with Washington, that being the withdrawal of the nuclear armed PGM-19 Jupiter MRBMs briefly stationed in Turkey, which was undertaken in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. While Washington withdrew the MRBMs, some B61 nuclear bombs are still stored in İncirlik Air Base.",
"title": "Later life (1961–1973)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "İnönü's governments established the National Security Council, Turkish Statistical Institute, and Turkey's leading research institute TÜBİTAK. Turkey signed the Ankara agreement, the first treaty of cooperation with the European Economic Community, and also increased ties with Iran and Pakistan. The army was modernized and the National Intelligence Organization was founded. İnönü was instrumental in establishing CHP as \"Left of Center\" on the political spectrum as a new left-wing party cadre led by his protégé Bülent Ecevit became more influential. İnönü survived an assassination attempt from a Menderes supporter in 1964.",
"title": "Later life (1961–1973)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "İnönü returned to the opposition after losing both the 1965 and 1969 general elections to a much younger man, Justice Party leader Süleyman Demirel. He remained leader of CHP until 1972, whereupon an interparty crisis over his endorsement of the 1971 military memorandum lead to his defeat by Ecevit in the 5th extraordinary CHP convention. This was the first overthrow of a party leader in a leadership contest in the Republic's history. İnönü left his party and resigned his parliamentarianship afterwords. Being a former president he was a member of the Senate in the last year of his life.",
"title": "Later life (1961–1973)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "On 25 December 1973 İsmet İnönü died of a heart attack at the age of 89. The parliament declared national mourning until his burial. He was interred at Anıtkabir opposite to Atatürk's mausoleum on 28 December. Following the 1980 coup, Kenan Evren transferred twelve graves from Anıtkabir, but kept İnönü's in place. İnönü's tomb took its present shape in January 1997.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "İnönü University and Malatya İnönü Stadium in Malatya are named after him, as is the İnönü Stadium in Istanbul, home of the Beşiktaş football club. A highly educated man, İnönü was able to speak fluently in Arabic, English, French and German in addition to his native Turkish.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Australian actor Gerard Kennedy played Colonel Ismet Bey in 1987's The Lighthorsemen.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
]
| Mustafa İsmet İnönü was a Turkish army officer and statesman who served as the second president of Turkey from 11 November 1938 to 22 May 1950, and as its prime minister three times: from 1923 to 1924, 1925 to 1937, and 1961 to 1965. İnönü is acknowledged by many as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's right-hand man, with their friendship going back to the Caucasus campaign. In the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, he served as the first chief of the General Staff from 1922 to 1924 for the regular Turkish army, during which he commanded forces during the First and Second Battles of İnönü. Atatürk bestowed İsmet with the surname İnönü, the site of the battles, when the 1934 Surname Law was adopted. He was also chief negotiator in the Mudanya and Lausanne conferences for the Ankara government, successfully negotiating away the Sevre treaty for the Treaty of Lausanne. As his prime minister for most of his presidency, İnönü executed many of Atatürk's modernizing and nationalist reforms. İnönü gave the orders to carry out the Zilan Massacre. İnönü succeeded Atatürk as president of Turkey after his death in 1938, and was granted the official title of Millî Şef by the parliament. As president and chairman of the Republican People's Party (CHP), İnönü initially continued Turkey's one party state. Kemalist style programs continued with great strides in education by supporting projects such as Village Institutes. His governments implemented notably heavy statist economic policies. The Hatay State was annexed in 1939, and Turkey was able to maintain an armed neutrality during World War II, joining the Allied powers only three months before the end of the European Theater. The Turkish Straits crisis prompted İnönü to build closer ties with the Western powers, with the country eventually joining NATO in 1952, though by then he was no longer president. Factionalism between statists and liberals in the CHP lead to the creation of the Democrat Party in 1946. İnönü held the first multiparty elections in the Republic's history that year, beginning Turkey's multiparty period. 1950 saw a peaceful transfer of power to the Democrats when the CHP suffered defeat in the elections. For ten years, İnönü served as the leader of the opposition before returning to power as prime minister following the 1961 election, held after the 1960 coup-d'état. The 1960s saw İnönü reinvent the CHP as a political party which was "Left of Center" as a new party cadre led by Bülent Ecevit became more influential. İnönü remained leader of the CHP until 1972, whereupon he was defeated by Ecevit in a leadership contest. He died on 25 December 1973 of a heart attack, at the age of 89, and is interred opposite to Atatürk's mausoleum at Anıtkabir in Ankara. | 2001-04-19T16:22:20Z | 2023-12-12T04:08:33Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%B0smet_%C4%B0n%C3%B6n%C3%BC |
14,624 | Inorganic chemistry | Inorganic chemistry deals with synthesis and behavior of inorganic and organometallic compounds. This field covers chemical compounds that are not carbon-based, which are the subjects of organic chemistry. The distinction between the two disciplines is far from absolute, as there is much overlap in the subdiscipline of organometallic chemistry. It has applications in every aspect of the chemical industry, including catalysis, materials science, pigments, surfactants, coatings, medications, fuels, and agriculture.
Many inorganic compounds are ionic compounds, consisting of cations and anions joined by ionic bonding. Examples of salts (which are ionic compounds) are magnesium chloride MgCl2, which consists of magnesium cations Mg and chloride anions Cl; or sodium oxide Na2O, which consists of sodium cations Na and oxide anions O. In any salt, the proportions of the ions are such that the electric charges cancel out, so that the bulk compound is electrically neutral. The ions are described by their oxidation state and their ease of formation can be inferred from the ionization potential (for cations) or from the electron affinity (anions) of the parent elements.
Important classes of inorganic compounds are the oxides, the carbonates, the sulfates, and the halides. Many inorganic compounds are characterized by high melting points. Many inorganic compounds have high melting point and ease of crystallization. Some salts (e.g., NaCl) are very soluble in water, others (e.g., FeS) are not.
The simplest inorganic reaction is double displacement when in mixing of two salts the ions are swapped without a change in oxidation state. In redox reactions one reactant, the oxidant, lowers its oxidation state and another reactant, the reductant, has its oxidation state increased. The net result is an exchange of electrons. Electron exchange can occur indirectly as well, e.g., in batteries, a key concept in electrochemistry.
When one reactant contains hydrogen atoms, a reaction can take place by exchanging protons in acid-base chemistry. In a more general definition, any chemical species capable of binding to electron pairs is called a Lewis acid; conversely any molecule that tends to donate an electron pair is referred to as a Lewis base. As a refinement of acid-base interactions, the HSAB theory takes into account polarizability and size of ions.
Inorganic compounds are found in nature as minerals. Soil may contain iron sulfide as pyrite or calcium sulfate as gypsum. Inorganic compounds are also found multitasking as biomolecules: as electrolytes (sodium chloride), in energy storage (ATP) or in construction (the polyphosphate backbone in DNA).
The first important man-made inorganic compound was ammonium nitrate for soil fertilization through the Haber process. Inorganic compounds are synthesized for use as catalysts such as vanadium(V) oxide and titanium(III) chloride, or as reagents in organic chemistry such as lithium aluminium hydride.
Subdivisions of inorganic chemistry are organometallic chemistry, cluster chemistry and bioinorganic chemistry. These fields are active areas of research in inorganic chemistry, aimed toward new catalysts, superconductors, and therapies.
Inorganic chemistry is a highly practical area of science. Traditionally, the scale of a nation's economy could be evaluated by their productivity of sulfuric acid. The manufacturing of fertilizers, which often begins with the Haber-Bosch process, is another practical application of industrial inorganic chemistry.
Descriptive inorganic chemistry focuses on the classification of compounds based on their properties. Partly the classification focuses on the position in the periodic table of the heaviest element (the element with the highest atomic weight) in the compound, partly by grouping compounds by their structural similarities.
Classical coordination compounds feature metals bound to "lone pairs" of electrons residing on the main group atoms of ligands such as H2O, NH3, Cl, and CN. In modern coordination compounds almost all organic and inorganic compounds can be used as ligands. The "metal" usually is a metal from the groups 3–13, as well as the trans-lanthanides and trans-actinides, but from a certain perspective, all chemical compounds can be described as coordination complexes.
The stereochemistry of coordination complexes can be quite rich, as hinted at by Werner's separation of two enantiomers of [Co((OH)2Co(NH3)4)3], an early demonstration that chirality is not inherent to organic compounds. A topical theme within this specialization is supramolecular coordination chemistry.
These species feature elements from groups I, II, III, IV, V,VI, VII, 0 (excluding hydrogen) of the periodic table. Due to their often similar reactivity, the elements in group 3 (Sc, Y, and La) and group 12 (Zn, Cd, and Hg) are also generally included, and the lanthanides and actinides are sometimes included as well.
Main group compounds have been known since the beginnings of chemistry, e.g., elemental sulfur and the distillable white phosphorus. Experiments on oxygen, O2, by Lavoisier and Priestley not only identified an important diatomic gas, but opened the way for describing compounds and reactions according to stoichiometric ratios. The discovery of a practical synthesis of ammonia using iron catalysts by Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber in the early 1900s deeply impacted mankind, demonstrating the significance of inorganic chemical synthesis. Typical main group compounds are SiO2, SnCl4, and N2O. Many main group compounds can also be classed as "organometallic", as they contain organic groups, e.g., B(CH3)3). Main group compounds also occur in nature, e.g., phosphate in DNA, and therefore may be classed as bioinorganic. Conversely, organic compounds lacking (many) hydrogen ligands can be classed as "inorganic", such as the fullerenes, buckytubes and binary carbon oxides.
Noble gases are elements which have filled valence electron shells in their neutral state, and are thus stable as lone atoms. Historically known as being inert, methods were discovered to react with them. The trend within the group is for the larger elements to be more reactive. Xenon and krypton are more easily ionized, and can combine with extremely electronegative elements to make fluorides and oxides and form solid ionic compounds. Argon, neon, and helium are much less reactive, though in cosmochemistry ArH has been observed spectroscopically in interstellar gas. Noble gases can also be trapped in solids while not being directly coordinated in clathrates or in endohedral fullerenes.
Compounds containing metals from group 4 to 11 are considered transition metal compounds. Compounds with a metal from group 3 or 12 are sometimes also incorporated into this group, but also often classified as main group compounds.
Transition metal compounds show a rich coordination chemistry, varying from tetrahedral for titanium (e.g., TiCl4) to square planar for some nickel complexes to octahedral for coordination complexes of cobalt. A range of transition metals can be found in biologically important compounds, such as iron in hemoglobin.
Usually, organometallic compounds are considered to contain the M-C-H group. The metal (M) in these species can either be a main group element or a transition metal. Operationally, the definition of an organometallic compound is more relaxed to include also highly lipophilic complexes such as metal carbonyls and even metal alkoxides.
Organometallic compounds are mainly considered a special category because organic ligands are often sensitive to hydrolysis or oxidation, necessitating that organometallic chemistry employs more specialized preparative methods than was traditional in Werner-type complexes. Synthetic methodology, especially the ability to manipulate complexes in solvents of low coordinating power, enabled the exploration of very weakly coordinating ligands such as hydrocarbons, H2, and N2. Because the ligands are petrochemicals in some sense, the area of organometallic chemistry has greatly benefited from its relevance to industry.
Clusters can be found in all classes of chemical compounds. According to the commonly accepted definition, a cluster consists minimally of a triangular set of atoms that are directly bonded to each other. But metal-metal bonded dimetallic complexes are highly relevant to the area. Clusters occur in "pure" inorganic systems, organometallic chemistry, main group chemistry, and bioinorganic chemistry. The distinction between very large clusters and bulk solids is increasingly blurred. This interface is the chemical basis of nanoscience or nanotechnology and specifically arise from the study of quantum size effects in cadmium selenide clusters. Thus, large clusters can be described as an array of bound atoms intermediate in character between a molecule and a solid.
By definition, these compounds occur in nature, but the subfield includes anthropogenic species, such as pollutants (e.g., methylmercury) and drugs (e.g., Cisplatin). The field, which incorporates many aspects of biochemistry, includes many kinds of compounds, e.g., the phosphates in DNA, and also metal complexes containing ligands that range from biological macromolecules, commonly peptides, to ill-defined species such as humic acid, and to water (e.g., coordinated to gadolinium complexes employed for MRI). Traditionally bioinorganic chemistry focuses on electron- and energy-transfer in proteins relevant to respiration. Medicinal inorganic chemistry includes the study of both non-essential and essential elements with applications to diagnosis and therapies.
This important area focuses on structure, bonding, and the physical properties of materials. In practice, solid state inorganic chemistry uses techniques such as crystallography to gain an understanding of the properties that result from collective interactions between the subunits of the solid. Included in solid state chemistry are metals and their alloys or intermetallic derivatives. Related fields are condensed matter physics, mineralogy, and materials science.
An alternative perspective on the area of inorganic chemistry begins with the Bohr model of the atom and, using the tools and models of theoretical chemistry and computational chemistry, expands into bonding in simple and then more complicated molecules. Precise quantum mechanical descriptions for multielectron species, the province of inorganic chemistry, is difficult. This challenge has spawned many semi-quantitative or semi-empirical approaches including molecular orbital theory and ligand field theory, In parallel with these theoretical descriptions, approximate methodologies are employed, including density functional theory.
Exceptions to theories, qualitative and quantitative, are extremely important in the development of the field. For example, Cu2(OAc)4(H2O)2 is almost diamagnetic below room temperature whereas crystal field theory predicts that the molecule would have two unpaired electrons. The disagreement between qualitative theory (paramagnetic) and observation (diamagnetic) led to the development of models for magnetic coupling, such as the exchange interaction. These improved models led to the development of new magnetic materials and new technologies.
Inorganic chemistry has greatly benefited from qualitative theories. Such theories are easier to learn as they require little background in quantum theory. Within main group compounds, VSEPR theory powerfully predicts, or at least rationalizes, the structures of main group compounds, such as an explanation for why NH3 is pyramidal whereas ClF3 is T-shaped. For the transition metals, crystal field theory allows one to understand the magnetism of many simple complexes, such as why [Fe(CN)6] has only one unpaired electron, whereas [Fe(H2O)6] has five. A particularly powerful qualitative approach to assessing the structure and reactivity begins with classifying molecules according to electron counting, focusing on the numbers of valence electrons, usually at the central atom in a molecule.
A central construct in inorganic chemistry is the theory of molecular symmetry. Mathematical group theory provides the language to describe the shapes of molecules according to their point group symmetry. Group theory also enables factoring and simplification of theoretical calculations.
Spectroscopic features are analyzed and described with respect to the symmetry properties of the, inter alia, vibrational or electronic states. Knowledge of the symmetry properties of the ground and excited states allows one to predict the numbers and intensities of absorptions in vibrational and electronic spectra. A classic application of group theory is the prediction of the number of C-O vibrations in substituted metal carbonyl complexes. The most common applications of symmetry to spectroscopy involve vibrational and electronic spectra.
Group theory highlights commonalities and differences in the bonding of otherwise disparate species. For example, the metal-based orbitals transform identically for WF6 and W(CO)6, but the energies and populations of these orbitals differ significantly. A similar relationship exists CO2 and molecular beryllium difluoride.
An alternative quantitative approach to inorganic chemistry focuses on energies of reactions. This approach is highly traditional and empirical, but it is also useful. Broad concepts that are couched in thermodynamic terms include redox potential, acidity, phase changes. A classic concept in inorganic thermodynamics is the Born–Haber cycle, which is used for assessing the energies of elementary processes such as electron affinity, some of which cannot be observed directly.
An important aspect of inorganic chemistry focuses on reaction pathways, i.e. reaction mechanisms.
The mechanisms of main group compounds of groups 13-18 are usually discussed in the context of organic chemistry (organic compounds are main group compounds, after all). Elements heavier than C, N, O, and F often form compounds with more electrons than predicted by the octet rule, as explained in the article on hypervalent molecules. The mechanisms of their reactions differ from organic compounds for this reason. Elements lighter than carbon (B, Be, Li) as well as Al and Mg often form electron-deficient structures that are electronically akin to carbocations. Such electron-deficient species tend to react via associative pathways. The chemistry of the lanthanides mirrors many aspects of chemistry seen for aluminium.
Transition metal and main group compounds often react differently. The important role of d-orbitals in bonding strongly influences the pathways and rates of ligand substitution and dissociation. These themes are covered in articles on coordination chemistry and ligand. Both associative and dissociative pathways are observed.
An overarching aspect of mechanistic transition metal chemistry is the kinetic lability of the complex illustrated by the exchange of free and bound water in the prototypical complexes [M(H2O)6]:
The rates of water exchange varies by 20 orders of magnitude across the periodic table, with lanthanide complexes at one extreme and Ir(III) species being the slowest.
Redox reactions are prevalent for the transition elements. Two classes of redox reaction are considered: atom-transfer reactions, such as oxidative addition/reductive elimination, and electron-transfer. A fundamental redox reaction is "self-exchange", which involves the degenerate reaction between an oxidant and a reductant. For example, permanganate and its one-electron reduced relative manganate exchange one electron:
Coordinated ligands display reactivity distinct from the free ligands. For example, the acidity of the ammonia ligands in [Co(NH3)6] is elevated relative to NH3 itself. Alkenes bound to metal cations are reactive toward nucleophiles whereas alkenes normally are not. The large and industrially important area of catalysis hinges on the ability of metals to modify the reactivity of organic ligands. Homogeneous catalysis occurs in solution and heterogeneous catalysis occurs when gaseous or dissolved substrates interact with surfaces of solids. Traditionally homogeneous catalysis is considered part of organometallic chemistry and heterogeneous catalysis is discussed in the context of surface science, a subfield of solid state chemistry. But the basic inorganic chemical principles are the same. Transition metals, almost uniquely, react with small molecules such as CO, H2, O2, and C2H4. The industrial significance of these feedstocks drives the active area of catalysis. Ligands can also undergo ligand transfer reactions such as transmetalation.
Because of the diverse range of elements and the correspondingly diverse properties of the resulting derivatives, inorganic chemistry is closely associated with many methods of analysis. Older methods tended to examine bulk properties such as the electrical conductivity of solutions, melting points, solubility, and acidity. With the advent of quantum theory and the corresponding expansion of electronic apparatus, new tools have been introduced to probe the electronic properties of inorganic molecules and solids. Often these measurements provide insights relevant to theoretical models. Commonly encountered techniques are:
Although some inorganic species can be obtained in pure form from nature, most are synthesized in chemical plants and in the laboratory.
Inorganic synthetic methods can be classified roughly according to the volatility or solubility of the component reactants. Soluble inorganic compounds are prepared using methods of organic synthesis. For metal-containing compounds that are reactive toward air, Schlenk line and glove box techniques are followed. Volatile compounds and gases are manipulated in "vacuum manifolds" consisting of glass piping interconnected through valves, the entirety of which can be evacuated to 0.001 mm Hg or less. Compounds are condensed using liquid nitrogen (b.p. 78K) or other cryogens. Solids are typically prepared using tube furnaces, the reactants and products being sealed in containers, often made of fused silica (amorphous SiO2) but sometimes more specialized materials such as welded Ta tubes or Pt "boats". Products and reactants are transported between temperature zones to drive reactions. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Inorganic chemistry deals with synthesis and behavior of inorganic and organometallic compounds. This field covers chemical compounds that are not carbon-based, which are the subjects of organic chemistry. The distinction between the two disciplines is far from absolute, as there is much overlap in the subdiscipline of organometallic chemistry. It has applications in every aspect of the chemical industry, including catalysis, materials science, pigments, surfactants, coatings, medications, fuels, and agriculture.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Many inorganic compounds are ionic compounds, consisting of cations and anions joined by ionic bonding. Examples of salts (which are ionic compounds) are magnesium chloride MgCl2, which consists of magnesium cations Mg and chloride anions Cl; or sodium oxide Na2O, which consists of sodium cations Na and oxide anions O. In any salt, the proportions of the ions are such that the electric charges cancel out, so that the bulk compound is electrically neutral. The ions are described by their oxidation state and their ease of formation can be inferred from the ionization potential (for cations) or from the electron affinity (anions) of the parent elements.",
"title": "Key concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Important classes of inorganic compounds are the oxides, the carbonates, the sulfates, and the halides. Many inorganic compounds are characterized by high melting points. Many inorganic compounds have high melting point and ease of crystallization. Some salts (e.g., NaCl) are very soluble in water, others (e.g., FeS) are not.",
"title": "Key concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The simplest inorganic reaction is double displacement when in mixing of two salts the ions are swapped without a change in oxidation state. In redox reactions one reactant, the oxidant, lowers its oxidation state and another reactant, the reductant, has its oxidation state increased. The net result is an exchange of electrons. Electron exchange can occur indirectly as well, e.g., in batteries, a key concept in electrochemistry.",
"title": "Key concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "When one reactant contains hydrogen atoms, a reaction can take place by exchanging protons in acid-base chemistry. In a more general definition, any chemical species capable of binding to electron pairs is called a Lewis acid; conversely any molecule that tends to donate an electron pair is referred to as a Lewis base. As a refinement of acid-base interactions, the HSAB theory takes into account polarizability and size of ions.",
"title": "Key concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Inorganic compounds are found in nature as minerals. Soil may contain iron sulfide as pyrite or calcium sulfate as gypsum. Inorganic compounds are also found multitasking as biomolecules: as electrolytes (sodium chloride), in energy storage (ATP) or in construction (the polyphosphate backbone in DNA).",
"title": "Key concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The first important man-made inorganic compound was ammonium nitrate for soil fertilization through the Haber process. Inorganic compounds are synthesized for use as catalysts such as vanadium(V) oxide and titanium(III) chloride, or as reagents in organic chemistry such as lithium aluminium hydride.",
"title": "Key concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Subdivisions of inorganic chemistry are organometallic chemistry, cluster chemistry and bioinorganic chemistry. These fields are active areas of research in inorganic chemistry, aimed toward new catalysts, superconductors, and therapies.",
"title": "Key concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Inorganic chemistry is a highly practical area of science. Traditionally, the scale of a nation's economy could be evaluated by their productivity of sulfuric acid. The manufacturing of fertilizers, which often begins with the Haber-Bosch process, is another practical application of industrial inorganic chemistry.",
"title": "Key concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry focuses on the classification of compounds based on their properties. Partly the classification focuses on the position in the periodic table of the heaviest element (the element with the highest atomic weight) in the compound, partly by grouping compounds by their structural similarities.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Classical coordination compounds feature metals bound to \"lone pairs\" of electrons residing on the main group atoms of ligands such as H2O, NH3, Cl, and CN. In modern coordination compounds almost all organic and inorganic compounds can be used as ligands. The \"metal\" usually is a metal from the groups 3–13, as well as the trans-lanthanides and trans-actinides, but from a certain perspective, all chemical compounds can be described as coordination complexes.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The stereochemistry of coordination complexes can be quite rich, as hinted at by Werner's separation of two enantiomers of [Co((OH)2Co(NH3)4)3], an early demonstration that chirality is not inherent to organic compounds. A topical theme within this specialization is supramolecular coordination chemistry.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "These species feature elements from groups I, II, III, IV, V,VI, VII, 0 (excluding hydrogen) of the periodic table. Due to their often similar reactivity, the elements in group 3 (Sc, Y, and La) and group 12 (Zn, Cd, and Hg) are also generally included, and the lanthanides and actinides are sometimes included as well.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Main group compounds have been known since the beginnings of chemistry, e.g., elemental sulfur and the distillable white phosphorus. Experiments on oxygen, O2, by Lavoisier and Priestley not only identified an important diatomic gas, but opened the way for describing compounds and reactions according to stoichiometric ratios. The discovery of a practical synthesis of ammonia using iron catalysts by Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber in the early 1900s deeply impacted mankind, demonstrating the significance of inorganic chemical synthesis. Typical main group compounds are SiO2, SnCl4, and N2O. Many main group compounds can also be classed as \"organometallic\", as they contain organic groups, e.g., B(CH3)3). Main group compounds also occur in nature, e.g., phosphate in DNA, and therefore may be classed as bioinorganic. Conversely, organic compounds lacking (many) hydrogen ligands can be classed as \"inorganic\", such as the fullerenes, buckytubes and binary carbon oxides.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Noble gases are elements which have filled valence electron shells in their neutral state, and are thus stable as lone atoms. Historically known as being inert, methods were discovered to react with them. The trend within the group is for the larger elements to be more reactive. Xenon and krypton are more easily ionized, and can combine with extremely electronegative elements to make fluorides and oxides and form solid ionic compounds. Argon, neon, and helium are much less reactive, though in cosmochemistry ArH has been observed spectroscopically in interstellar gas. Noble gases can also be trapped in solids while not being directly coordinated in clathrates or in endohedral fullerenes.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Compounds containing metals from group 4 to 11 are considered transition metal compounds. Compounds with a metal from group 3 or 12 are sometimes also incorporated into this group, but also often classified as main group compounds.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Transition metal compounds show a rich coordination chemistry, varying from tetrahedral for titanium (e.g., TiCl4) to square planar for some nickel complexes to octahedral for coordination complexes of cobalt. A range of transition metals can be found in biologically important compounds, such as iron in hemoglobin.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Usually, organometallic compounds are considered to contain the M-C-H group. The metal (M) in these species can either be a main group element or a transition metal. Operationally, the definition of an organometallic compound is more relaxed to include also highly lipophilic complexes such as metal carbonyls and even metal alkoxides.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Organometallic compounds are mainly considered a special category because organic ligands are often sensitive to hydrolysis or oxidation, necessitating that organometallic chemistry employs more specialized preparative methods than was traditional in Werner-type complexes. Synthetic methodology, especially the ability to manipulate complexes in solvents of low coordinating power, enabled the exploration of very weakly coordinating ligands such as hydrocarbons, H2, and N2. Because the ligands are petrochemicals in some sense, the area of organometallic chemistry has greatly benefited from its relevance to industry.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Clusters can be found in all classes of chemical compounds. According to the commonly accepted definition, a cluster consists minimally of a triangular set of atoms that are directly bonded to each other. But metal-metal bonded dimetallic complexes are highly relevant to the area. Clusters occur in \"pure\" inorganic systems, organometallic chemistry, main group chemistry, and bioinorganic chemistry. The distinction between very large clusters and bulk solids is increasingly blurred. This interface is the chemical basis of nanoscience or nanotechnology and specifically arise from the study of quantum size effects in cadmium selenide clusters. Thus, large clusters can be described as an array of bound atoms intermediate in character between a molecule and a solid.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "By definition, these compounds occur in nature, but the subfield includes anthropogenic species, such as pollutants (e.g., methylmercury) and drugs (e.g., Cisplatin). The field, which incorporates many aspects of biochemistry, includes many kinds of compounds, e.g., the phosphates in DNA, and also metal complexes containing ligands that range from biological macromolecules, commonly peptides, to ill-defined species such as humic acid, and to water (e.g., coordinated to gadolinium complexes employed for MRI). Traditionally bioinorganic chemistry focuses on electron- and energy-transfer in proteins relevant to respiration. Medicinal inorganic chemistry includes the study of both non-essential and essential elements with applications to diagnosis and therapies.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "This important area focuses on structure, bonding, and the physical properties of materials. In practice, solid state inorganic chemistry uses techniques such as crystallography to gain an understanding of the properties that result from collective interactions between the subunits of the solid. Included in solid state chemistry are metals and their alloys or intermetallic derivatives. Related fields are condensed matter physics, mineralogy, and materials science.",
"title": "Descriptive inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "An alternative perspective on the area of inorganic chemistry begins with the Bohr model of the atom and, using the tools and models of theoretical chemistry and computational chemistry, expands into bonding in simple and then more complicated molecules. Precise quantum mechanical descriptions for multielectron species, the province of inorganic chemistry, is difficult. This challenge has spawned many semi-quantitative or semi-empirical approaches including molecular orbital theory and ligand field theory, In parallel with these theoretical descriptions, approximate methodologies are employed, including density functional theory.",
"title": "Theoretical inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Exceptions to theories, qualitative and quantitative, are extremely important in the development of the field. For example, Cu2(OAc)4(H2O)2 is almost diamagnetic below room temperature whereas crystal field theory predicts that the molecule would have two unpaired electrons. The disagreement between qualitative theory (paramagnetic) and observation (diamagnetic) led to the development of models for magnetic coupling, such as the exchange interaction. These improved models led to the development of new magnetic materials and new technologies.",
"title": "Theoretical inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Inorganic chemistry has greatly benefited from qualitative theories. Such theories are easier to learn as they require little background in quantum theory. Within main group compounds, VSEPR theory powerfully predicts, or at least rationalizes, the structures of main group compounds, such as an explanation for why NH3 is pyramidal whereas ClF3 is T-shaped. For the transition metals, crystal field theory allows one to understand the magnetism of many simple complexes, such as why [Fe(CN)6] has only one unpaired electron, whereas [Fe(H2O)6] has five. A particularly powerful qualitative approach to assessing the structure and reactivity begins with classifying molecules according to electron counting, focusing on the numbers of valence electrons, usually at the central atom in a molecule.",
"title": "Theoretical inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "A central construct in inorganic chemistry is the theory of molecular symmetry. Mathematical group theory provides the language to describe the shapes of molecules according to their point group symmetry. Group theory also enables factoring and simplification of theoretical calculations.",
"title": "Theoretical inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Spectroscopic features are analyzed and described with respect to the symmetry properties of the, inter alia, vibrational or electronic states. Knowledge of the symmetry properties of the ground and excited states allows one to predict the numbers and intensities of absorptions in vibrational and electronic spectra. A classic application of group theory is the prediction of the number of C-O vibrations in substituted metal carbonyl complexes. The most common applications of symmetry to spectroscopy involve vibrational and electronic spectra.",
"title": "Theoretical inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Group theory highlights commonalities and differences in the bonding of otherwise disparate species. For example, the metal-based orbitals transform identically for WF6 and W(CO)6, but the energies and populations of these orbitals differ significantly. A similar relationship exists CO2 and molecular beryllium difluoride.",
"title": "Theoretical inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "An alternative quantitative approach to inorganic chemistry focuses on energies of reactions. This approach is highly traditional and empirical, but it is also useful. Broad concepts that are couched in thermodynamic terms include redox potential, acidity, phase changes. A classic concept in inorganic thermodynamics is the Born–Haber cycle, which is used for assessing the energies of elementary processes such as electron affinity, some of which cannot be observed directly.",
"title": "Thermodynamics and inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "An important aspect of inorganic chemistry focuses on reaction pathways, i.e. reaction mechanisms.",
"title": "Mechanistic inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The mechanisms of main group compounds of groups 13-18 are usually discussed in the context of organic chemistry (organic compounds are main group compounds, after all). Elements heavier than C, N, O, and F often form compounds with more electrons than predicted by the octet rule, as explained in the article on hypervalent molecules. The mechanisms of their reactions differ from organic compounds for this reason. Elements lighter than carbon (B, Be, Li) as well as Al and Mg often form electron-deficient structures that are electronically akin to carbocations. Such electron-deficient species tend to react via associative pathways. The chemistry of the lanthanides mirrors many aspects of chemistry seen for aluminium.",
"title": "Mechanistic inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Transition metal and main group compounds often react differently. The important role of d-orbitals in bonding strongly influences the pathways and rates of ligand substitution and dissociation. These themes are covered in articles on coordination chemistry and ligand. Both associative and dissociative pathways are observed.",
"title": "Mechanistic inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "An overarching aspect of mechanistic transition metal chemistry is the kinetic lability of the complex illustrated by the exchange of free and bound water in the prototypical complexes [M(H2O)6]:",
"title": "Mechanistic inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The rates of water exchange varies by 20 orders of magnitude across the periodic table, with lanthanide complexes at one extreme and Ir(III) species being the slowest.",
"title": "Mechanistic inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Redox reactions are prevalent for the transition elements. Two classes of redox reaction are considered: atom-transfer reactions, such as oxidative addition/reductive elimination, and electron-transfer. A fundamental redox reaction is \"self-exchange\", which involves the degenerate reaction between an oxidant and a reductant. For example, permanganate and its one-electron reduced relative manganate exchange one electron:",
"title": "Mechanistic inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Coordinated ligands display reactivity distinct from the free ligands. For example, the acidity of the ammonia ligands in [Co(NH3)6] is elevated relative to NH3 itself. Alkenes bound to metal cations are reactive toward nucleophiles whereas alkenes normally are not. The large and industrially important area of catalysis hinges on the ability of metals to modify the reactivity of organic ligands. Homogeneous catalysis occurs in solution and heterogeneous catalysis occurs when gaseous or dissolved substrates interact with surfaces of solids. Traditionally homogeneous catalysis is considered part of organometallic chemistry and heterogeneous catalysis is discussed in the context of surface science, a subfield of solid state chemistry. But the basic inorganic chemical principles are the same. Transition metals, almost uniquely, react with small molecules such as CO, H2, O2, and C2H4. The industrial significance of these feedstocks drives the active area of catalysis. Ligands can also undergo ligand transfer reactions such as transmetalation.",
"title": "Mechanistic inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Because of the diverse range of elements and the correspondingly diverse properties of the resulting derivatives, inorganic chemistry is closely associated with many methods of analysis. Older methods tended to examine bulk properties such as the electrical conductivity of solutions, melting points, solubility, and acidity. With the advent of quantum theory and the corresponding expansion of electronic apparatus, new tools have been introduced to probe the electronic properties of inorganic molecules and solids. Often these measurements provide insights relevant to theoretical models. Commonly encountered techniques are:",
"title": "Characterization of inorganic compounds"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Although some inorganic species can be obtained in pure form from nature, most are synthesized in chemical plants and in the laboratory.",
"title": "Synthetic inorganic chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Inorganic synthetic methods can be classified roughly according to the volatility or solubility of the component reactants. Soluble inorganic compounds are prepared using methods of organic synthesis. For metal-containing compounds that are reactive toward air, Schlenk line and glove box techniques are followed. Volatile compounds and gases are manipulated in \"vacuum manifolds\" consisting of glass piping interconnected through valves, the entirety of which can be evacuated to 0.001 mm Hg or less. Compounds are condensed using liquid nitrogen (b.p. 78K) or other cryogens. Solids are typically prepared using tube furnaces, the reactants and products being sealed in containers, often made of fused silica (amorphous SiO2) but sometimes more specialized materials such as welded Ta tubes or Pt \"boats\". Products and reactants are transported between temperature zones to drive reactions.",
"title": "Synthetic inorganic chemistry"
}
]
| Inorganic chemistry deals with synthesis and behavior of inorganic and organometallic compounds. This field covers chemical compounds that are not carbon-based, which are the subjects of organic chemistry. The distinction between the two disciplines is far from absolute, as there is much overlap in the subdiscipline of organometallic chemistry. It has applications in every aspect of the chemical industry, including catalysis, materials science, pigments, surfactants, coatings, medications, fuels, and agriculture. | 2001-11-01T15:49:50Z | 2023-09-12T13:02:41Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inorganic_chemistry |
14,625 | Insert (filmmaking) | In film, an insert is a shot of part of a scene as filmed from a different angle and/or focal length from the master shot. Inserts cover action already covered in the master shot, but emphasize a different aspect of that action due to the different framing. An insert differs from a cutaway as cutaways cover action not covered in the master shot.
There are more exact terms to use when the new, inserted shot is another view of actors: close-up, head shot, knee shot, two shot. So the term "insert" is often confined to views of objects—and body parts, other than the head. Often inserts of this sort are done separately from the main action, by a second-unit director using stand-ins.
Inserts and cutaways can both be vexatious for directors, as care must be taken to preserve continuity by keeping the objects in the same relative position as in the main take, and having the lighting be the same.
The 1975 movie Inserts directed by John Byrum about a pornographic film production, which starred Richard Dreyfuss and was originally released with an X rating, took its name from the double meaning that "insert" both refers to this film technique (often used in pornographic filmmaking) and to sexual intercourse. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In film, an insert is a shot of part of a scene as filmed from a different angle and/or focal length from the master shot. Inserts cover action already covered in the master shot, but emphasize a different aspect of that action due to the different framing. An insert differs from a cutaway as cutaways cover action not covered in the master shot.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "There are more exact terms to use when the new, inserted shot is another view of actors: close-up, head shot, knee shot, two shot. So the term \"insert\" is often confined to views of objects—and body parts, other than the head. Often inserts of this sort are done separately from the main action, by a second-unit director using stand-ins.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Inserts and cutaways can both be vexatious for directors, as care must be taken to preserve continuity by keeping the objects in the same relative position as in the main take, and having the lighting be the same.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The 1975 movie Inserts directed by John Byrum about a pornographic film production, which starred Richard Dreyfuss and was originally released with an X rating, took its name from the double meaning that \"insert\" both refers to this film technique (often used in pornographic filmmaking) and to sexual intercourse.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
}
]
| In film, an insert is a shot of part of a scene as filmed from a different angle and/or focal length from the master shot. Inserts cover action already covered in the master shot, but emphasize a different aspect of that action due to the different framing. An insert differs from a cutaway as cutaways cover action not covered in the master shot. There are more exact terms to use when the new, inserted shot is another view of actors: close-up, head shot, knee shot, two shot. So the term "insert" is often confined to views of objects—and body parts, other than the head. Often inserts of this sort are done separately from the main action, by a second-unit director using stand-ins. Inserts and cutaways can both be vexatious for directors, as care must be taken to preserve continuity by keeping the objects in the same relative position as in the main take, and having the lighting be the same. | 2001-04-27T00:43:05Z | 2023-10-30T04:27:52Z | [
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"Template:Use dmy dates",
"Template:Music video",
"Template:Cite book",
"Template:Cite web",
"Template:Continuity editing",
"Template:Cinematic techniques"
]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insert_(filmmaking) |
14,626 | Ingmar Bergman | Ernst Ingmar Bergman (14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish filmmaker and theatre director. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential film directors of all time, his films have been described as "profoundly personal meditations into the myriad struggles facing the psyche and the soul". Some of his most acclaimed works include The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Persona (1966), and Fanny and Alexander (1982); these four films were included in the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time. Bergman was also ranked No. 8 on the magazine's 2002 "Greatest Directors of All Time" list.
Bergman directed more than 60 films and documentaries, most of which he also wrote, for both cinema releases and television screenings. Most of his films were set in Sweden, and many of his films from 1961 onward were filmed on the island of Fårö. He forged a creative partnership with his cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist. He also had a theatrical career that included periods as Leading Director of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and of Germany's Residenztheater in Munich. He directed more than 170 plays. Among his company of actors were Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom and Max von Sydow.
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala on 14 July 1918, the son of nurse Karin (née Åkerblom) and Lutheran minister (and later chaplain to the King of Sweden) Erik Bergman. His mother was of Walloon descent. The Bergman family was originally from Järvsö. On his father's side, Bergman was a descendant of the noble Bröms, Ehrenskiöld, and Stockenström clergy families of Finnish, German, and Swedish origin. His father also descended from the German noble families Flach [sv] and de Frese introduced at the Swedish Riddarhuset. Bergman's paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather were cousins, making his parents second cousins. On his mother's side, he was descended from Dutch merchant Paul Calwagen, who left Holland for Sweden in the 17th century; Paul's Dutch-Swedish wife, Maria van der Hagen, was a descendant of the court painter Laurens van der Plas. Bergman's mother was also a descendant of the noble Tigerschiöld and Weinholz families, as well as the Bure [sv] family.
Bergman grew up with his older brother Dag and younger sister Margareta surrounded by religious imagery and discussion. His father was a conservative parish minister with strict ideas of parenting. Ingmar was locked up in dark closets for infractions such as wetting himself. "While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang, or listened", Ingmar wrote in his autobiography Laterna Magica, "I devoted my interest to the church's mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the coloured sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one's imagination could desire—angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans..." Although raised in a devout Lutheran household, Bergman later stated that he lost his faith at age eight, and came to terms with this fact while making Winter Light in 1962. His interest in theatre and film began early; at the age of nine, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a magic lantern. Within a year, he had created a private world by playing with this toy in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes, and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts."
Bergman attended the Palmgren School as a teenager. His school years were unhappy, and he remembered them unfavourably in later years. In a 1944 letter concerning the film Torment (sometimes known as Frenzy), which sparked debate on the condition of Swedish high schools (and which Bergman had written), the school's principal Henning Håkanson wrote, among other things, that Bergman had been a "problem child". Bergman wrote in a response that he had strongly disliked the emphasis on homework and testing in his formal schooling.
In 1934, aged 16, he was sent to Germany to spend the summer holidays with family friends. He attended a Nazi rally in Weimar at which he saw Adolf Hitler. He later wrote in Laterna Magica (The Magic Lantern) about the visit to Germany, describing how the German family had put a portrait of Hitler on the wall by his bed, and that "for many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats". Bergman commented that "Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd. ... The Nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful." Bergman did two five-month stretches of mandatory military service in Sweden. He later reflected, "When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open ... I was suddenly ripped of my innocence."
Bergman enrolled at Stockholm University College (later renamed Stockholm University) in 1937, to study art and literature. He spent most of his time involved in student theatre and became a "genuine movie addict". At the same time, a romantic involvement led to a physical confrontation with his father which resulted in a break in their relationship which lasted for many years. Although he did not graduate from the university, he wrote a number of plays and an opera, and became an assistant director at a local theatre. In 1942, he was given the opportunity to direct one of his own scripts, Caspar's Death. The play was seen by members of Svensk Filmindustri, which then offered Bergman a position working on scripts. He married Else Fisher in 1943.
Bergman's film career began in 1941 with his work rewriting scripts, but his first major accomplishment was in 1944 when he wrote the screenplay for Torment (a.k.a. Frenzy) (Hets), a film directed by Alf Sjöberg. Along with writing the screenplay, he was also appointed assistant director of the film. In his second autobiographical book, Images: My Life in Film, Bergman describes the filming of the exteriors as his actual film directorial debut. The film sparked debate on Swedish formal education. When Henning Håkanson (the principal of the high school Bergman had attended) wrote a letter following the film's release, Bergman, according to scholar Frank Gado, disparaged in a response what he viewed as Håkanson's implication that students "who did not fit some arbitrary prescription of worthiness deserved the system's cruel neglect". Bergman also stated in the letter that he "hated school as a principle, as a system and as an institution. And as such I have definitely not wanted to criticize my own school, but all schools." The international success of this film led to Bergman's first opportunity to direct a year later. During the next ten years he wrote and directed more than a dozen films, including Prison (Fängelse) in 1949, as well as Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton) and Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika), both released in 1953.
Bergman first achieved worldwide success with Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende, 1955), which won for "Best poetic humour" and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes the following year. This was followed by The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) and Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället), released in Sweden ten months apart in 1957. The Seventh Seal won a special jury prize and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and Wild Strawberries won numerous awards for Bergman and its star, Victor Sjöström. Bergman continued to be productive for the next two decades. From the early 1960s, he spent much of his life on the island of Fårö, where he made several films.
In the early 1960s he directed three films that explored the theme of faith and doubt in God, Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en Spegel, 1961), Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna, 1962), and The Silence (Tystnaden, 1963). Critics created the notion that the common themes in these three films made them a trilogy or cinematic triptych. Bergman initially responded that he did not plan these three films as a trilogy and that he could not see any common motifs in them, but he later seemed to adopt the notion, with some equivocation. His parody of the films of Federico Fellini, All These Women (För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor) was released in 1964.
Persona (1966), starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, is a film Bergman considered one of his most important works. While the highly experimental film won few awards, it has been considered his masterpiece. Other films of the period include The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1960), Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen, 1968), Shame (Skammen, 1968) and The Passion of Anna (En Passion, 1969). With his cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Bergman made use of a crimson color scheme for Cries and Whispers (1972), which received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture. He also produced extensively for Swedish television at this time. Two works of note were Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap, 1973) and The Magic Flute (Trollflöjten, 1975).
On 30 January 1976, while rehearsing August Strindberg's The Dance of Death at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, he was arrested by two plainclothes police officers and charged with income tax evasion. The impact of the event on Bergman was devastating. He suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of the humiliation, and was hospitalised in a state of deep depression.
The investigation was focused on an alleged 1970 transaction of 500,000 Swedish kronor (SEK) between Bergman's Swedish company Cinematograf and its Swiss subsidiary Persona, an entity that was mainly used for the paying of salaries to foreign actors. Bergman dissolved Persona in 1974 after having been notified by the Swedish Central Bank and subsequently reported the income. On 23 March 1976, the special prosecutor Anders Nordenadler dropped the charges against Bergman, saying that the alleged crime had no legal basis, saying it would be like bringing "charges against a person who has stolen his own car, thinking it was someone else's". Director General Gösta S Ekman, chief of the Swedish Internal Revenue Service, defended the failed investigation, saying that the investigation was dealing with important legal material and that Bergman was treated just like any other suspect. He expressed regret that Bergman had left the country, hoping that Bergman was a "stronger" person now when the investigation had shown that he had not done any wrong.
Although the charges were dropped, Bergman became disconsolate, fearing he would never again return to directing. Despite pleas by the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, high public figures, and leaders of the film industry, he vowed never to work in Sweden again. He closed down his studio on the island of Fårö, suspended two announced film projects, and went into self-imposed exile in Munich, West Germany. Harry Schein, director of the Swedish Film Institute, estimated the immediate damage as ten million SEK (kronor) and hundreds of jobs lost.
Bergman then briefly considered the possibility of working in America; his next film, The Serpent's Egg (1977) was a West German-U.S. production and his second English-language film (the first being The Touch, 1971). This was followed by a British-Norwegian co-production, Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten, 1978) starring Ingrid Bergman (no relation) and Liv Ullmann, and From the Life of the Marionettes (Aus dem Leben der Marionetten, 1980) which was a British-West German co-production.
He temporarily returned to his homeland to direct Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander, 1982). Bergman stated that the film would be his last, and that afterwards he would focus on directing theatre. After that he wrote several film scripts and directed a number of television specials. As with previous work for television, some of these productions were later theatrically released. The last such work was Saraband (2003), a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage and directed by Bergman when he was 84 years old.
Although he continued to operate from Munich, by mid-1978 Bergman had overcome some of his bitterness toward the Swedish government. In July of that year he visited Sweden, celebrating his sixtieth birthday on the island of Fårö, and partly resumed his work as a director at Royal Dramatic Theatre. To honour his return, the Swedish Film Institute launched a new Ingmar Bergman Prize to be awarded annually for excellence in filmmaking. Still, he remained in Munich until 1984. In one of the last major interviews with Bergman, conducted in 2005 on the island of Fårö, Bergman said that despite being active during the exile, he had effectively lost eight years of his professional life.
Bergman retired from filmmaking in December 2003. He had hip surgery in October 2006 and was making a difficult recovery. He died in his sleep at age 89; his body was found at his home on the island of Fårö, on 30 July 2007. It was the same day another renowned existentialist film director, Michelangelo Antonioni, died. The interment was private, at the Fårö Church on 18 August 2007. A place in the Fårö churchyard was prepared for him under heavy secrecy. Although he was buried on the island of Fårö, his name and date of birth were inscribed under his wife's name on a tomb at Roslagsbro churchyard, Norrtälje Municipality, several years before his death.
Bergman developed a personal "repertory company" of Swedish actors whom he repeatedly cast in his films, including Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, and Gunnar Björnstrand, each of whom appeared in at least five Bergman features. Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, who appeared in nine of Bergman's films and one televisual film (Saraband), was the last to join this group (in the film Persona), and ultimately became the most closely associated with Bergman, both artistically and personally. They had a daughter together, Linn Ullmann (born 1966).
In Bergman's working arrangement with Sven Nykvist, his best-known cinematographer, the two men developed sufficient rapport to allow Bergman not to worry about the composition of a shot until the day before it was filmed. On the morning of the shoot, he would briefly speak to Nykvist about the mood and composition he hoped for, and then leave Nykvist to work, lacking interruption or comment until post-production discussion of the next day's work.
By Bergman's own account, he never had a problem with funding. He cited two reasons for this: one, that he did not live in the United States, which he viewed as obsessed with box-office earnings; and two, that his films tended to be low-budget affairs. (Cries and Whispers, for instance, was finished for about $450,000, while Scenes from a Marriage, a six-episode television feature, cost only $200,000.)
Bergman usually wrote his films' screenplays, thinking about them for months or years before starting the actual process of writing, which he viewed as somewhat tedious. His earlier films are carefully constructed and are either based on his plays or written in collaboration with other authors. Bergman stated that in his later works, when on occasion his actors would want to do things differently from his own intention, he would let them, noting that the results were often "disastrous" when he did not do so. As his career progressed, Bergman increasingly let his actors improvise their dialogue. In his later films, he wrote just the ideas informing the scene and allowed his actors to determine the exact dialogue. When viewing daily rushes, Bergman stressed the importance of being critical but unemotive, claiming that he asked himself not if the work was great or terrible, but rather if it was sufficient or needed to be reshot.
Bergman's films usually deal with existential questions of mortality, loneliness, and religious faith. In addition to these cerebral topics, however, sexual desire features in the foreground of most of his films, whether the central event is medieval plague (The Seventh Seal), upper-class family activity in early twentieth century Uppsala (Fanny and Alexander), or contemporary alienation (The Silence). His female characters are usually more in touch with their sexuality than their male equivalents, and unafraid to proclaim it, sometimes with breathtaking overtness (as in Cries and Whispers) as would define the work of "the conjurer," as Bergman called himself in a 1960 TIME cover story. In an interview with Playboy in 1964, he said: "The manifestation of sex is very important, and particularly to me, for above all, I don't want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them." Film, Bergman said, was his demanding mistress. While he was a social democrat as an adult, Bergman stated that "as an artist I'm not politically involved ... I don't make propaganda for either one attitude or the other."
When asked in the series of interviews later titled "Ingmar Bergman – 3 dokumentärer om film, teater, Fårö och livet" conducted by Marie Nyreröd for Swedish TV and released in 2004, Bergman said that of his works, he held Winter Light, Persona, and Cries and Whispers in the highest regard. There he also states that he managed to push the envelope of film making in the films Persona and Cries and Whispers. Bergman stated on numerous occasions (for example in the interview book Bergman on Bergman) that The Silence meant the end of the era in which religious questions were a major concern of his films. Bergman said that he would get depressed by his own films: "jittery and ready to cry... and miserable." In the same interview he also stated: "If there is one thing I miss about working with films, it is working with Sven" (Nykvist), the third cinematographer with whom he had collaborated.
Although Bergman was universally famous for his contribution to cinema, he was also an active and productive stage director all his life. During his studies at what was then Stockholm University College, he became active in its student theatre, where he made a name for himself early on. His first work after graduation was as a trainee-director at a Stockholm theatre. At twenty-six years, he became the youngest theatrical manager in Europe at the Helsingborg City Theatre. He stayed at Helsingborg for three years and then became the director at Gothenburg city theatre from 1946 to 1949.
He became director of the Malmö City Theatre in 1953, and remained for seven years. Many of his star actors were people with whom he began working on stage. He was the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm from 1960 to 1966, and manager from 1963 to 1966, where he began a long-time collaboration with choreographer Donya Feuer.
After Bergman left Sweden because of the tax evasion incident, he became director of the Residenz Theatre of Munich, West Germany (1977–1984). He remained active in theatre throughout the 1990s and made his final production on stage with Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2003.
Bergman was married five times:
The first four marriages ended in divorce, while the last ended when his wife Ingrid died of stomach cancer in 1995, aged 65. Aside from his marriages, Bergman had romantic relationships with actresses Harriet Andersson (1952–1955), Bibi Andersson (1955–1959), and Liv Ullmann (1965–1970). He was the father of writer Linn Ullmann with Ullmann. In all, Bergman had nine children, one of whom predeceased him. Bergman eventually married all the mothers of his children, with the exception of Liv Ullmann. His daughter with his last wife, Ingrid von Rosen, was born twelve years before their marriage. He had dozens of mistresses throughout his life and would justify the affairs to his various wives by telling them: "I have so many lives."
Although Bergman once described himself as one who had lost his faith in an afterlife, in 2000 he stated that a conversation he had with Erland Josephson helped him to believe that he would see Ingrid again. He said, "I'm not actually afraid of dying. On the contrary, really. I think it'll be interesting." In 2012, Max von Sydow stated in an interview that he had had many discussions with Bergman about religion which seemed to indicate that Bergman believed in an afterlife.
In an early draft of his autobiography, Bergman admitted to raping his then-girlfriend Karin Lannby. The portion was edited out for the final version.
Bergman suffered from physical ailments such as insomnia and severe stomach problems dating back to childhood. He called his nervous stomach "a calamity as foolish as it is humiliating" and joked that the private lavatories he secured at the theatres in which he worked represented his "most lasting contribution to the history of theatre."
In 1958, he won the Best Director award for Brink of Life at the Cannes Film Festival, and won the Golden Bear for Wild Strawberries at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1960 Bergman was featured in the cover of TIME, the first foreign-language filmmaker to do so since Leni Riefenstahl in 1936. In 1971, Bergman received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the Academy Awards ceremony. Three of his films (The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, and Fanny and Alexander) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1997, he was awarded the Palme des Palmes (Palm of the Palms) at the 50th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. He won many other awards and has been nominated for numerous other awards.
Academy Awards
In 1996, Entertainment Weekly ranked Bergman at No. 8 in its "50 Greatest Directors" list. In 2002, Bergman was listed at number nine on the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound list of the top ten film directors of modern times. MovieMaker magazine ranked Bergman at No. 13 on their 2002 list of The 25 Most Influential Directors of All Time. Bergman was ranked at No. 36 on Empire magazine's "Top 40 Greatest Directors of All-Time" list in 2005. In 2007, Total Film magazine ranked Bergman at No. 7 on its "100 Greatest Film Directors Ever" list. In 2017, New York magazine ranked Bergman at number 55 on their list of The 100 Best Screenwriters of All Time.
Stanley Kubrick admired the work of Bergman and expressed it in personal letter: "Your vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are the greatest film-maker at work today [...], unsurpassed by anyone in the creation of mood and atmosphere, the subtlety of performance, the avoidance of the obvious, the truthfulness and completeness of characterization. To this one must also add everything else that goes into the making of a film; [...] and I shall look forward with eagerness to each of your films." Film critic Philip French referred to Bergman as "one of the greatest artists of the 20th century ... he found in literature and the performing arts a way of both recreating and questioning the human condition." Director Martin Scorsese commented that "it's impossible to overestimate the effect that [his] films had on people." Terrence Rafferty of The New York Times wrote that throughout the 1960s, when Bergman "was considered pretty much the last word in cinematic profundity, his every tic was scrupulously pored over, analyzed, elaborated in ingenious arguments about identity, the nature of film, the fate of the artist in the modern world and so on."
Bergman's work was a point of reference and inspiration for director Woody Allen. He described Bergman as “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera”. Bergman's films are mentioned and praised in Annie Hall and other Allen films. Allen also admired Bergman's longtime director of photography Sven Nykvist and invited him to return as his DP on Crimes and Misdemeanors. Danish Director Thomas Vinterberg has cited Bergman as one of his major influences, "Bergman is always in my head. He is part of my upbringing and I was fortunate to meet him and get advice from him." Writer and director Richard Ayoade counts Bergman as one of his inspirations. In 2017, the British Film Institute (BFI) hosted an Ingmar Bergman season and Ayoade said in a Guardian interview that he saw everything in it, "which was one of the best two months ever." The BFI's programme included a discussion with Ayoade on Bergman's 1966 film, Persona, before a screening.
After Bergman died, a large archive of notes was donated to the Swedish Film Institute. Among the notes are several unpublished and unfinished scripts both for stage and films, and many more ideas for works in different stages of development. A never-performed play has the title Kärlek utan älskare ("Love without lovers"), and has the note "Complete disaster!" written on the envelope; the play is about a director who disappears and an editor who tries to complete a work he has left unfinished. Other canceled projects include the script for a pornographic film which Bergman abandoned since he did not think it was alive enough, a play about a cannibal, some loose scenes set inside a womb, a film about the life of Jesus, a film about The Merry Widow, and a play with the title Från sperm till spöke ("From sperm to spook"). The Swedish director Marcus Lindeen went through the material, and inspired by Kärlek utan älskare he took samples from many of the works and turned them into a play, titled Arkivet för orealiserbara drömmar och visioner ("The archive for unrealisable dreams and visions"). Lindeen's play premiered on 28 May 2012 at the Stockholm City Theatre.
In 2018, in honor of Bergman's 100th birthday, The Criterion Collection compiled and released a Blu-ray disc box set comprising 39 of Bergman's features. The set spans Bergman's early career, beginning in the 1940s, up to his final film in 2003. The films are organized non-chronologically, and are instead presented in four groupings that mimic the procession of a film festival. Accompanying the discs is a book featuring critical essays on each of the films, intended to guide the viewer through the experience. Upon its release, The New York Times critic Glenn Kenny assessed the set as "impressive and almost exhaustive", and interpreted it as "a fresh case for [Bergman's] continuing importance", in response to criticisms such as Jonathan Rosenbaum's 2007 opinion piece "Scenes From an Overrated Career".
The Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award is awarded annually at the Gothenburg Film Festival, in partnership with the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, the Bergman Estate and the Bergman Center on Fårö. The prize includes a visit to the Bergman Estate as well as to Bergmans personal archive in Stockholm.
Quotations related to Ingmar Bergman at Wikiquote
Media related to Ingmar Bergman at Wikimedia Commons | [
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"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Ernst Ingmar Bergman (14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish filmmaker and theatre director. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential film directors of all time, his films have been described as \"profoundly personal meditations into the myriad struggles facing the psyche and the soul\". Some of his most acclaimed works include The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Persona (1966), and Fanny and Alexander (1982); these four films were included in the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time. Bergman was also ranked No. 8 on the magazine's 2002 \"Greatest Directors of All Time\" list.",
"title": ""
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"text": "Bergman directed more than 60 films and documentaries, most of which he also wrote, for both cinema releases and television screenings. Most of his films were set in Sweden, and many of his films from 1961 onward were filmed on the island of Fårö. He forged a creative partnership with his cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist. He also had a theatrical career that included periods as Leading Director of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and of Germany's Residenztheater in Munich. He directed more than 170 plays. Among his company of actors were Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom and Max von Sydow.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala on 14 July 1918, the son of nurse Karin (née Åkerblom) and Lutheran minister (and later chaplain to the King of Sweden) Erik Bergman. His mother was of Walloon descent. The Bergman family was originally from Järvsö. On his father's side, Bergman was a descendant of the noble Bröms, Ehrenskiöld, and Stockenström clergy families of Finnish, German, and Swedish origin. His father also descended from the German noble families Flach [sv] and de Frese introduced at the Swedish Riddarhuset. Bergman's paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather were cousins, making his parents second cousins. On his mother's side, he was descended from Dutch merchant Paul Calwagen, who left Holland for Sweden in the 17th century; Paul's Dutch-Swedish wife, Maria van der Hagen, was a descendant of the court painter Laurens van der Plas. Bergman's mother was also a descendant of the noble Tigerschiöld and Weinholz families, as well as the Bure [sv] family.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Bergman grew up with his older brother Dag and younger sister Margareta surrounded by religious imagery and discussion. His father was a conservative parish minister with strict ideas of parenting. Ingmar was locked up in dark closets for infractions such as wetting himself. \"While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang, or listened\", Ingmar wrote in his autobiography Laterna Magica, \"I devoted my interest to the church's mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the coloured sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one's imagination could desire—angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans...\" Although raised in a devout Lutheran household, Bergman later stated that he lost his faith at age eight, and came to terms with this fact while making Winter Light in 1962. His interest in theatre and film began early; at the age of nine, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a magic lantern. Within a year, he had created a private world by playing with this toy in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes, and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Bergman attended the Palmgren School as a teenager. His school years were unhappy, and he remembered them unfavourably in later years. In a 1944 letter concerning the film Torment (sometimes known as Frenzy), which sparked debate on the condition of Swedish high schools (and which Bergman had written), the school's principal Henning Håkanson wrote, among other things, that Bergman had been a \"problem child\". Bergman wrote in a response that he had strongly disliked the emphasis on homework and testing in his formal schooling.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1934, aged 16, he was sent to Germany to spend the summer holidays with family friends. He attended a Nazi rally in Weimar at which he saw Adolf Hitler. He later wrote in Laterna Magica (The Magic Lantern) about the visit to Germany, describing how the German family had put a portrait of Hitler on the wall by his bed, and that \"for many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats\". Bergman commented that \"Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd. ... The Nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful.\" Bergman did two five-month stretches of mandatory military service in Sweden. He later reflected, \"When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open ... I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Bergman enrolled at Stockholm University College (later renamed Stockholm University) in 1937, to study art and literature. He spent most of his time involved in student theatre and became a \"genuine movie addict\". At the same time, a romantic involvement led to a physical confrontation with his father which resulted in a break in their relationship which lasted for many years. Although he did not graduate from the university, he wrote a number of plays and an opera, and became an assistant director at a local theatre. In 1942, he was given the opportunity to direct one of his own scripts, Caspar's Death. The play was seen by members of Svensk Filmindustri, which then offered Bergman a position working on scripts. He married Else Fisher in 1943.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Bergman's film career began in 1941 with his work rewriting scripts, but his first major accomplishment was in 1944 when he wrote the screenplay for Torment (a.k.a. Frenzy) (Hets), a film directed by Alf Sjöberg. Along with writing the screenplay, he was also appointed assistant director of the film. In his second autobiographical book, Images: My Life in Film, Bergman describes the filming of the exteriors as his actual film directorial debut. The film sparked debate on Swedish formal education. When Henning Håkanson (the principal of the high school Bergman had attended) wrote a letter following the film's release, Bergman, according to scholar Frank Gado, disparaged in a response what he viewed as Håkanson's implication that students \"who did not fit some arbitrary prescription of worthiness deserved the system's cruel neglect\". Bergman also stated in the letter that he \"hated school as a principle, as a system and as an institution. And as such I have definitely not wanted to criticize my own school, but all schools.\" The international success of this film led to Bergman's first opportunity to direct a year later. During the next ten years he wrote and directed more than a dozen films, including Prison (Fängelse) in 1949, as well as Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton) and Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika), both released in 1953.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Bergman first achieved worldwide success with Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende, 1955), which won for \"Best poetic humour\" and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes the following year. This was followed by The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) and Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället), released in Sweden ten months apart in 1957. The Seventh Seal won a special jury prize and was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and Wild Strawberries won numerous awards for Bergman and its star, Victor Sjöström. Bergman continued to be productive for the next two decades. From the early 1960s, he spent much of his life on the island of Fårö, where he made several films.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the early 1960s he directed three films that explored the theme of faith and doubt in God, Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en Spegel, 1961), Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna, 1962), and The Silence (Tystnaden, 1963). Critics created the notion that the common themes in these three films made them a trilogy or cinematic triptych. Bergman initially responded that he did not plan these three films as a trilogy and that he could not see any common motifs in them, but he later seemed to adopt the notion, with some equivocation. His parody of the films of Federico Fellini, All These Women (För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor) was released in 1964.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Persona (1966), starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, is a film Bergman considered one of his most important works. While the highly experimental film won few awards, it has been considered his masterpiece. Other films of the period include The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1960), Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen, 1968), Shame (Skammen, 1968) and The Passion of Anna (En Passion, 1969). With his cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Bergman made use of a crimson color scheme for Cries and Whispers (1972), which received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture. He also produced extensively for Swedish television at this time. Two works of note were Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap, 1973) and The Magic Flute (Trollflöjten, 1975).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "On 30 January 1976, while rehearsing August Strindberg's The Dance of Death at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, he was arrested by two plainclothes police officers and charged with income tax evasion. The impact of the event on Bergman was devastating. He suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of the humiliation, and was hospitalised in a state of deep depression.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The investigation was focused on an alleged 1970 transaction of 500,000 Swedish kronor (SEK) between Bergman's Swedish company Cinematograf and its Swiss subsidiary Persona, an entity that was mainly used for the paying of salaries to foreign actors. Bergman dissolved Persona in 1974 after having been notified by the Swedish Central Bank and subsequently reported the income. On 23 March 1976, the special prosecutor Anders Nordenadler dropped the charges against Bergman, saying that the alleged crime had no legal basis, saying it would be like bringing \"charges against a person who has stolen his own car, thinking it was someone else's\". Director General Gösta S Ekman, chief of the Swedish Internal Revenue Service, defended the failed investigation, saying that the investigation was dealing with important legal material and that Bergman was treated just like any other suspect. He expressed regret that Bergman had left the country, hoping that Bergman was a \"stronger\" person now when the investigation had shown that he had not done any wrong.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Although the charges were dropped, Bergman became disconsolate, fearing he would never again return to directing. Despite pleas by the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, high public figures, and leaders of the film industry, he vowed never to work in Sweden again. He closed down his studio on the island of Fårö, suspended two announced film projects, and went into self-imposed exile in Munich, West Germany. Harry Schein, director of the Swedish Film Institute, estimated the immediate damage as ten million SEK (kronor) and hundreds of jobs lost.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Bergman then briefly considered the possibility of working in America; his next film, The Serpent's Egg (1977) was a West German-U.S. production and his second English-language film (the first being The Touch, 1971). This was followed by a British-Norwegian co-production, Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten, 1978) starring Ingrid Bergman (no relation) and Liv Ullmann, and From the Life of the Marionettes (Aus dem Leben der Marionetten, 1980) which was a British-West German co-production.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "He temporarily returned to his homeland to direct Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander, 1982). Bergman stated that the film would be his last, and that afterwards he would focus on directing theatre. After that he wrote several film scripts and directed a number of television specials. As with previous work for television, some of these productions were later theatrically released. The last such work was Saraband (2003), a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage and directed by Bergman when he was 84 years old.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Although he continued to operate from Munich, by mid-1978 Bergman had overcome some of his bitterness toward the Swedish government. In July of that year he visited Sweden, celebrating his sixtieth birthday on the island of Fårö, and partly resumed his work as a director at Royal Dramatic Theatre. To honour his return, the Swedish Film Institute launched a new Ingmar Bergman Prize to be awarded annually for excellence in filmmaking. Still, he remained in Munich until 1984. In one of the last major interviews with Bergman, conducted in 2005 on the island of Fårö, Bergman said that despite being active during the exile, he had effectively lost eight years of his professional life.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Bergman retired from filmmaking in December 2003. He had hip surgery in October 2006 and was making a difficult recovery. He died in his sleep at age 89; his body was found at his home on the island of Fårö, on 30 July 2007. It was the same day another renowned existentialist film director, Michelangelo Antonioni, died. The interment was private, at the Fårö Church on 18 August 2007. A place in the Fårö churchyard was prepared for him under heavy secrecy. Although he was buried on the island of Fårö, his name and date of birth were inscribed under his wife's name on a tomb at Roslagsbro churchyard, Norrtälje Municipality, several years before his death.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Bergman developed a personal \"repertory company\" of Swedish actors whom he repeatedly cast in his films, including Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, and Gunnar Björnstrand, each of whom appeared in at least five Bergman features. Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, who appeared in nine of Bergman's films and one televisual film (Saraband), was the last to join this group (in the film Persona), and ultimately became the most closely associated with Bergman, both artistically and personally. They had a daughter together, Linn Ullmann (born 1966).",
"title": "Style of working"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In Bergman's working arrangement with Sven Nykvist, his best-known cinematographer, the two men developed sufficient rapport to allow Bergman not to worry about the composition of a shot until the day before it was filmed. On the morning of the shoot, he would briefly speak to Nykvist about the mood and composition he hoped for, and then leave Nykvist to work, lacking interruption or comment until post-production discussion of the next day's work.",
"title": "Style of working"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "By Bergman's own account, he never had a problem with funding. He cited two reasons for this: one, that he did not live in the United States, which he viewed as obsessed with box-office earnings; and two, that his films tended to be low-budget affairs. (Cries and Whispers, for instance, was finished for about $450,000, while Scenes from a Marriage, a six-episode television feature, cost only $200,000.)",
"title": "Style of working"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Bergman usually wrote his films' screenplays, thinking about them for months or years before starting the actual process of writing, which he viewed as somewhat tedious. His earlier films are carefully constructed and are either based on his plays or written in collaboration with other authors. Bergman stated that in his later works, when on occasion his actors would want to do things differently from his own intention, he would let them, noting that the results were often \"disastrous\" when he did not do so. As his career progressed, Bergman increasingly let his actors improvise their dialogue. In his later films, he wrote just the ideas informing the scene and allowed his actors to determine the exact dialogue. When viewing daily rushes, Bergman stressed the importance of being critical but unemotive, claiming that he asked himself not if the work was great or terrible, but rather if it was sufficient or needed to be reshot.",
"title": "Style of working"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Bergman's films usually deal with existential questions of mortality, loneliness, and religious faith. In addition to these cerebral topics, however, sexual desire features in the foreground of most of his films, whether the central event is medieval plague (The Seventh Seal), upper-class family activity in early twentieth century Uppsala (Fanny and Alexander), or contemporary alienation (The Silence). His female characters are usually more in touch with their sexuality than their male equivalents, and unafraid to proclaim it, sometimes with breathtaking overtness (as in Cries and Whispers) as would define the work of \"the conjurer,\" as Bergman called himself in a 1960 TIME cover story. In an interview with Playboy in 1964, he said: \"The manifestation of sex is very important, and particularly to me, for above all, I don't want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them.\" Film, Bergman said, was his demanding mistress. While he was a social democrat as an adult, Bergman stated that \"as an artist I'm not politically involved ... I don't make propaganda for either one attitude or the other.\"",
"title": "Style of working"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "When asked in the series of interviews later titled \"Ingmar Bergman – 3 dokumentärer om film, teater, Fårö och livet\" conducted by Marie Nyreröd for Swedish TV and released in 2004, Bergman said that of his works, he held Winter Light, Persona, and Cries and Whispers in the highest regard. There he also states that he managed to push the envelope of film making in the films Persona and Cries and Whispers. Bergman stated on numerous occasions (for example in the interview book Bergman on Bergman) that The Silence meant the end of the era in which religious questions were a major concern of his films. Bergman said that he would get depressed by his own films: \"jittery and ready to cry... and miserable.\" In the same interview he also stated: \"If there is one thing I miss about working with films, it is working with Sven\" (Nykvist), the third cinematographer with whom he had collaborated.",
"title": "Style of working"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Although Bergman was universally famous for his contribution to cinema, he was also an active and productive stage director all his life. During his studies at what was then Stockholm University College, he became active in its student theatre, where he made a name for himself early on. His first work after graduation was as a trainee-director at a Stockholm theatre. At twenty-six years, he became the youngest theatrical manager in Europe at the Helsingborg City Theatre. He stayed at Helsingborg for three years and then became the director at Gothenburg city theatre from 1946 to 1949.",
"title": "Style of working"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "He became director of the Malmö City Theatre in 1953, and remained for seven years. Many of his star actors were people with whom he began working on stage. He was the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm from 1960 to 1966, and manager from 1963 to 1966, where he began a long-time collaboration with choreographer Donya Feuer.",
"title": "Style of working"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "After Bergman left Sweden because of the tax evasion incident, he became director of the Residenz Theatre of Munich, West Germany (1977–1984). He remained active in theatre throughout the 1990s and made his final production on stage with Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2003.",
"title": "Style of working"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Bergman was married five times:",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The first four marriages ended in divorce, while the last ended when his wife Ingrid died of stomach cancer in 1995, aged 65. Aside from his marriages, Bergman had romantic relationships with actresses Harriet Andersson (1952–1955), Bibi Andersson (1955–1959), and Liv Ullmann (1965–1970). He was the father of writer Linn Ullmann with Ullmann. In all, Bergman had nine children, one of whom predeceased him. Bergman eventually married all the mothers of his children, with the exception of Liv Ullmann. His daughter with his last wife, Ingrid von Rosen, was born twelve years before their marriage. He had dozens of mistresses throughout his life and would justify the affairs to his various wives by telling them: \"I have so many lives.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Although Bergman once described himself as one who had lost his faith in an afterlife, in 2000 he stated that a conversation he had with Erland Josephson helped him to believe that he would see Ingrid again. He said, \"I'm not actually afraid of dying. On the contrary, really. I think it'll be interesting.\" In 2012, Max von Sydow stated in an interview that he had had many discussions with Bergman about religion which seemed to indicate that Bergman believed in an afterlife.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In an early draft of his autobiography, Bergman admitted to raping his then-girlfriend Karin Lannby. The portion was edited out for the final version.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Bergman suffered from physical ailments such as insomnia and severe stomach problems dating back to childhood. He called his nervous stomach \"a calamity as foolish as it is humiliating\" and joked that the private lavatories he secured at the theatres in which he worked represented his \"most lasting contribution to the history of theatre.\"",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 1958, he won the Best Director award for Brink of Life at the Cannes Film Festival, and won the Golden Bear for Wild Strawberries at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1960 Bergman was featured in the cover of TIME, the first foreign-language filmmaker to do so since Leni Riefenstahl in 1936. In 1971, Bergman received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the Academy Awards ceremony. Three of his films (The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, and Fanny and Alexander) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1997, he was awarded the Palme des Palmes (Palm of the Palms) at the 50th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. He won many other awards and has been nominated for numerous other awards.",
"title": "Awards and nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Academy Awards",
"title": "Awards and nominations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1996, Entertainment Weekly ranked Bergman at No. 8 in its \"50 Greatest Directors\" list. In 2002, Bergman was listed at number nine on the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound list of the top ten film directors of modern times. MovieMaker magazine ranked Bergman at No. 13 on their 2002 list of The 25 Most Influential Directors of All Time. Bergman was ranked at No. 36 on Empire magazine's \"Top 40 Greatest Directors of All-Time\" list in 2005. In 2007, Total Film magazine ranked Bergman at No. 7 on its \"100 Greatest Film Directors Ever\" list. In 2017, New York magazine ranked Bergman at number 55 on their list of The 100 Best Screenwriters of All Time.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Stanley Kubrick admired the work of Bergman and expressed it in personal letter: \"Your vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are the greatest film-maker at work today [...], unsurpassed by anyone in the creation of mood and atmosphere, the subtlety of performance, the avoidance of the obvious, the truthfulness and completeness of characterization. To this one must also add everything else that goes into the making of a film; [...] and I shall look forward with eagerness to each of your films.\" Film critic Philip French referred to Bergman as \"one of the greatest artists of the 20th century ... he found in literature and the performing arts a way of both recreating and questioning the human condition.\" Director Martin Scorsese commented that \"it's impossible to overestimate the effect that [his] films had on people.\" Terrence Rafferty of The New York Times wrote that throughout the 1960s, when Bergman \"was considered pretty much the last word in cinematic profundity, his every tic was scrupulously pored over, analyzed, elaborated in ingenious arguments about identity, the nature of film, the fate of the artist in the modern world and so on.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Bergman's work was a point of reference and inspiration for director Woody Allen. He described Bergman as “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera”. Bergman's films are mentioned and praised in Annie Hall and other Allen films. Allen also admired Bergman's longtime director of photography Sven Nykvist and invited him to return as his DP on Crimes and Misdemeanors. Danish Director Thomas Vinterberg has cited Bergman as one of his major influences, \"Bergman is always in my head. He is part of my upbringing and I was fortunate to meet him and get advice from him.\" Writer and director Richard Ayoade counts Bergman as one of his inspirations. In 2017, the British Film Institute (BFI) hosted an Ingmar Bergman season and Ayoade said in a Guardian interview that he saw everything in it, \"which was one of the best two months ever.\" The BFI's programme included a discussion with Ayoade on Bergman's 1966 film, Persona, before a screening.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "After Bergman died, a large archive of notes was donated to the Swedish Film Institute. Among the notes are several unpublished and unfinished scripts both for stage and films, and many more ideas for works in different stages of development. A never-performed play has the title Kärlek utan älskare (\"Love without lovers\"), and has the note \"Complete disaster!\" written on the envelope; the play is about a director who disappears and an editor who tries to complete a work he has left unfinished. Other canceled projects include the script for a pornographic film which Bergman abandoned since he did not think it was alive enough, a play about a cannibal, some loose scenes set inside a womb, a film about the life of Jesus, a film about The Merry Widow, and a play with the title Från sperm till spöke (\"From sperm to spook\"). The Swedish director Marcus Lindeen went through the material, and inspired by Kärlek utan älskare he took samples from many of the works and turned them into a play, titled Arkivet för orealiserbara drömmar och visioner (\"The archive for unrealisable dreams and visions\"). Lindeen's play premiered on 28 May 2012 at the Stockholm City Theatre.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 2018, in honor of Bergman's 100th birthday, The Criterion Collection compiled and released a Blu-ray disc box set comprising 39 of Bergman's features. The set spans Bergman's early career, beginning in the 1940s, up to his final film in 2003. The films are organized non-chronologically, and are instead presented in four groupings that mimic the procession of a film festival. Accompanying the discs is a book featuring critical essays on each of the films, intended to guide the viewer through the experience. Upon its release, The New York Times critic Glenn Kenny assessed the set as \"impressive and almost exhaustive\", and interpreted it as \"a fresh case for [Bergman's] continuing importance\", in response to criticisms such as Jonathan Rosenbaum's 2007 opinion piece \"Scenes From an Overrated Career\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award is awarded annually at the Gothenburg Film Festival, in partnership with the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, the Bergman Estate and the Bergman Center on Fårö. The prize includes a visit to the Bergman Estate as well as to Bergmans personal archive in Stockholm.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Quotations related to Ingmar Bergman at Wikiquote",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Media related to Ingmar Bergman at Wikimedia Commons",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Ernst Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish filmmaker and theatre director. Widely considered one of the greatest and most influential film directors of all time, his films have been described as "profoundly personal meditations into the myriad struggles facing the psyche and the soul". Some of his most acclaimed works include The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Persona (1966), and Fanny and Alexander (1982); these four films were included in the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time. Bergman was also ranked No. 8 on the magazine's 2002 "Greatest Directors of All Time" list. Bergman directed more than 60 films and documentaries, most of which he also wrote, for both cinema releases and television screenings. Most of his films were set in Sweden, and many of his films from 1961 onward were filmed on the island of Fårö. He forged a creative partnership with his cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist. He also had a theatrical career that included periods as Leading Director of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and of Germany's Residenztheater in Munich. He directed more than 170 plays. Among his company of actors were Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom and Max von Sydow. | 2001-08-07T19:28:55Z | 2023-12-30T23:44:17Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingmar_Bergman |
14,627 | Isaac Newton | Sir Isaac Newton FRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus, though he developed calculus years before Leibniz. He is considered one of the greatest and most influential scientists in history.
In the Principia, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint for centuries until it was superseded by the theory of relativity. Newton used his mathematical description of gravity to derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena, eradicating doubt about the Solar System's heliocentricity. He demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and celestial bodies could be accounted for by the same principles. Newton's inference that the Earth is an oblate spheroid was later confirmed by the geodetic measurements of Maupertuis, La Condamine, and others, convincing most European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over earlier systems.
Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a sophisticated theory of colour based on the observation that a prism separates white light into the colours of the visible spectrum. His work on light was collected in his highly influential book Opticks, published in 1704. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling, made the first theoretical calculation of the speed of sound, and introduced the notion of a Newtonian fluid. In addition to his work on calculus, as a mathematician Newton contributed to the study of power series, generalised the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, developed a method for approximating the roots of a function, and classified most of the cubic plane curves.
Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian who privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. He refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, unlike most members of the Cambridge faculty of the day. Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death. Politically and personally tied to the Whig party, Newton served two brief terms as Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, in 1689–1690 and 1701–1702. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 and spent the last three decades of his life in London, serving as Warden (1696–1699) and Master (1699–1727) of the Royal Mint, as well as president of the Royal Society (1703–1727).
Isaac Newton was born (according to the Julian calendar in use in England at the time) on Christmas Day, 25 December 1642 (NS 4 January 1643) at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. His father, also named Isaac Newton, had died three months before. Born prematurely, Newton was a small child; his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a quart mug. When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough (née Blythe). Newton disliked his stepfather and maintained some enmity towards his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of 19: "Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them." Newton's mother had three children (Mary, Benjamin, and Hannah) from her second marriage.
From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King's School in Grantham, which taught Latin and Ancient Greek and probably imparted a significant foundation of mathematics. He was removed from school and returned to Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth by October 1659. His mother, widowed for the second time, attempted to make him a farmer, an occupation he hated. Henry Stokes, master at The King's School, persuaded his mother to send him back to school. Motivated partly by a desire for revenge against a schoolyard bully, he became the top-ranked student, distinguishing himself mainly by building sundials and models of windmills.
In June 1661, Newton was admitted to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. His uncle Reverend William Ayscough, who had studied at Cambridge, recommended him to the university. At Cambridge, Newton started as a subsizar, paying his way by performing valet duties until he was awarded a scholarship in 1664, which covered his university costs for four more years until the completion of his MA. At the time, Cambridge's teachings were based on those of Aristotle, whom Newton read along with then more modern philosophers, including Descartes and astronomers such as Galileo Galilei and Thomas Street. He set down in his notebook a series of "Quaestiones" about mechanical philosophy as he found it. In 1665, he discovered the generalised binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that later became calculus. Soon after Newton obtained his BA degree at Cambridge in August 1665, the university temporarily closed as a precaution against the Great Plague.
Although he had been undistinguished as a Cambridge student, Newton's private studies at his home in Woolsthorpe over the next two years saw the development of his theories on calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation.
In April 1667, Newton returned to the University of Cambridge, and in October he was elected as a fellow of Trinity. Fellows were required to take holy orders and be ordained as Anglican priests, although this was not enforced in the Restoration years, and an assertion of conformity to the Church of England was sufficient. He made the commitment that "I will either set Theology as the object of my studies and will take holy orders when the time prescribed by these statutes [7 years] arrives, or I will resign from the college." Up until this point he had not thought much about religion and had twice signed his agreement to the Thirty-nine Articles, the basis of Church of England doctrine. By 1675 the issue could not be avoided, and by then his unconventional views stood in the way.
His academic work impressed the Lucasian professor Isaac Barrow, who was anxious to develop his own religious and administrative potential (he became master of Trinity College two years later); in 1669, Newton succeeded him, only one year after receiving his MA. The terms of the Lucasian professorship required that the holder not be active in the church – presumably to leave more time for science. Newton argued that this should exempt him from the ordination requirement, and King Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this argument; thus, a conflict between Newton's religious views and Anglican orthodoxy was averted.
Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1672.
Newton's work has been said "to distinctly advance every branch of mathematics then studied". His work on the subject, usually referred to as fluxions or calculus, seen in a manuscript of October 1666, is now published among Newton's mathematical papers. His work De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas, sent by Isaac Barrow to John Collins in June 1669, was identified by Barrow in a letter sent to Collins that August as the work "of an extraordinary genius and proficiency in these things". Newton later became involved in a dispute with Leibniz over priority in the development of calculus (the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy). Most modern historians believe that Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently, although with very different mathematical notations. However, it is established that Newton came to develop calculus much earlier than Leibniz. Leibniz's notation and "differential Method", nowadays recognised as much more convenient notations, were adopted by continental European mathematicians, and after 1820 or so, also by British mathematicians.
His work extensively uses calculus in geometric form based on limiting values of the ratios of vanishingly small quantities: in the Principia itself, Newton gave demonstration of this under the name of "the method of first and last ratios" and explained why he put his expositions in this form, remarking also that "hereby the same thing is performed as by the method of indivisibles." Because of this, the Principia has been called "a book dense with the theory and application of the infinitesimal calculus" in modern times and in Newton's time "nearly all of it is of this calculus." His use of methods involving "one or more orders of the infinitesimally small" is present in his De motu corporum in gyrum of 1684 and in his papers on motion "during the two decades preceding 1684".
Newton had been reluctant to publish his calculus because he feared controversy and criticism. He was close to the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. In 1691, Duillier started to write a new version of Newton's Principia, and corresponded with Leibniz. In 1693, the relationship between Duillier and Newton deteriorated and the book was never completed. Starting in 1699, other members of the Royal Society accused Leibniz of plagiarism. The dispute then broke out in full force in 1711 when the Royal Society proclaimed in a study that it was Newton who was the true discoverer and labelled Leibniz a fraud; it was later found that Newton wrote the study's concluding remarks on Leibniz. Thus began the bitter controversy which marred the lives of both Newton and Leibniz until the latter's death in 1716.
Newton is generally credited with the generalised binomial theorem, valid for any exponent. He discovered Newton's identities, Newton's method, classified cubic plane curves (polynomials of degree three in two variables), made substantial contributions to the theory of finite differences, and was the first to use fractional indices and to employ coordinate geometry to derive solutions to Diophantine equations. He approximated partial sums of the harmonic series by logarithms (a precursor to Euler's summation formula) and was the first to use power series with confidence and to revert power series. Newton's work on infinite series was inspired by Simon Stevin's decimals.
In 1666, Newton observed that the spectrum of colours exiting a prism in the position of minimum deviation is oblong, even when the light ray entering the prism is circular, which is to say, the prism refracts different colours by different angles. This led him to conclude that colour is a property intrinsic to light – a point which had, until then, been a matter of debate.
From 1670 to 1672, Newton lectured on optics. During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that the multicoloured image produced by a prism, which he named a spectrum, could be recomposed into white light by a lens and a second prism. Modern scholarship has revealed that Newton's analysis and resynthesis of white light owes a debt to corpuscular alchemy.
He showed that coloured light does not change its properties by separating out a coloured beam and shining it on various objects, and that regardless of whether reflected, scattered, or transmitted, the light remains the same colour. Thus, he observed that colour is the result of objects interacting with already-coloured light rather than objects generating the colour themselves. This is known as Newton's theory of colour.
From this work, he concluded that the lens of any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours (chromatic aberration). As a proof of the concept, he constructed a telescope using reflective mirrors instead of lenses as the objective to bypass that problem. Building the design, the first known functional reflecting telescope, today known as a Newtonian telescope, involved solving the problem of a suitable mirror material and shaping technique. Newton ground his own mirrors out of a custom composition of highly reflective speculum metal, using Newton's rings to judge the quality of the optics for his telescopes. In late 1668, he was able to produce this first reflecting telescope. It was about eight inches long and it gave a clearer and larger image. In 1671, the Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope. Their interest encouraged him to publish his notes, Of Colours, which he later expanded into the work Opticks. When Robert Hooke criticised some of Newton's ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. Newton and Hooke had brief exchanges in 1679–80, when Hooke, appointed to manage the Royal Society's correspondence, opened up a correspondence intended to elicit contributions from Newton to Royal Society transactions, which had the effect of stimulating Newton to work out a proof that the elliptical form of planetary orbits would result from a centripetal force inversely proportional to the square of the radius vector. But the two men remained generally on poor terms until Hooke's death.
Newton argued that light is composed of particles or corpuscles, which were refracted by accelerating into a denser medium. He verged on soundlike waves to explain the repeated pattern of reflection and transmission by thin films (Opticks Bk. II, Props. 12), but still retained his theory of 'fits' that disposed corpuscles to be reflected or transmitted (Props.13). However, later physicists favoured a purely wavelike explanation of light to account for the interference patterns and the general phenomenon of diffraction. Today's quantum mechanics, photons, and the idea of wave–particle duality bear only a minor resemblance to Newton's understanding of light.
In his Hypothesis of Light of 1675, Newton posited the existence of the ether to transmit forces between particles. The contact with the Cambridge Platonist philosopher Henry More revived his interest in alchemy. He replaced the ether with occult forces based on Hermetic ideas of attraction and repulsion between particles. John Maynard Keynes, who acquired many of Newton's writings on alchemy, stated that "Newton was not the first of the age of reason: He was the last of the magicians." Newton's contributions to science cannot be isolated from his interest in alchemy. This was at a time when there was no clear distinction between alchemy and science, and had he not relied on the occult idea of action at a distance, across a vacuum, he might not have developed his theory of gravity.
In 1704, Newton published Opticks, in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light. He considered light to be made up of extremely subtle corpuscles, that ordinary matter was made of grosser corpuscles and speculated that through a kind of alchemical transmutation "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, ... and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?" Newton also constructed a primitive form of a frictional electrostatic generator, using a glass globe.
In his book Opticks, Newton was the first to show a diagram using a prism as a beam expander, and also the use of multiple-prism arrays. Some 278 years after Newton's discussion, multiple-prism beam expanders became central to the development of narrow-linewidth tunable lasers. Also, the use of these prismatic beam expanders led to the multiple-prism dispersion theory.
Subsequent to Newton, much has been amended. Young and Fresnel discarded Newton's particle theory in favour of Huygens' wave theory to show that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength. Science also slowly came to realise the difference between perception of colour and mathematisable optics. The German poet and scientist, Goethe, could not shake the Newtonian foundation but "one hole Goethe did find in Newton's armour, ... Newton had committed himself to the doctrine that refraction without colour was impossible. He, therefore, thought that the object-glasses of telescopes must forever remain imperfect, achromatism and refraction being incompatible. This inference was proved by Dollond to be wrong."
Newton had been developing his theory of gravitation as far back as 1665. In 1679, Newton returned to his work on celestial mechanics by considering gravitation and its effect on the orbits of planets with reference to Kepler's laws of planetary motion. This followed stimulation by a brief exchange of letters in 1679–80 with Hooke, who had been appointed to manage the Royal Society's correspondence, and who opened a correspondence intended to elicit contributions from Newton to Royal Society transactions. Newton's reawakening interest in astronomical matters received further stimulus by the appearance of a comet in the winter of 1680–1681, on which he corresponded with John Flamsteed. After the exchanges with Hooke, Newton worked out a proof that the elliptical form of planetary orbits would result from a centripetal force inversely proportional to the square of the radius vector. Newton communicated his results to Edmond Halley and to the Royal Society in De motu corporum in gyrum, a tract written on about nine sheets which was copied into the Royal Society's Register Book in December 1684. This tract contained the nucleus that Newton developed and expanded to form the Principia.
The Principia was published on 5 July 1687 with encouragement and financial help from Halley. In this work, Newton stated the three universal laws of motion. Together, these laws describe the relationship between any object, the forces acting upon it and the resulting motion, laying the foundation for classical mechanics. They contributed to many advances during the Industrial Revolution which soon followed and were not improved upon for more than 200 years. Many of these advances continue to be the underpinnings of non-relativistic technologies in the modern world. He used the Latin word gravitas (weight) for the effect that would become known as gravity, and defined the law of universal gravitation.
In the same work, Newton presented a calculus-like method of geometrical analysis using 'first and last ratios', gave the first analytical determination (based on Boyle's law) of the speed of sound in air, inferred the oblateness of Earth's spheroidal figure, accounted for the precession of the equinoxes as a result of the Moon's gravitational attraction on the Earth's oblateness, initiated the gravitational study of the irregularities in the motion of the Moon, provided a theory for the determination of the orbits of comets, and much more. Newton's biographer David Brewster reported that the complexity of applying his theory of gravity to the motion of the moon was so great it affected Newton's health: "[H]e was deprived of his appetite and sleep" during his work on the problem in 1692–93, and told the astronomer John Machin that "his head never ached but when he was studying the subject". According to Brewster, Edmund Halley also told John Conduitt that when pressed to complete his analysis Newton "always replied that it made his head ache, and kept him awake so often, that he would think of it no more". [Emphasis in original]
Newton made clear his heliocentric view of the Solar System—developed in a somewhat modern way because already in the mid-1680s he recognised the "deviation of the Sun" from the centre of gravity of the Solar System. For Newton, it was not precisely the centre of the Sun or any other body that could be considered at rest, but rather "the common centre of gravity of the Earth, the Sun and all the Planets is to be esteem'd the Centre of the World", and this centre of gravity "either is at rest or moves uniformly forward in a right line". (Newton adopted the "at rest" alternative in view of common consent that the centre, wherever it was, was at rest.)
Newton's postulate of an invisible force able to act over vast distances led to him being criticised for introducing "occult agencies" into science. Later, in the second edition of the Principia (1713), Newton firmly rejected such criticisms in a concluding General Scholium, writing that it was enough that the phenomena implied a gravitational attraction, as they did; but they did not so far indicate its cause, and it was both unnecessary and improper to frame hypotheses of things that were not implied by the phenomena. (Here Newton used what became his famous expression "hypotheses non-fingo".)
With the Principia, Newton became internationally recognised. He acquired a circle of admirers, including the Swiss-born mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier.
In 1710, Newton found 72 of the 78 "species" of cubic curves and categorised them into four types. In 1717, and probably with Newton's help, James Stirling proved that every cubic was one of these four types. Newton also claimed that the four types could be obtained by plane projection from one of them, and this was proved in 1731, four years after his death.
In the 1690s, Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal and symbolic interpretation of the Bible. A manuscript Newton sent to John Locke in which he disputed the fidelity of 1 John 5:7—the Johannine Comma—and its fidelity to the original manuscripts of the New Testament, remained unpublished until 1785.
Newton was also a member of the Parliament of England for Cambridge University in 1689 and 1701, but according to some accounts his only comments were to complain about a cold draught in the chamber and request that the window be closed. He was, however, noted by Cambridge diarist Abraham de la Pryme to have rebuked students who were frightening locals by claiming that a house was haunted.
Newton moved to London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, a position that he had obtained through the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. He took charge of England's great recoining, trod on the toes of Lord Lucas, Governor of the Tower, and secured the job of deputy comptroller of the temporary Chester branch for Edmond Halley. Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint upon the death of Thomas Neale in 1699, a position Newton held for the last 30 years of his life. These appointments were intended as sinecures, but Newton took them seriously. He retired from his Cambridge duties in 1701, and exercised his authority to reform the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters.
As Warden, and afterwards as Master, of the Royal Mint, Newton estimated that 20 percent of the coins taken in during the Great Recoinage of 1696 were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by the felon being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convicting even the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult, but Newton proved equal to the task.
Disguised as a habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton had himself made a justice of the peace in all the home counties. A draft letter regarding the matter is included in Newton's personal first edition of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which he must have been amending at the time. Then he conducted more than 100 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers, and suspects between June 1698 and Christmas 1699. Newton successfully prosecuted 28 coiners.
Newton was made president of the Royal Society in 1703 and an associate of the French Académie des Sciences. In his position at the Royal Society, Newton made an enemy of John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, by prematurely publishing Flamsteed's Historia Coelestis Britannica, which Newton had used in his studies.
In April 1705, Queen Anne knighted Newton during a royal visit to Trinity College, Cambridge. The knighthood is likely to have been motivated by political considerations connected with the parliamentary election in May 1705, rather than any recognition of Newton's scientific work or services as Master of the Mint. Newton was the second scientist to be knighted, after Francis Bacon.
As a result of a report written by Newton on 21 September 1717 to the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury, the bimetallic relationship between gold coins and silver coins was changed by royal proclamation on 22 December 1717, forbidding the exchange of gold guineas for more than 21 silver shillings. This inadvertently resulted in a silver shortage as silver coins were used to pay for imports, while exports were paid for in gold, effectively moving Britain from the silver standard to its first gold standard. It is a matter of debate as to whether he intended to do this or not. It has been argued that Newton conceived of his work at the Mint as a continuation of his alchemical work.
Newton was invested in the South Sea Company and lost some £20,000 (£4.4 million in 2020) when it collapsed in around 1720.
Toward the end of his life, Newton took up residence at Cranbury Park, near Winchester, with his niece and her husband, until his death. His half-niece, Catherine Barton, served as his hostess in social affairs at his house on Jermyn Street in London; he was her "very loving Uncle", according to his letter to her when she was recovering from smallpox.
Newton died in his sleep in London on 20 March 1727 (OS 20 March 1726; NS 31 March 1727). He was given a ceremonial funeral, attended by nobles, scientists, and philosophers, and was buried in Westminster Abbey among kings and queens. He was the first scientist to be buried in the abbey. Voltaire may have been present at his funeral. A bachelor, he had divested much of his estate to relatives during his last years, and died intestate. His papers went to John Conduitt and Catherine Barton.
Shortly after his death, a plaster death mask was moulded of Newton. It was used by Flemish sculptor John Michael Rysbrack in making a sculpture of Newton. It is now held by the Royal Society, who created a 3D scan of it in 2012.
Newton's hair was posthumously examined and found to contain mercury, probably resulting from his alchemical pursuits. Mercury poisoning could explain Newton's eccentricity in late life.
Although it was claimed that he was once engaged, Newton never married. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire, who was in London at the time of Newton's funeral, said that he "was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor had any commerce with women—a circumstance which was assured me by the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments". There exists a widespread belief that Newton died a virgin, and writers as diverse as mathematician Charles Hutton, economist John Maynard Keynes, and physicist Carl Sagan have commented on it.
Newton had a close friendship with the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, whom he met in London around 1689—some of their correspondence has survived. Their relationship came to an abrupt and unexplained end in 1693, and at the same time Newton suffered a nervous breakdown, which included sending wild accusatory letters to his friends Samuel Pepys and John Locke. His note to the latter included the charge that Locke "endeavoured to embroil me with woemen".
Newton was relatively modest about his achievements, writing in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Two writers think that the sentence, written at a time when Newton and Hooke were in dispute over optical discoveries, was an oblique attack on Hooke (said to have been short and hunchbacked), rather than—or in addition to—a statement of modesty. On the other hand, the widely known proverb about standing on the shoulders of giants, published among others by seventeenth-century poet George Herbert (a former orator of the University of Cambridge and fellow of Trinity College) in his Jacula Prudentum (1651), had as its main point that "a dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two", and so its effect as an analogy would place Newton himself rather than Hooke as the 'dwarf'.
In a later memoir, Newton wrote, "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
Although born into an Anglican family, by his thirties Newton held a Christian faith that, had it been made public, would not have been considered orthodox by mainstream Christianity, with one historian labelling him a heretic.
By 1672, he had started to record his theological researches in notebooks which he showed to no one and which have only recently been examined. They demonstrate an extensive knowledge of early Church writings and show that in the conflict between Athanasius and Arius which defined the Creed, he took the side of Arius, the loser, who rejected the conventional view of the Trinity. Newton "recognized Christ as a divine mediator between God and man, who was subordinate to the Father who created him." He was especially interested in prophecy, but for him, "the great apostasy was trinitarianism."
Newton tried unsuccessfully to obtain one of the two fellowships that exempted the holder from the ordination requirement. At the last moment in 1675 he received a dispensation from the government that excused him and all future holders of the Lucasian chair.
In Newton's eyes, worshipping Christ as God was idolatry, to him the fundamental sin. In 1999, historian Stephen D. Snobelen wrote, "Isaac Newton was a heretic. But ... he never made a public declaration of his private faith—which the orthodox would have deemed extremely radical. He hid his faith so well that scholars are still unraveling his personal beliefs." Snobelen concludes that Newton was at least a Socinian sympathiser (he owned and had thoroughly read at least eight Socinian books), possibly an Arian and almost certainly an anti-trinitarian.
Although the laws of motion and universal gravitation became Newton's best-known discoveries, he warned against using them to view the Universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock. He said, "So then gravity may put the planets into motion, but without the Divine Power it could never put them into such a circulating motion, as they have about the sun".
Along with his scientific fame, Newton's studies of the Bible and of the early Church Fathers were also noteworthy. Newton wrote works on textual criticism, most notably An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture and Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John. He placed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ at 3 April, AD 33, which agrees with one traditionally accepted date.
He believed in a rationally immanent world, but he rejected the hylozoism implicit in Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. The ordered and dynamically informed Universe could be understood, and must be understood, by an active reason. In his correspondence, Newton claimed that in writing the Principia "I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity". He saw evidence of design in the system of the world: "Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice". But Newton insisted that divine intervention would eventually be required to reform the system, due to the slow growth of instabilities. For this, Leibniz lampooned him: "God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion."
Newton's position was vigorously defended by his follower Samuel Clarke in a famous correspondence. A century later, Pierre-Simon Laplace's work Celestial Mechanics had a natural explanation for why the planet orbits do not require periodic divine intervention. The contrast between Laplace's mechanistic worldview and Newton's one is the most strident considering the famous answer which the French scientist gave Napoleon, who had criticised him for the absence of the Creator in the Mécanique céleste: "Sire, j'ai pu me passer de cette hypothèse" ("Sir, I didn't need this hypothesis").
Scholars long debated whether Newton disputed the doctrine of the Trinity. His first biographer, David Brewster, who compiled his manuscripts, interpreted Newton as questioning the veracity of some passages used to support the Trinity, but never denying the doctrine of the Trinity as such. In the twentieth century, encrypted manuscripts written by Newton and bought by John Maynard Keynes (among others) were deciphered and it became known that Newton did indeed reject Trinitarianism.
Newton and Robert Boyle's approach to the mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist pamphleteers as a viable alternative to the pantheists and enthusiasts, and was accepted hesitantly by orthodox preachers as well as dissident preachers like the latitudinarians. The clarity and simplicity of science was seen as a way to combat the emotional and metaphysical superlatives of both superstitious enthusiasm and the threat of atheism, and at the same time, the second wave of English deists used Newton's discoveries to demonstrate the possibility of a "Natural Religion".
The attacks made against pre-Enlightenment "magical thinking", and the mystical elements of Christianity, were given their foundation with Boyle's mechanical conception of the universe. Newton gave Boyle's ideas their completion through mathematical proofs and, perhaps more importantly, was very successful in popularising them.
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.
–John Maynard Keynes, "Newton, the Man"
Of an estimated ten million words of writing in Newton's papers, about one million deal with alchemy. Many of Newton's writings on alchemy are copies of other manuscripts, with his own annotations. Alchemical texts mix artisanal knowledge with philosophical speculation, often hidden behind layers of wordplay, allegory, and imagery to protect craft secrets. Some of the content contained in Newton's papers could have been considered heretical by the church.
In 1888, after spending sixteen years cataloguing Newton's papers, Cambridge University kept a small number and returned the rest to the Earl of Portsmouth. In 1936, a descendant offered the papers for sale at Sotheby's. The collection was broken up and sold for a total of about £9,000. John Maynard Keynes was one of about three dozen bidders who obtained part of the collection at auction. Keynes went on to reassemble an estimated half of Newton's collection of papers on alchemy before donating his collection to Cambridge University in 1946.
All of Newton's known writings on alchemy are currently being put online in a project undertaken by Indiana University: "The Chymistry of Isaac Newton" and summarised in a book.
Newton's fundamental contributions to science include the quantification of gravitational attraction, the discovery that white light is actually a mixture of immutable spectral colors, and the formulation of the calculus. Yet there is another, more mysterious side to Newton that is imperfectly known, a realm of activity that spanned some thirty years of his life, although he kept it largely hidden from his contemporaries and colleagues. We refer to Newton's involvement in the discipline of alchemy, or as it was often called in seventeenth-century England, "chymistry."
In June 2020, two unpublished pages of Newton's notes on Jan Baptist van Helmont's book on plague, De Peste, were being auctioned online by Bonhams. Newton's analysis of this book, which he made in Cambridge while protecting himself from London's 1665–1666 infection, is the most substantial written statement he is known to have made about the plague, according to Bonhams. As far as the therapy is concerned, Newton writes that "the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with various insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison".
The mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange said that Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived, and once added that Newton was also "the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish." English poet Alexander Pope wrote the famous epitaph:
Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
But this was not allowed to be inscribed in the monument. The epitaph in the monument is as follows:
H. S. E. ISAACUS NEWTON Eques Auratus, / Qui, animi vi prope divinâ, / Planetarum Motus, Figuras, / Cometarum semitas, Oceanique Aestus. Suâ Mathesi facem praeferente / Primus demonstravit: / Radiorum Lucis dissimilitudines, / Colorumque inde nascentium proprietates, / Quas nemo antea vel suspicatus erat, pervestigavit. / Naturae, Antiquitatis, S. Scripturae, / Sedulus, sagax, fidus Interpres / Dei O. M. Majestatem Philosophiâ asseruit, / Evangelij Simplicitatem Moribus expressit. / Sibi gratulentur Mortales, / Tale tantumque exstitisse / HUMANI GENERIS DECUS. / NAT. XXV DEC. A.D. MDCXLII. OBIIT. XX. MAR. MDCCXXVI,
which can be translated as follows:
Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced. Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race! He was born on 25th December 1642, and died on 20th March 1726.
In a 2005 survey of members of Britain's Royal Society (formerly headed by Newton) asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Albert Einstein, the members deemed Newton to have made the greater overall contribution. In 1999, an opinion poll of 100 of the day's leading physicists voted Einstein the "greatest physicist ever," with Newton the runner-up, while a parallel survey of rank-and-file physicists by the site PhysicsWeb gave the top spot to Newton. New Scientist called Newton "the supreme genius and most enigmatic character in the history of science". Einstein kept a picture of Newton on his study wall alongside ones of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell.
The SI derived unit of force is named the newton in his honour.
Woolsthorpe Manor is a Grade I listed building by Historic England through being his birthplace and "where he discovered gravity and developed his theories regarding the refraction of light".
In 1816, a tooth said to have belonged to Newton was sold for £730 in London to an aristocrat who had it set in a ring. Guinness World Records 2002 classified it as the most valuable tooth in the world, which would value approximately £25,000 (US$35,700) in late 2001. Who bought it and who currently has it has not been disclosed.
Newton himself often told the story that he was inspired to formulate his theory of gravitation by watching the fall of an apple from a tree. The story is believed to have passed into popular knowledge after being related by Catherine Barton, Newton's niece, to Voltaire. Voltaire then wrote in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727), "Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree."
Although it has been said that the apple story is a myth and that he did not arrive at his theory of gravity at any single moment, acquaintances of Newton (such as William Stukeley, whose manuscript account of 1752 has been made available by the Royal Society) do in fact confirm the incident, though not the apocryphal version that the apple actually hit Newton's head. Stukeley recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on 15 April 1726:
we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some appletrees, only he, & myself. amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. "why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground," thought he to him self: occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood: "why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple."
John Conduitt, Newton's assistant at the Royal Mint and husband of Newton's niece, also described the event when he wrote about Newton's life:
In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in Lincolnshire. Whilst he was pensively meandering in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from a tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from earth, but that this power must extend much further than was usually thought. Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself & if so, that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition.
It is known from his notebooks that Newton was grappling in the late 1660s with the idea that terrestrial gravity extends, in an inverse-square proportion, to the Moon; however, it took him two decades to develop the full-fledged theory. The question was not whether gravity existed, but whether it extended so far from Earth that it could also be the force holding the Moon to its orbit. Newton showed that if the force decreased as the inverse square of the distance, one could indeed calculate the Moon's orbital period, and get good agreement. He guessed the same force was responsible for other orbital motions, and hence named it "universal gravitation".
Various trees are claimed to be "the" apple tree which Newton describes. The King's School, Grantham claims that the tree was purchased by the school, uprooted and transported to the headmaster's garden some years later. The staff of the (now) National Trust-owned Woolsthorpe Manor dispute this, and claim that a tree present in their gardens is the one described by Newton. A descendant of the original tree can be seen growing outside the main gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, below the room Newton lived in when he studied there. The National Fruit Collection at Brogdale in Kent can supply grafts from their tree, which appears identical to Flower of Kent, a coarse-fleshed cooking variety.
Newton's monument (1731) can be seen in Westminster Abbey, at the north of the entrance to the choir against the choir screen, near his tomb. It was executed by the sculptor Michael Rysbrack (1694–1770) in white and grey marble with design by the architect William Kent. The monument features a figure of Newton reclining on top of a sarcophagus, his right elbow resting on several of his great books and his left hand pointing to a scroll with a mathematical design. Above him is a pyramid and a celestial globe showing the signs of the Zodiac and the path of the comet of 1680. A relief panel depicts putti using instruments such as a telescope and prism. The Latin inscription on the base translates as:
Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced. Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race! He was born on 25 December 1642, and died on 20 March 1726/7.
From 1978 until 1988, an image of Newton designed by Harry Ecclestone appeared on Series D £1 banknotes issued by the Bank of England (the last £1 notes to be issued by the Bank of England). Newton was shown on the reverse of the notes holding a book and accompanied by a telescope, a prism and a map of the Solar System.
A statue of Isaac Newton, looking at an apple at his feet, can be seen at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. A large bronze statue, Newton, after William Blake, by Eduardo Paolozzi, dated 1995 and inspired by Blake's etching, dominates the piazza of the British Library in London. A bronze statue of Newton was erected in 1858 in the centre of Grantham where he went to school, prominently standing in front of Grantham Guildhall.
The still-surviving farmhouse at Woolsthorpe By Colsterworth is a Grade I listed building by Historic England through being his birthplace and "where he discovered gravity and developed his theories regarding the refraction of light".
Enlightenment philosophers chose a short history of scientific predecessors—Galileo, Boyle, and Newton principally—as the guides and guarantors of their applications of the singular concept of nature and natural law to every physical and social field of the day. In this respect, the lessons of history and the social structures built upon it could be discarded.
It is held by European philosophers of the Enlightenment and by historians of the Enlightenment that Newton's publication of the Principia was a turning point in the Scientific Revolution and started the Enlightenment. It was Newton's conception of the universe based upon natural and rationally understandable laws that became one of the seeds for Enlightenment ideology. Locke and Voltaire applied concepts of natural law to political systems advocating intrinsic rights; the physiocrats and Adam Smith applied natural conceptions of psychology and self-interest to economic systems; and sociologists criticised the current social order for trying to fit history into natural models of progress. Monboddo and Samuel Clarke resisted elements of Newton's work, but eventually rationalised it to conform with their strong religious views of nature. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Sir Isaac Newton FRS (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus, though he developed calculus years before Leibniz. He is considered one of the greatest and most influential scientists in history.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the Principia, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint for centuries until it was superseded by the theory of relativity. Newton used his mathematical description of gravity to derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena, eradicating doubt about the Solar System's heliocentricity. He demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and celestial bodies could be accounted for by the same principles. Newton's inference that the Earth is an oblate spheroid was later confirmed by the geodetic measurements of Maupertuis, La Condamine, and others, convincing most European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over earlier systems.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a sophisticated theory of colour based on the observation that a prism separates white light into the colours of the visible spectrum. His work on light was collected in his highly influential book Opticks, published in 1704. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling, made the first theoretical calculation of the speed of sound, and introduced the notion of a Newtonian fluid. In addition to his work on calculus, as a mathematician Newton contributed to the study of power series, generalised the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, developed a method for approximating the roots of a function, and classified most of the cubic plane curves.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian who privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. He refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, unlike most members of the Cambridge faculty of the day. Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death. Politically and personally tied to the Whig party, Newton served two brief terms as Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, in 1689–1690 and 1701–1702. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 and spent the last three decades of his life in London, serving as Warden (1696–1699) and Master (1699–1727) of the Royal Mint, as well as president of the Royal Society (1703–1727).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Isaac Newton was born (according to the Julian calendar in use in England at the time) on Christmas Day, 25 December 1642 (NS 4 January 1643) at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. His father, also named Isaac Newton, had died three months before. Born prematurely, Newton was a small child; his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a quart mug. When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabas Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough (née Blythe). Newton disliked his stepfather and maintained some enmity towards his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of 19: \"Threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them and the house over them.\" Newton's mother had three children (Mary, Benjamin, and Hannah) from her second marriage.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "From the age of about twelve until he was seventeen, Newton was educated at The King's School in Grantham, which taught Latin and Ancient Greek and probably imparted a significant foundation of mathematics. He was removed from school and returned to Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth by October 1659. His mother, widowed for the second time, attempted to make him a farmer, an occupation he hated. Henry Stokes, master at The King's School, persuaded his mother to send him back to school. Motivated partly by a desire for revenge against a schoolyard bully, he became the top-ranked student, distinguishing himself mainly by building sundials and models of windmills.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In June 1661, Newton was admitted to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. His uncle Reverend William Ayscough, who had studied at Cambridge, recommended him to the university. At Cambridge, Newton started as a subsizar, paying his way by performing valet duties until he was awarded a scholarship in 1664, which covered his university costs for four more years until the completion of his MA. At the time, Cambridge's teachings were based on those of Aristotle, whom Newton read along with then more modern philosophers, including Descartes and astronomers such as Galileo Galilei and Thomas Street. He set down in his notebook a series of \"Quaestiones\" about mechanical philosophy as he found it. In 1665, he discovered the generalised binomial theorem and began to develop a mathematical theory that later became calculus. Soon after Newton obtained his BA degree at Cambridge in August 1665, the university temporarily closed as a precaution against the Great Plague.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Although he had been undistinguished as a Cambridge student, Newton's private studies at his home in Woolsthorpe over the next two years saw the development of his theories on calculus, optics, and the law of gravitation.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In April 1667, Newton returned to the University of Cambridge, and in October he was elected as a fellow of Trinity. Fellows were required to take holy orders and be ordained as Anglican priests, although this was not enforced in the Restoration years, and an assertion of conformity to the Church of England was sufficient. He made the commitment that \"I will either set Theology as the object of my studies and will take holy orders when the time prescribed by these statutes [7 years] arrives, or I will resign from the college.\" Up until this point he had not thought much about religion and had twice signed his agreement to the Thirty-nine Articles, the basis of Church of England doctrine. By 1675 the issue could not be avoided, and by then his unconventional views stood in the way.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "His academic work impressed the Lucasian professor Isaac Barrow, who was anxious to develop his own religious and administrative potential (he became master of Trinity College two years later); in 1669, Newton succeeded him, only one year after receiving his MA. The terms of the Lucasian professorship required that the holder not be active in the church – presumably to leave more time for science. Newton argued that this should exempt him from the ordination requirement, and King Charles II, whose permission was needed, accepted this argument; thus, a conflict between Newton's religious views and Anglican orthodoxy was averted.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Newton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1672.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Newton's work has been said \"to distinctly advance every branch of mathematics then studied\". His work on the subject, usually referred to as fluxions or calculus, seen in a manuscript of October 1666, is now published among Newton's mathematical papers. His work De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas, sent by Isaac Barrow to John Collins in June 1669, was identified by Barrow in a letter sent to Collins that August as the work \"of an extraordinary genius and proficiency in these things\". Newton later became involved in a dispute with Leibniz over priority in the development of calculus (the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy). Most modern historians believe that Newton and Leibniz developed calculus independently, although with very different mathematical notations. However, it is established that Newton came to develop calculus much earlier than Leibniz. Leibniz's notation and \"differential Method\", nowadays recognised as much more convenient notations, were adopted by continental European mathematicians, and after 1820 or so, also by British mathematicians.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "His work extensively uses calculus in geometric form based on limiting values of the ratios of vanishingly small quantities: in the Principia itself, Newton gave demonstration of this under the name of \"the method of first and last ratios\" and explained why he put his expositions in this form, remarking also that \"hereby the same thing is performed as by the method of indivisibles.\" Because of this, the Principia has been called \"a book dense with the theory and application of the infinitesimal calculus\" in modern times and in Newton's time \"nearly all of it is of this calculus.\" His use of methods involving \"one or more orders of the infinitesimally small\" is present in his De motu corporum in gyrum of 1684 and in his papers on motion \"during the two decades preceding 1684\".",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Newton had been reluctant to publish his calculus because he feared controversy and criticism. He was close to the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. In 1691, Duillier started to write a new version of Newton's Principia, and corresponded with Leibniz. In 1693, the relationship between Duillier and Newton deteriorated and the book was never completed. Starting in 1699, other members of the Royal Society accused Leibniz of plagiarism. The dispute then broke out in full force in 1711 when the Royal Society proclaimed in a study that it was Newton who was the true discoverer and labelled Leibniz a fraud; it was later found that Newton wrote the study's concluding remarks on Leibniz. Thus began the bitter controversy which marred the lives of both Newton and Leibniz until the latter's death in 1716.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Newton is generally credited with the generalised binomial theorem, valid for any exponent. He discovered Newton's identities, Newton's method, classified cubic plane curves (polynomials of degree three in two variables), made substantial contributions to the theory of finite differences, and was the first to use fractional indices and to employ coordinate geometry to derive solutions to Diophantine equations. He approximated partial sums of the harmonic series by logarithms (a precursor to Euler's summation formula) and was the first to use power series with confidence and to revert power series. Newton's work on infinite series was inspired by Simon Stevin's decimals.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1666, Newton observed that the spectrum of colours exiting a prism in the position of minimum deviation is oblong, even when the light ray entering the prism is circular, which is to say, the prism refracts different colours by different angles. This led him to conclude that colour is a property intrinsic to light – a point which had, until then, been a matter of debate.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "From 1670 to 1672, Newton lectured on optics. During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that the multicoloured image produced by a prism, which he named a spectrum, could be recomposed into white light by a lens and a second prism. Modern scholarship has revealed that Newton's analysis and resynthesis of white light owes a debt to corpuscular alchemy.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "He showed that coloured light does not change its properties by separating out a coloured beam and shining it on various objects, and that regardless of whether reflected, scattered, or transmitted, the light remains the same colour. Thus, he observed that colour is the result of objects interacting with already-coloured light rather than objects generating the colour themselves. This is known as Newton's theory of colour.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "From this work, he concluded that the lens of any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours (chromatic aberration). As a proof of the concept, he constructed a telescope using reflective mirrors instead of lenses as the objective to bypass that problem. Building the design, the first known functional reflecting telescope, today known as a Newtonian telescope, involved solving the problem of a suitable mirror material and shaping technique. Newton ground his own mirrors out of a custom composition of highly reflective speculum metal, using Newton's rings to judge the quality of the optics for his telescopes. In late 1668, he was able to produce this first reflecting telescope. It was about eight inches long and it gave a clearer and larger image. In 1671, the Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope. Their interest encouraged him to publish his notes, Of Colours, which he later expanded into the work Opticks. When Robert Hooke criticised some of Newton's ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. Newton and Hooke had brief exchanges in 1679–80, when Hooke, appointed to manage the Royal Society's correspondence, opened up a correspondence intended to elicit contributions from Newton to Royal Society transactions, which had the effect of stimulating Newton to work out a proof that the elliptical form of planetary orbits would result from a centripetal force inversely proportional to the square of the radius vector. But the two men remained generally on poor terms until Hooke's death.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Newton argued that light is composed of particles or corpuscles, which were refracted by accelerating into a denser medium. He verged on soundlike waves to explain the repeated pattern of reflection and transmission by thin films (Opticks Bk. II, Props. 12), but still retained his theory of 'fits' that disposed corpuscles to be reflected or transmitted (Props.13). However, later physicists favoured a purely wavelike explanation of light to account for the interference patterns and the general phenomenon of diffraction. Today's quantum mechanics, photons, and the idea of wave–particle duality bear only a minor resemblance to Newton's understanding of light.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In his Hypothesis of Light of 1675, Newton posited the existence of the ether to transmit forces between particles. The contact with the Cambridge Platonist philosopher Henry More revived his interest in alchemy. He replaced the ether with occult forces based on Hermetic ideas of attraction and repulsion between particles. John Maynard Keynes, who acquired many of Newton's writings on alchemy, stated that \"Newton was not the first of the age of reason: He was the last of the magicians.\" Newton's contributions to science cannot be isolated from his interest in alchemy. This was at a time when there was no clear distinction between alchemy and science, and had he not relied on the occult idea of action at a distance, across a vacuum, he might not have developed his theory of gravity.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 1704, Newton published Opticks, in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light. He considered light to be made up of extremely subtle corpuscles, that ordinary matter was made of grosser corpuscles and speculated that through a kind of alchemical transmutation \"Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, ... and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?\" Newton also constructed a primitive form of a frictional electrostatic generator, using a glass globe.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In his book Opticks, Newton was the first to show a diagram using a prism as a beam expander, and also the use of multiple-prism arrays. Some 278 years after Newton's discussion, multiple-prism beam expanders became central to the development of narrow-linewidth tunable lasers. Also, the use of these prismatic beam expanders led to the multiple-prism dispersion theory.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Subsequent to Newton, much has been amended. Young and Fresnel discarded Newton's particle theory in favour of Huygens' wave theory to show that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength. Science also slowly came to realise the difference between perception of colour and mathematisable optics. The German poet and scientist, Goethe, could not shake the Newtonian foundation but \"one hole Goethe did find in Newton's armour, ... Newton had committed himself to the doctrine that refraction without colour was impossible. He, therefore, thought that the object-glasses of telescopes must forever remain imperfect, achromatism and refraction being incompatible. This inference was proved by Dollond to be wrong.\"",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Newton had been developing his theory of gravitation as far back as 1665. In 1679, Newton returned to his work on celestial mechanics by considering gravitation and its effect on the orbits of planets with reference to Kepler's laws of planetary motion. This followed stimulation by a brief exchange of letters in 1679–80 with Hooke, who had been appointed to manage the Royal Society's correspondence, and who opened a correspondence intended to elicit contributions from Newton to Royal Society transactions. Newton's reawakening interest in astronomical matters received further stimulus by the appearance of a comet in the winter of 1680–1681, on which he corresponded with John Flamsteed. After the exchanges with Hooke, Newton worked out a proof that the elliptical form of planetary orbits would result from a centripetal force inversely proportional to the square of the radius vector. Newton communicated his results to Edmond Halley and to the Royal Society in De motu corporum in gyrum, a tract written on about nine sheets which was copied into the Royal Society's Register Book in December 1684. This tract contained the nucleus that Newton developed and expanded to form the Principia.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Principia was published on 5 July 1687 with encouragement and financial help from Halley. In this work, Newton stated the three universal laws of motion. Together, these laws describe the relationship between any object, the forces acting upon it and the resulting motion, laying the foundation for classical mechanics. They contributed to many advances during the Industrial Revolution which soon followed and were not improved upon for more than 200 years. Many of these advances continue to be the underpinnings of non-relativistic technologies in the modern world. He used the Latin word gravitas (weight) for the effect that would become known as gravity, and defined the law of universal gravitation.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In the same work, Newton presented a calculus-like method of geometrical analysis using 'first and last ratios', gave the first analytical determination (based on Boyle's law) of the speed of sound in air, inferred the oblateness of Earth's spheroidal figure, accounted for the precession of the equinoxes as a result of the Moon's gravitational attraction on the Earth's oblateness, initiated the gravitational study of the irregularities in the motion of the Moon, provided a theory for the determination of the orbits of comets, and much more. Newton's biographer David Brewster reported that the complexity of applying his theory of gravity to the motion of the moon was so great it affected Newton's health: \"[H]e was deprived of his appetite and sleep\" during his work on the problem in 1692–93, and told the astronomer John Machin that \"his head never ached but when he was studying the subject\". According to Brewster, Edmund Halley also told John Conduitt that when pressed to complete his analysis Newton \"always replied that it made his head ache, and kept him awake so often, that he would think of it no more\". [Emphasis in original]",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Newton made clear his heliocentric view of the Solar System—developed in a somewhat modern way because already in the mid-1680s he recognised the \"deviation of the Sun\" from the centre of gravity of the Solar System. For Newton, it was not precisely the centre of the Sun or any other body that could be considered at rest, but rather \"the common centre of gravity of the Earth, the Sun and all the Planets is to be esteem'd the Centre of the World\", and this centre of gravity \"either is at rest or moves uniformly forward in a right line\". (Newton adopted the \"at rest\" alternative in view of common consent that the centre, wherever it was, was at rest.)",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Newton's postulate of an invisible force able to act over vast distances led to him being criticised for introducing \"occult agencies\" into science. Later, in the second edition of the Principia (1713), Newton firmly rejected such criticisms in a concluding General Scholium, writing that it was enough that the phenomena implied a gravitational attraction, as they did; but they did not so far indicate its cause, and it was both unnecessary and improper to frame hypotheses of things that were not implied by the phenomena. (Here Newton used what became his famous expression \"hypotheses non-fingo\".)",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "With the Principia, Newton became internationally recognised. He acquired a circle of admirers, including the Swiss-born mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 1710, Newton found 72 of the 78 \"species\" of cubic curves and categorised them into four types. In 1717, and probably with Newton's help, James Stirling proved that every cubic was one of these four types. Newton also claimed that the four types could be obtained by plane projection from one of them, and this was proved in 1731, four years after his death.",
"title": "Mid-life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In the 1690s, Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal and symbolic interpretation of the Bible. A manuscript Newton sent to John Locke in which he disputed the fidelity of 1 John 5:7—the Johannine Comma—and its fidelity to the original manuscripts of the New Testament, remained unpublished until 1785.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Newton was also a member of the Parliament of England for Cambridge University in 1689 and 1701, but according to some accounts his only comments were to complain about a cold draught in the chamber and request that the window be closed. He was, however, noted by Cambridge diarist Abraham de la Pryme to have rebuked students who were frightening locals by claiming that a house was haunted.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Newton moved to London to take up the post of warden of the Royal Mint in 1696, a position that he had obtained through the patronage of Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. He took charge of England's great recoining, trod on the toes of Lord Lucas, Governor of the Tower, and secured the job of deputy comptroller of the temporary Chester branch for Edmond Halley. Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint upon the death of Thomas Neale in 1699, a position Newton held for the last 30 years of his life. These appointments were intended as sinecures, but Newton took them seriously. He retired from his Cambridge duties in 1701, and exercised his authority to reform the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "As Warden, and afterwards as Master, of the Royal Mint, Newton estimated that 20 percent of the coins taken in during the Great Recoinage of 1696 were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by the felon being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convicting even the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult, but Newton proved equal to the task.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Disguised as a habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton had himself made a justice of the peace in all the home counties. A draft letter regarding the matter is included in Newton's personal first edition of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which he must have been amending at the time. Then he conducted more than 100 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers, and suspects between June 1698 and Christmas 1699. Newton successfully prosecuted 28 coiners.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Newton was made president of the Royal Society in 1703 and an associate of the French Académie des Sciences. In his position at the Royal Society, Newton made an enemy of John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, by prematurely publishing Flamsteed's Historia Coelestis Britannica, which Newton had used in his studies.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In April 1705, Queen Anne knighted Newton during a royal visit to Trinity College, Cambridge. The knighthood is likely to have been motivated by political considerations connected with the parliamentary election in May 1705, rather than any recognition of Newton's scientific work or services as Master of the Mint. Newton was the second scientist to be knighted, after Francis Bacon.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "As a result of a report written by Newton on 21 September 1717 to the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury, the bimetallic relationship between gold coins and silver coins was changed by royal proclamation on 22 December 1717, forbidding the exchange of gold guineas for more than 21 silver shillings. This inadvertently resulted in a silver shortage as silver coins were used to pay for imports, while exports were paid for in gold, effectively moving Britain from the silver standard to its first gold standard. It is a matter of debate as to whether he intended to do this or not. It has been argued that Newton conceived of his work at the Mint as a continuation of his alchemical work.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Newton was invested in the South Sea Company and lost some £20,000 (£4.4 million in 2020) when it collapsed in around 1720.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Toward the end of his life, Newton took up residence at Cranbury Park, near Winchester, with his niece and her husband, until his death. His half-niece, Catherine Barton, served as his hostess in social affairs at his house on Jermyn Street in London; he was her \"very loving Uncle\", according to his letter to her when she was recovering from smallpox.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Newton died in his sleep in London on 20 March 1727 (OS 20 March 1726; NS 31 March 1727). He was given a ceremonial funeral, attended by nobles, scientists, and philosophers, and was buried in Westminster Abbey among kings and queens. He was the first scientist to be buried in the abbey. Voltaire may have been present at his funeral. A bachelor, he had divested much of his estate to relatives during his last years, and died intestate. His papers went to John Conduitt and Catherine Barton.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Shortly after his death, a plaster death mask was moulded of Newton. It was used by Flemish sculptor John Michael Rysbrack in making a sculpture of Newton. It is now held by the Royal Society, who created a 3D scan of it in 2012.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Newton's hair was posthumously examined and found to contain mercury, probably resulting from his alchemical pursuits. Mercury poisoning could explain Newton's eccentricity in late life.",
"title": "Later life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Although it was claimed that he was once engaged, Newton never married. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire, who was in London at the time of Newton's funeral, said that he \"was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor had any commerce with women—a circumstance which was assured me by the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments\". There exists a widespread belief that Newton died a virgin, and writers as diverse as mathematician Charles Hutton, economist John Maynard Keynes, and physicist Carl Sagan have commented on it.",
"title": "Personality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Newton had a close friendship with the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, whom he met in London around 1689—some of their correspondence has survived. Their relationship came to an abrupt and unexplained end in 1693, and at the same time Newton suffered a nervous breakdown, which included sending wild accusatory letters to his friends Samuel Pepys and John Locke. His note to the latter included the charge that Locke \"endeavoured to embroil me with woemen\".",
"title": "Personality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Newton was relatively modest about his achievements, writing in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676, \"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.\" Two writers think that the sentence, written at a time when Newton and Hooke were in dispute over optical discoveries, was an oblique attack on Hooke (said to have been short and hunchbacked), rather than—or in addition to—a statement of modesty. On the other hand, the widely known proverb about standing on the shoulders of giants, published among others by seventeenth-century poet George Herbert (a former orator of the University of Cambridge and fellow of Trinity College) in his Jacula Prudentum (1651), had as its main point that \"a dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two\", and so its effect as an analogy would place Newton himself rather than Hooke as the 'dwarf'.",
"title": "Personality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In a later memoir, Newton wrote, \"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.\"",
"title": "Personality"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Although born into an Anglican family, by his thirties Newton held a Christian faith that, had it been made public, would not have been considered orthodox by mainstream Christianity, with one historian labelling him a heretic.",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "By 1672, he had started to record his theological researches in notebooks which he showed to no one and which have only recently been examined. They demonstrate an extensive knowledge of early Church writings and show that in the conflict between Athanasius and Arius which defined the Creed, he took the side of Arius, the loser, who rejected the conventional view of the Trinity. Newton \"recognized Christ as a divine mediator between God and man, who was subordinate to the Father who created him.\" He was especially interested in prophecy, but for him, \"the great apostasy was trinitarianism.\"",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Newton tried unsuccessfully to obtain one of the two fellowships that exempted the holder from the ordination requirement. At the last moment in 1675 he received a dispensation from the government that excused him and all future holders of the Lucasian chair.",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In Newton's eyes, worshipping Christ as God was idolatry, to him the fundamental sin. In 1999, historian Stephen D. Snobelen wrote, \"Isaac Newton was a heretic. But ... he never made a public declaration of his private faith—which the orthodox would have deemed extremely radical. He hid his faith so well that scholars are still unraveling his personal beliefs.\" Snobelen concludes that Newton was at least a Socinian sympathiser (he owned and had thoroughly read at least eight Socinian books), possibly an Arian and almost certainly an anti-trinitarian.",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Although the laws of motion and universal gravitation became Newton's best-known discoveries, he warned against using them to view the Universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock. He said, \"So then gravity may put the planets into motion, but without the Divine Power it could never put them into such a circulating motion, as they have about the sun\".",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Along with his scientific fame, Newton's studies of the Bible and of the early Church Fathers were also noteworthy. Newton wrote works on textual criticism, most notably An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture and Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John. He placed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ at 3 April, AD 33, which agrees with one traditionally accepted date.",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "He believed in a rationally immanent world, but he rejected the hylozoism implicit in Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. The ordered and dynamically informed Universe could be understood, and must be understood, by an active reason. In his correspondence, Newton claimed that in writing the Principia \"I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity\". He saw evidence of design in the system of the world: \"Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice\". But Newton insisted that divine intervention would eventually be required to reform the system, due to the slow growth of instabilities. For this, Leibniz lampooned him: \"God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.\"",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Newton's position was vigorously defended by his follower Samuel Clarke in a famous correspondence. A century later, Pierre-Simon Laplace's work Celestial Mechanics had a natural explanation for why the planet orbits do not require periodic divine intervention. The contrast between Laplace's mechanistic worldview and Newton's one is the most strident considering the famous answer which the French scientist gave Napoleon, who had criticised him for the absence of the Creator in the Mécanique céleste: \"Sire, j'ai pu me passer de cette hypothèse\" (\"Sir, I didn't need this hypothesis\").",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Scholars long debated whether Newton disputed the doctrine of the Trinity. His first biographer, David Brewster, who compiled his manuscripts, interpreted Newton as questioning the veracity of some passages used to support the Trinity, but never denying the doctrine of the Trinity as such. In the twentieth century, encrypted manuscripts written by Newton and bought by John Maynard Keynes (among others) were deciphered and it became known that Newton did indeed reject Trinitarianism.",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Newton and Robert Boyle's approach to the mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist pamphleteers as a viable alternative to the pantheists and enthusiasts, and was accepted hesitantly by orthodox preachers as well as dissident preachers like the latitudinarians. The clarity and simplicity of science was seen as a way to combat the emotional and metaphysical superlatives of both superstitious enthusiasm and the threat of atheism, and at the same time, the second wave of English deists used Newton's discoveries to demonstrate the possibility of a \"Natural Religion\".",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The attacks made against pre-Enlightenment \"magical thinking\", and the mystical elements of Christianity, were given their foundation with Boyle's mechanical conception of the universe. Newton gave Boyle's ideas their completion through mathematical proofs and, perhaps more importantly, was very successful in popularising them.",
"title": "Theology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.",
"title": "Alchemy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "–John Maynard Keynes, \"Newton, the Man\"",
"title": "Alchemy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Of an estimated ten million words of writing in Newton's papers, about one million deal with alchemy. Many of Newton's writings on alchemy are copies of other manuscripts, with his own annotations. Alchemical texts mix artisanal knowledge with philosophical speculation, often hidden behind layers of wordplay, allegory, and imagery to protect craft secrets. Some of the content contained in Newton's papers could have been considered heretical by the church.",
"title": "Alchemy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 1888, after spending sixteen years cataloguing Newton's papers, Cambridge University kept a small number and returned the rest to the Earl of Portsmouth. In 1936, a descendant offered the papers for sale at Sotheby's. The collection was broken up and sold for a total of about £9,000. John Maynard Keynes was one of about three dozen bidders who obtained part of the collection at auction. Keynes went on to reassemble an estimated half of Newton's collection of papers on alchemy before donating his collection to Cambridge University in 1946.",
"title": "Alchemy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "All of Newton's known writings on alchemy are currently being put online in a project undertaken by Indiana University: \"The Chymistry of Isaac Newton\" and summarised in a book.",
"title": "Alchemy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Newton's fundamental contributions to science include the quantification of gravitational attraction, the discovery that white light is actually a mixture of immutable spectral colors, and the formulation of the calculus. Yet there is another, more mysterious side to Newton that is imperfectly known, a realm of activity that spanned some thirty years of his life, although he kept it largely hidden from his contemporaries and colleagues. We refer to Newton's involvement in the discipline of alchemy, or as it was often called in seventeenth-century England, \"chymistry.\"",
"title": "Alchemy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In June 2020, two unpublished pages of Newton's notes on Jan Baptist van Helmont's book on plague, De Peste, were being auctioned online by Bonhams. Newton's analysis of this book, which he made in Cambridge while protecting himself from London's 1665–1666 infection, is the most substantial written statement he is known to have made about the plague, according to Bonhams. As far as the therapy is concerned, Newton writes that \"the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with various insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison\".",
"title": "Alchemy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange said that Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived, and once added that Newton was also \"the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.\" English poet Alexander Pope wrote the famous epitaph:",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "But this was not allowed to be inscribed in the monument. The epitaph in the monument is as follows:",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "H. S. E. ISAACUS NEWTON Eques Auratus, / Qui, animi vi prope divinâ, / Planetarum Motus, Figuras, / Cometarum semitas, Oceanique Aestus. Suâ Mathesi facem praeferente / Primus demonstravit: / Radiorum Lucis dissimilitudines, / Colorumque inde nascentium proprietates, / Quas nemo antea vel suspicatus erat, pervestigavit. / Naturae, Antiquitatis, S. Scripturae, / Sedulus, sagax, fidus Interpres / Dei O. M. Majestatem Philosophiâ asseruit, / Evangelij Simplicitatem Moribus expressit. / Sibi gratulentur Mortales, / Tale tantumque exstitisse / HUMANI GENERIS DECUS. / NAT. XXV DEC. A.D. MDCXLII. OBIIT. XX. MAR. MDCCXXVI,",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "which can be translated as follows:",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced. Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race! He was born on 25th December 1642, and died on 20th March 1726.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In a 2005 survey of members of Britain's Royal Society (formerly headed by Newton) asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton or Albert Einstein, the members deemed Newton to have made the greater overall contribution. In 1999, an opinion poll of 100 of the day's leading physicists voted Einstein the \"greatest physicist ever,\" with Newton the runner-up, while a parallel survey of rank-and-file physicists by the site PhysicsWeb gave the top spot to Newton. New Scientist called Newton \"the supreme genius and most enigmatic character in the history of science\". Einstein kept a picture of Newton on his study wall alongside ones of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The SI derived unit of force is named the newton in his honour.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Woolsthorpe Manor is a Grade I listed building by Historic England through being his birthplace and \"where he discovered gravity and developed his theories regarding the refraction of light\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In 1816, a tooth said to have belonged to Newton was sold for £730 in London to an aristocrat who had it set in a ring. Guinness World Records 2002 classified it as the most valuable tooth in the world, which would value approximately £25,000 (US$35,700) in late 2001. Who bought it and who currently has it has not been disclosed.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Newton himself often told the story that he was inspired to formulate his theory of gravitation by watching the fall of an apple from a tree. The story is believed to have passed into popular knowledge after being related by Catherine Barton, Newton's niece, to Voltaire. Voltaire then wrote in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1727), \"Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Although it has been said that the apple story is a myth and that he did not arrive at his theory of gravity at any single moment, acquaintances of Newton (such as William Stukeley, whose manuscript account of 1752 has been made available by the Royal Society) do in fact confirm the incident, though not the apocryphal version that the apple actually hit Newton's head. Stukeley recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on 15 April 1726:",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some appletrees, only he, & myself. amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. \"why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground,\" thought he to him self: occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood: \"why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "John Conduitt, Newton's assistant at the Royal Mint and husband of Newton's niece, also described the event when he wrote about Newton's life:",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in Lincolnshire. Whilst he was pensively meandering in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from a tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from earth, but that this power must extend much further than was usually thought. Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself & if so, that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "It is known from his notebooks that Newton was grappling in the late 1660s with the idea that terrestrial gravity extends, in an inverse-square proportion, to the Moon; however, it took him two decades to develop the full-fledged theory. The question was not whether gravity existed, but whether it extended so far from Earth that it could also be the force holding the Moon to its orbit. Newton showed that if the force decreased as the inverse square of the distance, one could indeed calculate the Moon's orbital period, and get good agreement. He guessed the same force was responsible for other orbital motions, and hence named it \"universal gravitation\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Various trees are claimed to be \"the\" apple tree which Newton describes. The King's School, Grantham claims that the tree was purchased by the school, uprooted and transported to the headmaster's garden some years later. The staff of the (now) National Trust-owned Woolsthorpe Manor dispute this, and claim that a tree present in their gardens is the one described by Newton. A descendant of the original tree can be seen growing outside the main gate of Trinity College, Cambridge, below the room Newton lived in when he studied there. The National Fruit Collection at Brogdale in Kent can supply grafts from their tree, which appears identical to Flower of Kent, a coarse-fleshed cooking variety.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Newton's monument (1731) can be seen in Westminster Abbey, at the north of the entrance to the choir against the choir screen, near his tomb. It was executed by the sculptor Michael Rysbrack (1694–1770) in white and grey marble with design by the architect William Kent. The monument features a figure of Newton reclining on top of a sarcophagus, his right elbow resting on several of his great books and his left hand pointing to a scroll with a mathematical design. Above him is a pyramid and a celestial globe showing the signs of the Zodiac and the path of the comet of 1680. A relief panel depicts putti using instruments such as a telescope and prism. The Latin inscription on the base translates as:",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced. Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race! He was born on 25 December 1642, and died on 20 March 1726/7.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "From 1978 until 1988, an image of Newton designed by Harry Ecclestone appeared on Series D £1 banknotes issued by the Bank of England (the last £1 notes to be issued by the Bank of England). Newton was shown on the reverse of the notes holding a book and accompanied by a telescope, a prism and a map of the Solar System.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "A statue of Isaac Newton, looking at an apple at his feet, can be seen at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. A large bronze statue, Newton, after William Blake, by Eduardo Paolozzi, dated 1995 and inspired by Blake's etching, dominates the piazza of the British Library in London. A bronze statue of Newton was erected in 1858 in the centre of Grantham where he went to school, prominently standing in front of Grantham Guildhall.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The still-surviving farmhouse at Woolsthorpe By Colsterworth is a Grade I listed building by Historic England through being his birthplace and \"where he discovered gravity and developed his theories regarding the refraction of light\".",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Enlightenment philosophers chose a short history of scientific predecessors—Galileo, Boyle, and Newton principally—as the guides and guarantors of their applications of the singular concept of nature and natural law to every physical and social field of the day. In this respect, the lessons of history and the social structures built upon it could be discarded.",
"title": "The Enlightenment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "It is held by European philosophers of the Enlightenment and by historians of the Enlightenment that Newton's publication of the Principia was a turning point in the Scientific Revolution and started the Enlightenment. It was Newton's conception of the universe based upon natural and rationally understandable laws that became one of the seeds for Enlightenment ideology. Locke and Voltaire applied concepts of natural law to political systems advocating intrinsic rights; the physiocrats and Adam Smith applied natural conceptions of psychology and self-interest to economic systems; and sociologists criticised the current social order for trying to fit history into natural models of progress. Monboddo and Samuel Clarke resisted elements of Newton's work, but eventually rationalised it to conform with their strong religious views of nature.",
"title": "The Enlightenment"
}
]
| Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus, though he developed calculus years before Leibniz. He is considered one of the greatest and most influential scientists in history. In the Principia, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint for centuries until it was superseded by the theory of relativity. Newton used his mathematical description of gravity to derive Kepler's laws of planetary motion, account for tides, the trajectories of comets, the precession of the equinoxes and other phenomena, eradicating doubt about the Solar System's heliocentricity. He demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and celestial bodies could be accounted for by the same principles. Newton's inference that the Earth is an oblate spheroid was later confirmed by the geodetic measurements of Maupertuis, La Condamine, and others, convincing most European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over earlier systems. Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a sophisticated theory of colour based on the observation that a prism separates white light into the colours of the visible spectrum. His work on light was collected in his highly influential book Opticks, published in 1704. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling, made the first theoretical calculation of the speed of sound, and introduced the notion of a Newtonian fluid. In addition to his work on calculus, as a mathematician Newton contributed to the study of power series, generalised the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, developed a method for approximating the roots of a function, and classified most of the cubic plane curves. Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian who privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. He refused to take holy orders in the Church of England, unlike most members of the Cambridge faculty of the day. Beyond his work on the mathematical sciences, Newton dedicated much of his time to the study of alchemy and biblical chronology, but most of his work in those areas remained unpublished until long after his death. Politically and personally tied to the Whig party, Newton served two brief terms as Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, in 1689–1690 and 1701–1702. He was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705 and spent the last three decades of his life in London, serving as Warden (1696–1699) and Master (1699–1727) of the Royal Mint, as well as president of the Royal Society (1703–1727). | 2001-10-22T18:51:11Z | 2023-12-31T15:38:36Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton |
14,631 | Immanuel Kant | Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy.
In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued space and time are mere "forms of intuition" that structure all experience and that the objects of experience are mere "appearances". The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. In an attempt to counter the philosophical doctrine of skepticism, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), his best-known work. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal to think of the objects of experience as conforming to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition and the categories of our understanding, so that we have a priori cognition of those objects. These claims have proved especially influential in the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology, which regard human activities as pre-oriented by cultural norms.
Kant believed that reason is the source of morality, and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory. Their exact nature, however, remains in dispute. He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states and international cooperation. His cosmopolitan reputation, however, is called into question by his promulgation of scientific racism for much of his career, although he altered his views on the subject in the last decade of his life.
Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia (since 1946 the Russian city of Kaliningrad). His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness-maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). It is possible that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantvainiai (German: Kantwaggen – today part of Priekulė) and were of Kursenieki origin.
Baptized Emanuel, Kant later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. He was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood).
The Kant household stressed the pietist values of religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. The young Immanuel's education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.
In his later years, Kant lived a strictly ordered life. It was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married but seems to have had a rewarding social life; he was a popular teacher as well as a modestly successful author, even before starting on his major philosophical works.
Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum, from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he would later remain for the rest of his professional life. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until he died in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded negatively. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism.
Kant had contacts with students, colleagues, friends and diners who frequented the local Masonic lodge.
His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748; he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–1747).
Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic, and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force.
In 1756, Kant also published three papers on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Kant's theory, which involved shifts in huge caverns filled with hot gases, though inaccurate, was one of the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and, in 1802, a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics, and anthropology, along with other topics.
In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant "nebulae" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms.
From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1766 Kant wrote a critical piece on Emanuel Swedenborg's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.
In 1770, Kant was appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.
It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50's after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledge—that is, reasoned knowledge—these two being related, but having very different processes.
Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a "dogmatic slumber" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume, in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature, had argued that we only know the mind through a subjective, essentially illusory series of perceptions. Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori, and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. He acquiesced to Hume somewhat by defining causality as a "regular, constant sequence of events in time, and nothing more".
Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. Kant was quite upset with its reception. His former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similar to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack", obscured by "all this heavy gossamer". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805), a professor of mathematics, published Explanations of Professor Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason.
Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique), and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.
In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now-famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself in the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.
He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics, and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold, Beck, and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions.
In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic." Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."
Kant's health, long poor, worsened. He died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering "Es ist gut" (It is good) before expiring. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum. Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. However, Heinrich Heine noted the magnitude of "his destructive, world-crushing thoughts" and considered him a sort of philosophical "executioner", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men "represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god."
When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a "high and broad" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well known through his portraits: "In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it—as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant—the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating."
Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924, in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location.
The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they captured the city. Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana, were included in the Königsberg City Museum. However, the museum was destroyed during World War II. A replica of the statue of Kant that in German times stood in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds.
After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism. The university was again renamed in the 2010s, to Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.
Like many of his contemporaries, Kant was greatly impressed with the scientific advances made by Newton and others. This new evidence of the power of human reason, however, called into question for many the traditional authority of politics and religion. In particular, the modern mechanistic view of the world called into question the very possibility of morality; for, if there is no agency, there cannot be any responsibility.
The aim of Kant's critical project is to secure human autonomy, the basis of religion and morality, from this threat of mechanism—and to do so in a way that preserves the advances of modern science.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant summarizes his philosophical concerns in the following three questions:
The Critique of Pure Reason focuses upon the first question and opens a conceptual space for an answer to the second question. It argues that even though we cannot, strictly know that we are free, we can—and for practical purposes, must—think of ourselves as free. In Kant's own words, "I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." Our rational faith in morality is further developed in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Critique of Practical Reason.
The Critique of the Power of Judgment argues we may rationally hope for the harmonious unity of the theoretical and practical domains treated in the first two Critiques on the basis, not only of its conceptual possibility, but also on the basis of our affective experience of natural beauty and, more generally, the organization of the natural world. In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, Kant endeavors to complete his answer to this third question.
These works all place the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. In brief, Kant argues that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles.
Kant's 1781 (revised 1787) book the Critique of Pure Reason has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy.
In the first Critique, and later on in other works as well, Kant frames the "general" and "real problem of pure reason" in terms of the following question: "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?"
To parse this claim, it is necessary to define some terms. First, Kant makes a distinction in terms of the source of the content of knowledge:
Second, he makes a distinction in terms of the form of knowledge:
An analytic proposition is true by nature of strictly conceptual relations. All analytic propositions are a priori (it is analytically true that no analytic proposition could be a posteriori). By contrast, a synthetic proposition is one the content of which includes something new. The truth or falsehood of a synthetic statement depends upon something more than what is contained in its concepts. The most obvious form of synthetic proposition is a simple empirical observation.
Philosophers such as David Hume believed that these were the only possible kinds of human reason and investigation, which he called "relations of ideas" and "matters of fact". Establishing the synthetic a priori as a third mode of knowledge would allow Kant to push back against Hume's skepticism about such matters as causation and metaphysical knowledge more generally. This is because, unlike a posteriori cognition, a priori cognition has "true or strict...universality" and includes a claim of "necessity".
Kant himself regards it as uncontroversial that we do have synthetic a priori knowledge—most obviously, that of mathematics. That 7 + 5 = 12, he claims, is a result not contained in the concepts of seven, five, and the addition operation. Yet, although he considers the possibility of such knowledge to be obvious, Kant nevertheless assumes the burden of providing a philosophical proof that we have a priori knowledge in mathematics, the natural sciences, and metaphysics. It is the twofold aim of the Critique both to prove and to explain the possibility of this knowledge.
Before turning to Kant's arguments in the body of the Critique, there are two more distinctions from its introductory sections that must be introduced.
"There are", Kant says, "two stems of human cognition, which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, but through the second of which they are thought."
Kant's term for the object of sensibility is intuition, and his term for the object of the understanding is concept. In general terms, the former is a non-discursive representation of a particular object, and the latter is a discursive (or mediate) representation of a general type of object. The conditions of possible experience require both intuitions and concepts, that is, the affection of the receptive sensibility and the actively synthesizing power of the understanding. Thus the statement: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."
Kant's basic strategy in the first half of his book will be to argue that some intuitions and concepts are pure—that is, are contributed entirely by the mind, independent of anything empirical. Knowledge generated on this basis, under certain conditions, can be synthetic a priori. This insight is known as Kant's "Copernican revolution", because, just as Copernicus advanced astronomy by way of a radical shift in perspective, so Kant here claims do the same for metaphysics.
The second half of the Critique is the explicitly critical part. In this "transcendental dialectic", Kant argues that many of the claims of traditional rationalist metaphysics violate the criteria he claims to establishing the first, "constructive" part of his book. As Kant observes, "human reason, without being moved by the mere vanity of knowing it all, inexorably pushes on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason". It is the project of "the critique of pure reason" to establish the limits as to just how far reason may legitimately so proceed.
The section of the Critique entitled "The transcendental aesthetic" advances Kant's famous thesis of transcendental idealism. Something is "transcendental" if it is a necessary condition for the possibility of experience, and "idealism" denotes some form of mind-dependence that must be further specified. (The correct interpretation of Kant's own specification remains controversial.)
The thesis, then, states that human beings only experience and know appearances, not things-in-themselves, because space and time are nothing but the subjective forms of intuition that we ourselves contribute to experience.
Nevertheless, although Kant says that space and time are "transcendentally ideal"—the pure forms of human sensibility, rather than part of nature or reality as it exists in-itself—he also claims that they are "empirically real", by which he means "that 'everything that can come before us externally as an object' is in both space and time, and that our internal intuitions of ourselves are in time". However we may interpret Kant's doctrine, he clearly wishes to distinguish his position from the subjective idealism of Berkeley.
Paul Guyer, although critical of many of Kant's arguments in this section, nevertheless writes of the "Transcendental Aesthetic" that it "not only lays the first stone in Kant's constructive theory of knowledge; it also lays the foundation for both his critique and his reconstruction of traditional metaphysics. It argues that all genuine knowledge requires a sensory component, and thus that metaphysical claims that transcend the possibility of sensory confirmation can never amount to knowledge."
One interpretation, known as the "two-world" interpretation, regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". However, Kant also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendent object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone; this is known as the "two-aspect" view.
Following the "Transcendental Analytic" is the "Transcendental Logic". Whereas the former was concerned with the contributions of the sensibility, the latter is concerned, first, with the contributions of the understanding ("Transcendental Analytic") and, second, with the faculty of reason as the source of both metaphysical errors and genuine regulatory principles ("Transcendental Dialectic").
The "Transcendental Analytic" is further divided into two sections. The first, "Analytic of Concepts", is concerned with establishing the universality and necessity of the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e., the categories). This section contains Kant's famous "transcendental deduction". The second, "Analytic of Principles", is concerned with the application of those pure concepts in empirical judgments. This second section is longer than the first and is further divided into many sub-sections.
The "Analytic of Concepts" argues for the universal and necessary validity of the pure concepts of the understanding, or the categories, e.g., the concepts of substance and causation. These twelve basic categories define what it is to be a thing in general—that is, they articulate the necessary conditions according to which something is a possible object of experience. These, in conjunction with the a priori forms of intuition, are the basis of all synthetic a priori cognition.
According to Guyer and Wood, "Kant's idea is that just as there are certain essential features of all judgments, so there must be certain corresponding ways in which we form the concepts of objects so that judgments may be about objects."
Kant provides two central lines of argumentation in support of his claims about the categories. The first, known as the "metaphysical deduction", proceeds analytically from a table of the Aristotelian logical functions of judgment. As Kant was aware, however, this assumes precisely what the skeptic rejects, namely, the existence of synthetic a priori cognition. For this reason, Kant also supplies a synthetic argument that does not depend upon the assumption in dispute.
This argument, provided under the heading "Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding", is widely considered to be both the most important and the most difficult of Kant's arguments in the Critique. Kant himself said that it is the one that cost him the most labor. Frustrated by its confused reception in the first edition of his book, he rewrote it entirely for the second edition.
The "Transcendental Deduction" gives Kant's argument that these pure concepts apply universally and necessarily to the objects that are given in experience. According to Guyer and Wood, "He centers his argument on the premise that our experience can be ascribed to a single identical subject, via what he calls the 'transcendental unity of apperception,' only if the elements of experience given in intuition are synthetically combined so as to present us with objects that are thought through the categories."
Kant's principle of apperception is that "The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me." The necessary possibility of the self-ascription of the representations of self-consciousness, identical to itself through time, is an a priori conceptual truth that cannot be based on experience.
This, however, is only a bare sketch of one of the arguments that Kant presents.
Kant's deduction of the categories in the "Analytic of Concepts", if successful, demonstrates its claims about the categories only in an abstract way. The task of the "Analytic of Principles" is to show both that they must universally apply to objects given in actual experience (i.e., manifolds of intuition) and how it is they do so.
In the first book of this section on the "schematism", Kant connects each of the purely logical categories of the understanding to the temporality of intuition to show that, although non-empirical, they do have purchase upon the objects of experience. The second book continues this line of argument in four chapters, each associated with one of the category groupings. In some cases, it adds a connection to the spatial dimension of intuition to the categories it analyzes.
The fourth chapter of this section, "The Analogies of Experience", marks a shift from "mathematical" to "dynamical" principles, that is, to those that deal with relations among objects. Some commentators consider this the most significant section of the Critique. The analogies are three in number:
The fourth section of this chapter, which is not an analogy, deals with the empirical use of the modal categories. That was the end of the chapter in the A edition of the Critique.
The B edition, however, includes one more short section, "The Refutation of Idealism". In this section, by analysis of the concept of self-consciousness, Kant argues that his transcendental idealism is a "critical" or "formal" idealism that does not deny the existence of reality apart from our subjective representations.
The final chapter of "The Analytic of Principles" distinguishes phenomena, of which we have can have genuine knowledge, from noumena, a term which refers to objects of pure thought that we cannot know, but to which we may still refer "in a negative sense".
An Appendix to the section further develops Kant's criticism of Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism by arguing that its "dogmatic" metaphysics confuses the "mere features of concepts through which we think things...[with] features of the objects themselves". Against this, Kant reasserts his own insistence upon the necessity of a sensible component in all genuine knowledge.
The second of the two Divisions of "The Transcendental Logic", "The Transcendental Dialectic", contains the "negative" portion of Kant's Critique, which builds upon the "positive" arguments of the preceding "Transcendental Analytic" to expose the limits of metaphysical speculation. In particular, it is concerned to demonstrate as spurious the efforts of reason to arrive at knowledge independent of sensibility. This endeavor, Kant argues, is doomed to failure, which he claims to demonstrate by showing that reason, unbounded by sense, is always capable of generating opposing or otherwise incompatible conclusions.
Like "the light dove, in free flight cutting through the air, the resistance of which it feels", reason "could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space". Against this, Kant claims that, absent epistemic friction, there can be no knowledge.
Nevertheless, Kant's critique is not entirely destructive. He presents the speculative excesses of traditional metaphysics as inherent in our very capacity of reason. Moreover, he argues that its products are not without some (carefully qualified) regulative value.
Kant calls the basic concepts of metaphysics "ideas". They are different from the concepts of understanding in that they are not limited by the critical stricture limiting knowledge to the conditions of possible experience and its objects. "Transcendental illusion" is Kant's term for the tendency of reason to produce such ideas.
Although reason has a "logical use" of simply drawing inferences from principles, in "The Transcendental Dialectic", Kant is concerned with its purportedly "real use" to arrive at conclusions by way of unchecked regressive syllogistic ratiocination.
The three categories of relation, pursued without regard to the limits of possible experience, yield the three central ideas of traditional metaphysics:
Although Kant denies that these ideas can be objects of genuine cognition, he argues that they are the result of reason's inherent drive to unify cognition into a systematic whole.
Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics was divided into four parts: ontology, psychology, cosmology, and theology. Kant replaces the first with the positive results of the first part of the Critique. He proposes to replace the following three with his later doctrines of anthropology, the metaphysical foundations of natural science, and the critical postulation of human freedom and morality.
In the second of the two Books of "The Transcendental Dialectic", Kant undertakes to demonstrate the contradictory nature of unbounded reason. He does this by developing contradictions in each of the three metaphysical disciplines that he contends are, in fact, pseudo-sciences. This section of the Critique is long and Kant's arguments are extremely detailed. In this context, it not possible to do much more than enumerate the topics of discussion.
The first chapter addresses what Kant terms the paralogisms—i.e., false inferences—that pure reason makes in the metaphysical discipline of rational psychology. He argues that one cannot take the mere thought of "I" in the proposition "I think" as the proper cognition of "I" as an object. In this way, he claims to debunk various metaphysical theses about the substantiality, unity, and self-identity of the soul.
The second chapter, which is the longest, takes up the topic Kant calls the antinomies of pure reason—that is, the contradictions of reason with itself—in the metaphysical discipline of rational cosmology. (Originally, Kant had thought that all transcendental illusion could be analyzed in antinomic terms.) He presents four cases in which he claims reason is able to prove opposing theses with equal plausibility:
Kant further argues in each case that his doctrine of transcendental idealism is able to resolve the antinomy.
The third chapter examines fallacious arguments about God in rational theology under the heading of the "Ideal of Pure Reason". (Whereas an idea is a pure concept generated by reason, an ideal is the concept of an idea as an individual thing.) Here Kant addresses and claims to refute three traditional arguments for the existence of God: the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the physio-theological argument (i.e., the argument from design).
The results of the transcendental dialectic so far appear to be entirely negative. In an Appendix to this section, however, Kant rejects such a conclusion. The ideas of pure reason, he argues, have an important regulatory function in directing and organizing our theoretical and practical inquiry. Kant's later works elaborate upon this function at length and in detail.
Kant developed his ethics, or moral philosophy, in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797). With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity—understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others—as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold.
Kant is known for his theory that all moral obligation is grounded in what he calls the "categorical imperative", which is derived from the concept of duty. He argues that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy; to act on the moral law has no other motive than "worthiness to be happy".
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed", and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of ... its transcendental meaning", which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling block" that has embarrassed speculative reason.
Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom"; he calls the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions, but are held analogously with the universal law of causality, moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason a priori dictate "what is to be done".
Kant's categories of freedom function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free, and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such.
Kant makes a distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives. A hypothetical imperative is one that we must obey to satisfy contingent desires. A categorical imperative binds us regardless of our desires: for example, everyone has a duty to not lie, regardless of circumstances, even though it is sometimes in our narrowly selfish interest to do so. These imperatives are morally binding because they are based on reason, rather than contingent facts about an agent. Unlike hypothetical imperatives, which bind us insofar as we are part of a group or society which we owe duties to, we cannot opt out of the categorical imperative, because we cannot opt out of being rational agents. We owe a duty to rationality by virtue of being rational agents; therefore, rational moral principles apply to all rational agents at all times. Stated in other terms, with all forms of instrumental rationality excluded from morality, "the moral law itself, Kant holds, can only be the form of lawfulness itself, because nothing else is left once all content has been rejected".
Kant provides three formulations for the categorical imperative. He claims that these are necessarily equivalent, as all being expressions of the pure universality of the moral law as such. Many scholars, however, are not convinced.
The formulas are as follows:
Kant defines maxim as a "subjective principle of volition", which is distinguished from an "objective principle or 'practical law.'" While "the latter is valid for every rational being and is a 'principle according to which they ought to act[,]' a maxim 'contains the practical rule which reason determines in accordance with the conditions of the subject (often their ignorance or inclinations) and is thus the principle according to which the subject does act.'"
Maxims fail to qualify as practical laws if they produce a contradiction in conception or a contradiction in the will when universalized. A contradiction in conception happens when, if a maxim were to be universalized, it ceases to make sense, because the "maxim would necessarily destroy itself as soon as it was made a universal law". For example, if the maxim 'It is permissible to break promises' was universalized, no one would trust any promises made, so the idea of a promise would become meaningless; the maxim would be self-contradictory because, when it is universalized, promises cease to be meaningful. The maxim is not moral because it is logically impossible to universalize—that is, we could not conceive of a world where this maxim was universalized. A maxim can also be immoral if it creates a contradiction in the will when universalized. This does not mean a logical contradiction, but that universalizing the maxim leads to a state of affairs that no rational being would desire.
As Kant explains in the 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (and as its title directly indicates) that text is "nothing more than the search for and establishment of the supreme principle of morality". His promised Metaphysics of Morals, however, was much delayed and did not appear until its two parts, "The Doctrine of Right" and "The Doctrine of Virtue", were published separately in 1797 and 1798. The first deals with political philosophy, the second with ethics.
"The Doctrine of Virtue" provides "a very different account of ordinary moral reasoning" than the one suggested by the Groundwork. It is concerned with duties of virtue or "ends that are at the same time duties". It is here, in the domain of ethics, that the greatest innovation by The Metaphysics of Morals is to be found. According to Kant's account, "ordinary moral reasoning is fundamentally teleological—it is reasoning about what ends we are constrained by morality to pursue, and the priorities among these ends we are required to observe". More specifically,
There are two sorts of ends that it is our duty to have: our own perfection and the happiness of others (MS 6:385). "Perfection" includes both our natural perfection (the development of our talents, skills, and capacities of understanding) and moral perfection (our virtuous disposition) (MS 6:387). A person's "happiness" is the greatest rational whole of the ends the person set for the sake of her own satisfaction (MS 6:387–388).
Kant's elaboration of this teleological doctrine offers up a moral theory very different from the one typically attributed to him on the basis of his foundational works alone.
In Towards Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project, Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. His classical republican theory was extended in the Doctrine of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in Perpetual Peace as natural rather than rational:
What affords this guarantee (surety) is nothing less than the great artist nature (natura daedala rerum) from whose mechanical course purposiveness shines forth visibly, letting concord arise by means of the discord between human beings even against their will; and for this reason nature, regarded as necessitation by a cause the laws of whose operation are unknown to us, is called fate, but if we consider its purposiveness in the course of the world as the profound wisdom of a higher cause directed to the objective final end of the human race and predetermining this course of the world, it is called providence.
Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization: "In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law.'" "Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state rightly so called is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such."
He opposed "democracy", which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "democracy in the strict sense of the word is necessarily a despotism because it establishes an executive power in which all decide for and, if need be, against one (who thus does not agree), so that all, who are nevertheless not all, decide; and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom." As with most writers at the time, he distinguished three forms of government—namely, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy—with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.
He believed in republican ideals and forms of governance, and rule of law brought on by them.
Although Kant published this as a "popular piece", Mary J. Gregor points out that two years later, in The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant claims to demonstrate systematically that "establishing universal and lasting peace constitutes not merely a part of the doctrine of right, but rather the entire final end of the doctrine of right within the limits of mere reason".
The Doctrine of Right, published in 1797, contains Kant's most mature and systematic contribution to political philosophy. It addresses duties according to law, which are "concerned only with protecting the external freedom of individuals" and indifferent to incentives. (Although we do have a moral duty "to limit ourselves to actions that are right, that duty is not part of [right] itself".) Its basic political idea is that "each person's entitlement to be his or her own master is only consistent with the entitlements of others if public legal institutions are in place".
Starting in the twentieth century, commentators have tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, although in the nineteenth century this had not been the prevalent view. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose letters helped make Kant famous, wrote: "I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason." According to Johann Schultz, who wrote one of the first commentaries on Kant: "And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?" The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to Spinozism, which was widely seen as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone.
Kant articulates his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations to those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition, and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs for the existence of God that were grounded in pure reason (particularly the ontological argument) and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and to Christianity in particular. Other interpreters, nevertheless, consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief.
Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism. Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example, Allen W. Wood and Merold Westphal. As for Kant's book Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality, and Christianity to ethics. However, many interpreters, including Allen W. Wood and Lawrence Pasternack, now agree with Stephen Palmquist's claim that a better way of reading Kant's Religion is to see him as raising morality to the status of religion.
Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste". In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment", the first major division of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that differs from its modern sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste", noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori".
After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.
In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical".
A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e., judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity. This universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense. Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal.
In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason.
Some commentators argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764.
The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great". This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self. In the dynamical sublime, there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
Kant developed a theory of humor that has been interpreted as an "incongruity" theory. He illustrated his theory of humor by telling three narrative jokes in the Critique of Judgment. He thought that the physiological impact of humor is akin to that of music.
Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society" and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind "belongs to culture".
Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. Transcripts of Kant's lectures on anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German.
Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.
Kant was also the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments and plotted in two dimensions "what belongs to a human being's faculty of desire": "his natural aptitude or natural predisposition" and "his temperament or sensibility". Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic, phlegmatics as balanced and weak, sanguines as balanced and energetic, and melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits.
Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as "what nature makes of the human being"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explores the things that a human "can and should make of himself".
Kant's theory of race and his prejudicial beliefs are among the most contentious areas of recent Kant scholarship. While few, if any, dispute the overt racism and chauvinism present in his work, a more contested question is the degree to which it degrades or invalidates his other contributions. His most severe critics assert that Kant intentionally manipulated science to support chattel slavery and discrimination. Others acknowledge that he lived in an era of immature science, with many erroneous beliefs, some racist, all appearing decades before evolution, molecular genetics, and other sciences that today are taken for granted.
Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend racism. Philosopher Charles W. Mills is unequivocal: "Kant is also seen as one of the central figures in the birth of modern 'scientific' racism. Whereas other contributors to early racial thought like Carolus Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had offered only 'empirical' (scare-quotes necessary!) observation, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race."
Using the four temperaments of ancient Greece, Kant proposed a hierarchy of racial categories including white Europeans, black Africans, and red Native Americans. Although he was a proponent of scientific racism for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European colonialism in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795).
Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be "degraded" and that "fusing of races" is undesirable, for "not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans." He states that "instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, nature has here made a law of just the opposite."
Kant was also an anti-Semite, believing that Jews were incapable of transcending material forces, which a moral order required. In this way, Jews are presented as the opposite of autonomous, rational Christians, and therefore incapable of being incorporated into an ethical Christian society. In his "Anthropology", Kant called the Jews "a nation of cheaters" and portrayed them as "a group that has followed not the path of transcendental freedom but that of enslavement to the material world".
Charles W. Mills wrote that Kant has been "sanitized for public consumption", his racist works conveniently ignored. Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant "supplied the first scientific definition of race". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who he believed often glossed over this part of his life and works.
Pauline Kleingeld argues that, while Kant "did defend a racial hierarchy until at least the end of the 1780s", his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in Perpetual Peace (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European colonialism, which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework.
While Kant's racist rhetoric is indicative of the state of scholarship and science during the 18th century, German philosopher Daniel-Pascal Zorn explains the risk of taking period quotations out of context. Many of Kant's most outrageous quotations are from a series of articles from 1777–1788, a public exchange among Kant, Herder, natural scientist Georg Forster, and other scholars prominent in that period. Kant asserts that all races of humankind are of the same species, challenging the position of Forster and others that the races were distinct species. While his commentary is clearly biased at times, certain extreme statements were patterned specifically to paraphrase or counter Forster and other authors. By considering the full arc of Kant's scholarship, Zorn notes the progression in both his philosophical and his anthropological works, "with which he argues, against the zeitgeist, for the unity of humanity".
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Although the basic tenets of Kant's transcendental idealism (i.e., that space and time are a priori forms of human perception rather than real properties and the claim that formal logic and transcendental logic coincide) have been claimed to be falsified by modern science and logic, and no longer set the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers, Kant is credited with having innovated the way philosophical inquiry has been carried on at least up to the early nineteenth century. This shift consisted of several closely related innovations that, although highly contentious in themselves, have become important in subsequent philosophy and in the social sciences broadly construed:
Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include German idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction.
During his own life, much critical attention was paid to Kant's thought. He influenced Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and of German Idealism generally, in the UK and the US. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), he credits Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive, but an active agent in the apprehension of reality.
Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a "transcendental subject" (i.e., human consciousness) apart from the living individual as well as from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed, although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction. Similar concerns motivated Hegel's criticisms of Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community. In a sense, Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns.
Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain by philosophers such as Thomas Carlyle to challenge the nineteenth-century decline in religious faith. British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time.
Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G. E. Schulze, Jacobi, and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself. Things-in-themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe, nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the Critique of Pure Reason, philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself. Many have argued that, if such a thing exists beyond experience, then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category "causality" beyond the realm of experience.
With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's own influence began to wane, but a re-examination of his ideas began in Germany in 1865 with the publication of Kant und die Epigonen by Otto Liebmann, whose motto was "Back to Kant". There proceeded an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as Neo-Kantianism.
Kant's notion of "critique" has been more broadly influential. The early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitation—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting.
French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".
Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through the a priori intuition of space and time, as transcendental preconditions of experience. Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism.
With his Perpetual Peace, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science. More concretely, Constructivist theorist Alexander Wendt proposed that the anarchy of the international system could evolve from the 'brutish' Hobbesian anarchy understood by Realist theorists, through Lockean anarchy, and ultimately a Kantian anarchy in which states would see their self-interests as inextricably linked to the well being of other states, thus transforming international politics into a far more peaceful form.
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P. F. Strawson, Onora O'Neill, and Quassim Cassam, and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard. Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.
Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy. They have argued against relativism, supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy.
Mou Zongsan's study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou's personal philosophy, namely New Confucianism. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant's philosophy—having translated all three of Kant's critiques—served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to westernize in China.
Kant's influence has also extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences—as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget and Carl Gustav Jung, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development, though one which he later criticized and rejected. In recent years, there has also been renewed interest in Kant's theory of mind from the point of view of formal logic and computer science.
Because of the thoroughness of Kant's paradigm shift, his influence extends well beyond this to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology.
Unless otherwise noted, all citations are to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in English Translation, 16 vols., ed. Guyer, Paul, and Wood, Allen W. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Citations in the article are to individual works per abbreviations in List of Major works below.
Abbreviations used in body of article are boldface in brackets. Unless otherwise noted, pagination is to the critical Akademie edition, which can be found in the margins of the Cambridge translations.
Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the Academy edition (the Akademie-Ausgabe abbreviated as AA or Ak) of Kant's writings (Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895, and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections:
An electronic version is also available: Elektronische Edition der Gesammelten Werke Immanuel Kants (vols. 1–23). | [
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"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy.",
"title": ""
},
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"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued space and time are mere \"forms of intuition\" that structure all experience and that the objects of experience are mere \"appearances\". The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. In an attempt to counter the philosophical doctrine of skepticism, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), his best-known work. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal to think of the objects of experience as conforming to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition and the categories of our understanding, so that we have a priori cognition of those objects. These claims have proved especially influential in the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology, which regard human activities as pre-oriented by cultural norms.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Kant believed that reason is the source of morality, and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory. Their exact nature, however, remains in dispute. He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states and international cooperation. His cosmopolitan reputation, however, is called into question by his promulgation of scientific racism for much of his career, although he altered his views on the subject in the last decade of his life.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 into a Prussian German family of Lutheran Protestant faith in Königsberg, East Prussia (since 1946 the Russian city of Kaliningrad). His mother, Anna Regina Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Königsberg to a father from Nuremberg. Her surname is sometimes erroneously given as Porter. Kant's father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harness-maker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). It is possible that the Kants got their name from the village of Kantvainiai (German: Kantwaggen – today part of Priekulė) and were of Kursenieki origin.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Baptized Emanuel, Kant later changed the spelling of his name to Immanuel after learning Hebrew. He was the fourth of nine children (six of whom reached adulthood).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The Kant household stressed the pietist values of religious devotion, humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. The young Immanuel's education was strict, punitive and disciplinary, and focused on Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In his later years, Kant lived a strictly ordered life. It was said that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married but seems to have had a rewarding social life; he was a popular teacher as well as a modestly successful author, even before starting on his major philosophical works.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Kant showed a great aptitude for study at an early age. He first attended the Collegium Fridericianum, from which he graduated at the end of the summer of 1740. In 1740, aged 16, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he would later remain for the rest of his professional life. He studied the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff under Martin Knutzen (Associate Professor of Logic and Metaphysics from 1734 until he died in 1751), a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Isaac Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as \"the pillow for the lazy mind\". He also dissuaded Kant from idealism, the idea that reality is purely mental, which most philosophers in the 18th century regarded negatively. The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant later included in the Critique of Pure Reason was developed partially in opposition to traditional idealism.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Kant had contacts with students, colleagues, friends and diners who frequented the local Masonic lodge.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant left Königsberg shortly after August 1748; he would return there in August 1754. He became a private tutor in the towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. In 1749, he published his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (written in 1745–1747).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Kant is best known for his work in the philosophy of ethics and metaphysics, but he made significant contributions to other disciplines. In 1754, while contemplating on a prize question by the Berlin Academy about the problem of Earth's rotation, he argued that the Moon's gravity would slow down Earth's spin and he also put forth the argument that gravity would eventually cause the Moon's tidal locking to coincide with the Earth's rotation. The next year, he expanded this reasoning to the formation and evolution of the Solar System in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. In 1755, Kant received a license to lecture in the University of Königsberg and began lecturing on a variety of topics including mathematics, physics, logic, and metaphysics. In his 1756 essay on the theory of winds, Kant laid out an original insight into the Coriolis force.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1756, Kant also published three papers on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Kant's theory, which involved shifts in huge caverns filled with hot gases, though inaccurate, was one of the first systematic attempts to explain earthquakes in natural rather than supernatural terms. In 1757, Kant began lecturing on geography making him one of the first lecturers to explicitly teach geography as its own subject. Geography was one of Kant's most popular lecturing topics and, in 1802, a compilation by Friedrich Theodor Rink of Kant's lecturing notes, Physical Geography, was released. After Kant became a professor in 1770, he expanded the topics of his lectures to include lectures on natural law, ethics, and anthropology, along with other topics.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In the Universal Natural History, Kant laid out the nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System had formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized formed from a much larger spinning gas cloud. He further suggested that other distant \"nebulae\" might be other galaxies. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy, for the first time extending it beyond the solar system to galactic and intergalactic realms.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "From then on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. By 1764, Kant had become a notable popular author, and wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; he was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as \"The Prize Essay\"). In 1766 Kant wrote a critical piece on Emanuel Swedenborg's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1770, Kant was appointed Full Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. In defense of this appointment, Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. To miss this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoiding this error does metaphysics flourish.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "It is often claimed that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50's after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these \"pre-critical\" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "At age 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher, and much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the inaugural dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He needed to explain how we combine what is known as sensory knowledge with the other type of knowledge—that is, reasoned knowledge—these two being related, but having very different processes.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Kant also credited David Hume with awakening him from a \"dogmatic slumber\" in which he had unquestioningly accepted the tenets of both religion and natural philosophy. Hume, in his 1739 Treatise on Human Nature, had argued that we only know the mind through a subjective, essentially illusory series of perceptions. Ideas such as causality, morality, and objects are not evident in experience, so their reality may be questioned. Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself, and resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant countered Hume's empiricism by claiming that some knowledge exists inherently in the mind, independent of experience. He drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that worldly objects can be intuited a priori, and that intuition is consequently distinct from objective reality. He acquiesced to Hume somewhat by defining causality as a \"regular, constant sequence of events in time, and nothing more\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique disappointed Kant's readers upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a convoluted style. Kant was quite upset with its reception. His former student, Johann Gottfried Herder criticized it for placing reason as an entity worthy of criticism instead of considering the process of reasoning within the context of language and one's entire personality. Similar to Christian Garve and Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, he rejected Kant's position that space and time possessed a form that could be analyzed. Additionally, Garve and Feder also faulted Kant's Critique for not explaining differences in perception of sensations. Its density made it, as Herder said in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a \"tough nut to crack\", obscured by \"all this heavy gossamer\". Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. Shortly thereafter, Kant's friend Johann Friedrich Schultz (1739–1805), a professor of mathematics, published Explanations of Professor Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Königsberg, 1784), which was a brief but very accurate commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Kant's reputation gradually rose through the latter portion of the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, \"Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?\"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published a series of public letters on Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the pantheism controversy. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, leading to a bitter public dispute among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a debate about the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique), and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of the French Revolution. Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship. This insubordination earned him a now-famous reprimand from the King. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion. Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself in the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics, and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth-century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing Kantian philosophy. Despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples and followers (including Reinhold, Beck, and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799. It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1800, a student of Kant named Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche (1762–1842) published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Friedrich Meier entitled Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great 19th-century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to Logik, that \"Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic.\" Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, \"Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Kant's health, long poor, worsened. He died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering \"Es ist gut\" (It is good) before expiring. His unfinished final work was published as Opus Postumum. Kant always cut a curious figure in his lifetime for his modest, rigorously scheduled habits, which have been referred to as clocklike. However, Heinrich Heine noted the magnitude of \"his destructive, world-crushing thoughts\" and considered him a sort of philosophical \"executioner\", comparing him to Robespierre with the observation that both men \"represented in the highest the type of provincial bourgeois. Nature had destined them to weigh coffee and sugar, but Fate determined that they should weigh other things and placed on the scales of the one a king, on the scales of the other a god.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "When his body was transferred to a new burial spot, his skull was measured during the exhumation and found to be larger than the average German male's with a \"high and broad\" forehead. His forehead has been an object of interest ever since it became well known through his portraits: \"In Döbler's portrait and in Kiefer's faithful if expressionistic reproduction of it—as well as in many of the other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits of Kant—the forehead is remarkably large and decidedly retreating.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Kant's mausoleum adjoins the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924, in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved to a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated and was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same location.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The tomb and its mausoleum are among the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they captured the city. Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum. Artifacts previously owned by Kant, known as Kantiana, were included in the Königsberg City Museum. However, the museum was destroyed during World War II. A replica of the statue of Kant that in German times stood in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-language Kaliningrad State University, which appropriated the campus and surviving buildings. In 2005, the university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia. The name change was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism. The university was again renamed in the 2010s, to Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Like many of his contemporaries, Kant was greatly impressed with the scientific advances made by Newton and others. This new evidence of the power of human reason, however, called into question for many the traditional authority of politics and religion. In particular, the modern mechanistic view of the world called into question the very possibility of morality; for, if there is no agency, there cannot be any responsibility.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The aim of Kant's critical project is to secure human autonomy, the basis of religion and morality, from this threat of mechanism—and to do so in a way that preserves the advances of modern science.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant summarizes his philosophical concerns in the following three questions:",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Critique of Pure Reason focuses upon the first question and opens a conceptual space for an answer to the second question. It argues that even though we cannot, strictly know that we are free, we can—and for practical purposes, must—think of ourselves as free. In Kant's own words, \"I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.\" Our rational faith in morality is further developed in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Critique of Practical Reason.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Critique of the Power of Judgment argues we may rationally hope for the harmonious unity of the theoretical and practical domains treated in the first two Critiques on the basis, not only of its conceptual possibility, but also on the basis of our affective experience of natural beauty and, more generally, the organization of the natural world. In Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, Kant endeavors to complete his answer to this third question.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "These works all place the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. In brief, Kant argues that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Kant's 1781 (revised 1787) book the Critique of Pure Reason has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In the first Critique, and later on in other works as well, Kant frames the \"general\" and \"real problem of pure reason\" in terms of the following question: \"How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "To parse this claim, it is necessary to define some terms. First, Kant makes a distinction in terms of the source of the content of knowledge:",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Second, he makes a distinction in terms of the form of knowledge:",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "An analytic proposition is true by nature of strictly conceptual relations. All analytic propositions are a priori (it is analytically true that no analytic proposition could be a posteriori). By contrast, a synthetic proposition is one the content of which includes something new. The truth or falsehood of a synthetic statement depends upon something more than what is contained in its concepts. The most obvious form of synthetic proposition is a simple empirical observation.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Philosophers such as David Hume believed that these were the only possible kinds of human reason and investigation, which he called \"relations of ideas\" and \"matters of fact\". Establishing the synthetic a priori as a third mode of knowledge would allow Kant to push back against Hume's skepticism about such matters as causation and metaphysical knowledge more generally. This is because, unlike a posteriori cognition, a priori cognition has \"true or strict...universality\" and includes a claim of \"necessity\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Kant himself regards it as uncontroversial that we do have synthetic a priori knowledge—most obviously, that of mathematics. That 7 + 5 = 12, he claims, is a result not contained in the concepts of seven, five, and the addition operation. Yet, although he considers the possibility of such knowledge to be obvious, Kant nevertheless assumes the burden of providing a philosophical proof that we have a priori knowledge in mathematics, the natural sciences, and metaphysics. It is the twofold aim of the Critique both to prove and to explain the possibility of this knowledge.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Before turning to Kant's arguments in the body of the Critique, there are two more distinctions from its introductory sections that must be introduced.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "\"There are\", Kant says, \"two stems of human cognition, which may perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root, namely sensibility and understanding, through the first of which objects are given to us, but through the second of which they are thought.\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Kant's term for the object of sensibility is intuition, and his term for the object of the understanding is concept. In general terms, the former is a non-discursive representation of a particular object, and the latter is a discursive (or mediate) representation of a general type of object. The conditions of possible experience require both intuitions and concepts, that is, the affection of the receptive sensibility and the actively synthesizing power of the understanding. Thus the statement: \"Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Kant's basic strategy in the first half of his book will be to argue that some intuitions and concepts are pure—that is, are contributed entirely by the mind, independent of anything empirical. Knowledge generated on this basis, under certain conditions, can be synthetic a priori. This insight is known as Kant's \"Copernican revolution\", because, just as Copernicus advanced astronomy by way of a radical shift in perspective, so Kant here claims do the same for metaphysics.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The second half of the Critique is the explicitly critical part. In this \"transcendental dialectic\", Kant argues that many of the claims of traditional rationalist metaphysics violate the criteria he claims to establishing the first, \"constructive\" part of his book. As Kant observes, \"human reason, without being moved by the mere vanity of knowing it all, inexorably pushes on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason\". It is the project of \"the critique of pure reason\" to establish the limits as to just how far reason may legitimately so proceed.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The section of the Critique entitled \"The transcendental aesthetic\" advances Kant's famous thesis of transcendental idealism. Something is \"transcendental\" if it is a necessary condition for the possibility of experience, and \"idealism\" denotes some form of mind-dependence that must be further specified. (The correct interpretation of Kant's own specification remains controversial.)",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The thesis, then, states that human beings only experience and know appearances, not things-in-themselves, because space and time are nothing but the subjective forms of intuition that we ourselves contribute to experience.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Nevertheless, although Kant says that space and time are \"transcendentally ideal\"—the pure forms of human sensibility, rather than part of nature or reality as it exists in-itself—he also claims that they are \"empirically real\", by which he means \"that 'everything that can come before us externally as an object' is in both space and time, and that our internal intuitions of ourselves are in time\". However we may interpret Kant's doctrine, he clearly wishes to distinguish his position from the subjective idealism of Berkeley.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Paul Guyer, although critical of many of Kant's arguments in this section, nevertheless writes of the \"Transcendental Aesthetic\" that it \"not only lays the first stone in Kant's constructive theory of knowledge; it also lays the foundation for both his critique and his reconstruction of traditional metaphysics. It argues that all genuine knowledge requires a sensory component, and thus that metaphysical claims that transcend the possibility of sensory confirmation can never amount to knowledge.\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "One interpretation, known as the \"two-world\" interpretation, regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the \"thing-in-itself\". However, Kant also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendent object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone; this is known as the \"two-aspect\" view.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Following the \"Transcendental Analytic\" is the \"Transcendental Logic\". Whereas the former was concerned with the contributions of the sensibility, the latter is concerned, first, with the contributions of the understanding (\"Transcendental Analytic\") and, second, with the faculty of reason as the source of both metaphysical errors and genuine regulatory principles (\"Transcendental Dialectic\").",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The \"Transcendental Analytic\" is further divided into two sections. The first, \"Analytic of Concepts\", is concerned with establishing the universality and necessity of the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e., the categories). This section contains Kant's famous \"transcendental deduction\". The second, \"Analytic of Principles\", is concerned with the application of those pure concepts in empirical judgments. This second section is longer than the first and is further divided into many sub-sections.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The \"Analytic of Concepts\" argues for the universal and necessary validity of the pure concepts of the understanding, or the categories, e.g., the concepts of substance and causation. These twelve basic categories define what it is to be a thing in general—that is, they articulate the necessary conditions according to which something is a possible object of experience. These, in conjunction with the a priori forms of intuition, are the basis of all synthetic a priori cognition.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "According to Guyer and Wood, \"Kant's idea is that just as there are certain essential features of all judgments, so there must be certain corresponding ways in which we form the concepts of objects so that judgments may be about objects.\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Kant provides two central lines of argumentation in support of his claims about the categories. The first, known as the \"metaphysical deduction\", proceeds analytically from a table of the Aristotelian logical functions of judgment. As Kant was aware, however, this assumes precisely what the skeptic rejects, namely, the existence of synthetic a priori cognition. For this reason, Kant also supplies a synthetic argument that does not depend upon the assumption in dispute.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "This argument, provided under the heading \"Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding\", is widely considered to be both the most important and the most difficult of Kant's arguments in the Critique. Kant himself said that it is the one that cost him the most labor. Frustrated by its confused reception in the first edition of his book, he rewrote it entirely for the second edition.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The \"Transcendental Deduction\" gives Kant's argument that these pure concepts apply universally and necessarily to the objects that are given in experience. According to Guyer and Wood, \"He centers his argument on the premise that our experience can be ascribed to a single identical subject, via what he calls the 'transcendental unity of apperception,' only if the elements of experience given in intuition are synthetically combined so as to present us with objects that are thought through the categories.\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Kant's principle of apperception is that \"The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me.\" The necessary possibility of the self-ascription of the representations of self-consciousness, identical to itself through time, is an a priori conceptual truth that cannot be based on experience.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "This, however, is only a bare sketch of one of the arguments that Kant presents.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Kant's deduction of the categories in the \"Analytic of Concepts\", if successful, demonstrates its claims about the categories only in an abstract way. The task of the \"Analytic of Principles\" is to show both that they must universally apply to objects given in actual experience (i.e., manifolds of intuition) and how it is they do so.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In the first book of this section on the \"schematism\", Kant connects each of the purely logical categories of the understanding to the temporality of intuition to show that, although non-empirical, they do have purchase upon the objects of experience. The second book continues this line of argument in four chapters, each associated with one of the category groupings. In some cases, it adds a connection to the spatial dimension of intuition to the categories it analyzes.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The fourth chapter of this section, \"The Analogies of Experience\", marks a shift from \"mathematical\" to \"dynamical\" principles, that is, to those that deal with relations among objects. Some commentators consider this the most significant section of the Critique. The analogies are three in number:",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The fourth section of this chapter, which is not an analogy, deals with the empirical use of the modal categories. That was the end of the chapter in the A edition of the Critique.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The B edition, however, includes one more short section, \"The Refutation of Idealism\". In this section, by analysis of the concept of self-consciousness, Kant argues that his transcendental idealism is a \"critical\" or \"formal\" idealism that does not deny the existence of reality apart from our subjective representations.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The final chapter of \"The Analytic of Principles\" distinguishes phenomena, of which we have can have genuine knowledge, from noumena, a term which refers to objects of pure thought that we cannot know, but to which we may still refer \"in a negative sense\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "An Appendix to the section further develops Kant's criticism of Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism by arguing that its \"dogmatic\" metaphysics confuses the \"mere features of concepts through which we think things...[with] features of the objects themselves\". Against this, Kant reasserts his own insistence upon the necessity of a sensible component in all genuine knowledge.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The second of the two Divisions of \"The Transcendental Logic\", \"The Transcendental Dialectic\", contains the \"negative\" portion of Kant's Critique, which builds upon the \"positive\" arguments of the preceding \"Transcendental Analytic\" to expose the limits of metaphysical speculation. In particular, it is concerned to demonstrate as spurious the efforts of reason to arrive at knowledge independent of sensibility. This endeavor, Kant argues, is doomed to failure, which he claims to demonstrate by showing that reason, unbounded by sense, is always capable of generating opposing or otherwise incompatible conclusions.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Like \"the light dove, in free flight cutting through the air, the resistance of which it feels\", reason \"could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space\". Against this, Kant claims that, absent epistemic friction, there can be no knowledge.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Nevertheless, Kant's critique is not entirely destructive. He presents the speculative excesses of traditional metaphysics as inherent in our very capacity of reason. Moreover, he argues that its products are not without some (carefully qualified) regulative value.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Kant calls the basic concepts of metaphysics \"ideas\". They are different from the concepts of understanding in that they are not limited by the critical stricture limiting knowledge to the conditions of possible experience and its objects. \"Transcendental illusion\" is Kant's term for the tendency of reason to produce such ideas.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Although reason has a \"logical use\" of simply drawing inferences from principles, in \"The Transcendental Dialectic\", Kant is concerned with its purportedly \"real use\" to arrive at conclusions by way of unchecked regressive syllogistic ratiocination.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The three categories of relation, pursued without regard to the limits of possible experience, yield the three central ideas of traditional metaphysics:",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Although Kant denies that these ideas can be objects of genuine cognition, he argues that they are the result of reason's inherent drive to unify cognition into a systematic whole.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics was divided into four parts: ontology, psychology, cosmology, and theology. Kant replaces the first with the positive results of the first part of the Critique. He proposes to replace the following three with his later doctrines of anthropology, the metaphysical foundations of natural science, and the critical postulation of human freedom and morality.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In the second of the two Books of \"The Transcendental Dialectic\", Kant undertakes to demonstrate the contradictory nature of unbounded reason. He does this by developing contradictions in each of the three metaphysical disciplines that he contends are, in fact, pseudo-sciences. This section of the Critique is long and Kant's arguments are extremely detailed. In this context, it not possible to do much more than enumerate the topics of discussion.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The first chapter addresses what Kant terms the paralogisms—i.e., false inferences—that pure reason makes in the metaphysical discipline of rational psychology. He argues that one cannot take the mere thought of \"I\" in the proposition \"I think\" as the proper cognition of \"I\" as an object. In this way, he claims to debunk various metaphysical theses about the substantiality, unity, and self-identity of the soul.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The second chapter, which is the longest, takes up the topic Kant calls the antinomies of pure reason—that is, the contradictions of reason with itself—in the metaphysical discipline of rational cosmology. (Originally, Kant had thought that all transcendental illusion could be analyzed in antinomic terms.) He presents four cases in which he claims reason is able to prove opposing theses with equal plausibility:",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Kant further argues in each case that his doctrine of transcendental idealism is able to resolve the antinomy.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The third chapter examines fallacious arguments about God in rational theology under the heading of the \"Ideal of Pure Reason\". (Whereas an idea is a pure concept generated by reason, an ideal is the concept of an idea as an individual thing.) Here Kant addresses and claims to refute three traditional arguments for the existence of God: the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and the physio-theological argument (i.e., the argument from design).",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The results of the transcendental dialectic so far appear to be entirely negative. In an Appendix to this section, however, Kant rejects such a conclusion. The ideas of pure reason, he argues, have an important regulatory function in directing and organizing our theoretical and practical inquiry. Kant's later works elaborate upon this function at length and in detail.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Kant developed his ethics, or moral philosophy, in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797). With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity—understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others—as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Kant is known for his theory that all moral obligation is grounded in what he calls the \"categorical imperative\", which is derived from the concept of duty. He argues that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy; to act on the moral law has no other motive than \"worthiness to be happy\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is \"mainly empirical\" and refers to \"whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself is to be assumed\", and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the \"coercion\" or \"necessitation through sensuous impulses\". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical idea of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom, but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking \"no account of ... its transcendental meaning\", which he feels was properly \"disposed of\" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy \"a real stumbling block\" that has embarrassed speculative reason.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Kant calls practical \"everything that is possible through freedom\"; he calls the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions, but are held analogously with the universal law of causality, moral laws. Reason can give us only the \"pragmatic laws of free action through the senses\", but pure practical laws given by reason a priori dictate \"what is to be done\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Kant's categories of freedom function primarily as conditions for the possibility for actions (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free, and (iii) to be morally evaluated. For Kant, although actions as theoretical objects are constituted by means of the theoretical categories, actions as practical objects (objects of practical use of reason, and which can be good or bad) are constituted by means of the categories of freedom. Only in this way can actions, as phenomena, be a consequence of freedom, and be understood and evaluated as such.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Kant makes a distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives. A hypothetical imperative is one that we must obey to satisfy contingent desires. A categorical imperative binds us regardless of our desires: for example, everyone has a duty to not lie, regardless of circumstances, even though it is sometimes in our narrowly selfish interest to do so. These imperatives are morally binding because they are based on reason, rather than contingent facts about an agent. Unlike hypothetical imperatives, which bind us insofar as we are part of a group or society which we owe duties to, we cannot opt out of the categorical imperative, because we cannot opt out of being rational agents. We owe a duty to rationality by virtue of being rational agents; therefore, rational moral principles apply to all rational agents at all times. Stated in other terms, with all forms of instrumental rationality excluded from morality, \"the moral law itself, Kant holds, can only be the form of lawfulness itself, because nothing else is left once all content has been rejected\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Kant provides three formulations for the categorical imperative. He claims that these are necessarily equivalent, as all being expressions of the pure universality of the moral law as such. Many scholars, however, are not convinced.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The formulas are as follows:",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Kant defines maxim as a \"subjective principle of volition\", which is distinguished from an \"objective principle or 'practical law.'\" While \"the latter is valid for every rational being and is a 'principle according to which they ought to act[,]' a maxim 'contains the practical rule which reason determines in accordance with the conditions of the subject (often their ignorance or inclinations) and is thus the principle according to which the subject does act.'\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Maxims fail to qualify as practical laws if they produce a contradiction in conception or a contradiction in the will when universalized. A contradiction in conception happens when, if a maxim were to be universalized, it ceases to make sense, because the \"maxim would necessarily destroy itself as soon as it was made a universal law\". For example, if the maxim 'It is permissible to break promises' was universalized, no one would trust any promises made, so the idea of a promise would become meaningless; the maxim would be self-contradictory because, when it is universalized, promises cease to be meaningful. The maxim is not moral because it is logically impossible to universalize—that is, we could not conceive of a world where this maxim was universalized. A maxim can also be immoral if it creates a contradiction in the will when universalized. This does not mean a logical contradiction, but that universalizing the maxim leads to a state of affairs that no rational being would desire.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "As Kant explains in the 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (and as its title directly indicates) that text is \"nothing more than the search for and establishment of the supreme principle of morality\". His promised Metaphysics of Morals, however, was much delayed and did not appear until its two parts, \"The Doctrine of Right\" and \"The Doctrine of Virtue\", were published separately in 1797 and 1798. The first deals with political philosophy, the second with ethics.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "\"The Doctrine of Virtue\" provides \"a very different account of ordinary moral reasoning\" than the one suggested by the Groundwork. It is concerned with duties of virtue or \"ends that are at the same time duties\". It is here, in the domain of ethics, that the greatest innovation by The Metaphysics of Morals is to be found. According to Kant's account, \"ordinary moral reasoning is fundamentally teleological—it is reasoning about what ends we are constrained by morality to pursue, and the priorities among these ends we are required to observe\". More specifically,",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "There are two sorts of ends that it is our duty to have: our own perfection and the happiness of others (MS 6:385). \"Perfection\" includes both our natural perfection (the development of our talents, skills, and capacities of understanding) and moral perfection (our virtuous disposition) (MS 6:387). A person's \"happiness\" is the greatest rational whole of the ends the person set for the sake of her own satisfaction (MS 6:387–388).",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Kant's elaboration of this teleological doctrine offers up a moral theory very different from the one typically attributed to him on the basis of his foundational works alone.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "In Towards Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project, Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. His classical republican theory was extended in the Doctrine of Right, the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant believed that universal history leads to the ultimate world of republican states at peace, but his theory was not pragmatic. The process was described in Perpetual Peace as natural rather than rational:",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "What affords this guarantee (surety) is nothing less than the great artist nature (natura daedala rerum) from whose mechanical course purposiveness shines forth visibly, letting concord arise by means of the discord between human beings even against their will; and for this reason nature, regarded as necessitation by a cause the laws of whose operation are unknown to us, is called fate, but if we consider its purposiveness in the course of the world as the profound wisdom of a higher cause directed to the objective final end of the human race and predetermining this course of the world, it is called providence.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Kant's political thought can be summarized as republican government and international organization: \"In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of 'peace through law.'\" \"Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state rightly so called is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such.\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "He opposed \"democracy\", which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, \"democracy in the strict sense of the word is necessarily a despotism because it establishes an executive power in which all decide for and, if need be, against one (who thus does not agree), so that all, who are nevertheless not all, decide; and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom.\" As with most writers at the time, he distinguished three forms of government—namely, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy—with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "He believed in republican ideals and forms of governance, and rule of law brought on by them.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Although Kant published this as a \"popular piece\", Mary J. Gregor points out that two years later, in The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant claims to demonstrate systematically that \"establishing universal and lasting peace constitutes not merely a part of the doctrine of right, but rather the entire final end of the doctrine of right within the limits of mere reason\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "The Doctrine of Right, published in 1797, contains Kant's most mature and systematic contribution to political philosophy. It addresses duties according to law, which are \"concerned only with protecting the external freedom of individuals\" and indifferent to incentives. (Although we do have a moral duty \"to limit ourselves to actions that are right, that duty is not part of [right] itself\".) Its basic political idea is that \"each person's entitlement to be his or her own master is only consistent with the entitlements of others if public legal institutions are in place\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Starting in the twentieth century, commentators have tended to see Kant as having a strained relationship with religion, although in the nineteenth century this had not been the prevalent view. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose letters helped make Kant famous, wrote: \"I believe that I may infer without reservation that the interest of religion, and of Christianity in particular, accords completely with the result of the Critique of Reason.\" According to Johann Schultz, who wrote one of the first commentaries on Kant: \"And does not this system itself cohere most splendidly with the Christian religion? Do not the divinity and beneficence of the latter become all the more evident?\" The reason for these views was Kant's moral theology and the widespread belief that his philosophy was the great antithesis to Spinozism, which was widely seen as a form of sophisticated pantheism or even atheism. As Kant's philosophy disregarded the possibility of arguing for God through pure reason alone, for the same reasons it also disregarded the possibility of arguing against God through pure reason alone.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Kant articulates his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of religious organizations to those that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition, and a hierarchical church order. He sees these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in choosing and acting upon one's maxims. Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of certain theoretical proofs for the existence of God that were grounded in pure reason (particularly the ontological argument) and his philosophical commentary on some Christian doctrines, have resulted in interpretations that see Kant as hostile to religion in general and to Christianity in particular. Other interpreters, nevertheless, consider that Kant was trying to mark off defensible from indefensible Christian belief.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Regarding Kant's conception of religion, some critics have argued that he was sympathetic to deism. Other critics have argued that Kant's moral conception moves from deism to theism (as moral theism), for example, Allen W. Wood and Merold Westphal. As for Kant's book Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, it was emphasized that Kant reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality, and Christianity to ethics. However, many interpreters, including Allen W. Wood and Lawrence Pasternack, now agree with Stephen Palmquist's claim that a better way of reading Kant's Religion is to see him as raising morality to the status of religion.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), where he investigates the possibility and logical status of \"judgments of taste\". In the \"Critique of Aesthetic Judgment\", the first major division of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant used the term \"aesthetic\" in a manner that differs from its modern sense. In the Critique of Pure Reason, to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term \"aesthetic\" as \"designating the critique of taste\", noting that judgments of taste could never be \"directed\" by \"laws a priori\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "In the chapter \"Analytic of the Beautiful\" in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment, \"and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "A pure judgement of taste is subjective since it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste (i.e., judgements of beauty), lay claim to universal validity. This universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense. Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "In the chapter \"Analytic of the Sublime\" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments that concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Some commentators argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation, and a development of the \"noble\" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "The mathematical sublime results from the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear \"absolutely great\". This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self. In the dynamical sublime, there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Kant developed a theory of humor that has been interpreted as an \"incongruity\" theory. He illustrated his theory of humor by telling three narrative jokes in the Critique of Judgment. He thought that the physiological impact of humor is akin to that of music.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Kant developed a distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a \"refined\" value in his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the \"fruits of unsociableness\" due to men's \"antagonism in society\" and, in the Seventh Thesis, asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind \"belongs to culture\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Kant lectured on anthropology, the study of human nature, for twenty-three years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. Transcripts of Kant's lectures on anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Kant was among the first people of his time to introduce anthropology as an intellectual area of study, long before the field gained popularity, and his texts are considered to have advanced the field. His point of view was to influence the works of later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Kant was also the first to suggest using a dimensionality approach to human diversity. He analyzed the nature of the Hippocrates-Galen four temperaments and plotted in two dimensions \"what belongs to a human being's faculty of desire\": \"his natural aptitude or natural predisposition\" and \"his temperament or sensibility\". Cholerics were described as emotional and energetic, phlegmatics as balanced and weak, sanguines as balanced and energetic, and melancholics as emotional and weak. These two dimensions reappeared in all subsequent models of temperament and personality traits.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Kant viewed anthropology in two broad categories: (1) the physiological approach, which he referred to as \"what nature makes of the human being\"; and (2) the pragmatic approach, which explores the things that a human \"can and should make of himself\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Kant's theory of race and his prejudicial beliefs are among the most contentious areas of recent Kant scholarship. While few, if any, dispute the overt racism and chauvinism present in his work, a more contested question is the degree to which it degrades or invalidates his other contributions. His most severe critics assert that Kant intentionally manipulated science to support chattel slavery and discrimination. Others acknowledge that he lived in an era of immature science, with many erroneous beliefs, some racist, all appearing decades before evolution, molecular genetics, and other sciences that today are taken for granted.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Kant was one of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers to defend racism. Philosopher Charles W. Mills is unequivocal: \"Kant is also seen as one of the central figures in the birth of modern 'scientific' racism. Whereas other contributors to early racial thought like Carolus Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had offered only 'empirical' (scare-quotes necessary!) observation, Kant produced a full-blown theory of race.\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "Using the four temperaments of ancient Greece, Kant proposed a hierarchy of racial categories including white Europeans, black Africans, and red Native Americans. Although he was a proponent of scientific racism for much of his career, Kant's views on race changed significantly in the last decade of his life, and he ultimately rejected racial hierarchies and European colonialism in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795).",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Kant was an opponent of miscegenation, believing that whites would be \"degraded\" and that \"fusing of races\" is undesirable, for \"not every race adopts the morals and customs of the Europeans.\" He states that \"instead of assimilation, which was intended by the melting together of the various races, nature has here made a law of just the opposite.\"",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "Kant was also an anti-Semite, believing that Jews were incapable of transcending material forces, which a moral order required. In this way, Jews are presented as the opposite of autonomous, rational Christians, and therefore incapable of being incorporated into an ethical Christian society. In his \"Anthropology\", Kant called the Jews \"a nation of cheaters\" and portrayed them as \"a group that has followed not the path of transcendental freedom but that of enslavement to the material world\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Charles W. Mills wrote that Kant has been \"sanitized for public consumption\", his racist works conveniently ignored. Robert Bernasconi stated that Kant \"supplied the first scientific definition of race\". Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze is credited with bringing Kant's contributions to racism to light in the 1990s among Western philosophers, who he believed often glossed over this part of his life and works.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "Pauline Kleingeld argues that, while Kant \"did defend a racial hierarchy until at least the end of the 1780s\", his views on race changed significantly in works published in the last decade of his life. In particular, she argues that Kant rejected past views related to racial hierarchies and the diminished rights or moral status of non-whites in Perpetual Peace (1795). This work also saw him providing extended arguments against European colonialism, which he claimed was morally unjust and incompatible with the equal rights held by indigenous populations. Kleingeld argues that this shift in Kant's views later in life has often been forgotten or ignored in the literature on Kant's racist anthropology, and that the shift suggests a belated recognition of the fact that racial hierarchy was incompatible with a universalized moral framework.",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "While Kant's racist rhetoric is indicative of the state of scholarship and science during the 18th century, German philosopher Daniel-Pascal Zorn explains the risk of taking period quotations out of context. Many of Kant's most outrageous quotations are from a series of articles from 1777–1788, a public exchange among Kant, Herder, natural scientist Georg Forster, and other scholars prominent in that period. Kant asserts that all races of humankind are of the same species, challenging the position of Forster and others that the races were distinct species. While his commentary is clearly biased at times, certain extreme statements were patterned specifically to paraphrase or counter Forster and other authors. By considering the full arc of Kant's scholarship, Zorn notes the progression in both his philosophical and his anthropological works, \"with which he argues, against the zeitgeist, for the unity of humanity\".",
"title": "Philosophy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound. Although the basic tenets of Kant's transcendental idealism (i.e., that space and time are a priori forms of human perception rather than real properties and the claim that formal logic and transcendental logic coincide) have been claimed to be falsified by modern science and logic, and no longer set the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers, Kant is credited with having innovated the way philosophical inquiry has been carried on at least up to the early nineteenth century. This shift consisted of several closely related innovations that, although highly contentious in themselves, have become important in subsequent philosophy and in the social sciences broadly construed:",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "Kant's ideas have been incorporated into a variety of schools of thought. These include German idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "During his own life, much critical attention was paid to Kant's thought. He influenced Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "Samuel Taylor Coleridge was greatly influenced by Kant and helped to spread awareness of him, and of German Idealism generally, in the UK and the US. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), he credits Kant's ideas in coming to believe that the mind is not a passive, but an active agent in the apprehension of reality.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "Hegel was one of Kant's first major critics. In Hegel's view the entire project of setting a \"transcendental subject\" (i.e., human consciousness) apart from the living individual as well as from nature, history, and society was fundamentally flawed, although parts of that very project could be put to good use in a new direction. Similar concerns motivated Hegel's criticisms of Kant's concept of moral autonomy, to which Hegel opposed an ethic focused on the \"ethical life\" of the community. In a sense, Hegel's notion of \"ethical life\" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite \"desires\", by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's concerns.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain by philosophers such as Thomas Carlyle to challenge the nineteenth-century decline in religious faith. British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G. E. Schulze, Jacobi, and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself. Things-in-themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe, nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the Critique of Pure Reason, philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing-in-itself. Many have argued that, if such a thing exists beyond experience, then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category \"causality\" beyond the realm of experience.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's own influence began to wane, but a re-examination of his ideas began in Germany in 1865 with the publication of Kant und die Epigonen by Otto Liebmann, whose motto was \"Back to Kant\". There proceeded an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as Neo-Kantianism.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "Kant's notion of \"critique\" has been more broadly influential. The early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his \"Athenaeum Fragments\", used Kant's reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry. Also in aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay \"Modernist Painting\", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as \"immanent criticism\", to justify the aims of abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitation—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of \"critique\" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of \"critical thought\". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a \"critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant\".",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through the a priori intuition of space and time, as transcendental preconditions of experience. Kant's often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert's formalism, and Frege and Bertrand Russell's logicism.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "With his Perpetual Peace, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science. More concretely, Constructivist theorist Alexander Wendt proposed that the anarchy of the international system could evolve from the 'brutish' Hobbesian anarchy understood by Realist theorists, through Lockean anarchy, and ultimately a Kantian anarchy in which states would see their self-interests as inextricably linked to the well being of other states, thus transforming international politics into a far more peaceful form.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosophers P. F. Strawson, Onora O'Neill, and Quassim Cassam, and the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Christine Korsgaard. Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy. They have argued against relativism, supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "Mou Zongsan's study of Kant has been cited as a highly crucial part in the development of Mou's personal philosophy, namely New Confucianism. Widely regarded as the most influential Kant scholar in China, Mou's rigorous critique of Kant's philosophy—having translated all three of Kant's critiques—served as an ardent attempt to reconcile Chinese and Western philosophy whilst increasing pressure to westernize in China.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "Kant's influence has also extended to the social, behavioral, and physical sciences—as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget and Carl Gustav Jung, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development, though one which he later criticized and rejected. In recent years, there has also been renewed interest in Kant's theory of mind from the point of view of formal logic and computer science.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "Because of the thoroughness of Kant's paradigm shift, his influence extends well beyond this to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology.",
"title": "Influence and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Unless otherwise noted, all citations are to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in English Translation, 16 vols., ed. Guyer, Paul, and Wood, Allen W. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Citations in the article are to individual works per abbreviations in List of Major works below.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "Abbreviations used in body of article are boldface in brackets. Unless otherwise noted, pagination is to the critical Akademie edition, which can be found in the margins of the Cambridge translations.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "Wilhelm Dilthey inaugurated the Academy edition (the Akademie-Ausgabe abbreviated as AA or Ak) of Kant's writings (Gesammelte Schriften, Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1902–38) in 1895, and served as its first editor. The volumes are grouped into four sections:",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "An electronic version is also available: Elektronische Edition der Gesammelten Werke Immanuel Kants (vols. 1–23).",
"title": "Bibliography"
}
]
| Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued space and time are mere "forms of intuition" that structure all experience and that the objects of experience are mere "appearances". The nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. In an attempt to counter the philosophical doctrine of skepticism, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), his best-known work. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal to think of the objects of experience as conforming to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition and the categories of our understanding, so that we have a priori cognition of those objects. These claims have proved especially influential in the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology, which regard human activities as pre-oriented by cultural norms. Kant believed that reason is the source of morality, and that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment. Kant's religious views were deeply connected to his moral theory. Their exact nature, however, remains in dispute. He hoped that perpetual peace could be secured through an international federation of republican states and international cooperation. His cosmopolitan reputation, however, is called into question by his promulgation of scientific racism for much of his career, although he altered his views on the subject in the last decade of his life. | 2001-11-04T17:34:19Z | 2024-01-01T00:39:13Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant |
14,643 | History of Indonesia | The history of Indonesia has been shaped by its geographic position, natural resources, a series of human migrations and contacts, wars and conquests, as well as by trade, economics and politics. Indonesia is an archipelagic country of 17,000 to 18,000 islands stretching along the equator in Southeast Asia. The country's strategic sea-lane position fostered inter-island and international trade; trade has since fundamentally shaped Indonesian history. The area of Indonesia is populated by peoples of various migrations, creating a diversity of cultures, ethnicities, and languages. The archipelago's landforms and climate significantly influenced agriculture and trade, and the formation of states. The boundaries of the state of Indonesia match the 20th-century borders of the Dutch East Indies.
Fossilised remains of Homo erectus, popularly known as "Java Man", and their tools suggest the Indonesian archipelago was inhabited at least 1.5 million years ago. Austronesian people, who form the majority of the modern population, are thought to have originally been from Taiwan and arrived in Indonesia around 2000 BCE. From the 7th century CE, the powerful Srivijaya naval kingdom flourished, bringing Hindu and Buddhist influences with it. The agricultural Buddhist Sailendra and Hindu Mataram dynasties subsequently thrived in inland Java. The last significant non-Muslim kingdom, the Hindu Majapahit kingdom, flourished from the late 13th century, and its influence stretched over much of Indonesia. The earliest evidence of Islamised populations in Indonesia dates to the 13th century in northern Sumatra; other Indonesian areas gradually adopted Islam, which became the dominant religion in Java and Sumatra by the end of the 16th century. For the most part, Islam overlaid and mixed with existing cultural and religious influences.
Europeans such as the Portuguese arrived in Indonesia from the 16th century seeking to monopolise the sources of valuable nutmeg, cloves, and cubeb pepper in Maluku. In 1602, the Dutch established the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) and became the dominant European power by 1610. Following bankruptcy, the VOC was formally dissolved in 1800, and the government of the Netherlands established the Dutch East Indies under government control. By the early 20th century, Dutch dominance extended to the current boundaries. The Japanese invasion and occupation in 1942–1945 during WWII ended Dutch rule, and encouraged the previously suppressed Indonesian independence movement. Two days after the surrender of Japan in August 1945, nationalist leader Sukarno declared independence and became president. The Netherlands tried to reestablish its rule, but a bitter armed and diplomatic struggle ended in December 1949, when in the face of international pressure the Dutch formally recognised Indonesian independence.
An attempted coup in 1965 led to a violent army-led anti-communist purge in which over half a million people were killed. General Suharto politically outmanoeuvred President Sukarno, and became president in March 1968. His New Order administration garnered the favour of the West, whose investment in Indonesia was a major factor in the subsequent three decades of substantial economic growth. In the late 1990s, however, Indonesia was the country hardest hit by the East Asian financial crisis, which led to popular protests and Suharto's resignation on 21 May 1998. The Reformasi era following Suharto's resignation has led to a strengthening of democratic processes, including a regional autonomy program, the secession of East Timor, and the first direct presidential election in 2004. Political instability, social unrest, corruption, natural disasters, and terrorism remained problems in the 2000s, but the economy has performed strongly since 2007. Although relations between different religious and ethnic groups are largely harmonious, acute sectarian discontent and violence remain problems in some areas.
Today, Indonesia is a diverse and multicultural nation with a population of over 270 million people. The country is known for its natural beauty, rich cultural heritage, and significant contributions to global art, music, and cuisine. It is also one of the world's fastest-growing economies and a major player in the Southeast Asian region.
In 2007, an analysis of cut marks on two bovid bones found in Sangiran, showed them to have been made 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago by clamshell tools. This is the oldest evidence for the presence of early humans in Indonesia. Fossilised remains of Homo erectus in Indonesia, popularly known as the "Java Man" were first discovered by the Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois at Trinil in 1891, and are at least 700,000 years old. Other H. erectus fossils of a similar age were found at Sangiran in the 1930s by the anthropologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald, who in the same time period also uncovered fossils at Ngandong alongside more advanced tools, re-dated in 2011 to between 550,000 and 143,000 years old. In 1977 another H. erectus skull was discovered at Sambungmacan. In 2010, stone tools were discovered on Flores, dating from 1 million years ago. These are the earliest remains implying human seafaring technology. The earliest evidence of artistic activity ever found, in the form of diagonal etchings made with the use of a shark's tooth, was detected in 2014 on a 500,000-year-old fossil of a clam found in Java in the 1890s, associated with H. erectus.
In 2003, on the island of Flores, fossils of a 1.1 m (3 ft 7 in) tall hominid dated between 74,000 and 13,000 years old were discovered, much to the surprise of the scientific community. This newly discovered hominid was named the "Flores Man", or Homo floresiensis. A phylogenetic analysis published in 2017 suggests that H. floresiensis was descended from the same ancestor as Homo habilis. H. floresiensis would thus represent a previously unknown and very early migration out of Africa. The Homo floresiensis skeletal material is dated from 60,000 to 100,000 years ago; stone tools recovered alongside the skeletal remains were from archaeological horizons ranging from 50,000 to 190,000 years ago.
The Indonesian archipelago was formed during the thaw after the Last Glacial Maximum. Early humans travelled by sea and spread from mainland Asia eastward to New Guinea and Australia. Homo sapiens reached the region by around 45,000 years ago. In 2011, evidence was uncovered in neighbouring East Timor, showing that 42,000 years ago, these early settlers had high-level maritime skills, and by implication the technology needed to make ocean crossings to reach Australia and other islands, as they were catching and consuming large numbers of big deep sea fish such as tuna.
An elaborate 4.5 m long rock art panel in a limestone cave at Leang Bulu' in Sulawesi is currently considered the earliest figurative artwork in the world. It portrays several figures hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids. This rock art was dated to at least 43.9 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. A painted hand stencil from Leang Timpuseng, which has a minimum age of 39.9 kyr, is now the oldest known hand stencil in the world.
Austronesian people form the majority of the modern population. They may have arrived in Indonesia around 2000 BCE and are thought to have originated in Taiwan. During this period, parts of Indonesia participated in the Maritime Jade Road, whith outlets in Kalimantan which existed for 3,000 years between 2000 BCE to 1000 CE. Dong Son culture spread to Indonesia bringing with it techniques of wet-field rice cultivation, ritual buffalo sacrifice, bronze casting, megalithic practises, and ikat weaving methods. Some of these practices remain in areas including the Batak areas of Sumatra, Toraja in Sulawesi, and several islands in Nusa Tenggara. Early Indonesians were animists who honoured the spirits of the dead believing their souls or life force could still help the living.
Ideal agricultural conditions, and the mastering of wet-field rice cultivation as early as the 8th century BCE, allowed villages, towns, and small kingdoms to flourish by the 1st century CE. These kingdoms (little more than collections of villages subservient to petty chieftains) evolved with their own ethnic and tribal religions. Java's hot and even temperature, abundant rain and volcanic soil, was perfect for wet rice cultivation. Such agriculture required a well-organized society, in contrast to the society based on dry-field rice, which is a much simpler form of cultivation that does not require an elaborate social structure to support it.
Buni culture clay pottery flourished in coastal northern West Java and Banten around 400 BCE to 100 CE. The Buni culture was probably the predecessor of the Tarumanagara kingdom, one of the earliest Hindu kingdoms in Indonesia, producing numerous inscriptions and marking the beginning of the historical period in Java.
On 11 December 2019, a team of researchers led by Dr. Maxime Aubert announced the discovery of the oldest hunting scenes in prehistoric art in the world which is more than 44,000 years old from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu' Sipong 4. Archaeologists determined the age of the depiction of hunting a pig and buffalo thanks to the calcite 'popcorn', different isotope levels of radioactive uranium and thorium.
Indonesia like much of Southeast Asia was influenced by Indian culture. From the 2nd century, through the Indian dynasties like the Pallava, Gupta, Pala and Chola in the succeeding centuries up to the 12th century, Indian culture spread across all of Southeast Asia.
References to the Dvipantara or Yawadvipa, a Hindu kingdom in Java and Sumatra appear in Sanskrit writings from 200 BCE. In India's earliest epic, the Ramayana, Sugriva, the chief of Rama's army dispatched his men to Yawadvipa, the island of Java, in search of Sita. According to the ancient Tamil text Manimekalai Java had a kingdom with a capital called Nagapuram. The earliest archaeological relic discovered in Indonesia is from the Ujung Kulon National Park, West Java, where an early Hindu statue of Ganesha estimated from the 1st century CE was found on the summit of Mount Raksa in Panaitan island. There is also archaeological evidence of Sunda Kingdom in West Java dating from the 2nd-century, and Jiwa Temple in Batujaya, Karawang, West Java was probably built around this time. South Indian culture was spread to Southeast Asia by the south Indian Pallava dynasty in the 4th and 5th centuries. and by the 5th century, stone inscriptions written in Pallava scripts were found in Java and Borneo.
A number of Hindu and Buddhist states flourished and then declined across Indonesia. Seven rough plinths dating from the beginning of the 4th century CE were found in Kutai, East Kalimantan, near the Mahakam River known as the Yupa inscription or "Mulavarman Inscription" believed to be one of the earliest Sanskrit inscriptions of Indonesia, the plinths were written by Brahmins in the Sanskrit language using the Pallava script of India recalling of a generous king by the name of Mulavarman who donated a huge amount of alms to Brahmin priests in his kingdom, the kingdom was known as the Kutai Martadipura Kingdom located in present East Kalimantan Province, believed to be the oldest and first Hindu kingdom of Indonesia.
One such early kingdom was Tarumanagara, which flourished between 358 and 669 CE. Located in West Java close to modern-day Jakarta, its 5th-century king, Purnawarman, established the earliest known inscriptions in Java, the Ciaruteun inscription located near Bogor. And other inscriptions called the Pasir Awi inscription and the Muncul inscription. On this monument, King Purnawarman inscribed his name and made an imprint of his footprints, as well as his elephant's footprints. The accompanying inscription reads, "Here are the footprints of King Purnavarman, the heroic conqueror of the world". This inscription is written in Pallava script and in Sanskrit and is still clear after 1500 years. Purnawarman apparently built a canal that changed the course of the Cakung River, and drained a coastal area for agriculture and settlement purpose. In his stone inscriptions, Purnawarman associated himself with Vishnu, and Brahmins ritually secured the hydraulic project.
Around the same period, in the 6th to 7th centuries (501–700 CE), the Kalingga Kingdom was established in Central Java northern coast, mentioned in Chinese account. The name of this kingdom was derived from ancient Indian kingdom of Kalinga, which suggest the ancient link between India and Indonesia.
The political history of Indonesian archipelago during the 7th to 11th (601–1100 CE) around centuries was dominated by Srivijaya based in Sumatra and Sailendra that dominated southeast Asia based in Java and constructed Borobudur, the largest Buddhist monument in the world. The history prior of the 14th and 15th centuries (1301–1500 CE) is not well known due to the scarcity of evidence. By the 15th century (1401–1500 CE), two major states dominated this period; Majapahit in East Java, the greatest of the pre-Islamic Indonesian states, and Malacca on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, arguably one of the greatest of the Muslim trading empires, this marked the rise of Muslim states in the Indonesian archipelago.
Mataram Empire, sometimes referred to as Mataram Kingdom, was an Indianized kingdom based in Central Java around modern-day Yogyakarta between the 8th and 10th centuries. The kingdom was ruled by the Sailendra dynasty, and later by the Sanjaya dynasty. The centre of the kingdom was moved from central Java to East Java by Mpu Sindok. An eruption of the volcano Mount Merapi in 929, and political pressure from Sailendrans based in the Srivijaya Empire may have caused the move.
The first king of Mataram, Sri Sanjaya, left inscriptions in stone. The monumental Hindu temple of Prambanan in the vicinity of Yogyakarta was built by Pikatan. Dharmawangsa ordered the translation of the Mahabharata into Old Javanese in 996.
In the period 750 CE – 850 CE, the kingdom saw the blossoming of classical Javanese art and architecture. A rapid increase in temple construction occurred across the landscape of its heartland in Mataram (Kedu and Kewu Plain). The most notable temples constructed in Mataram are Kalasan, Sewu, Borobudur and Prambanan. The Empire had become the supreme power not only in Java but also over Srivijayan Empire, Bali, southern Thailand, some Philippine kingdoms, and Khmer in Cambodia.
Later in its history, the dynasty divided into two dynasties based on their own religion, the Buddhist and Shivaist dynasties. Civil war was unavoidable and the outcome was Mataram Empire divided into two powerful kingdom based on region and religion. The Shivaist dynasty of Mataram kingdom in Java led by Rakai Pikatan and the Buddhist dynasty of Srivijaya kingdom in Sumatra led by Balaputradewa. The hostility between them didn't end until in 1006 when the Sailendran based in Srivijaya kingdom incited rebellion by Wurawari, vassal of Mataram kingdom and sacked Shivaist dynasty's capital in Watugaluh, Java. Srivijaya kingdom rose into undisputed hegemonic Empire in the era as the result. Yet the Shivaist dynasty survived and successfully reclaimed the east Java in 1019 then descended to Kahuripan kingdom led by Airlangga son of Udayana of Bali.
Sriwijaya was a kingdom on Sumatra which influenced much of the Maritime Southeast Asia. From the 7th century, the powerful Srivijaya naval kingdom flourished as a result of trade and the influences of Hinduism and Buddhism that were imported with it.
Srivijaya was centred in the coastal trading centre of present-day Palembang. Srivijaya was not a "state" in the modern sense with defined boundaries and a centralised government to which the citizens own allegiance. Rather Srivijaya was a confederacy form of society centred on a royal heartland. It was a thalassocracy and did not extend its influence far beyond the coastal areas of the islands of Southeast Asia. Trade was the driving force of Srivijaya just as it is for most societies throughout history. The Srivijayan navy controlled the trade that made its way through the Strait of Malacca.
By the 7th century, the harbours of various vassal states of Srivijaya lined both coasts of the Straits of Melaka. Around this time, Srivijaya had established suzerainty over large areas of Sumatra, western Java, and much of the Malay Peninsula. Dominating the Malacca and Sunda straits, the empire controlled both the Spice Route traffic and local trade. It remained a formidable sea power until the 13th century. This spread the ethnic Malay culture throughout Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, and western Borneo. A stronghold of Mahayana Buddhism, Srivijaya attracted pilgrims and scholars from other parts of Asia.
The relation between Srivijaya and the Chola Empire of south India was friendly during the reign of Raja Raja Chola I but during the reign of Rajendra Chola I the Chola Empire attacked Srivijaya cities. A series of Chola raids in the 11th century weakened the Srivijayan hegemony and enabled the formation of regional kingdoms based, like Kediri, on intensive agriculture rather than coastal and long-distance trade. Srivijayan influence waned by the 11th century. The island was in frequent conflict with the Javanese kingdoms, first Singhasari and then Majapahit. Islam eventually made its way to the Aceh region of Sumatra, spreading its influence through contacts with Arabs and Indian traders. By the late 13th century, the kingdom of Pasai in northern Sumatra converted to Islam. The last inscription dates to 1374, where a crown prince, Ananggavarman, is mentioned. Srivijaya ceased to exist by 1414, when Parameswara, the kingdom's last prince, fled to Temasik, then to Malacca. Later his son converted to Islam and founded the Sultanate of Malacca on the Malay peninsula.
Majapahit was the most dominant of Indonesia's pre-Islamic states. The Hindu Majapahit kingdom was founded in eastern Java in the late 13th century, and under Gajah Mada it experienced what is often referred to as a golden age in Indonesian history, when its influence extended to much of southern Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, and Bali from about 1293 to around 1500.
The founder of the Majapahit Empire, Kertarajasa, was the son-in-law of the ruler of the Singhasari kingdom, also based in Java. After Singhasari drove Srivijaya out of Java in 1290, the rising power of Singhasari came to the attention of Kublai Khan in China and he sent emissaries demanding tribute. Kertanagara, ruler of the Singhasari kingdom, refused to pay tribute and the Khan sent a punitive expedition which arrived off the coast of Java in 1293. By that time, a rebel from Kediri, Jayakatwang, had killed Kertanagara. The Majapahit founder allied himself with the Mongols against Jayakatwang and, once the Singhasari kingdom was destroyed, turned and forced his Mongol allies to withdraw in confusion.
Gajah Mada, a Majapahit prime minister and regent from 1331 to 1364, extended the empire's rule to the surrounding islands. A few years after Gajah Mada's death, the Majapahit navy captured Palembang, putting an end to the Sriwijaya kingdom. Although the Majapahit rulers extended their power over other islands and destroyed neighbouring kingdoms, their focus seems to have been on controlling and gaining a larger share of the commercial trade that passed through the archipelago. About the time Majapahit was founded, Muslim traders and proselytisers began entering the area. After its peak in the 14th century, Majapahit power began to decline and was unable to control the rising power of the Sultanate of Malacca. Dates for the end of the Majapahit Empire range from 1478 to 1520. A large number of courtiers, artisans, priests, and members of the royal family moved east to the island of Bali at the end of Majapahit power.
The earliest accounts of the Indonesian archipelago date from the Abbasid Caliphate, according to those early accounts the Indonesian archipelago were famous among early Muslim sailors mainly due to its abundance of precious spice trade commodities such as nutmeg, cloves, galangal and many other spices.
Although Muslim traders first travelled through South East Asia early in the Islamic era, the spread of Islam among the inhabitants of the Indonesian archipelago dates to the 13th century in northern Sumatra.
Although it is known that the spread of Islam began in the west of the archipelago, the fragmentary evidence does not suggest a rolling wave of conversion through adjacent areas; rather, it suggests the process was complicated and slow. The spread of Islam was driven by increasing trade links outside of the archipelago; in general, traders and the royalty of major kingdoms were the first to adopt the new religion.
Other Indonesian areas gradually adopted Islam, making it the dominant religion in Java and Sumatra by the end of the 7th until 13th century. For the most part, Islam overlaid and mixed with existing cultural and religious influences, which shaped the predominant form of Islam in Indonesia, particularly in Java. Only Bali retained a Hindu majority. In the eastern archipelago, both Christian and Islamic missionaries were active in the 16th and 17th centuries, and, currently, there are large communities of both religions on these islands.
The Sultanate of Mataram was the third Sultanate in Java, after the Sultanate of Demak Bintoro and the Sultanate of Pajang.
According to Javanese records, Kyai Gedhe Pamanahan became the ruler of the Mataram area in the 1570s with the support of the kingdom of Pajang to the east, near the current site of Surakarta (Solo). Pamanahan was often referred to as Kyai Gedhe Mataram after his ascension.
Pamanahan's son, Panembahan Senapati, replaced his father on the throne around 1584. Under Senapati the kingdom grew substantially through regular military campaigns against Mataram's neighbours. Shortly after his accession, for example, he conquered his father's patrons in Pajang.
The reign of Panembahan Seda ing Krapyak (c. 1601–1613), the son of Senapati, was dominated by further warfare, especially against powerful Surabaya, already a major centre in East Java. The first contact between Mataram and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) occurred under Krapyak. Dutch activities at the time were limited to trading from limited coastal settlements, so their interactions with the inland Mataram kingdom were limited, although they did form an alliance against Surabaya in 1613. Krapyak died that year.
Krapyak was succeeded by his son, who is known simply as Sultan Agung ("Great Sultan") in Javanese records. Agung was responsible for the great expansion and lasting historical legacy of Mataram due to the extensive military conquests of his long reign from 1613 to 1646.
In 1524–25, Sunan Gunung Jati from Cirebon, together with the armies of Demak Sultanate, seized the port of Banten from the Sunda kingdom, and established The Sultanate of Banten. This was accompanied by Muslim preachers and the adoption of Islam amongst the local population. At its peak in the first half of the 17th century, the Sultanate lasted from 1526 to 1813 AD. The Sultanate left many archaeological remains and historical records.
Beginning in the 16th century, successive waves of Europeans—the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English—sought to dominate the spice trade at its sources in India and the 'Spice Islands' (Maluku) of Indonesia. This meant finding a way to Asia to cut out Muslim merchants who, with their Venetian outlet in the Mediterranean, monopolised spice imports to Europe. Astronomically priced at the time, spices were highly coveted not only to preserve and make poorly preserved meat palatable, but also as medicines and magic potions.
The arrival of Europeans in South East Asia is often regarded as the watershed moment in its history. Other scholars consider this view untenable, arguing that European influence during the times of the early arrivals of the 16th and 17th centuries was limited in both area and depth. This is in part due to Europe not being the most advanced or dynamic area of the world in the early 15th century. Rather, the major expansionist force of this time was Islam; in 1453, for example, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, while Islam continued to spread through Indonesia and the Philippines. European influence, particularly that of the Dutch, would not have its greatest impact on Indonesia until the 18th and 19th centuries.
New found Portuguese expertise in navigation, shipbuilding and weaponry allowed them to make daring expeditions of exploration and expansion. Starting with the first exploratory expeditions sent from newly conquered Malacca in 1512, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive in Indonesia, and sought to dominate the sources of valuable spices and to extend the Catholic Church's missionary efforts. The Portuguese turned east to Maluku and through both military conquest and alliance with local rulers, they established trading posts, forts, and missions on the islands of Ternate, Ambon, and Solor among others. The height of Portuguese missionary activities, however, came in the latter half of the 16th century. Ultimately, the Portuguese presence in Indonesia was reduced to Solor, Flores and Timor in modern-day Nusa Tenggara, following defeat at the hands of indigenous Ternateans and the Dutch in Maluku, and a general failure to maintain control of trade in the region. In comparison with the original Portuguese ambition to dominate Asian trade, their influence on Indonesian culture was small: the romantic keroncong guitar ballads; a number of Indonesian words which reflect Portuguese's role as the lingua franca of the archipelago alongside Malay; and many family names in eastern Indonesia such as da Costa, Dias, de Fretes, Gonsalves, etc. The most significant impacts of the Portuguese arrival were the disruption and disorganisation of the trade network mostly as a result of their conquest of Malacca, and the first significant plantings of Christianity in Indonesia. There have continued to be Christian communities in eastern Indonesia through to the present, which has contributed to a sense of shared interest with Europeans, particularly among the Ambonese.
In 1602, the Dutch parliament awarded the VOC a monopoly on trade and colonial activities in the region at a time before the company controlled any territory in Java. In 1619, the VOC conquered the West Javan city of Jayakarta, where they founded the city of Batavia (present-day Jakarta). The VOC became deeply involved in the internal politics of Java in this period, and fought in a number of wars involving the leaders of Mataram and Banten.
The Dutch followed the Portuguese aspirations, courage, brutality, and strategies but brought better organisation, weapons, ships, and superior financial backing. Although they failed to gain complete control of the Indonesian spice trade, they had much more success than the previous Portuguese efforts. They exploited the factionalisation of the small kingdoms in Java that had replaced Majapahit, establishing a permanent foothold in Java, from which grew a land-based colonial empire which became one of the richest colonial possessions on earth.
By the mid-17th century, Batavia, the headquarter of VOC in Asia, had become an important trade centre in the region. It had repelled attacks from the Javanese Mataram kingdom. In 1641, the Dutch captured Malacca from the Portuguese, thus weakened Portuguese position in Asia. The Dutch defeated the Sulawesi city of Makassar in 1667 thus bringing its trade under VOC control. Sumatran ports were also brought under VOC control and the last of the Portuguese were expelled in 1660. In return for monopoly control over the pepper trade and the expulsion of the English, the Dutch helped the son of the ruler of Banten overthrow his father in 1680. By the 18th century, the VOC has established themselves firmly in Indonesian archipelago, controlling inter-island trade as part of their Asian business which includes India, Ceylon, Formosa, and Japan. VOC has established their important bases in some ports in Java, Maluku, and parts of Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Malay Peninsula.
After the fall of the Netherlands to the First French Empire and the dissolution of the Dutch East India Company in 1800, there were profound changes in the European colonial administration of the East Indies. The company's assets in East Indies were nationalised as the Dutch colony, the Dutch East Indies. Meanwhile, Europe was devastated by the Napoleonic Wars. In the Netherlands, Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806 oversaw the dissolution of the Batavian Republic, which was replaced by the Kingdom of Holland, a French puppet kingdom ruled by Napoleon's third brother Louis Bonaparte (Lodewijk Napoleon). The East Indies were treated as a proxy French colony, administered through a Dutch intermediary.
In 1806, King Lodewijk of the Netherlands sent one of his generals, Herman Willem Daendels, to serve as governor-general of the East Indies, based in Java. Daendels was sent to strengthen Javanese defences against a predicted British invasion. Since 1685, the British had had a presence in Bencoolen on the western coast of Sumatra, as well as several posts north of the Malaccan straits. Daendels was responsible for the construction of the Great Post Road (Indonesian: Jalan Raya Pos) across northern Java from Anjer to Panaroecan. The thousand-kilometre road was meant as to ease logistics across Java and was completed in only one year, during which thousands of Javanese forced labourers died. In 1811, Java was captured by the British, becoming a possession of the British Empire, and Thomas Stamford Raffles was appointed as the island's governor. Raffles launched several military expeditions against local Javanese princes; such as the assault on Yogyakarta kraton on 21 June 1812, and the military expedition against Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II of Palembang, along with giving orders to seize the nearby Bangka Island. During his administration, numbers of ancient monuments in Java were rediscovered, excavated and systematically catalogued for the first time, the most important one being the rediscovery of Borobudur Buddhist temple in Central Java. Raffles was an enthusiast of the island's history, as he wrote the book History of Java published later in 1817. In 1816, under the administration of British governor John Fendall, Java was returned to control of the Netherlands as per the terms of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814.
After the VOC was dissolved in 1800 following bankruptcy, and after the end of British rule under Raffles' governorship, the Dutch state took over the VOC possessions in 1816. A Javanese uprising was crushed in the Java War of 1825–1830. After 1830, a system of forced cultivations and indentured labour was introduced on Java, the Cultivation System (in Dutch: cultuurstelsel). This system brought the Dutch and their Indonesian allies enormous wealth. The cultivation system tied peasants to their land, forcing them to work in government-owned plantations for 60 days of the year. The system was abolished in a more liberal period after 1870. In 1901, the Dutch adopted what they called the Ethical Policy, which included somewhat increased investment in indigenous education, and modest political reforms.
The Dutch colonials formed a privileged upper social class of soldiers, administrators, managers, teachers, and pioneers. They lived together with the "natives", but at the top of a rigid social and racial caste system. The Dutch East Indies had two legal classes of citizens; European and indigenous. A third class, Foreign Easterners, was added in 1920.
Upgrading the infrastructure of ports and roads was a high priority for the Dutch, with the goal of modernising the economy, pumping wages into local areas, facilitating commerce, and speeding up military movements. By 1950, Dutch engineers had built and upgraded a road network with 12,000 km of asphalted surface, 41,000 km of metalled road area and 16,000 km of gravel surfaces. In addition the Dutch built 7,500 kilometres (4,700 mi) of railways, bridges, irrigation systems covering 1.4 million hectares (5,400 sq mi) of rice fields, several harbours, and 140 public drinking water systems. These Dutch constructed public works became the economic base of the colonial state; after independence, they became the basis of the Indonesian infrastructure.
For most of the colonial period, Dutch control over its territories in the Indonesian archipelago was tenuous. In some cases, Dutch police and military actions in parts of Indonesia were quite cruel. Recent discussions, for example, of Dutch cruelty in Aceh have encouraged renewed research on these aspects of Dutch rule. It was only in the early 20th century, three centuries after the first Dutch trading post, that the full extent of the colonial territory was established and direct colonial rule exerted across what would become the boundaries of the modern Indonesian state. Portuguese Timor, now East Timor, remained under Portuguese rule until 1975 when it was invaded by Indonesia. The Indonesian government declared the territory an Indonesian province but relinquished it in 1999.
In October 1908, the first nationalist movement was formed, Budi Utomo. On 10 September 1912, the first nationalist mass movement was formed: Sarekat Islam. By December 1912, Sarekat Islam had 93,000 members. The Dutch responded after the First World War with repressive measures. The nationalist leaders came from a small group of young professionals and students, some of whom had been educated in the Netherlands. In the post–World War I era, the Indonesian communists who were associated with the Third International started to usurp the nationalist movement. The repression of the nationalist movement led to many arrests, including Indonesia's first president, Sukarno (1901–70), who was imprisoned for political activities on 29 December 1929. Also arrested was Mohammad Hatta, first vice-president of Indonesia. Additionally, Sutan Sjahrir, who later became the first Prime Minister of Indonesia, was arrested on this date.
In 1914 the exiled Dutch socialist Henk Sneevliet founded the Indies Social Democratic Association. Initially a small forum of Dutch socialists, it would later evolve into the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) in 1924. In the post–World War I era, the Dutch strongly repressed all attempts at change. This repression led to a growth of the PKI. By December 1924, the PKI had a membership of 1,140. One year later in 1925, the PKI had grown to 3,000 members. From 1926 to 1927, there was a PKI-led revolt against Dutch colonialism and the harsh repression of strikes of urban workers. However, the strikes and the revolt was put down by the Dutch with some 13,000 nationalists and communists leaders were arrested. Some 4,500 were given prison sentences.
Sukarno was released from prison in December 1931 but was re-arrested on 1 August 1933.
The Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation during World War II interrupted Dutch rule and encouraged the previously suppressed Indonesian independence movement. In May 1940, early in World War II, Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands, but the Dutch government-in-exile initially continued to control the Dutch East Indies from its base in London. The Dutch East Indies declared a state of siege and in July 1940 redirected exports intended for Japan to the US and Britain. Negotiations with the Japanese aimed at securing supplies of aviation fuel collapsed in June 1941, and the Japanese started their conquest of Southeast Asia in December of that year. That same month, factions from Sumatra sought Japanese assistance for a revolt against the Dutch wartime government. The Japanese military defeated last Dutch forces in the East Indies in March 1942.
In July 1942, Sukarno accepted Japan's offer to rally the public in support of the Japanese war effort. Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta were decorated by the Emperor of Japan in 1943. However, experience of the Japanese occupation of Dutch East Indies varied considerably, depending upon where one lived and one's social position. Many who lived in areas considered important to the war effort experienced torture, sex slavery, arbitrary arrest and execution, and other war crimes. Thousands taken away from Indonesia as war labourers (romusha) suffered or died as a result of ill-treatment and starvation. People of Dutch and mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent were particular targets of the Japanese occupation.
In March 1945, the Japanese established the Investigating Committee for Preparatory Work for Independence (BPUPK) as the initial stage of the establishment of independence for the area under the control of the Japanese 16th Army. At its first meeting in May, Soepomo spoke of national integration and against personal individualism, while Muhammad Yamin suggested that the new nation should claim British Borneo, British Malaya, Portuguese Timor, and all the pre-war territories of the Dutch East Indies. The committee drafted the 1945 Constitution, which remains in force, though now much amended. On 9 August 1945 Sukarno, Hatta, and Radjiman Wediodiningrat were flown to meet Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi in Vietnam. They were told that Japan intended to announce Indonesian independence on 24 August. After the Japanese surrender, however, Sukarno unilaterally proclaimed Indonesian independence on 17 August. A later UN report stated that four million people died in Indonesia as a result of the Japanese occupation.
Under pressure from radical and politicised pemuda ('youth') groups, Sukarno and Hatta on behalf of the Nation proclaimed Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945 from colonialism by foreign nations two days after the Japanese Emperor's surrender in the Pacific, and made this nation an independent state, which has the right to govern its people and nation in accordance with the philosophy, character and spirit of the Indonesia nation itself. The following day, the Central Indonesian National Committee (KNIP) declared Sukarno President and Hatta Vice-President. Word of the proclamation spread by shortwave and fliers while the Indonesian war-time military (PETA), youths, and others rallied in support of the new republic, often moving to take over government offices from the Japanese. In December 1946 the United Nations acknowledged that Netherlands had advised the United Nations that the "Netherlands Indies" was a non-self-governing territory (colony) for which the Netherlands had a legal duty to make yearly reports and to assist towards "a full measure of self-government" as required by the Charter of the United Nations article 73.
The Dutch, initially backed by the British, tried to re-establish their rule, and a bitter armed and diplomatic struggle ended in December 1949, when in the face of international pressure, the Dutch formally recognised Indonesian independence. Dutch efforts to re-establish complete control met resistance. At the end of World War II, a power vacuum arose, and the nationalists often succeeded in seizing the arms of the demoralised Japanese. A period of unrest with city guerrilla warfare called the Bersiap period ensued. Groups of Indonesian nationalists armed with improvised weapons (like bamboo spears) and firearms attacked returning Allied troops. 3,500 Europeans were killed and 20,000 were missing, meaning there were more European deaths in Indonesia after the war than during the war. After returning to Java, Dutch forces quickly re-occupied the colonial capital of Batavia (now Jakarta), so the city of Yogyakarta in central Java became the capital of the nationalist forces. Negotiations with the nationalists led to two major truce agreements, but disputes about their implementation, and much mutual provocation, led each time to renewed conflict. Within four years the Dutch had recaptured almost the whole of Indonesia, but guerrilla resistance persisted, led on Java by commander Nasution. On 27 December 1949, after four years of sporadic warfare and fierce criticism of the Dutch by the UN, the Netherlands officially recognised Indonesian sovereignty under the federal structure of the United States of Indonesia (RUSI). With the unification of all the kingdoms in the archipelago On 17 August 1950, exactly five years after the proclamation of independence, the last of the federal states were dissolved and Sukarno proclaimed a single unitary Republic of Indonesia until now.
With the unifying struggle to secure Indonesia's independence over, divisions in Indonesian society began to appear. These included regional differences in customs, religion, the impact of Christianity and Marxism, and fears of Javanese political domination. Following colonial rule, Japanese occupation, and war against the Dutch, the new country suffered from severe poverty, a ruinous economy, low educational and skills levels, and authoritarian traditions. Challenges to the authority of the Republic included the militant Darul Islam who waged a guerrilla struggle against the Republic from 1948 to 1962; the declaration of an independent Republic of South Maluku by Ambonese formerly of the Royal Dutch Indies Army; and rebellions in Sumatra and Sulawesi between 1955 and 1961.
In contrast to the 1945 Constitution, the 1950 constitution mandated a parliamentary system of government, an executive responsible to parliament, and stipulated at length constitutional guarantees for human rights, drawing heavily on the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A proliferation of political parties dealing for shares of cabinet seats resulted in a rapid turnover of coalition governments including 17 cabinets between 1945 and 1958. The long-postponed parliamentary elections were held in 1955; although the Indonesian National Party (PNI)—considered Sukarno's party—topped the poll, and the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) received strong support, no party garnered more than a quarter of the votes, which resulted in short-lived coalitions.
By 1956, Sukarno was openly criticising parliamentary democracy, stating that it was "based upon inherent conflict" which ran counter to Indonesian notions of harmony as being the natural state of human relationships. Instead, he sought a system based on the traditional village system of discussion and consensus, under the guidance of village elders. He proposed a threefold blend of nasionalisme ('nationalism'), agama ('religion'), and komunisme ('communism') into a co-operative 'Nas-A-Kom' government. This was intended to appease the three main factions in Indonesian politics — the army, Islamic groups, and the communists. With the support of the military, he proclaimed in February 1957 a system of 'Guided Democracy', and proposed a cabinet representing all the political parties of importance (including the PKI). The US tried and failed to secretly overthrow the president, even though Secretary of State Dulles declared before Congress that "we are not interested in the internal affairs of this country."
Sukarno abrogated the 1950 Constitution on 9 July 1959 by a decree dissolving the Constitutional Assembly and restoring the 1945 Constitution. The elected parliament was replaced by one appointed by, and subject to the will of, the president. Another non-elected body, the Supreme Advisory Council, was the main policy development body, while the National Front was set up in September 1960 and presided over by the president to "mobilise the revolutionary forces of the people". Western-style parliamentary democracy was thus finished in Indonesia until the 1999 elections of the Reformasi era.
Charismatic Sukarno spoke as a romantic revolutionary, and under his increasingly authoritarian rule, Indonesia moved on a course of stormy nationalism. Sukarno was popularly referred to as bang ("older brother"), and he painted himself as a man of the people carrying the aspirations of Indonesia and one who dared take on the West. He instigated a number of large, ideologically driven infrastructure projects and monuments celebrating Indonesia's identity, which were criticised as substitutes for real development in a deteriorating economy.
Western New Guinea had been part of the Dutch East Indies, and Indonesian nationalists had thus claimed it on this basis. Indonesia was able to instigate a diplomatic and military confrontation with the Dutch over the territory following an Indonesian-Soviet arms agreement in 1960. It was, however, United States pressure on the Netherlands that led to an Indonesian takeover in 1963. Also in 1963, Indonesia commenced Konfrontasi with the new state of Malaysia. The northern states of Borneo, formerly British Sarawak and Sabah, had wavered in joining Malaysia, whilst Indonesia saw itself as the rightful ruler of Austronesian peoples and supported an unsuccessful revolution attempt in Brunei. Reviving the glories of the Indonesian National Revolution, Sukarno increased the anti-British sentiment in his rhetoric and mounted military offensives along the Indonesia-Malaysia border in Borneo. As the PKI rallied in Jakarta streets in support, the West became increasingly alarmed at Indonesian foreign policy and the United States withdrew its aid to Indonesia.
In social policy, Sukarno's time in office witnessed substantial reforms in health and education, together with the passage of various pro-labour measures. However, Indonesia's economic position deteriorated under Sukarno; by the mid-1960s, the cash-strapped government had to scrap critical public sector subsidies, inflation was at 1,000%, export revenues were shrinking, infrastructure crumbling, and factories were operating at minimal capacity with negligible investment. Severe poverty and hunger were widespread.
Described as the great dalang ("puppet master"), Sukarno's position depended on balancing the opposing and increasingly hostile forces of the army and the PKI. Sukarno's anti-imperialist ideology saw Indonesia increasingly dependent on Soviet and then communist China. By 1965, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world outside the Soviet Union or China. Penetrating all levels of government, the party increasingly gained influence at the expense of the army.
On 30 September 1965, six of the most senior generals within the military and other officers were assassinated in an attempted coup. The insurgents, known later as the 30 September Movement, backed a rival faction of the army and took up positions in the capital, later seizing control of the national radio station. They claimed they were acting against a plot organised by the generals to overthrow Sukarno. Within a few hours, Major General Suharto, commander of the Army Strategic Reserve (Kostrad), mobilised counteraction, and by the evening of 1 October, it was clear that the coup, which had little co-ordination and was largely limited to Jakarta, had failed. Complicated and partisan theories continue to this day over the identity of the attempted coup's organisers and their aims. According to the Indonesian army, the PKI were behind the coup and used disgruntled army officers to carry it out, and this became the official account of Suharto's subsequent New Order administration. Although there is not broad agreement on who bears ultimate responsibility for the coup or even if there was really a single mastermind controlling all events, modern evidence has suggested at least a role played by Western intelligence agencies including the American Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom's MI6.
The PKI was blamed for the coup, and anti-communists, initially following the army's lead, went on a violent anti-communist purge across much of the country. The PKI was effectively destroyed, and the most widely accepted estimates are that between 500,000 and 1 million were killed. The violence was especially brutal in Java and Bali. The PKI was outlawed and possibly more than 1 million of its leaders and affiliates were imprisoned. The United States and other Western powers facilitated and supported the purge.
Throughout the 1965–66 period, President Sukarno attempted to restore his political position and shift the country back to its pre-October 1965 position but his Guided Democracy balancing act was destroyed with the PKI's demise. Although he remained president, the weakened Sukarno was forced to transfer key political and military powers to General Suharto, who by that time had become head of the armed forces. In March 1967, the Provisional People's Consultative Assembly (MPRS) named General Suharto acting president. Suharto was formally appointed president in March 1968. Sukarno lived under virtual house arrest until his death in 1970.
In the aftermath of Suharto's rise, hundreds of thousands of people were killed or imprisoned by the military and religious groups in a backlash against alleged communist supporters, with direct support from the United States. Suharto's administration is commonly called the New Order era. Suharto invited major foreign investment, which produced substantial, if uneven, economic growth. However, Suharto enriched himself and his family through business dealings and widespread corruption.
At the time of independence, the Dutch retained control over the western half of New Guinea (also known as West Irian), and permitted steps towards self-government and a declaration of independence on 1 December 1961. After negotiations with the Dutch on the incorporation of the territory into Indonesia failed, an Indonesian paratroop invasion 18 December preceded armed clashes between Indonesian and Dutch troops in 1961 and 1962. In 1962 the United States pressured the Netherlands into secret talks with Indonesia which in August 1962 produced the New York Agreement, and Indonesia assumed administrative responsibility for West Irian on 1 May 1963.
Rejecting UN supervision, the Indonesian government under Suharto decided to settle the question of West Irian, the former Dutch New Guinea, in their favour. Rather than a referendum of all residents of West Irian as had been agreed under Sukarno, an 'Act of Free Choice' was conducted in 1969 in which 1,025 Papuan representatives of local councils were selected by the Indonesians. They were warned to vote in favour of Indonesian integration with the group unanimously voting for integration with Indonesia. A subsequent UN General Assembly resolution confirmed the transfer of sovereignty to Indonesia.
West Irian was renamed Irian Jaya ('glorious Irian') in 1973. Opposition to Indonesian administration of Irian Jaya (later known as Papua) gave rise to guerrilla activity in the years following Jakarta's assumption of control.
In 1975, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal caused authorities there to announce plans for decolonisation of Portuguese Timor, the eastern half of the island of Timor whose western half was a part of the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara. In the East Timorese elections held in 1975, Fretilin, a left-leaning party, and UDT, aligned with the local elite, emerged as the largest parties, having previously formed an alliance to campaign for independence from Portugal. Apodeti, a party advocating integration with Indonesia, enjoyed little popular support.
Indonesia alleged that Fretilin was communist, and feared that an independent East Timor would influence separatism in the archipelago. Indonesian military intelligence influenced the break-up of the alliance between Fretilin and UDT, which led to a coup by the UDT on 11 August 1975 and the start of a month-long civil war. During this time, the Portuguese government effectively abandoned the territory and did not resume the decolonisation process. On 28 November, Fretilin unilaterally declared independence, and proclaimed the 'Democratic Republic of East Timor'. Nine days later, on 7 December, Indonesia invaded East Timor, eventually annexing the tiny country of (then) 680,000 people. Indonesia was supported materially and diplomatically by the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, who regarded Indonesia as an anti-communist ally.
Following the 1998 resignation of Suharto, the people of East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence in a UN-sponsored referendum held on 30 August 1999. About 99% of the eligible population participated; more than three quarters chose independence despite months of attacks by the Indonesian military and its militia. After the result was announced, elements of the Indonesian military and its militia retaliated by killing approximately 2,000 East Timorese, displacing two-thirds of the population, raping hundreds of women and girls, and destroying much of the country's infrastructure. In October 1999, the Indonesian parliament (MPR) revoked the decree that annexed East Timor, and the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) assumed responsibility for governing East Timor until it officially became an independent state in May 2002.
The Transmigration program (Transmigrasi) was a National Government initiative to move landless people from densely populated areas of Indonesia (such as Java and Bali) to less populous areas of the country including Papua, Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Sulawesi. The stated purpose of this program was to reduce the considerable poverty and overpopulation on Java, to provide opportunities for hard-working poor people, and to provide a workforce to better utilise the resources of the outer islands. The program, however, has been controversial, with critics accusing the Indonesian Government of trying to use these migrants to reduce the proportion of native populations in destination areas to weaken separatist movements. The program has often been cited as a major and ongoing factor in controversies and even conflict and violence between settlers and indigenous populations.
In 1996, Suharto undertook efforts to pre-empt a challenge to the New Order government. The Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), a legal party that had traditionally propped up the regime, had changed direction and began to assert its independence. Suharto fostered a split over the leadership of PDI, backing a co-opted faction loyal to deputy speaker of the People's Representative Council Suryadi against a faction loyal to Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Sukarno and the PDI's chairperson.
After the Suryadi faction announced a party congress to sack Megawati would be held in Medan on 20–22 June, Megawati proclaimed that her supporters would hold demonstrations in protest. The Suryadi faction went through with its sacking of Megawati, and the demonstrations manifested themselves throughout Indonesia. This led to several confrontations on the streets between protesters and security forces, and recriminations over the violence. The protests culminated in the military allowing Megawati's supporters to take over PDI headquarters in Jakarta, with a pledge of no further demonstrations.
Suharto allowed the occupation of PDI headquarters to go on for almost a month, as attentions were also on Jakarta due to a set of high-profile ASEAN meetings scheduled to take place there. Capitalizing on this, Megawati supporters organised "democracy forums" with several speakers at the site. On 26 July, officers of the military, Suryadi, and Suharto openly aired their disgust with the forums.
On 27 July, police, soldiers, and persons claiming to be Suryadi supporters stormed the headquarters. Several Megawati supporters were killed, and over two hundred people were arrested and tried under the Anti-Subversion and Hate-Spreading laws. The day would become known as "Black Saturday" and mark the beginning of a renewed crackdown by the New Order government against supporters of democracy, now called the "Reformasi" or Reform movement.
In 1997 and 1998, Indonesia was the country hardest hit by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which had dire consequences for the Indonesian economy and society, as well as Suharto's presidency. At the same time, the country suffered a severe drought and some of the largest forest fires in history burned in Kalimantan and Sumatra. The rupiah, the Indonesian currency, took a sharp dive in value. Suharto came under scrutiny from international lending institutions, chiefly the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States, over longtime embezzlement of funds and some protectionist policies. In December, Suharto's government signed a letter of intent to the IMF, pledging to enact austerity measures, including cuts to public services and removal of subsidies, in return for aid from the IMF and other donors. Prices for goods such as kerosene and rice, as well as fees for public services including education, rose dramatically. The effects were exacerbated by widespread corruption. The austerity measures approved by Suharto had started to erode domestic confidence with the New Order and led to popular protests.
Suharto stood for re-election by parliament for the seventh time in March 1998, justifying it on the grounds of the necessity of his leadership during the crisis. The parliament approved a new term. This sparked protests and riots throughout the country, now termed the Indonesian 1998 Revolution. Dissent within the ranks of his own Golkar party and the military finally weakened Suharto, and on 21 May he stood down from power. He was replaced by his deputy, Vice President B.J. Habibie.
President Habibie quickly assembled a cabinet. One of its main tasks was to re-establish International Monetary Fund and donor community support for an economic stabilisation program. He moved quickly to release political prisoners and lift some controls on freedom of speech and association. Elections for the national, provincial, and sub-provincial parliaments were held on 7 June 1999. In the elections for the national parliament, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P, led by Sukarno's daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri) won 34% of the vote; Golkar (Suharto's party, formerly the only legal party of government) 22%; United Development Party (PPP, led by Hamzah Haz) 12%; and National Awakening Party (PKB, led by Abdurrahman Wahid) 10%.
The May 1998 riots of Indonesia also known as the 1998 tragedy or simply the 1998 event, were incidents of mass violence, demonstrations, and civil unrest of a racial nature that occurred throughout Indonesia.
In October 1999, the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), which consists of the 500-member Parliament plus 200 appointed members, elected Abdurrahman Wahid, commonly referred to as "Gus Dur", as President, and Megawati Sukarnoputri as Vice-President, both for five-year terms. Wahid named his first Cabinet in early November 1999 and a reshuffled, second Cabinet in August 2000. President Wahid's government continued to pursue democratisation and to encourage renewed economic growth under challenging conditions. In addition to continuing economic malaise, his government faced regional, interethnic, and interreligious conflict, particularly in Aceh, the Maluku Islands, and Irian Jaya. In West Timor, the problems of displaced East Timorese and violence by pro-Indonesian East Timorese militias caused considerable humanitarian and social problems. An increasingly assertive Parliament frequently challenged President Wahid's policies and prerogatives, contributing to a lively and sometimes rancorous national political debate.
During the People's Consultative Assembly's first annual session in August 2000, President Wahid gave an account of his government's performance. On 29 January 2001, thousands of student protesters stormed parliament grounds and demanded that President Abdurrahman Wahid resign due to alleged involvement in corruption scandals. Under pressure from the Assembly to improve management and co-ordination within the government, he issued a presidential decree giving Vice-President Megawati control over the day-to-day administration of government. Soon after, Megawati Sukarnoputri assumed the presidency on 23 July. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won Indonesia's first direct presidential election in 2004, and was reelected in 2009.
Joko Widodo, the PDI-P candidate, was elected president in 2014. Having previously served as the Governor of Jakarta, he is the first Indonesian president without a high-ranking political or military background. However, his opponent Prabowo Subianto disputed the outcome and withdrew from the race before the count was completed. Jokowi was reelected in 2019, again defeating Prabowo Subianto.
As a multi-ethnic and multicultural democratic country with a Muslim-majority population, Indonesia faces the challenge of dealing with terrorism linked to global militant Islamic movements. Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a militant Islamic organisation that aspires for the establishment of a Daulah Islamiyah across Southeast Asia, is responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in Indonesia. This terrorist organisation, linked to Al-Qaeda, was responsible for the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005, as well as Jakarta bombings in 2003, 2004, and 2009. The Indonesian government and authorities have tried to crack down on terrorist cells in Indonesia.
On 14 January 2016, suicide bombers and gunmen initiated a terror attack in Jakarta, resulting in the death of eight people: three Indonesian civilians, a Canadian and four of the attackers. Twenty people were wounded during the attack. The Islamic state claimed responsibility for the incident.
On 26 December 2004, a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated parts of northern Sumatra, particularly Aceh. Partly as a result of the need for co-operation and peace during the recovery from the tsunami in Aceh, peace talks between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) were restarted. Accords signed in Helsinki created a framework for military de-escalation in which the government has reduced its military presence, as members of GAM's armed wing decommission their weapons and apply for amnesty. The agreement also allows for local parties to be established, and other autonomy measures.
Since 1997 Indonesia has been struggling to contain forest fires, especially on the islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan. Haze occurs annually during the dry season and is largely caused by illegal agricultural fires due to slash-and-burn practices in Indonesia, especially in the provinces of South Sumatra and Riau on Indonesia's Sumatra island, and Kalimantan on Indonesian Borneo. The haze that occurred in 1997 was one of the most severe; dense hazes occurred again in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2013, and the worst was in 2015, killing dozens of Indonesians as a result of respiratory illnesses and road accidents due to poor visibility. Another 10 people were killed due to smog from forest and land fires.
In September 2014, Indonesia ratified the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, becoming the last ASEAN country to do so. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The history of Indonesia has been shaped by its geographic position, natural resources, a series of human migrations and contacts, wars and conquests, as well as by trade, economics and politics. Indonesia is an archipelagic country of 17,000 to 18,000 islands stretching along the equator in Southeast Asia. The country's strategic sea-lane position fostered inter-island and international trade; trade has since fundamentally shaped Indonesian history. The area of Indonesia is populated by peoples of various migrations, creating a diversity of cultures, ethnicities, and languages. The archipelago's landforms and climate significantly influenced agriculture and trade, and the formation of states. The boundaries of the state of Indonesia match the 20th-century borders of the Dutch East Indies.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Fossilised remains of Homo erectus, popularly known as \"Java Man\", and their tools suggest the Indonesian archipelago was inhabited at least 1.5 million years ago. Austronesian people, who form the majority of the modern population, are thought to have originally been from Taiwan and arrived in Indonesia around 2000 BCE. From the 7th century CE, the powerful Srivijaya naval kingdom flourished, bringing Hindu and Buddhist influences with it. The agricultural Buddhist Sailendra and Hindu Mataram dynasties subsequently thrived in inland Java. The last significant non-Muslim kingdom, the Hindu Majapahit kingdom, flourished from the late 13th century, and its influence stretched over much of Indonesia. The earliest evidence of Islamised populations in Indonesia dates to the 13th century in northern Sumatra; other Indonesian areas gradually adopted Islam, which became the dominant religion in Java and Sumatra by the end of the 16th century. For the most part, Islam overlaid and mixed with existing cultural and religious influences.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Europeans such as the Portuguese arrived in Indonesia from the 16th century seeking to monopolise the sources of valuable nutmeg, cloves, and cubeb pepper in Maluku. In 1602, the Dutch established the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) and became the dominant European power by 1610. Following bankruptcy, the VOC was formally dissolved in 1800, and the government of the Netherlands established the Dutch East Indies under government control. By the early 20th century, Dutch dominance extended to the current boundaries. The Japanese invasion and occupation in 1942–1945 during WWII ended Dutch rule, and encouraged the previously suppressed Indonesian independence movement. Two days after the surrender of Japan in August 1945, nationalist leader Sukarno declared independence and became president. The Netherlands tried to reestablish its rule, but a bitter armed and diplomatic struggle ended in December 1949, when in the face of international pressure the Dutch formally recognised Indonesian independence.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "An attempted coup in 1965 led to a violent army-led anti-communist purge in which over half a million people were killed. General Suharto politically outmanoeuvred President Sukarno, and became president in March 1968. His New Order administration garnered the favour of the West, whose investment in Indonesia was a major factor in the subsequent three decades of substantial economic growth. In the late 1990s, however, Indonesia was the country hardest hit by the East Asian financial crisis, which led to popular protests and Suharto's resignation on 21 May 1998. The Reformasi era following Suharto's resignation has led to a strengthening of democratic processes, including a regional autonomy program, the secession of East Timor, and the first direct presidential election in 2004. Political instability, social unrest, corruption, natural disasters, and terrorism remained problems in the 2000s, but the economy has performed strongly since 2007. Although relations between different religious and ethnic groups are largely harmonious, acute sectarian discontent and violence remain problems in some areas.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Today, Indonesia is a diverse and multicultural nation with a population of over 270 million people. The country is known for its natural beauty, rich cultural heritage, and significant contributions to global art, music, and cuisine. It is also one of the world's fastest-growing economies and a major player in the Southeast Asian region.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 2007, an analysis of cut marks on two bovid bones found in Sangiran, showed them to have been made 1.5 to 1.6 million years ago by clamshell tools. This is the oldest evidence for the presence of early humans in Indonesia. Fossilised remains of Homo erectus in Indonesia, popularly known as the \"Java Man\" were first discovered by the Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois at Trinil in 1891, and are at least 700,000 years old. Other H. erectus fossils of a similar age were found at Sangiran in the 1930s by the anthropologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald, who in the same time period also uncovered fossils at Ngandong alongside more advanced tools, re-dated in 2011 to between 550,000 and 143,000 years old. In 1977 another H. erectus skull was discovered at Sambungmacan. In 2010, stone tools were discovered on Flores, dating from 1 million years ago. These are the earliest remains implying human seafaring technology. The earliest evidence of artistic activity ever found, in the form of diagonal etchings made with the use of a shark's tooth, was detected in 2014 on a 500,000-year-old fossil of a clam found in Java in the 1890s, associated with H. erectus.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 2003, on the island of Flores, fossils of a 1.1 m (3 ft 7 in) tall hominid dated between 74,000 and 13,000 years old were discovered, much to the surprise of the scientific community. This newly discovered hominid was named the \"Flores Man\", or Homo floresiensis. A phylogenetic analysis published in 2017 suggests that H. floresiensis was descended from the same ancestor as Homo habilis. H. floresiensis would thus represent a previously unknown and very early migration out of Africa. The Homo floresiensis skeletal material is dated from 60,000 to 100,000 years ago; stone tools recovered alongside the skeletal remains were from archaeological horizons ranging from 50,000 to 190,000 years ago.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Indonesian archipelago was formed during the thaw after the Last Glacial Maximum. Early humans travelled by sea and spread from mainland Asia eastward to New Guinea and Australia. Homo sapiens reached the region by around 45,000 years ago. In 2011, evidence was uncovered in neighbouring East Timor, showing that 42,000 years ago, these early settlers had high-level maritime skills, and by implication the technology needed to make ocean crossings to reach Australia and other islands, as they were catching and consuming large numbers of big deep sea fish such as tuna.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "An elaborate 4.5 m long rock art panel in a limestone cave at Leang Bulu' in Sulawesi is currently considered the earliest figurative artwork in the world. It portrays several figures hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids. This rock art was dated to at least 43.9 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. A painted hand stencil from Leang Timpuseng, which has a minimum age of 39.9 kyr, is now the oldest known hand stencil in the world.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Austronesian people form the majority of the modern population. They may have arrived in Indonesia around 2000 BCE and are thought to have originated in Taiwan. During this period, parts of Indonesia participated in the Maritime Jade Road, whith outlets in Kalimantan which existed for 3,000 years between 2000 BCE to 1000 CE. Dong Son culture spread to Indonesia bringing with it techniques of wet-field rice cultivation, ritual buffalo sacrifice, bronze casting, megalithic practises, and ikat weaving methods. Some of these practices remain in areas including the Batak areas of Sumatra, Toraja in Sulawesi, and several islands in Nusa Tenggara. Early Indonesians were animists who honoured the spirits of the dead believing their souls or life force could still help the living.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Ideal agricultural conditions, and the mastering of wet-field rice cultivation as early as the 8th century BCE, allowed villages, towns, and small kingdoms to flourish by the 1st century CE. These kingdoms (little more than collections of villages subservient to petty chieftains) evolved with their own ethnic and tribal religions. Java's hot and even temperature, abundant rain and volcanic soil, was perfect for wet rice cultivation. Such agriculture required a well-organized society, in contrast to the society based on dry-field rice, which is a much simpler form of cultivation that does not require an elaborate social structure to support it.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Buni culture clay pottery flourished in coastal northern West Java and Banten around 400 BCE to 100 CE. The Buni culture was probably the predecessor of the Tarumanagara kingdom, one of the earliest Hindu kingdoms in Indonesia, producing numerous inscriptions and marking the beginning of the historical period in Java.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "On 11 December 2019, a team of researchers led by Dr. Maxime Aubert announced the discovery of the oldest hunting scenes in prehistoric art in the world which is more than 44,000 years old from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu' Sipong 4. Archaeologists determined the age of the depiction of hunting a pig and buffalo thanks to the calcite 'popcorn', different isotope levels of radioactive uranium and thorium.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Indonesia like much of Southeast Asia was influenced by Indian culture. From the 2nd century, through the Indian dynasties like the Pallava, Gupta, Pala and Chola in the succeeding centuries up to the 12th century, Indian culture spread across all of Southeast Asia.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "References to the Dvipantara or Yawadvipa, a Hindu kingdom in Java and Sumatra appear in Sanskrit writings from 200 BCE. In India's earliest epic, the Ramayana, Sugriva, the chief of Rama's army dispatched his men to Yawadvipa, the island of Java, in search of Sita. According to the ancient Tamil text Manimekalai Java had a kingdom with a capital called Nagapuram. The earliest archaeological relic discovered in Indonesia is from the Ujung Kulon National Park, West Java, where an early Hindu statue of Ganesha estimated from the 1st century CE was found on the summit of Mount Raksa in Panaitan island. There is also archaeological evidence of Sunda Kingdom in West Java dating from the 2nd-century, and Jiwa Temple in Batujaya, Karawang, West Java was probably built around this time. South Indian culture was spread to Southeast Asia by the south Indian Pallava dynasty in the 4th and 5th centuries. and by the 5th century, stone inscriptions written in Pallava scripts were found in Java and Borneo.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A number of Hindu and Buddhist states flourished and then declined across Indonesia. Seven rough plinths dating from the beginning of the 4th century CE were found in Kutai, East Kalimantan, near the Mahakam River known as the Yupa inscription or \"Mulavarman Inscription\" believed to be one of the earliest Sanskrit inscriptions of Indonesia, the plinths were written by Brahmins in the Sanskrit language using the Pallava script of India recalling of a generous king by the name of Mulavarman who donated a huge amount of alms to Brahmin priests in his kingdom, the kingdom was known as the Kutai Martadipura Kingdom located in present East Kalimantan Province, believed to be the oldest and first Hindu kingdom of Indonesia.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "One such early kingdom was Tarumanagara, which flourished between 358 and 669 CE. Located in West Java close to modern-day Jakarta, its 5th-century king, Purnawarman, established the earliest known inscriptions in Java, the Ciaruteun inscription located near Bogor. And other inscriptions called the Pasir Awi inscription and the Muncul inscription. On this monument, King Purnawarman inscribed his name and made an imprint of his footprints, as well as his elephant's footprints. The accompanying inscription reads, \"Here are the footprints of King Purnavarman, the heroic conqueror of the world\". This inscription is written in Pallava script and in Sanskrit and is still clear after 1500 years. Purnawarman apparently built a canal that changed the course of the Cakung River, and drained a coastal area for agriculture and settlement purpose. In his stone inscriptions, Purnawarman associated himself with Vishnu, and Brahmins ritually secured the hydraulic project.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Around the same period, in the 6th to 7th centuries (501–700 CE), the Kalingga Kingdom was established in Central Java northern coast, mentioned in Chinese account. The name of this kingdom was derived from ancient Indian kingdom of Kalinga, which suggest the ancient link between India and Indonesia.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The political history of Indonesian archipelago during the 7th to 11th (601–1100 CE) around centuries was dominated by Srivijaya based in Sumatra and Sailendra that dominated southeast Asia based in Java and constructed Borobudur, the largest Buddhist monument in the world. The history prior of the 14th and 15th centuries (1301–1500 CE) is not well known due to the scarcity of evidence. By the 15th century (1401–1500 CE), two major states dominated this period; Majapahit in East Java, the greatest of the pre-Islamic Indonesian states, and Malacca on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, arguably one of the greatest of the Muslim trading empires, this marked the rise of Muslim states in the Indonesian archipelago.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Mataram Empire, sometimes referred to as Mataram Kingdom, was an Indianized kingdom based in Central Java around modern-day Yogyakarta between the 8th and 10th centuries. The kingdom was ruled by the Sailendra dynasty, and later by the Sanjaya dynasty. The centre of the kingdom was moved from central Java to East Java by Mpu Sindok. An eruption of the volcano Mount Merapi in 929, and political pressure from Sailendrans based in the Srivijaya Empire may have caused the move.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The first king of Mataram, Sri Sanjaya, left inscriptions in stone. The monumental Hindu temple of Prambanan in the vicinity of Yogyakarta was built by Pikatan. Dharmawangsa ordered the translation of the Mahabharata into Old Javanese in 996.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the period 750 CE – 850 CE, the kingdom saw the blossoming of classical Javanese art and architecture. A rapid increase in temple construction occurred across the landscape of its heartland in Mataram (Kedu and Kewu Plain). The most notable temples constructed in Mataram are Kalasan, Sewu, Borobudur and Prambanan. The Empire had become the supreme power not only in Java but also over Srivijayan Empire, Bali, southern Thailand, some Philippine kingdoms, and Khmer in Cambodia.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Later in its history, the dynasty divided into two dynasties based on their own religion, the Buddhist and Shivaist dynasties. Civil war was unavoidable and the outcome was Mataram Empire divided into two powerful kingdom based on region and religion. The Shivaist dynasty of Mataram kingdom in Java led by Rakai Pikatan and the Buddhist dynasty of Srivijaya kingdom in Sumatra led by Balaputradewa. The hostility between them didn't end until in 1006 when the Sailendran based in Srivijaya kingdom incited rebellion by Wurawari, vassal of Mataram kingdom and sacked Shivaist dynasty's capital in Watugaluh, Java. Srivijaya kingdom rose into undisputed hegemonic Empire in the era as the result. Yet the Shivaist dynasty survived and successfully reclaimed the east Java in 1019 then descended to Kahuripan kingdom led by Airlangga son of Udayana of Bali.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Sriwijaya was a kingdom on Sumatra which influenced much of the Maritime Southeast Asia. From the 7th century, the powerful Srivijaya naval kingdom flourished as a result of trade and the influences of Hinduism and Buddhism that were imported with it.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Srivijaya was centred in the coastal trading centre of present-day Palembang. Srivijaya was not a \"state\" in the modern sense with defined boundaries and a centralised government to which the citizens own allegiance. Rather Srivijaya was a confederacy form of society centred on a royal heartland. It was a thalassocracy and did not extend its influence far beyond the coastal areas of the islands of Southeast Asia. Trade was the driving force of Srivijaya just as it is for most societies throughout history. The Srivijayan navy controlled the trade that made its way through the Strait of Malacca.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "By the 7th century, the harbours of various vassal states of Srivijaya lined both coasts of the Straits of Melaka. Around this time, Srivijaya had established suzerainty over large areas of Sumatra, western Java, and much of the Malay Peninsula. Dominating the Malacca and Sunda straits, the empire controlled both the Spice Route traffic and local trade. It remained a formidable sea power until the 13th century. This spread the ethnic Malay culture throughout Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, and western Borneo. A stronghold of Mahayana Buddhism, Srivijaya attracted pilgrims and scholars from other parts of Asia.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The relation between Srivijaya and the Chola Empire of south India was friendly during the reign of Raja Raja Chola I but during the reign of Rajendra Chola I the Chola Empire attacked Srivijaya cities. A series of Chola raids in the 11th century weakened the Srivijayan hegemony and enabled the formation of regional kingdoms based, like Kediri, on intensive agriculture rather than coastal and long-distance trade. Srivijayan influence waned by the 11th century. The island was in frequent conflict with the Javanese kingdoms, first Singhasari and then Majapahit. Islam eventually made its way to the Aceh region of Sumatra, spreading its influence through contacts with Arabs and Indian traders. By the late 13th century, the kingdom of Pasai in northern Sumatra converted to Islam. The last inscription dates to 1374, where a crown prince, Ananggavarman, is mentioned. Srivijaya ceased to exist by 1414, when Parameswara, the kingdom's last prince, fled to Temasik, then to Malacca. Later his son converted to Islam and founded the Sultanate of Malacca on the Malay peninsula.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Majapahit was the most dominant of Indonesia's pre-Islamic states. The Hindu Majapahit kingdom was founded in eastern Java in the late 13th century, and under Gajah Mada it experienced what is often referred to as a golden age in Indonesian history, when its influence extended to much of southern Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, and Bali from about 1293 to around 1500.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The founder of the Majapahit Empire, Kertarajasa, was the son-in-law of the ruler of the Singhasari kingdom, also based in Java. After Singhasari drove Srivijaya out of Java in 1290, the rising power of Singhasari came to the attention of Kublai Khan in China and he sent emissaries demanding tribute. Kertanagara, ruler of the Singhasari kingdom, refused to pay tribute and the Khan sent a punitive expedition which arrived off the coast of Java in 1293. By that time, a rebel from Kediri, Jayakatwang, had killed Kertanagara. The Majapahit founder allied himself with the Mongols against Jayakatwang and, once the Singhasari kingdom was destroyed, turned and forced his Mongol allies to withdraw in confusion.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Gajah Mada, a Majapahit prime minister and regent from 1331 to 1364, extended the empire's rule to the surrounding islands. A few years after Gajah Mada's death, the Majapahit navy captured Palembang, putting an end to the Sriwijaya kingdom. Although the Majapahit rulers extended their power over other islands and destroyed neighbouring kingdoms, their focus seems to have been on controlling and gaining a larger share of the commercial trade that passed through the archipelago. About the time Majapahit was founded, Muslim traders and proselytisers began entering the area. After its peak in the 14th century, Majapahit power began to decline and was unable to control the rising power of the Sultanate of Malacca. Dates for the end of the Majapahit Empire range from 1478 to 1520. A large number of courtiers, artisans, priests, and members of the royal family moved east to the island of Bali at the end of Majapahit power.",
"title": "Hindu-Buddhist civilizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The earliest accounts of the Indonesian archipelago date from the Abbasid Caliphate, according to those early accounts the Indonesian archipelago were famous among early Muslim sailors mainly due to its abundance of precious spice trade commodities such as nutmeg, cloves, galangal and many other spices.",
"title": "The age of Islamic states"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Although Muslim traders first travelled through South East Asia early in the Islamic era, the spread of Islam among the inhabitants of the Indonesian archipelago dates to the 13th century in northern Sumatra.",
"title": "The age of Islamic states"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Although it is known that the spread of Islam began in the west of the archipelago, the fragmentary evidence does not suggest a rolling wave of conversion through adjacent areas; rather, it suggests the process was complicated and slow. The spread of Islam was driven by increasing trade links outside of the archipelago; in general, traders and the royalty of major kingdoms were the first to adopt the new religion.",
"title": "The age of Islamic states"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Other Indonesian areas gradually adopted Islam, making it the dominant religion in Java and Sumatra by the end of the 7th until 13th century. For the most part, Islam overlaid and mixed with existing cultural and religious influences, which shaped the predominant form of Islam in Indonesia, particularly in Java. Only Bali retained a Hindu majority. In the eastern archipelago, both Christian and Islamic missionaries were active in the 16th and 17th centuries, and, currently, there are large communities of both religions on these islands.",
"title": "The age of Islamic states"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Sultanate of Mataram was the third Sultanate in Java, after the Sultanate of Demak Bintoro and the Sultanate of Pajang.",
"title": "The age of Islamic states"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "According to Javanese records, Kyai Gedhe Pamanahan became the ruler of the Mataram area in the 1570s with the support of the kingdom of Pajang to the east, near the current site of Surakarta (Solo). Pamanahan was often referred to as Kyai Gedhe Mataram after his ascension.",
"title": "The age of Islamic states"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Pamanahan's son, Panembahan Senapati, replaced his father on the throne around 1584. Under Senapati the kingdom grew substantially through regular military campaigns against Mataram's neighbours. Shortly after his accession, for example, he conquered his father's patrons in Pajang.",
"title": "The age of Islamic states"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The reign of Panembahan Seda ing Krapyak (c. 1601–1613), the son of Senapati, was dominated by further warfare, especially against powerful Surabaya, already a major centre in East Java. The first contact between Mataram and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) occurred under Krapyak. Dutch activities at the time were limited to trading from limited coastal settlements, so their interactions with the inland Mataram kingdom were limited, although they did form an alliance against Surabaya in 1613. Krapyak died that year.",
"title": "The age of Islamic states"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Krapyak was succeeded by his son, who is known simply as Sultan Agung (\"Great Sultan\") in Javanese records. Agung was responsible for the great expansion and lasting historical legacy of Mataram due to the extensive military conquests of his long reign from 1613 to 1646.",
"title": "The age of Islamic states"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 1524–25, Sunan Gunung Jati from Cirebon, together with the armies of Demak Sultanate, seized the port of Banten from the Sunda kingdom, and established The Sultanate of Banten. This was accompanied by Muslim preachers and the adoption of Islam amongst the local population. At its peak in the first half of the 17th century, the Sultanate lasted from 1526 to 1813 AD. The Sultanate left many archaeological remains and historical records.",
"title": "The age of Islamic states"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Beginning in the 16th century, successive waves of Europeans—the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English—sought to dominate the spice trade at its sources in India and the 'Spice Islands' (Maluku) of Indonesia. This meant finding a way to Asia to cut out Muslim merchants who, with their Venetian outlet in the Mediterranean, monopolised spice imports to Europe. Astronomically priced at the time, spices were highly coveted not only to preserve and make poorly preserved meat palatable, but also as medicines and magic potions.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The arrival of Europeans in South East Asia is often regarded as the watershed moment in its history. Other scholars consider this view untenable, arguing that European influence during the times of the early arrivals of the 16th and 17th centuries was limited in both area and depth. This is in part due to Europe not being the most advanced or dynamic area of the world in the early 15th century. Rather, the major expansionist force of this time was Islam; in 1453, for example, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, while Islam continued to spread through Indonesia and the Philippines. European influence, particularly that of the Dutch, would not have its greatest impact on Indonesia until the 18th and 19th centuries.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "New found Portuguese expertise in navigation, shipbuilding and weaponry allowed them to make daring expeditions of exploration and expansion. Starting with the first exploratory expeditions sent from newly conquered Malacca in 1512, the Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive in Indonesia, and sought to dominate the sources of valuable spices and to extend the Catholic Church's missionary efforts. The Portuguese turned east to Maluku and through both military conquest and alliance with local rulers, they established trading posts, forts, and missions on the islands of Ternate, Ambon, and Solor among others. The height of Portuguese missionary activities, however, came in the latter half of the 16th century. Ultimately, the Portuguese presence in Indonesia was reduced to Solor, Flores and Timor in modern-day Nusa Tenggara, following defeat at the hands of indigenous Ternateans and the Dutch in Maluku, and a general failure to maintain control of trade in the region. In comparison with the original Portuguese ambition to dominate Asian trade, their influence on Indonesian culture was small: the romantic keroncong guitar ballads; a number of Indonesian words which reflect Portuguese's role as the lingua franca of the archipelago alongside Malay; and many family names in eastern Indonesia such as da Costa, Dias, de Fretes, Gonsalves, etc. The most significant impacts of the Portuguese arrival were the disruption and disorganisation of the trade network mostly as a result of their conquest of Malacca, and the first significant plantings of Christianity in Indonesia. There have continued to be Christian communities in eastern Indonesia through to the present, which has contributed to a sense of shared interest with Europeans, particularly among the Ambonese.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 1602, the Dutch parliament awarded the VOC a monopoly on trade and colonial activities in the region at a time before the company controlled any territory in Java. In 1619, the VOC conquered the West Javan city of Jayakarta, where they founded the city of Batavia (present-day Jakarta). The VOC became deeply involved in the internal politics of Java in this period, and fought in a number of wars involving the leaders of Mataram and Banten.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Dutch followed the Portuguese aspirations, courage, brutality, and strategies but brought better organisation, weapons, ships, and superior financial backing. Although they failed to gain complete control of the Indonesian spice trade, they had much more success than the previous Portuguese efforts. They exploited the factionalisation of the small kingdoms in Java that had replaced Majapahit, establishing a permanent foothold in Java, from which grew a land-based colonial empire which became one of the richest colonial possessions on earth.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "By the mid-17th century, Batavia, the headquarter of VOC in Asia, had become an important trade centre in the region. It had repelled attacks from the Javanese Mataram kingdom. In 1641, the Dutch captured Malacca from the Portuguese, thus weakened Portuguese position in Asia. The Dutch defeated the Sulawesi city of Makassar in 1667 thus bringing its trade under VOC control. Sumatran ports were also brought under VOC control and the last of the Portuguese were expelled in 1660. In return for monopoly control over the pepper trade and the expulsion of the English, the Dutch helped the son of the ruler of Banten overthrow his father in 1680. By the 18th century, the VOC has established themselves firmly in Indonesian archipelago, controlling inter-island trade as part of their Asian business which includes India, Ceylon, Formosa, and Japan. VOC has established their important bases in some ports in Java, Maluku, and parts of Sulawesi, Sumatra, and Malay Peninsula.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "After the fall of the Netherlands to the First French Empire and the dissolution of the Dutch East India Company in 1800, there were profound changes in the European colonial administration of the East Indies. The company's assets in East Indies were nationalised as the Dutch colony, the Dutch East Indies. Meanwhile, Europe was devastated by the Napoleonic Wars. In the Netherlands, Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806 oversaw the dissolution of the Batavian Republic, which was replaced by the Kingdom of Holland, a French puppet kingdom ruled by Napoleon's third brother Louis Bonaparte (Lodewijk Napoleon). The East Indies were treated as a proxy French colony, administered through a Dutch intermediary.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In 1806, King Lodewijk of the Netherlands sent one of his generals, Herman Willem Daendels, to serve as governor-general of the East Indies, based in Java. Daendels was sent to strengthen Javanese defences against a predicted British invasion. Since 1685, the British had had a presence in Bencoolen on the western coast of Sumatra, as well as several posts north of the Malaccan straits. Daendels was responsible for the construction of the Great Post Road (Indonesian: Jalan Raya Pos) across northern Java from Anjer to Panaroecan. The thousand-kilometre road was meant as to ease logistics across Java and was completed in only one year, during which thousands of Javanese forced labourers died. In 1811, Java was captured by the British, becoming a possession of the British Empire, and Thomas Stamford Raffles was appointed as the island's governor. Raffles launched several military expeditions against local Javanese princes; such as the assault on Yogyakarta kraton on 21 June 1812, and the military expedition against Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II of Palembang, along with giving orders to seize the nearby Bangka Island. During his administration, numbers of ancient monuments in Java were rediscovered, excavated and systematically catalogued for the first time, the most important one being the rediscovery of Borobudur Buddhist temple in Central Java. Raffles was an enthusiast of the island's history, as he wrote the book History of Java published later in 1817. In 1816, under the administration of British governor John Fendall, Java was returned to control of the Netherlands as per the terms of the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "After the VOC was dissolved in 1800 following bankruptcy, and after the end of British rule under Raffles' governorship, the Dutch state took over the VOC possessions in 1816. A Javanese uprising was crushed in the Java War of 1825–1830. After 1830, a system of forced cultivations and indentured labour was introduced on Java, the Cultivation System (in Dutch: cultuurstelsel). This system brought the Dutch and their Indonesian allies enormous wealth. The cultivation system tied peasants to their land, forcing them to work in government-owned plantations for 60 days of the year. The system was abolished in a more liberal period after 1870. In 1901, the Dutch adopted what they called the Ethical Policy, which included somewhat increased investment in indigenous education, and modest political reforms.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Dutch colonials formed a privileged upper social class of soldiers, administrators, managers, teachers, and pioneers. They lived together with the \"natives\", but at the top of a rigid social and racial caste system. The Dutch East Indies had two legal classes of citizens; European and indigenous. A third class, Foreign Easterners, was added in 1920.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Upgrading the infrastructure of ports and roads was a high priority for the Dutch, with the goal of modernising the economy, pumping wages into local areas, facilitating commerce, and speeding up military movements. By 1950, Dutch engineers had built and upgraded a road network with 12,000 km of asphalted surface, 41,000 km of metalled road area and 16,000 km of gravel surfaces. In addition the Dutch built 7,500 kilometres (4,700 mi) of railways, bridges, irrigation systems covering 1.4 million hectares (5,400 sq mi) of rice fields, several harbours, and 140 public drinking water systems. These Dutch constructed public works became the economic base of the colonial state; after independence, they became the basis of the Indonesian infrastructure.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "For most of the colonial period, Dutch control over its territories in the Indonesian archipelago was tenuous. In some cases, Dutch police and military actions in parts of Indonesia were quite cruel. Recent discussions, for example, of Dutch cruelty in Aceh have encouraged renewed research on these aspects of Dutch rule. It was only in the early 20th century, three centuries after the first Dutch trading post, that the full extent of the colonial territory was established and direct colonial rule exerted across what would become the boundaries of the modern Indonesian state. Portuguese Timor, now East Timor, remained under Portuguese rule until 1975 when it was invaded by Indonesia. The Indonesian government declared the territory an Indonesian province but relinquished it in 1999.",
"title": "Colonial era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In October 1908, the first nationalist movement was formed, Budi Utomo. On 10 September 1912, the first nationalist mass movement was formed: Sarekat Islam. By December 1912, Sarekat Islam had 93,000 members. The Dutch responded after the First World War with repressive measures. The nationalist leaders came from a small group of young professionals and students, some of whom had been educated in the Netherlands. In the post–World War I era, the Indonesian communists who were associated with the Third International started to usurp the nationalist movement. The repression of the nationalist movement led to many arrests, including Indonesia's first president, Sukarno (1901–70), who was imprisoned for political activities on 29 December 1929. Also arrested was Mohammad Hatta, first vice-president of Indonesia. Additionally, Sutan Sjahrir, who later became the first Prime Minister of Indonesia, was arrested on this date.",
"title": "The emergence of Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In 1914 the exiled Dutch socialist Henk Sneevliet founded the Indies Social Democratic Association. Initially a small forum of Dutch socialists, it would later evolve into the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) in 1924. In the post–World War I era, the Dutch strongly repressed all attempts at change. This repression led to a growth of the PKI. By December 1924, the PKI had a membership of 1,140. One year later in 1925, the PKI had grown to 3,000 members. From 1926 to 1927, there was a PKI-led revolt against Dutch colonialism and the harsh repression of strikes of urban workers. However, the strikes and the revolt was put down by the Dutch with some 13,000 nationalists and communists leaders were arrested. Some 4,500 were given prison sentences.",
"title": "The emergence of Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Sukarno was released from prison in December 1931 but was re-arrested on 1 August 1933.",
"title": "The emergence of Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation during World War II interrupted Dutch rule and encouraged the previously suppressed Indonesian independence movement. In May 1940, early in World War II, Nazi Germany occupied the Netherlands, but the Dutch government-in-exile initially continued to control the Dutch East Indies from its base in London. The Dutch East Indies declared a state of siege and in July 1940 redirected exports intended for Japan to the US and Britain. Negotiations with the Japanese aimed at securing supplies of aviation fuel collapsed in June 1941, and the Japanese started their conquest of Southeast Asia in December of that year. That same month, factions from Sumatra sought Japanese assistance for a revolt against the Dutch wartime government. The Japanese military defeated last Dutch forces in the East Indies in March 1942.",
"title": "The emergence of Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In July 1942, Sukarno accepted Japan's offer to rally the public in support of the Japanese war effort. Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta were decorated by the Emperor of Japan in 1943. However, experience of the Japanese occupation of Dutch East Indies varied considerably, depending upon where one lived and one's social position. Many who lived in areas considered important to the war effort experienced torture, sex slavery, arbitrary arrest and execution, and other war crimes. Thousands taken away from Indonesia as war labourers (romusha) suffered or died as a result of ill-treatment and starvation. People of Dutch and mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent were particular targets of the Japanese occupation.",
"title": "The emergence of Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In March 1945, the Japanese established the Investigating Committee for Preparatory Work for Independence (BPUPK) as the initial stage of the establishment of independence for the area under the control of the Japanese 16th Army. At its first meeting in May, Soepomo spoke of national integration and against personal individualism, while Muhammad Yamin suggested that the new nation should claim British Borneo, British Malaya, Portuguese Timor, and all the pre-war territories of the Dutch East Indies. The committee drafted the 1945 Constitution, which remains in force, though now much amended. On 9 August 1945 Sukarno, Hatta, and Radjiman Wediodiningrat were flown to meet Marshal Hisaichi Terauchi in Vietnam. They were told that Japan intended to announce Indonesian independence on 24 August. After the Japanese surrender, however, Sukarno unilaterally proclaimed Indonesian independence on 17 August. A later UN report stated that four million people died in Indonesia as a result of the Japanese occupation.",
"title": "The emergence of Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Under pressure from radical and politicised pemuda ('youth') groups, Sukarno and Hatta on behalf of the Nation proclaimed Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945 from colonialism by foreign nations two days after the Japanese Emperor's surrender in the Pacific, and made this nation an independent state, which has the right to govern its people and nation in accordance with the philosophy, character and spirit of the Indonesia nation itself. The following day, the Central Indonesian National Committee (KNIP) declared Sukarno President and Hatta Vice-President. Word of the proclamation spread by shortwave and fliers while the Indonesian war-time military (PETA), youths, and others rallied in support of the new republic, often moving to take over government offices from the Japanese. In December 1946 the United Nations acknowledged that Netherlands had advised the United Nations that the \"Netherlands Indies\" was a non-self-governing territory (colony) for which the Netherlands had a legal duty to make yearly reports and to assist towards \"a full measure of self-government\" as required by the Charter of the United Nations article 73.",
"title": "The emergence of Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Dutch, initially backed by the British, tried to re-establish their rule, and a bitter armed and diplomatic struggle ended in December 1949, when in the face of international pressure, the Dutch formally recognised Indonesian independence. Dutch efforts to re-establish complete control met resistance. At the end of World War II, a power vacuum arose, and the nationalists often succeeded in seizing the arms of the demoralised Japanese. A period of unrest with city guerrilla warfare called the Bersiap period ensued. Groups of Indonesian nationalists armed with improvised weapons (like bamboo spears) and firearms attacked returning Allied troops. 3,500 Europeans were killed and 20,000 were missing, meaning there were more European deaths in Indonesia after the war than during the war. After returning to Java, Dutch forces quickly re-occupied the colonial capital of Batavia (now Jakarta), so the city of Yogyakarta in central Java became the capital of the nationalist forces. Negotiations with the nationalists led to two major truce agreements, but disputes about their implementation, and much mutual provocation, led each time to renewed conflict. Within four years the Dutch had recaptured almost the whole of Indonesia, but guerrilla resistance persisted, led on Java by commander Nasution. On 27 December 1949, after four years of sporadic warfare and fierce criticism of the Dutch by the UN, the Netherlands officially recognised Indonesian sovereignty under the federal structure of the United States of Indonesia (RUSI). With the unification of all the kingdoms in the archipelago On 17 August 1950, exactly five years after the proclamation of independence, the last of the federal states were dissolved and Sukarno proclaimed a single unitary Republic of Indonesia until now.",
"title": "The emergence of Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "With the unifying struggle to secure Indonesia's independence over, divisions in Indonesian society began to appear. These included regional differences in customs, religion, the impact of Christianity and Marxism, and fears of Javanese political domination. Following colonial rule, Japanese occupation, and war against the Dutch, the new country suffered from severe poverty, a ruinous economy, low educational and skills levels, and authoritarian traditions. Challenges to the authority of the Republic included the militant Darul Islam who waged a guerrilla struggle against the Republic from 1948 to 1962; the declaration of an independent Republic of South Maluku by Ambonese formerly of the Royal Dutch Indies Army; and rebellions in Sumatra and Sulawesi between 1955 and 1961.",
"title": "Sukarno's presidency"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In contrast to the 1945 Constitution, the 1950 constitution mandated a parliamentary system of government, an executive responsible to parliament, and stipulated at length constitutional guarantees for human rights, drawing heavily on the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A proliferation of political parties dealing for shares of cabinet seats resulted in a rapid turnover of coalition governments including 17 cabinets between 1945 and 1958. The long-postponed parliamentary elections were held in 1955; although the Indonesian National Party (PNI)—considered Sukarno's party—topped the poll, and the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) received strong support, no party garnered more than a quarter of the votes, which resulted in short-lived coalitions.",
"title": "Sukarno's presidency"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "By 1956, Sukarno was openly criticising parliamentary democracy, stating that it was \"based upon inherent conflict\" which ran counter to Indonesian notions of harmony as being the natural state of human relationships. Instead, he sought a system based on the traditional village system of discussion and consensus, under the guidance of village elders. He proposed a threefold blend of nasionalisme ('nationalism'), agama ('religion'), and komunisme ('communism') into a co-operative 'Nas-A-Kom' government. This was intended to appease the three main factions in Indonesian politics — the army, Islamic groups, and the communists. With the support of the military, he proclaimed in February 1957 a system of 'Guided Democracy', and proposed a cabinet representing all the political parties of importance (including the PKI). The US tried and failed to secretly overthrow the president, even though Secretary of State Dulles declared before Congress that \"we are not interested in the internal affairs of this country.\"",
"title": "Sukarno's presidency"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Sukarno abrogated the 1950 Constitution on 9 July 1959 by a decree dissolving the Constitutional Assembly and restoring the 1945 Constitution. The elected parliament was replaced by one appointed by, and subject to the will of, the president. Another non-elected body, the Supreme Advisory Council, was the main policy development body, while the National Front was set up in September 1960 and presided over by the president to \"mobilise the revolutionary forces of the people\". Western-style parliamentary democracy was thus finished in Indonesia until the 1999 elections of the Reformasi era.",
"title": "Sukarno's presidency"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Charismatic Sukarno spoke as a romantic revolutionary, and under his increasingly authoritarian rule, Indonesia moved on a course of stormy nationalism. Sukarno was popularly referred to as bang (\"older brother\"), and he painted himself as a man of the people carrying the aspirations of Indonesia and one who dared take on the West. He instigated a number of large, ideologically driven infrastructure projects and monuments celebrating Indonesia's identity, which were criticised as substitutes for real development in a deteriorating economy.",
"title": "Sukarno's presidency"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Western New Guinea had been part of the Dutch East Indies, and Indonesian nationalists had thus claimed it on this basis. Indonesia was able to instigate a diplomatic and military confrontation with the Dutch over the territory following an Indonesian-Soviet arms agreement in 1960. It was, however, United States pressure on the Netherlands that led to an Indonesian takeover in 1963. Also in 1963, Indonesia commenced Konfrontasi with the new state of Malaysia. The northern states of Borneo, formerly British Sarawak and Sabah, had wavered in joining Malaysia, whilst Indonesia saw itself as the rightful ruler of Austronesian peoples and supported an unsuccessful revolution attempt in Brunei. Reviving the glories of the Indonesian National Revolution, Sukarno increased the anti-British sentiment in his rhetoric and mounted military offensives along the Indonesia-Malaysia border in Borneo. As the PKI rallied in Jakarta streets in support, the West became increasingly alarmed at Indonesian foreign policy and the United States withdrew its aid to Indonesia.",
"title": "Sukarno's presidency"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In social policy, Sukarno's time in office witnessed substantial reforms in health and education, together with the passage of various pro-labour measures. However, Indonesia's economic position deteriorated under Sukarno; by the mid-1960s, the cash-strapped government had to scrap critical public sector subsidies, inflation was at 1,000%, export revenues were shrinking, infrastructure crumbling, and factories were operating at minimal capacity with negligible investment. Severe poverty and hunger were widespread.",
"title": "Sukarno's presidency"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Described as the great dalang (\"puppet master\"), Sukarno's position depended on balancing the opposing and increasingly hostile forces of the army and the PKI. Sukarno's anti-imperialist ideology saw Indonesia increasingly dependent on Soviet and then communist China. By 1965, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world outside the Soviet Union or China. Penetrating all levels of government, the party increasingly gained influence at the expense of the army.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "On 30 September 1965, six of the most senior generals within the military and other officers were assassinated in an attempted coup. The insurgents, known later as the 30 September Movement, backed a rival faction of the army and took up positions in the capital, later seizing control of the national radio station. They claimed they were acting against a plot organised by the generals to overthrow Sukarno. Within a few hours, Major General Suharto, commander of the Army Strategic Reserve (Kostrad), mobilised counteraction, and by the evening of 1 October, it was clear that the coup, which had little co-ordination and was largely limited to Jakarta, had failed. Complicated and partisan theories continue to this day over the identity of the attempted coup's organisers and their aims. According to the Indonesian army, the PKI were behind the coup and used disgruntled army officers to carry it out, and this became the official account of Suharto's subsequent New Order administration. Although there is not broad agreement on who bears ultimate responsibility for the coup or even if there was really a single mastermind controlling all events, modern evidence has suggested at least a role played by Western intelligence agencies including the American Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom's MI6.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The PKI was blamed for the coup, and anti-communists, initially following the army's lead, went on a violent anti-communist purge across much of the country. The PKI was effectively destroyed, and the most widely accepted estimates are that between 500,000 and 1 million were killed. The violence was especially brutal in Java and Bali. The PKI was outlawed and possibly more than 1 million of its leaders and affiliates were imprisoned. The United States and other Western powers facilitated and supported the purge.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Throughout the 1965–66 period, President Sukarno attempted to restore his political position and shift the country back to its pre-October 1965 position but his Guided Democracy balancing act was destroyed with the PKI's demise. Although he remained president, the weakened Sukarno was forced to transfer key political and military powers to General Suharto, who by that time had become head of the armed forces. In March 1967, the Provisional People's Consultative Assembly (MPRS) named General Suharto acting president. Suharto was formally appointed president in March 1968. Sukarno lived under virtual house arrest until his death in 1970.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In the aftermath of Suharto's rise, hundreds of thousands of people were killed or imprisoned by the military and religious groups in a backlash against alleged communist supporters, with direct support from the United States. Suharto's administration is commonly called the New Order era. Suharto invited major foreign investment, which produced substantial, if uneven, economic growth. However, Suharto enriched himself and his family through business dealings and widespread corruption.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "At the time of independence, the Dutch retained control over the western half of New Guinea (also known as West Irian), and permitted steps towards self-government and a declaration of independence on 1 December 1961. After negotiations with the Dutch on the incorporation of the territory into Indonesia failed, an Indonesian paratroop invasion 18 December preceded armed clashes between Indonesian and Dutch troops in 1961 and 1962. In 1962 the United States pressured the Netherlands into secret talks with Indonesia which in August 1962 produced the New York Agreement, and Indonesia assumed administrative responsibility for West Irian on 1 May 1963.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Rejecting UN supervision, the Indonesian government under Suharto decided to settle the question of West Irian, the former Dutch New Guinea, in their favour. Rather than a referendum of all residents of West Irian as had been agreed under Sukarno, an 'Act of Free Choice' was conducted in 1969 in which 1,025 Papuan representatives of local councils were selected by the Indonesians. They were warned to vote in favour of Indonesian integration with the group unanimously voting for integration with Indonesia. A subsequent UN General Assembly resolution confirmed the transfer of sovereignty to Indonesia.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "West Irian was renamed Irian Jaya ('glorious Irian') in 1973. Opposition to Indonesian administration of Irian Jaya (later known as Papua) gave rise to guerrilla activity in the years following Jakarta's assumption of control.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In 1975, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal caused authorities there to announce plans for decolonisation of Portuguese Timor, the eastern half of the island of Timor whose western half was a part of the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara. In the East Timorese elections held in 1975, Fretilin, a left-leaning party, and UDT, aligned with the local elite, emerged as the largest parties, having previously formed an alliance to campaign for independence from Portugal. Apodeti, a party advocating integration with Indonesia, enjoyed little popular support.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Indonesia alleged that Fretilin was communist, and feared that an independent East Timor would influence separatism in the archipelago. Indonesian military intelligence influenced the break-up of the alliance between Fretilin and UDT, which led to a coup by the UDT on 11 August 1975 and the start of a month-long civil war. During this time, the Portuguese government effectively abandoned the territory and did not resume the decolonisation process. On 28 November, Fretilin unilaterally declared independence, and proclaimed the 'Democratic Republic of East Timor'. Nine days later, on 7 December, Indonesia invaded East Timor, eventually annexing the tiny country of (then) 680,000 people. Indonesia was supported materially and diplomatically by the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, who regarded Indonesia as an anti-communist ally.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Following the 1998 resignation of Suharto, the people of East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence in a UN-sponsored referendum held on 30 August 1999. About 99% of the eligible population participated; more than three quarters chose independence despite months of attacks by the Indonesian military and its militia. After the result was announced, elements of the Indonesian military and its militia retaliated by killing approximately 2,000 East Timorese, displacing two-thirds of the population, raping hundreds of women and girls, and destroying much of the country's infrastructure. In October 1999, the Indonesian parliament (MPR) revoked the decree that annexed East Timor, and the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) assumed responsibility for governing East Timor until it officially became an independent state in May 2002.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The Transmigration program (Transmigrasi) was a National Government initiative to move landless people from densely populated areas of Indonesia (such as Java and Bali) to less populous areas of the country including Papua, Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Sulawesi. The stated purpose of this program was to reduce the considerable poverty and overpopulation on Java, to provide opportunities for hard-working poor people, and to provide a workforce to better utilise the resources of the outer islands. The program, however, has been controversial, with critics accusing the Indonesian Government of trying to use these migrants to reduce the proportion of native populations in destination areas to weaken separatist movements. The program has often been cited as a major and ongoing factor in controversies and even conflict and violence between settlers and indigenous populations.",
"title": "The New Order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In 1996, Suharto undertook efforts to pre-empt a challenge to the New Order government. The Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI), a legal party that had traditionally propped up the regime, had changed direction and began to assert its independence. Suharto fostered a split over the leadership of PDI, backing a co-opted faction loyal to deputy speaker of the People's Representative Council Suryadi against a faction loyal to Megawati Sukarnoputri, the daughter of Sukarno and the PDI's chairperson.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "After the Suryadi faction announced a party congress to sack Megawati would be held in Medan on 20–22 June, Megawati proclaimed that her supporters would hold demonstrations in protest. The Suryadi faction went through with its sacking of Megawati, and the demonstrations manifested themselves throughout Indonesia. This led to several confrontations on the streets between protesters and security forces, and recriminations over the violence. The protests culminated in the military allowing Megawati's supporters to take over PDI headquarters in Jakarta, with a pledge of no further demonstrations.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Suharto allowed the occupation of PDI headquarters to go on for almost a month, as attentions were also on Jakarta due to a set of high-profile ASEAN meetings scheduled to take place there. Capitalizing on this, Megawati supporters organised \"democracy forums\" with several speakers at the site. On 26 July, officers of the military, Suryadi, and Suharto openly aired their disgust with the forums.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "On 27 July, police, soldiers, and persons claiming to be Suryadi supporters stormed the headquarters. Several Megawati supporters were killed, and over two hundred people were arrested and tried under the Anti-Subversion and Hate-Spreading laws. The day would become known as \"Black Saturday\" and mark the beginning of a renewed crackdown by the New Order government against supporters of democracy, now called the \"Reformasi\" or Reform movement.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In 1997 and 1998, Indonesia was the country hardest hit by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which had dire consequences for the Indonesian economy and society, as well as Suharto's presidency. At the same time, the country suffered a severe drought and some of the largest forest fires in history burned in Kalimantan and Sumatra. The rupiah, the Indonesian currency, took a sharp dive in value. Suharto came under scrutiny from international lending institutions, chiefly the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States, over longtime embezzlement of funds and some protectionist policies. In December, Suharto's government signed a letter of intent to the IMF, pledging to enact austerity measures, including cuts to public services and removal of subsidies, in return for aid from the IMF and other donors. Prices for goods such as kerosene and rice, as well as fees for public services including education, rose dramatically. The effects were exacerbated by widespread corruption. The austerity measures approved by Suharto had started to erode domestic confidence with the New Order and led to popular protests.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Suharto stood for re-election by parliament for the seventh time in March 1998, justifying it on the grounds of the necessity of his leadership during the crisis. The parliament approved a new term. This sparked protests and riots throughout the country, now termed the Indonesian 1998 Revolution. Dissent within the ranks of his own Golkar party and the military finally weakened Suharto, and on 21 May he stood down from power. He was replaced by his deputy, Vice President B.J. Habibie.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "President Habibie quickly assembled a cabinet. One of its main tasks was to re-establish International Monetary Fund and donor community support for an economic stabilisation program. He moved quickly to release political prisoners and lift some controls on freedom of speech and association. Elections for the national, provincial, and sub-provincial parliaments were held on 7 June 1999. In the elections for the national parliament, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P, led by Sukarno's daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri) won 34% of the vote; Golkar (Suharto's party, formerly the only legal party of government) 22%; United Development Party (PPP, led by Hamzah Haz) 12%; and National Awakening Party (PKB, led by Abdurrahman Wahid) 10%.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The May 1998 riots of Indonesia also known as the 1998 tragedy or simply the 1998 event, were incidents of mass violence, demonstrations, and civil unrest of a racial nature that occurred throughout Indonesia.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In October 1999, the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR), which consists of the 500-member Parliament plus 200 appointed members, elected Abdurrahman Wahid, commonly referred to as \"Gus Dur\", as President, and Megawati Sukarnoputri as Vice-President, both for five-year terms. Wahid named his first Cabinet in early November 1999 and a reshuffled, second Cabinet in August 2000. President Wahid's government continued to pursue democratisation and to encourage renewed economic growth under challenging conditions. In addition to continuing economic malaise, his government faced regional, interethnic, and interreligious conflict, particularly in Aceh, the Maluku Islands, and Irian Jaya. In West Timor, the problems of displaced East Timorese and violence by pro-Indonesian East Timorese militias caused considerable humanitarian and social problems. An increasingly assertive Parliament frequently challenged President Wahid's policies and prerogatives, contributing to a lively and sometimes rancorous national political debate.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "During the People's Consultative Assembly's first annual session in August 2000, President Wahid gave an account of his government's performance. On 29 January 2001, thousands of student protesters stormed parliament grounds and demanded that President Abdurrahman Wahid resign due to alleged involvement in corruption scandals. Under pressure from the Assembly to improve management and co-ordination within the government, he issued a presidential decree giving Vice-President Megawati control over the day-to-day administration of government. Soon after, Megawati Sukarnoputri assumed the presidency on 23 July. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won Indonesia's first direct presidential election in 2004, and was reelected in 2009.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Joko Widodo, the PDI-P candidate, was elected president in 2014. Having previously served as the Governor of Jakarta, he is the first Indonesian president without a high-ranking political or military background. However, his opponent Prabowo Subianto disputed the outcome and withdrew from the race before the count was completed. Jokowi was reelected in 2019, again defeating Prabowo Subianto.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "As a multi-ethnic and multicultural democratic country with a Muslim-majority population, Indonesia faces the challenge of dealing with terrorism linked to global militant Islamic movements. Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a militant Islamic organisation that aspires for the establishment of a Daulah Islamiyah across Southeast Asia, is responsible for a series of terrorist attacks in Indonesia. This terrorist organisation, linked to Al-Qaeda, was responsible for the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005, as well as Jakarta bombings in 2003, 2004, and 2009. The Indonesian government and authorities have tried to crack down on terrorist cells in Indonesia.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "On 14 January 2016, suicide bombers and gunmen initiated a terror attack in Jakarta, resulting in the death of eight people: three Indonesian civilians, a Canadian and four of the attackers. Twenty people were wounded during the attack. The Islamic state claimed responsibility for the incident.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "On 26 December 2004, a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated parts of northern Sumatra, particularly Aceh. Partly as a result of the need for co-operation and peace during the recovery from the tsunami in Aceh, peace talks between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) were restarted. Accords signed in Helsinki created a framework for military de-escalation in which the government has reduced its military presence, as members of GAM's armed wing decommission their weapons and apply for amnesty. The agreement also allows for local parties to be established, and other autonomy measures.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Since 1997 Indonesia has been struggling to contain forest fires, especially on the islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan. Haze occurs annually during the dry season and is largely caused by illegal agricultural fires due to slash-and-burn practices in Indonesia, especially in the provinces of South Sumatra and Riau on Indonesia's Sumatra island, and Kalimantan on Indonesian Borneo. The haze that occurred in 1997 was one of the most severe; dense hazes occurred again in 2005, 2006, 2009, 2013, and the worst was in 2015, killing dozens of Indonesians as a result of respiratory illnesses and road accidents due to poor visibility. Another 10 people were killed due to smog from forest and land fires.",
"title": "Reform Era"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In September 2014, Indonesia ratified the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, becoming the last ASEAN country to do so.",
"title": "Reform Era"
}
]
| The history of Indonesia has been shaped by its geographic position, natural resources, a series of human migrations and contacts, wars and conquests, as well as by trade, economics and politics. Indonesia is an archipelagic country of 17,000 to 18,000 islands stretching along the equator in Southeast Asia. The country's strategic sea-lane position fostered inter-island and international trade; trade has since fundamentally shaped Indonesian history. The area of Indonesia is populated by peoples of various migrations, creating a diversity of cultures, ethnicities, and languages. The archipelago's landforms and climate significantly influenced agriculture and trade, and the formation of states. The boundaries of the state of Indonesia match the 20th-century borders of the Dutch East Indies. Fossilised remains of Homo erectus, popularly known as "Java Man", and their tools suggest the Indonesian archipelago was inhabited at least 1.5 million years ago. Austronesian people, who form the majority of the modern population, are thought to have originally been from Taiwan and arrived in Indonesia around 2000 BCE. From the 7th century CE, the powerful Srivijaya naval kingdom flourished, bringing Hindu and Buddhist influences with it. The agricultural Buddhist Sailendra and Hindu Mataram dynasties subsequently thrived in inland Java. The last significant non-Muslim kingdom, the Hindu Majapahit kingdom, flourished from the late 13th century, and its influence stretched over much of Indonesia. The earliest evidence of Islamised populations in Indonesia dates to the 13th century in northern Sumatra; other Indonesian areas gradually adopted Islam, which became the dominant religion in Java and Sumatra by the end of the 16th century. For the most part, Islam overlaid and mixed with existing cultural and religious influences. Europeans such as the Portuguese arrived in Indonesia from the 16th century seeking to monopolise the sources of valuable nutmeg, cloves, and cubeb pepper in Maluku. In 1602, the Dutch established the Dutch East India Company and became the dominant European power by 1610. Following bankruptcy, the VOC was formally dissolved in 1800, and the government of the Netherlands established the Dutch East Indies under government control. By the early 20th century, Dutch dominance extended to the current boundaries. The Japanese invasion and occupation in 1942–1945 during WWII ended Dutch rule, and encouraged the previously suppressed Indonesian independence movement. Two days after the surrender of Japan in August 1945, nationalist leader Sukarno declared independence and became president. The Netherlands tried to reestablish its rule, but a bitter armed and diplomatic struggle ended in December 1949, when in the face of international pressure the Dutch formally recognised Indonesian independence. An attempted coup in 1965 led to a violent army-led anti-communist purge in which over half a million people were killed. General Suharto politically outmanoeuvred President Sukarno, and became president in March 1968. His New Order administration garnered the favour of the West, whose investment in Indonesia was a major factor in the subsequent three decades of substantial economic growth. In the late 1990s, however, Indonesia was the country hardest hit by the East Asian financial crisis, which led to popular protests and Suharto's resignation on 21 May 1998. The Reformasi era following Suharto's resignation has led to a strengthening of democratic processes, including a regional autonomy program, the secession of East Timor, and the first direct presidential election in 2004. Political instability, social unrest, corruption, natural disasters, and terrorism remained problems in the 2000s, but the economy has performed strongly since 2007. Although relations between different religious and ethnic groups are largely harmonious, acute sectarian discontent and violence remain problems in some areas. Today, Indonesia is a diverse and multicultural nation with a population of over 270 million people. The country is known for its natural beauty, rich cultural heritage, and significant contributions to global art, music, and cuisine. It is also one of the world's fastest-growing economies and a major player in the Southeast Asian region. | 2001-07-09T08:54:44Z | 2023-12-28T22:33:30Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indonesia |
14,644 | Geography of Indonesia | Indonesia is an archipelagic country located in Southeast Asia and Oceania, lying between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. It is located in a strategic location astride or along major sea lanes connecting East Asia, South Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world. Indonesia's various regional cultures have been shaped—although not specifically determined—by centuries of complex interactions with its physical environment.
Indonesia is an archipelagic country extending about 5,120 kilometres (3,181 mi) from east to west and 1,760 kilometres (1,094 mi) from north to south. It is considered to be the largest archipelagic country in the world. According to a geospatial survey conducted between 2007 and 2010 by National Coordinating Agency for Survey and Mapping (Bakosurtanal), Indonesia has 17,500 islands. While earlier survey conducted in 2002 by National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (LAPAN) stated Indonesia has 18,307 islands. According to the CIA World Factbook, there are 17,508 islands. The discrepancy between the surveys is likely caused by the earlier different survey method including tidal islands, sandy cays and rocky reefs that surface during low tide and submerge during high tide. There are 8,844 named islands according to estimates made by the government of Indonesia, with 922 of those being permanent. It comprises five main islands: Sumatra, Java, Borneo (known as Kalimantan in Indonesia), Sulawesi, and New Guinea; two major island groups (Nusa Tenggara and the Maluku Islands) and sixty smaller island groups. Four of the islands are shared with other countries: Borneo is shared with Malaysia and Brunei; Sebatik, located off the northeastern coast of Kalimantan, shared with Malaysia; Timor is shared with East Timor; and New Guinea is shared with Papua New Guinea.
Indonesia has total land area of 1,904,569 square kilometres (735,358 sq mi), Including 93,000 square kilometres (35,908 sq mi) of inland seas (straits, bays, and other bodies of water). This makes it the largest island country in the world. The additional surrounding sea areas bring Indonesia's generally recognised territory (land and sea) to about 5 million km. The government claims an exclusive economic zone of 6,159,032 km (2,378,016 sq mi). This brings the total area to about 7.9 million km.
Indonesia is a transcontinental country, where its territory consisted of islands geologically considered as part of either Asia or Australia. During the Pleistocene, the Greater Sunda Islands were connected to the Asian mainland while New Guinea was connected to Australia. Karimata Strait, Java Sea and Arafura Sea were formed as the sea level rose at the end of the Pleistocene.
The main islands of Sumatra, Java, Madura, and Kalimantan lie on the Sunda Plate and geographers have conventionally grouped them, (along with Sulawesi), as the Greater Sunda Islands. At Indonesia's eastern extremity is western New Guinea, which lies on the Australian Plate. Sea depths in the Sunda and Sahul shelves average 300 metres (984 ft) or less. Between these two shelves lie Sulawesi, Nusa Tenggara (also known as the Lesser Sunda Islands), and the Maluku Islands (or the Moluccas), which form a second island group with deep, surrounding seas down to 4,500 metres (14,764 ft) in depth. The term "Outer Islands" is used inconsistently by various writers but it is usually taken to mean those islands other than Java and Madura.
Sulawesi is an island lies on three separate plates, the Banda Sea Plate, Molucca Sea Plate, and Sunda Plate. Seismic and volcanic activities are high on its northeastern part, evidenced by the formation of volcanoes in North Sulawesi and island arcs such as the Sangihe and Talaud Islands, southwest of the Philippine Trench.
Nusa Tenggara or Lesser Sunda Islands consists of two strings of islands stretching eastward from Bali toward southern Maluku. The inner arc of Nusa Tenggara is a continuation of the Alpide belt chain of mountains and volcanoes extending from Sumatra through Java, Bali, and Flores, and trailing off in the volcanic Banda Islands, which along with the Kai Islands and the Tanimbar Islands and other small islands in the Banda Sea are typical examples of the Wallacea mixture of Asian and Australasian plant and animal life. The outer arc of Nusa Tenggara is a geological extension of the chain of islands west of Sumatra that includes Nias, Mentawai, and Enggano. This chain resurfaces in Nusa Tenggara in the ruggedly mountainous islands of Sumba and Timor.
The Maluku Islands (or Moluccas) are geologically among the most complex of the Indonesian islands, consisted of four different tectonic plates. They are located in the northeast sector of the archipelago, bounded by the Philippine Sea to the north, Papua to the east, and Nusa Tenggara to the southwest. The largest of these islands include Halmahera, Seram and Buru, all of which rise steeply out of very deep seas and have unique Wallacea vegetation. This abrupt relief pattern from sea to high mountains means that there are very few level coastal plains. To the south lies the Banda Sea. The convergence between the Banda Sea Plate and Australian Plate created a chain of volcanic islands called the Banda Arc. The sea also contains the Weber Deep, one of the deepest point in Indonesia.
Geomorphologists believe that the island of New Guinea is part of the Australian continent, both lies on Sahul Shelf and once joined via a land bridge during the Last glacial period. The tectonic movement of the Australian Plate created towering, snowcapped mountain peaks lining the island's central east–west spine and hot, humid alluvial plains along the coasts. The New Guinea Highlands range some 650 kilometres (404 mi) east to west along the island, forming a mountainous spine between the northern and southern portion of the island. Due to its tectonic movement, New Guinea experienced many earthquakes and tsunamis, especially in its northern and western part.
Most of the larger islands are mountainous, with peaks ranging between 2,000 and 3,800 metres (6,562 and 12,467 ft) meters above sea level in Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok, Sulawesi, and Seram. The country's tallest mountains are located in the Jayawijaya Mountains and the Sudirman Range in Papua. The highest peak, Puncak Jaya (4,884 metres (16,024 ft)), is located in the Sudirman Mountains. A string of volcanoes stretches from Sumatra to Nusa Tenggara, and then loops around through to the Banda Islands of Maluku to northeastern Sulawesi. Of the 400 volcanoes, approximately 150 are active. Two of the most violent volcanic eruptions in modern times occurred in Indonesia; in 1815 Mount Tambora in Sumbawa erupted killing 92,000 and in 1883, Krakatau, erupted killing 36,000. While volcanic ashes resulted from eruption has positive effects for the fertility of the surrounding soils, it also makes agricultural conditions unpredictable in some areas.
Indonesia has relatively high tectonic and volcanic activities. It lies on the convergence between the Eurasian, Indo-Australian, Pacific, and Philippine Sea Plate. The Sunda megathrust is a 5,500 km long fault located off southern coasts of Sumatra, Java and Lesser Sunda Islands, where the Indo-Australian Plate is thrusting northeastward towards the subducting Sunda Plate. Tectonic movement in this fault is responsible for the creation of the Sunda Trench, and mountain ranges across Sumatra, Java, and the Lesser Sunda Islands. Many great earthquakes occurred in the vicinity of the fault, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. Mount Merapi, located in the Java portion of the megathrust, is the most active volcano in Indonesia and is designated as one of world's Decade Volcanoes due to the hazard it poses to the surrounding populated areas.
The northern part of Sulawesi and Maluku Islands lie on the convergence of Sunda Plate and Molucca Sea Plate, making it an active tectonic region with volcanic chains such as the Sangihe and Talaud Islands. Northern Maluku and western New Guinea is located on the convergence of Bird's Head, Philippine Sea and Caroline Plate. It is also a seismically active region, with the 7.6 Mw 2009 Papua earthquakes being the most recent great earthquake to date in the region.
Borneo is the third largest island in the world and the native vegetation was mostly Borneo lowland rain forests although much of this has been cleared with wildlife retreating to the Borneo montane rain forests inland. The islands of North Maluku are the original Spice Islands, a distinct rainforest ecoregion. A number of islands off the coast of New Guinea have their own distinctive biogeographic features, including the limestone islands of Biak, in the entrance to the large Cenderawasih Bay at the northwest end of the island.
A recent global remote sensing analysis suggested that there were 14,416km² of tidal flats in Indonesia, ranking it 1st in the world in terms of how much tidal flat occurs there. Another global analysis also estimated that Indonesia experienced the greatest total tidal wetland change (36% of global net change including mangroves, tidal flats, and tidal marshes) between 1999-2019 with a net loss of 1,426 km (551 sq mi).
Indonesia is divided into three time zones:
Lying along the equator, Indonesia's climate tends to be relatively even year-round. Indonesia has two seasons—a wet season and a dry season—with no extremes of summer or winter. For most of Indonesia, the dry season falls between May and October while the wet season between November and April.
Some regions, such as Kalimantan and Sumatra, experience only slight differences in rainfall and temperature between the seasons, whereas others, such as Nusa Tenggara, experience far more pronounced differences with droughts in the dry season, and floods in the wet. Rainfall in Indonesia is plentiful, particularly in west Sumatra, northwest Kalimantan, west Java, and western New Guinea.
Parts of Sulawesi and some islands closer to Australia, such as Sumba and Timor, are drier, however, these are exceptions. The almost uniformly warm waters that make up 81% of Indonesia's area ensure that temperatures on land remain fairly constant. The coastal plains averaging 28 °C (82.4 °F), the inland and mountain areas averaging 26 °C (78.8 °F), and the higher mountain regions, 23 °C (73.4 °F). The area's relative humidity ranges between 70 and 90%.
Winds are moderate and generally predictable, with monsoons usually blowing in from the south and east in June through October and from the northwest in November through March. Typhoons and large scale storms pose little hazard to mariners in Indonesia waters; the major danger comes from swift currents in channels, such as the Lombok and Sape straits.
Indonesia's climate is almost entirely tropical, dominated by the tropical rainforest climate found in every major island of Indonesia, followed by the tropical monsoon climate that predominantly lies along Java's coastal north, Sulawesi's coastal south and east, and Bali, and finally the tropical savanna climate, found in isolated locations of Central Java, lowland East Java, coastal southern Papua and smaller islands to the east of Lombok.
However, cooler climate types do exist in mountainous regions of Indonesia 1,300–1,500 metres above sea level. The oceanic climate (Köppen Cfb) prevail in highland areas with fairly uniform precipitation year-round, adjacent to rainforest climates, while the subtropical highland climate (Köppen Cwb) exist in highland areas with a more pronounced dry season, adjacent to tropical monsoon and savanna climates.
Above 3000 metres is where cold, subpolar climates dominate and where frost and occasional snow become more commonplace. The subpolar oceanic climate (Köppen Cfc), existing between 3,000 and 3,500 metres, can be found on the mountain slopes of Indonesia's highest peaks, and serves as a transition between oceanic climates and tundra climates. Tundra climates (Köppen ET), are found anywhere above 3500 metres on the highest peaks of Indonesia, including the permanently snow-capped peaks in Papua. In this climate regime, average monthly temperatures are all below 10 °C, and monthly precipitation is uniform.
Indonesia's high population and rapid industrialisation present serious environmental issues, which are often given a lower priority due to high poverty levels and weak, under-resourced governance. Issues include large-scale deforestation (much of it illegal) and related wildfires causing heavy smog over parts of western Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore; over-exploitation of marine resources; and environmental problems associated with rapid urbanisation and economic development, including air pollution, traffic congestion, garbage management, and reliable water and waste water services.
Deforestation and the destruction of peatlands make Indonesia the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Habitat destruction threatens the survival of indigenous and endemic species, including 140 species of mammals identified by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) as threatened, and 15 identified as critically endangered, including the Sumatran Orangutan.
In 1970, 15% of Indonesians lived in cities compared to over 30% today, and this increases pressure on the urban environment. Industrial pollution is increasing, particularly in Java, and the increasing affluence of the growing middle class drives a rapid increase in the number of motor vehicles and associated emissions. Garbage and waste water services are being placed under increasing pressure. Reliance on septic systems or effluent disposal in open canals and river systems remains the norm, and is a major polluter of water resources. Very few Indonesians have access to safe drinking water and must boil water before use.
The geographical resources of the Indonesian archipelago have been exploited in ways that fall into consistent social and historical patterns. One cultural pattern consists of the formerly Indianized, rice-growing peasants in the valleys and plains of Sumatra, Java, and Bali, another cultural complex is composed of the largely Islamic coastal commercial sector, a third, more marginal sector consists of the upland forest farming communities which exist by means of subsistence swidden agriculture. To some degree, these patterns can be linked to the geographical resources themselves, with abundant shoreline, generally calm seas, and steady winds favouring the use of sailing vessels, and fertile valleys and plains—at least in the Greater Sunda Islands—permitting irrigated rice farming. The heavily forested, mountainous interior hinders overland communication by road or river, but fosters slash-and-burn agriculture.
Area: total land area: 1,904,569 km (land: 1,811,569 km, inland water: 93,000 km) (35,907 mi)
Area - comparative:
Land boundaries:
Coastline: 54,720 km (34,000 mi)
Maritime claims: measured from claimed archipelagic baselines territorial sea: 12 nmi (13.8 mi; 22.2 km) exclusive economic zone: 6,159,032 km (2,378,016 sq mi) with 200 nmi (230.2 mi; 370.4 km)
Elevation extremes: lowest point: Sea level at 0 m (sea surface level); southern portion of the Philippine Trench, east of Miangas at −9,125 metres (−29,938 ft)highest point: Puncak Jaya (also known as Carstensz Pyramid) 4,884 m
Land use: arable land: 12.97% permanent crops: 12.14% other: 74.88% (2013)
Irrigated land: 67,220 km (2005) (25,953 mi)
Total renewable water resources: 2,019 km (2011) (484 mi)
Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural): total: 113.3 km/yr (11%/19%/71%) per capita: 517.3 m/yr (2005)
Natural resources: coal, petroleum, natural gas, tin, nickel, timber, bauxite, copper, fertile soils, gold, silver | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Indonesia is an archipelagic country located in Southeast Asia and Oceania, lying between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. It is located in a strategic location astride or along major sea lanes connecting East Asia, South Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world. Indonesia's various regional cultures have been shaped—although not specifically determined—by centuries of complex interactions with its physical environment.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Indonesia is an archipelagic country extending about 5,120 kilometres (3,181 mi) from east to west and 1,760 kilometres (1,094 mi) from north to south. It is considered to be the largest archipelagic country in the world. According to a geospatial survey conducted between 2007 and 2010 by National Coordinating Agency for Survey and Mapping (Bakosurtanal), Indonesia has 17,500 islands. While earlier survey conducted in 2002 by National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (LAPAN) stated Indonesia has 18,307 islands. According to the CIA World Factbook, there are 17,508 islands. The discrepancy between the surveys is likely caused by the earlier different survey method including tidal islands, sandy cays and rocky reefs that surface during low tide and submerge during high tide. There are 8,844 named islands according to estimates made by the government of Indonesia, with 922 of those being permanent. It comprises five main islands: Sumatra, Java, Borneo (known as Kalimantan in Indonesia), Sulawesi, and New Guinea; two major island groups (Nusa Tenggara and the Maluku Islands) and sixty smaller island groups. Four of the islands are shared with other countries: Borneo is shared with Malaysia and Brunei; Sebatik, located off the northeastern coast of Kalimantan, shared with Malaysia; Timor is shared with East Timor; and New Guinea is shared with Papua New Guinea.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Indonesia has total land area of 1,904,569 square kilometres (735,358 sq mi), Including 93,000 square kilometres (35,908 sq mi) of inland seas (straits, bays, and other bodies of water). This makes it the largest island country in the world. The additional surrounding sea areas bring Indonesia's generally recognised territory (land and sea) to about 5 million km. The government claims an exclusive economic zone of 6,159,032 km (2,378,016 sq mi). This brings the total area to about 7.9 million km.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Indonesia is a transcontinental country, where its territory consisted of islands geologically considered as part of either Asia or Australia. During the Pleistocene, the Greater Sunda Islands were connected to the Asian mainland while New Guinea was connected to Australia. Karimata Strait, Java Sea and Arafura Sea were formed as the sea level rose at the end of the Pleistocene.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The main islands of Sumatra, Java, Madura, and Kalimantan lie on the Sunda Plate and geographers have conventionally grouped them, (along with Sulawesi), as the Greater Sunda Islands. At Indonesia's eastern extremity is western New Guinea, which lies on the Australian Plate. Sea depths in the Sunda and Sahul shelves average 300 metres (984 ft) or less. Between these two shelves lie Sulawesi, Nusa Tenggara (also known as the Lesser Sunda Islands), and the Maluku Islands (or the Moluccas), which form a second island group with deep, surrounding seas down to 4,500 metres (14,764 ft) in depth. The term \"Outer Islands\" is used inconsistently by various writers but it is usually taken to mean those islands other than Java and Madura.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Sulawesi is an island lies on three separate plates, the Banda Sea Plate, Molucca Sea Plate, and Sunda Plate. Seismic and volcanic activities are high on its northeastern part, evidenced by the formation of volcanoes in North Sulawesi and island arcs such as the Sangihe and Talaud Islands, southwest of the Philippine Trench.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Nusa Tenggara or Lesser Sunda Islands consists of two strings of islands stretching eastward from Bali toward southern Maluku. The inner arc of Nusa Tenggara is a continuation of the Alpide belt chain of mountains and volcanoes extending from Sumatra through Java, Bali, and Flores, and trailing off in the volcanic Banda Islands, which along with the Kai Islands and the Tanimbar Islands and other small islands in the Banda Sea are typical examples of the Wallacea mixture of Asian and Australasian plant and animal life. The outer arc of Nusa Tenggara is a geological extension of the chain of islands west of Sumatra that includes Nias, Mentawai, and Enggano. This chain resurfaces in Nusa Tenggara in the ruggedly mountainous islands of Sumba and Timor.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Maluku Islands (or Moluccas) are geologically among the most complex of the Indonesian islands, consisted of four different tectonic plates. They are located in the northeast sector of the archipelago, bounded by the Philippine Sea to the north, Papua to the east, and Nusa Tenggara to the southwest. The largest of these islands include Halmahera, Seram and Buru, all of which rise steeply out of very deep seas and have unique Wallacea vegetation. This abrupt relief pattern from sea to high mountains means that there are very few level coastal plains. To the south lies the Banda Sea. The convergence between the Banda Sea Plate and Australian Plate created a chain of volcanic islands called the Banda Arc. The sea also contains the Weber Deep, one of the deepest point in Indonesia.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Geomorphologists believe that the island of New Guinea is part of the Australian continent, both lies on Sahul Shelf and once joined via a land bridge during the Last glacial period. The tectonic movement of the Australian Plate created towering, snowcapped mountain peaks lining the island's central east–west spine and hot, humid alluvial plains along the coasts. The New Guinea Highlands range some 650 kilometres (404 mi) east to west along the island, forming a mountainous spine between the northern and southern portion of the island. Due to its tectonic movement, New Guinea experienced many earthquakes and tsunamis, especially in its northern and western part.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Most of the larger islands are mountainous, with peaks ranging between 2,000 and 3,800 metres (6,562 and 12,467 ft) meters above sea level in Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok, Sulawesi, and Seram. The country's tallest mountains are located in the Jayawijaya Mountains and the Sudirman Range in Papua. The highest peak, Puncak Jaya (4,884 metres (16,024 ft)), is located in the Sudirman Mountains. A string of volcanoes stretches from Sumatra to Nusa Tenggara, and then loops around through to the Banda Islands of Maluku to northeastern Sulawesi. Of the 400 volcanoes, approximately 150 are active. Two of the most violent volcanic eruptions in modern times occurred in Indonesia; in 1815 Mount Tambora in Sumbawa erupted killing 92,000 and in 1883, Krakatau, erupted killing 36,000. While volcanic ashes resulted from eruption has positive effects for the fertility of the surrounding soils, it also makes agricultural conditions unpredictable in some areas.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Indonesia has relatively high tectonic and volcanic activities. It lies on the convergence between the Eurasian, Indo-Australian, Pacific, and Philippine Sea Plate. The Sunda megathrust is a 5,500 km long fault located off southern coasts of Sumatra, Java and Lesser Sunda Islands, where the Indo-Australian Plate is thrusting northeastward towards the subducting Sunda Plate. Tectonic movement in this fault is responsible for the creation of the Sunda Trench, and mountain ranges across Sumatra, Java, and the Lesser Sunda Islands. Many great earthquakes occurred in the vicinity of the fault, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. Mount Merapi, located in the Java portion of the megathrust, is the most active volcano in Indonesia and is designated as one of world's Decade Volcanoes due to the hazard it poses to the surrounding populated areas.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The northern part of Sulawesi and Maluku Islands lie on the convergence of Sunda Plate and Molucca Sea Plate, making it an active tectonic region with volcanic chains such as the Sangihe and Talaud Islands. Northern Maluku and western New Guinea is located on the convergence of Bird's Head, Philippine Sea and Caroline Plate. It is also a seismically active region, with the 7.6 Mw 2009 Papua earthquakes being the most recent great earthquake to date in the region.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Borneo is the third largest island in the world and the native vegetation was mostly Borneo lowland rain forests although much of this has been cleared with wildlife retreating to the Borneo montane rain forests inland. The islands of North Maluku are the original Spice Islands, a distinct rainforest ecoregion. A number of islands off the coast of New Guinea have their own distinctive biogeographic features, including the limestone islands of Biak, in the entrance to the large Cenderawasih Bay at the northwest end of the island.",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "A recent global remote sensing analysis suggested that there were 14,416km² of tidal flats in Indonesia, ranking it 1st in the world in terms of how much tidal flat occurs there. Another global analysis also estimated that Indonesia experienced the greatest total tidal wetland change (36% of global net change including mangroves, tidal flats, and tidal marshes) between 1999-2019 with a net loss of 1,426 km (551 sq mi).",
"title": "Ecology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Indonesia is divided into three time zones:",
"title": "Time zones"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Lying along the equator, Indonesia's climate tends to be relatively even year-round. Indonesia has two seasons—a wet season and a dry season—with no extremes of summer or winter. For most of Indonesia, the dry season falls between May and October while the wet season between November and April.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Some regions, such as Kalimantan and Sumatra, experience only slight differences in rainfall and temperature between the seasons, whereas others, such as Nusa Tenggara, experience far more pronounced differences with droughts in the dry season, and floods in the wet. Rainfall in Indonesia is plentiful, particularly in west Sumatra, northwest Kalimantan, west Java, and western New Guinea.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Parts of Sulawesi and some islands closer to Australia, such as Sumba and Timor, are drier, however, these are exceptions. The almost uniformly warm waters that make up 81% of Indonesia's area ensure that temperatures on land remain fairly constant. The coastal plains averaging 28 °C (82.4 °F), the inland and mountain areas averaging 26 °C (78.8 °F), and the higher mountain regions, 23 °C (73.4 °F). The area's relative humidity ranges between 70 and 90%.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Winds are moderate and generally predictable, with monsoons usually blowing in from the south and east in June through October and from the northwest in November through March. Typhoons and large scale storms pose little hazard to mariners in Indonesia waters; the major danger comes from swift currents in channels, such as the Lombok and Sape straits.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Indonesia's climate is almost entirely tropical, dominated by the tropical rainforest climate found in every major island of Indonesia, followed by the tropical monsoon climate that predominantly lies along Java's coastal north, Sulawesi's coastal south and east, and Bali, and finally the tropical savanna climate, found in isolated locations of Central Java, lowland East Java, coastal southern Papua and smaller islands to the east of Lombok.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "However, cooler climate types do exist in mountainous regions of Indonesia 1,300–1,500 metres above sea level. The oceanic climate (Köppen Cfb) prevail in highland areas with fairly uniform precipitation year-round, adjacent to rainforest climates, while the subtropical highland climate (Köppen Cwb) exist in highland areas with a more pronounced dry season, adjacent to tropical monsoon and savanna climates.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Above 3000 metres is where cold, subpolar climates dominate and where frost and occasional snow become more commonplace. The subpolar oceanic climate (Köppen Cfc), existing between 3,000 and 3,500 metres, can be found on the mountain slopes of Indonesia's highest peaks, and serves as a transition between oceanic climates and tundra climates. Tundra climates (Köppen ET), are found anywhere above 3500 metres on the highest peaks of Indonesia, including the permanently snow-capped peaks in Papua. In this climate regime, average monthly temperatures are all below 10 °C, and monthly precipitation is uniform.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Indonesia's high population and rapid industrialisation present serious environmental issues, which are often given a lower priority due to high poverty levels and weak, under-resourced governance. Issues include large-scale deforestation (much of it illegal) and related wildfires causing heavy smog over parts of western Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore; over-exploitation of marine resources; and environmental problems associated with rapid urbanisation and economic development, including air pollution, traffic congestion, garbage management, and reliable water and waste water services.",
"title": "Environmental issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Deforestation and the destruction of peatlands make Indonesia the world's third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Habitat destruction threatens the survival of indigenous and endemic species, including 140 species of mammals identified by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) as threatened, and 15 identified as critically endangered, including the Sumatran Orangutan.",
"title": "Environmental issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1970, 15% of Indonesians lived in cities compared to over 30% today, and this increases pressure on the urban environment. Industrial pollution is increasing, particularly in Java, and the increasing affluence of the growing middle class drives a rapid increase in the number of motor vehicles and associated emissions. Garbage and waste water services are being placed under increasing pressure. Reliance on septic systems or effluent disposal in open canals and river systems remains the norm, and is a major polluter of water resources. Very few Indonesians have access to safe drinking water and must boil water before use.",
"title": "Environmental issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The geographical resources of the Indonesian archipelago have been exploited in ways that fall into consistent social and historical patterns. One cultural pattern consists of the formerly Indianized, rice-growing peasants in the valleys and plains of Sumatra, Java, and Bali, another cultural complex is composed of the largely Islamic coastal commercial sector, a third, more marginal sector consists of the upland forest farming communities which exist by means of subsistence swidden agriculture. To some degree, these patterns can be linked to the geographical resources themselves, with abundant shoreline, generally calm seas, and steady winds favouring the use of sailing vessels, and fertile valleys and plains—at least in the Greater Sunda Islands—permitting irrigated rice farming. The heavily forested, mountainous interior hinders overland communication by road or river, but fosters slash-and-burn agriculture.",
"title": "Environmental issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Area: total land area: 1,904,569 km (land: 1,811,569 km, inland water: 93,000 km) (35,907 mi)",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Area - comparative:",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Land boundaries:",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Coastline: 54,720 km (34,000 mi)",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Maritime claims: measured from claimed archipelagic baselines territorial sea: 12 nmi (13.8 mi; 22.2 km) exclusive economic zone: 6,159,032 km (2,378,016 sq mi) with 200 nmi (230.2 mi; 370.4 km)",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Elevation extremes: lowest point: Sea level at 0 m (sea surface level); southern portion of the Philippine Trench, east of Miangas at −9,125 metres (−29,938 ft)highest point: Puncak Jaya (also known as Carstensz Pyramid) 4,884 m",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Land use: arable land: 12.97% permanent crops: 12.14% other: 74.88% (2013)",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Irrigated land: 67,220 km (2005) (25,953 mi)",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Total renewable water resources: 2,019 km (2011) (484 mi)",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural): total: 113.3 km/yr (11%/19%/71%) per capita: 517.3 m/yr (2005)",
"title": "Statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Natural resources: coal, petroleum, natural gas, tin, nickel, timber, bauxite, copper, fertile soils, gold, silver",
"title": "Statistics"
}
]
| Indonesia is an archipelagic country located in Southeast Asia and Oceania, lying between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. It is located in a strategic location astride or along major sea lanes connecting East Asia, South Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world. Indonesia's various regional cultures have been shaped—although not specifically determined—by centuries of complex interactions with its physical environment. | 2001-05-04T23:31:58Z | 2023-11-15T08:39:54Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Indonesia |
14,645 | Demographics of Indonesia | The population of Indonesia was 270.20 million according to the 2020 national census, an increase from 237.64 million in 2010. Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world. Approximately 55% of Indonesia's population resides on Java, which is the most populous island in the world.
Despite a fairly effective family planning program that has been in place since 1967, Indonesia's average population growth per year was over 1.1% for the decade ending in 2020, nearly having 13% population growth for that decade. At this rate, Indonesia's population is projected to surpass the population of the United States if the recent population growth continues.
Indonesia has a relatively young population compared to Western nations, though it is aging as the country's birth rate has slowed and its life expectancy has increased. The median age was 30.2 years in 2017. Indonesia includes numerous ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups, some of which are related to each other. Since independence, Indonesian is the language of most written communication, education, government, and business. Many local ethnic languages are the first language of most Indonesians and are still important.
Source: Population Census 2010, except for final column, taken from Inter-Census Survey 2015.
Note: North Kalimantan province was created in 2012 (by separation from East Kalimantan province); the 2010 total figures given are those for the provinces as they were following that splitting (Urban % and Total Fertility Rate columns unadjusted).
Age structure in Indonesia (2020)
Population Estimates by Sex and Age Group (01.VII.2020) (Data are based on the publication: "Indonesia Population Projection 2015-2045"):
Source: UN DESA, World Population Prospects, 2022
Data from Department of Statistics of Indonesia :
Total Fertility Rate (TFR) (Wanted Fertility Rate) and Crude Birth Rate (CBR):
According to the CIA World Factbook, in 2020 Indonesia's average total fertility rate was 2.04 children/born per woman.
Total fertility rate (TFR) and population over age 60 by region as of 2010:
There are over 1,300 ethnic groups in Indonesia; 95% of those are of Native Indonesian ancestry. Javanese is the largest group with 100 million people (42%), followed by Sundanese, who number nearly 40 million (15%).
Religion in Indonesia (2022)
Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation; based on civil registration data in 2022 from Ministry of Home Affairs, 87.02% of Indonesians are Muslims, 10.49% Christians (7.43% Protestants, 3.06% Roman Catholic), 1.69% Hindu, 0.73% Buddhists, 0.03% Confucians and 0.04% other faiths. Most Indonesian Hindus are Balinese and most Buddhists in modern-day Indonesia are Chinese.
Indonesian is the official language, but there are many different languages native to Indonesia. According to Ethnologue, there are currently 737 living languages spoken in Indonesia, the most widely spoken being Javanese and Sundanese. In Western New Guinea, there are more than 270 indigenous languages in spoken form. Some Chinese varieties, most prominently Min Nan, are also spoken. The public use of Chinese, especially usage of Chinese characters, was dissuaded officially between 1966 and 1998.
definition: age 15 and over can read and write total population: 92.81% male: 95.5% female: 90.4% (2011 est.)
Education is free in state schools; it is compulsory for children through to grade 12. Although about 92% of eligible children are enrolled in primary school, a much smaller percentage attend full-time. About 44% of secondary school-age children attend junior high school, and some others of this age group attend vocational schools.
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.
Age structure
Median age
Birth rate
Death rate
Population growth rate
Urbanization
Sex ratio
Infant mortality rate
Life expectancy at birth
Total fertility rate
HIV/AIDS
Obesity – adult prevalence rate
Children under the age of 5 years underweight
Nationality
Religions
Languages
School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)
Education expenditures | [
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"title": ""
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{
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"text": "Despite a fairly effective family planning program that has been in place since 1967, Indonesia's average population growth per year was over 1.1% for the decade ending in 2020, nearly having 13% population growth for that decade. At this rate, Indonesia's population is projected to surpass the population of the United States if the recent population growth continues.",
"title": ""
},
{
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"text": "Indonesia has a relatively young population compared to Western nations, though it is aging as the country's birth rate has slowed and its life expectancy has increased. The median age was 30.2 years in 2017. Indonesia includes numerous ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups, some of which are related to each other. Since independence, Indonesian is the language of most written communication, education, government, and business. Many local ethnic languages are the first language of most Indonesians and are still important.",
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"text": "Source: Population Census 2010, except for final column, taken from Inter-Census Survey 2015.",
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"text": "Note: North Kalimantan province was created in 2012 (by separation from East Kalimantan province); the 2010 total figures given are those for the provinces as they were following that splitting (Urban % and Total Fertility Rate columns unadjusted).",
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"text": "Population Estimates by Sex and Age Group (01.VII.2020) (Data are based on the publication: \"Indonesia Population Projection 2015-2045\"):",
"title": "Population"
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{
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"text": "Source: UN DESA, World Population Prospects, 2022",
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"text": "Data from Department of Statistics of Indonesia :",
"title": "Vital statistics"
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{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Total Fertility Rate (TFR) (Wanted Fertility Rate) and Crude Birth Rate (CBR):",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to the CIA World Factbook, in 2020 Indonesia's average total fertility rate was 2.04 children/born per woman.",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Total fertility rate (TFR) and population over age 60 by region as of 2010:",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "There are over 1,300 ethnic groups in Indonesia; 95% of those are of Native Indonesian ancestry. Javanese is the largest group with 100 million people (42%), followed by Sundanese, who number nearly 40 million (15%).",
"title": "Ethnic groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Religion in Indonesia (2022)",
"title": "Religions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation; based on civil registration data in 2022 from Ministry of Home Affairs, 87.02% of Indonesians are Muslims, 10.49% Christians (7.43% Protestants, 3.06% Roman Catholic), 1.69% Hindu, 0.73% Buddhists, 0.03% Confucians and 0.04% other faiths. Most Indonesian Hindus are Balinese and most Buddhists in modern-day Indonesia are Chinese.",
"title": "Religions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Indonesian is the official language, but there are many different languages native to Indonesia. According to Ethnologue, there are currently 737 living languages spoken in Indonesia, the most widely spoken being Javanese and Sundanese. In Western New Guinea, there are more than 270 indigenous languages in spoken form. Some Chinese varieties, most prominently Min Nan, are also spoken. The public use of Chinese, especially usage of Chinese characters, was dissuaded officially between 1966 and 1998.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "definition: age 15 and over can read and write total population: 92.81% male: 95.5% female: 90.4% (2011 est.)",
"title": "Literacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Education is free in state schools; it is compulsory for children through to grade 12. Although about 92% of eligible children are enrolled in primary school, a much smaller percentage attend full-time. About 44% of secondary school-age children attend junior high school, and some others of this age group attend vocational schools.",
"title": "Literacy"
},
{
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"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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{
"paragraph_id": 26,
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"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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{
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"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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{
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"text": "Languages",
"title": "CIA World Factbook demographic statistics"
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{
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"text": "School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)",
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| The population of Indonesia was 270.20 million according to the 2020 national census, an increase from 237.64 million in 2010. Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world. Approximately 55% of Indonesia's population resides on Java, which is the most populous island in the world. Despite a fairly effective family planning program that has been in place since 1967, Indonesia's average population growth per year was over 1.1% for the decade ending in 2020, nearly having 13% population growth for that decade. At this rate, Indonesia's population is projected to surpass the population of the United States if the recent population growth continues. Indonesia has a relatively young population compared to Western nations, though it is aging as the country's birth rate has slowed and its life expectancy has increased. The median age was 30.2 years in 2017. Indonesia includes numerous ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups, some of which are related to each other. Since independence, Indonesian is the language of most written communication, education, government, and business. Many local ethnic languages are the first language of most Indonesians and are still important. | 2001-07-09T09:45:21Z | 2023-12-30T14:14:13Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Indonesia |
14,646 | Politics of Indonesia | The politics of Indonesia take place in the framework of a presidential representative democratic republic whereby the President of Indonesia is both head of state and head of government and of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the bicameral People's Consultative Assembly. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.
The 1945 constitution provided for a limited separation of executive, legislative and judicial power. The governmental system has been described as "presidential with parliamentary characteristics". Following the Indonesian riots of May 1998 and the resignation of President Suharto, several political reforms were set in motion via amendments to the Constitution of Indonesia, which resulted in changes to all branches of government.
The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Indonesia a "flawed democracy" in 2022. Indonesia's political parties have been characterized as cartel parties with extensive power-sharing among parties and limited accountability to voters.
Currently, scholars are conflicted about the strength and durability of Indonesia’s democracy. Indonesia scores well on certain characteristics of democracy, such as political rights, classifying it as a democracy in the minimalist interpretation of the word. However, the country lacks other aspects of democracy that are usually required for a regime to reach democratic consolidation, such as adequate civil rights protections.
A minimalist view of democracy classifies political regimes purely in terms of their institutions and procedures rather than the outcomes they produce. Specifically, a regime must implement free and fair elections. In Indonesia, the president is directly elected and can serve up to two five-year terms. There are limited voting irregularities, and international election monitors consider the elections free and fair. Additionally, in 2019, the Constitutional Court rejected claims of widespread voter fraud. The right to organize competing political parties is respected, and the system allows for the competition of several political parties. Thus, according to the minimalist definition, Indonesia is a democracy.
However, a maximalist approach to democracy claims that free and fair elections are insufficient to consider a regime a democracy. Maximalists argue that these countries must also guarantee other social, political, and economic rights, often those found in consolidated democracies. These include human rights protections, civil rights, egalitarianism, judicial independence, and more. Individuals in Indonesia are generally not free to practice and express their religious faith. Atheists and those who practice one of the “unrecognized” faiths in Indonesia can be penalized and face discrimination. Additionally, the court system often has many instances of corruption, and there is no due process in civil and criminal matters. Thus, Indonesia fails to meet many of the civil requirements for a consolidated, or maximalist, democracy.
The durability of democracies can be attributed to a few key characteristics, such as per capita income, the control of political parties, and the frequency of elections. Indonesia scores very well in each of these categories. Indonesia has a relatively high per capita income of $5,000 USD, has multiple competing political parties, and has new leadership elected every five years. So, although Indonesia may not yet be a consolidated democracy, the country has made tremendous progress in advancing its score in democratic processes and durability.
The "Old Order" (1950-1965) in Indonesia has long been understood to be a period of turmoil and crisis, characterized by rebellions and political unrest. The weakness of Indonesia's democracy and its gradual transition to authoritarianism during the Old Order can be attributed to conventional modernization theory, which suggests that without strong socioeconomic structures, successful transitions to democracy are unlikely. Indeed, it was not until the late 1960s when urbanization took place that the Indonesian government began to build a stronger democracy.
During the "Liberal Democracy" period (1950-1957), Indonesia aspired to renew its global status and achieve modernity as a newly-independent country. In line with this vision, it sought to establish a democratic parliamentary system, bringing forth a "multi-party system, cabinet government under a prime minister, and a ceremonial president". However, the economic instability inherited from colonial rule significantly hindered their democratic nation-building vision: the Indonesian economy struggled to recover from the hardships of colonial occupation, with economic growth being stagnant and inflation reaching over 600% between the 1950s-1960s. Indonesia's economy heavily relied on the agricultural sector, but without diversification and industrialization, the government became vulnerable to polarization and instability.
Moreover, Indonesia's abundance of natural resources, such as coffee, rubber, and cocoa, made it susceptible to the political resource curse: Indonesia's resource wealth led to corruption, inequality, and political instability, hindering economic and social progress; the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few elites with a monopoly over these resources worsened the country's economic and political problems. This ultimately led to rising political tensions and the government's loss of control.
"Guided Democracy", which was in place from 1957 to 1966, aimed to bring about political stability, modernization, and development under the leadership of President Sukarno. Initially, Sukarno sought to build political institutions to bolster representation and resolve conflicts of regionalism, social class, and religion that plagued the Parliament during the Liberal Democracy era. However, power became increasingly centralized to the executive branch in the latter half of Guided Democracy, with Sukarno assuming a dictator-like role in the government. Indonesia's gradual transition to authoritarianism during the Guided Democracy period exemplifies the failure of the democratic project in the country due to weak socio-economic structures and the political resource curse that undermined its democratic development.
The transition to the "New Order" in the mid-1960s, ousted Sukarno after 22 years in the position. One of the most tumultuous periods in the country's modern history, it was the commencement of Suharto's three-decade presidency. Described as the great dhalang ("puppet master"), Sukarno drew power from balancing the opposing and increasingly antagonistic forces of the army and the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).
By 1965, the PKI extensively penetrated all levels of government and gained influence at the expense of the army. On 30 September 1965, six of the military's most senior officers were killed in an action (generally labelled an "attempted coup") by the so-called 30 September Movement, a group from within the armed forces. Within a few hours, Major General Suharto mobilised forces under his command and took control of Jakarta. Anti-communists, initially following the army's lead, went on a violent purge of communists throughout the country, killing an estimated half million people and destroying the PKI, which was officially blamed for the crisis.
The politically weakened Sukarno was forced to transfer key political and military powers to General Suharto, who had become head of the armed forces. In March 1967, the Provisional People's Consultative Assembly (MPRS) named General Suharto acting president. He was formally appointed president one year later. Sukarno lived under virtual house arrest until his death in 1970. In contrast to the stormy nationalism, revolutionary rhetoric, and economic failure that characterised the early 1960s under the left-leaning Sukarno, Suharto's pro-Western "New Order" stabilised the economy but continued the official state philosophy of Pancasila.
Sukarno-Indonesia's first national figure and president-dissolved the elected assembly, introduced a concept known as Guided Democracy, and reinstated the 1945 constitution in 1959. The period of Guided Democracy was marked by the creation of a plethora of ministries, by the rise of the Indonesia Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia; PKI) to a position of political dominance, and by the emergence of the army as a major anticommunist political force. The structure collapsed with an attempted coup d'etat in 1965, which led to the downfall of Sukarno. Under Suharto, Sukarno's successor, Indonesia entered a new political era, officially called the New Order
The New Order (Indonesian: Orde Baru) is the term coined by President Suharto to characterise his regime as he came to power in 1966. He used this term to contrast his rule with that of his predecessor, Sukarno (dubbed the "Old Order," or Orde Lama). The term "New Order" in more recent times has become synonymous with the Suharto years (1966–1998).
Immediately following the attempted coup in 1965, the political situation was uncertain, but the New Order found much popular support from groups wanting a separation from Indonesia's problems since its independence. The 'generation of 66' (Angkatan 66) epitomised talk of a new group of young leaders and new intellectual thought. Following communal and political conflicts, and economic collapse and social breakdown of the late 1950s through to the mid-1960s, the New Order was committed to achieving and maintaining political order, economic development, and the removal of mass participation in the political process. The features of the New Order established from the late 1960s were thus a strong political role for the military, the bureaucratisation and corporatisation of political and societal organisations, and selective but effective repression of opponents. Strident anti-communism remained a hallmark of the regime for its subsequent 32 years.
Within a few years, however, many of its original allies had become indifferent or averse to the New Order, which comprised a military faction supported by a narrow civilian group. Among much of the pro-democracy movement which forced Suharto to resign in 1998 and then gained power, the term "New Order" has come to be used pejoratively. It is frequently employed to describe figures who were either tied to the New Order, or who upheld the practises of his authoritarian regime, such as corruption, collusion and nepotism (widely known by the acronym KKN: korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme).
The Post-Suharto era began with the fall of Suharto in 1998 during which Indonesia has been in a period of transition, an era known as Reformasi (English: Reform). This period has seen a more open and liberal political-social environment.
Indonesia’s transition to democracy was a key part of the broader reform era. Democratic transitions tend to be grouped into two categories: bottom-up transitions where people rise up and overthrow an existing regime, and top-down transitions where an authoritarian ruler introduces liberalizing reforms leading to democratic transition. Indonesia experienced a transition toward democratic rule that involved both bottom-up and top-down forces after the fall of the authoritarian regime in 1998, thus altering the political structure of the country. Differences in democratization across developing countries, including Indonesia, is common and may be explained by different theoretical models. While Indonesia has been considered a democracy since the fall of the authoritarian regime in 1998, democratic consolidation has not completely been achieved.
A process of constitutional reform lasted from 1999 to 2002, with four amendments producing major changes. Among these were term limits of up to two five-year terms for the president and vice president and measures to institute checks and balances. The highest state institution is the People's Consultative Assembly (Indonesian: Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, MPR), whose functions previously included electing the president and vice-president (since 2004 the president has been elected directly by the people), establishing broad guidelines of state policy, and amending the constitution. The 695-member MPR includes all 550 members of the House of Representatives (Indonesian: Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR) plus 130 members of Regional Representative Council (Indonesian: Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, DPD) elected by the 26 provincial parliaments and 65 appointed members from societal groups.
The DPR, which is the premier legislative institution, originally included 462 members elected through a mixed proportional/district representational system and thirty-eight appointed members of the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) and police (POLRI). TNI/POLRI representation in the DPR and MPR ended in 2004. Societal group representation in the MPR was eliminated in 2004 through further constitutional change. Having served as rubberstamp bodies in the past, the DPR and MPR have gained considerable power and are increasingly assertive in oversight of the executive branch. Under constitutional changes in 2004, the MPR became a bicameral legislature, with the creation of the DPD, in which each province is represented by four members, although its legislative powers are more limited than those of the DPR. Through his/her appointed cabinet, the president retains the authority to conduct the administration of the government.
A general election in June 1999 produced the first freely elected national, provincial and regional parliaments in over 40 years. In October 1999, the MPR elected a compromise candidate, Abdurrahman Wahid, as the country's fourth president, and Megawati Sukarnoputri—a daughter of Sukarno—as the vice-president. Megawati's PDI-P party had won the largest share of the vote (34%) in the general election, while Golkar, the dominant party during the New Order, came in second (22%). Several other, mostly Islamic parties won shares large enough to be seated in the DPR. Other nationwide democratic elections took place in 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019.
In Indonesia, while free and fair elections have been held and a constitution guaranteeing certain rights and freedoms exists, corruption and involvement of money in politics persists. Corruption in regional government is often revenue-related, involving bribery and theft of public goods for personal gain, and identifies political corruption, such as fraudulent behavior and deviant lobbying techniques, as the type committed by government officials. Additionally, one of the primary reasons Indonesia may not be considered a consolidated democracy is due to their lack of “civilian control over the military”. Indonesia has created democratic institutions, but there is still progress that must be made to address the challenges the country currently faces in order to consolidate democracy.
Civil society is a term that has been coined by both sides of the political spectrum for their respective interests. It is defined broadly by David Rieff as the wide range of organizations operating outside the governmental and business sectors. It has taken on ambiguous connotations as Robert Putnam has associated it with the strengthening of Democratic government while Sheri Berman has demonstrated how civil associations helped to collapse Weimar Germany. As with any other country, Indonesian civil society spans an array of organizations including professional, religious, intermediary, and mass-based. Under Suharto, civil society organizations (CSOs) often fought for democracy and human rights.
Under Suharto, civil society in Indonesia was massively contained. The mass murders of the left limited CSOs to advocacy relating to human rights and democracy. After his fall, civil society established itself in the reformed era. CSOs in Indonesia are reflective of the unique politics of the country. They exist on a spectrum of opinion on Islam’s proper role in the government. For example, in 2017, the Indonesian government prohibited the Indonesian Chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Using the Law on Mass-Based Organizations (ORMAS). Some CSOs condemned the action as a violation of human rights while others saw the move as a necessity in curbing extremist ideology. ORMAS represents new bureaucratic regulations and restrictions on CSOs. The passage of this law has been associated with the Indonesian government’s continued crackdown on free speech and expression.
Humanprogress.org provides a Civil Society Participation Index which measures whether “major CSOs routinely consulted by policymakers; how large is the involvement of people in CSOs; are women prevented from participating;” among a variety of other factors. Indonesia’s Civil Society Index has fluctuated throughout the 20th century. During the period of liberal democracy before Sukarno, Indonesia reached a Civil Society Participation score of 0.74. During the presidencies of Sukarno and Suharto, the score plunged to 0.12. As Indonesia entered its Reform Era, the score climbed to 0.95; however in recent years Indonesia’s Civil Society Participation Index has declined to 0.82. Compared to its neighbors in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has been hailed as a champion for free expression in the region. Other tools to measure civil society are the CSO Sustainability Index Explorer by csosi.org and the Civil Society Index provided by the United Nations Development Programme.
The executive branch of Indonesia is headed by a president, who is head of government and head of state. The president is elected by general election and can serve up to two five-year terms if re-elected. The executive branch also includes a vice-president and a cabinet. All bills need joint approval between the executive and the legislature to become law, meaning the president has veto power over all legislation. The president also has the power to issue presidential decrees that have policy effects, and is also in charge of Indonesia's foreign relations, although treaties require legislative approval. Prior to 2004, the president was selected by the MPR, but following the third amendment to the constitution, enacted in 2001, the president is now directly elected.The last election was held in April 2019, and incumbent Joko Widodo was re-elected.
The MPR is the legislative branch of Indonesia's political system. The MPR is composed of two houses: the DPR, which is commonly called the House of Representatives, and the DPD, which is called the Regional Representative Council. The 575 DPR members are elected through multi-member electoral districts, whereas 4 DPD senators are elected in each of Indonesia's 34 provinces. The DPR holds most of the legislative power because it has the sole power to pass laws. The DPD acts as a supplementary body to the DPR; it can propose bills, offer its opinion and participate in discussions, but it has no legal power. The MPR itself has power outside of those given to the individual houses. It can amend the constitution, inaugurate the president and conduct impeachment procedures. When the MPR acts in this function, it does so by simply combining the members of the two houses.
The General Elections Commission (Indonesian: Komisi Pemilihan Umum, KPU) is the body that is responsible for running both parliamentary and presidential elections. Article 22E(5) of the Constitution rules that the KPU is national, permanent, and independent. Prior to the 2004 elections, the KPU was made up of members who were also members of political parties. However, members of KPU must now be non-partisan.
Both the Supreme Court of Indonesia (Mahkamah Agung) and the Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi) are the highest level of the judicial branch. The Constitutional Court listens to disputes concerning legality of law, general elections, dissolution of political parties, and the scope of authority of state institution. It has 9 judges appointed by the DPR, the President and the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of Indonesia hears final cessation appeals and conducts case reviews. It has 51 judges divided into 8 chambers. Its judges are nominated by the Judicial Commission of Indonesia and appointed by the President. Most civil disputes appear before the State Court (Pengadilan Negeri); appeals are heard before the High Court (Pengadilan Tinggi). Other courts include the Commercial Court, which handles bankruptcy and insolvency; the State Administrative Court (Pengadilan Tata Usaha Negara) to hear administrative law cases against the government; and the Religious Court (Pengadilan Agama) to deal with codified Islamic personal law (sharia) cases. Additionally, the Judicial Commission (Komisi Yudisial) monitors the performance of judges.
During the regime of president Suharto, Indonesia built strong relations with the United States and had difficult relations with the People's Republic of China owing to Indonesia's anti-communist policies and domestic tensions with the Chinese community. It received international denunciation for its annexation of East Timor and the related genocide against the East Timorese in 1978. Indonesia is a founding member of the Association of South East Asian Nations, and thereby a member of both ASEAN+3 and the East Asia Summit.
Since the 1980s, Indonesia has worked to develop close political and economic ties between Southeast Asian countries, and is also influential in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Indonesia was heavily criticised between 1975 and 1999 for allegedly suppressing human rights in East Timor, and for supporting violence against the East Timorese following the latter's secession and independence in 1999. Since 2001, the government of Indonesia has co-operated with the US in cracking down on Islamic fundamentalism and terrorist groups. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The politics of Indonesia take place in the framework of a presidential representative democratic republic whereby the President of Indonesia is both head of state and head of government and of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the bicameral People's Consultative Assembly. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The 1945 constitution provided for a limited separation of executive, legislative and judicial power. The governmental system has been described as \"presidential with parliamentary characteristics\". Following the Indonesian riots of May 1998 and the resignation of President Suharto, several political reforms were set in motion via amendments to the Constitution of Indonesia, which resulted in changes to all branches of government.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Indonesia a \"flawed democracy\" in 2022. Indonesia's political parties have been characterized as cartel parties with extensive power-sharing among parties and limited accountability to voters.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Currently, scholars are conflicted about the strength and durability of Indonesia’s democracy. Indonesia scores well on certain characteristics of democracy, such as political rights, classifying it as a democracy in the minimalist interpretation of the word. However, the country lacks other aspects of democracy that are usually required for a regime to reach democratic consolidation, such as adequate civil rights protections.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "A minimalist view of democracy classifies political regimes purely in terms of their institutions and procedures rather than the outcomes they produce. Specifically, a regime must implement free and fair elections. In Indonesia, the president is directly elected and can serve up to two five-year terms. There are limited voting irregularities, and international election monitors consider the elections free and fair. Additionally, in 2019, the Constitutional Court rejected claims of widespread voter fraud. The right to organize competing political parties is respected, and the system allows for the competition of several political parties. Thus, according to the minimalist definition, Indonesia is a democracy.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "However, a maximalist approach to democracy claims that free and fair elections are insufficient to consider a regime a democracy. Maximalists argue that these countries must also guarantee other social, political, and economic rights, often those found in consolidated democracies. These include human rights protections, civil rights, egalitarianism, judicial independence, and more. Individuals in Indonesia are generally not free to practice and express their religious faith. Atheists and those who practice one of the “unrecognized” faiths in Indonesia can be penalized and face discrimination. Additionally, the court system often has many instances of corruption, and there is no due process in civil and criminal matters. Thus, Indonesia fails to meet many of the civil requirements for a consolidated, or maximalist, democracy.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The durability of democracies can be attributed to a few key characteristics, such as per capita income, the control of political parties, and the frequency of elections. Indonesia scores very well in each of these categories. Indonesia has a relatively high per capita income of $5,000 USD, has multiple competing political parties, and has new leadership elected every five years. So, although Indonesia may not yet be a consolidated democracy, the country has made tremendous progress in advancing its score in democratic processes and durability.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The \"Old Order\" (1950-1965) in Indonesia has long been understood to be a period of turmoil and crisis, characterized by rebellions and political unrest. The weakness of Indonesia's democracy and its gradual transition to authoritarianism during the Old Order can be attributed to conventional modernization theory, which suggests that without strong socioeconomic structures, successful transitions to democracy are unlikely. Indeed, it was not until the late 1960s when urbanization took place that the Indonesian government began to build a stronger democracy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During the \"Liberal Democracy\" period (1950-1957), Indonesia aspired to renew its global status and achieve modernity as a newly-independent country. In line with this vision, it sought to establish a democratic parliamentary system, bringing forth a \"multi-party system, cabinet government under a prime minister, and a ceremonial president\". However, the economic instability inherited from colonial rule significantly hindered their democratic nation-building vision: the Indonesian economy struggled to recover from the hardships of colonial occupation, with economic growth being stagnant and inflation reaching over 600% between the 1950s-1960s. Indonesia's economy heavily relied on the agricultural sector, but without diversification and industrialization, the government became vulnerable to polarization and instability.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Moreover, Indonesia's abundance of natural resources, such as coffee, rubber, and cocoa, made it susceptible to the political resource curse: Indonesia's resource wealth led to corruption, inequality, and political instability, hindering economic and social progress; the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few elites with a monopoly over these resources worsened the country's economic and political problems. This ultimately led to rising political tensions and the government's loss of control.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "\"Guided Democracy\", which was in place from 1957 to 1966, aimed to bring about political stability, modernization, and development under the leadership of President Sukarno. Initially, Sukarno sought to build political institutions to bolster representation and resolve conflicts of regionalism, social class, and religion that plagued the Parliament during the Liberal Democracy era. However, power became increasingly centralized to the executive branch in the latter half of Guided Democracy, with Sukarno assuming a dictator-like role in the government. Indonesia's gradual transition to authoritarianism during the Guided Democracy period exemplifies the failure of the democratic project in the country due to weak socio-economic structures and the political resource curse that undermined its democratic development.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The transition to the \"New Order\" in the mid-1960s, ousted Sukarno after 22 years in the position. One of the most tumultuous periods in the country's modern history, it was the commencement of Suharto's three-decade presidency. Described as the great dhalang (\"puppet master\"), Sukarno drew power from balancing the opposing and increasingly antagonistic forces of the army and the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "By 1965, the PKI extensively penetrated all levels of government and gained influence at the expense of the army. On 30 September 1965, six of the military's most senior officers were killed in an action (generally labelled an \"attempted coup\") by the so-called 30 September Movement, a group from within the armed forces. Within a few hours, Major General Suharto mobilised forces under his command and took control of Jakarta. Anti-communists, initially following the army's lead, went on a violent purge of communists throughout the country, killing an estimated half million people and destroying the PKI, which was officially blamed for the crisis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The politically weakened Sukarno was forced to transfer key political and military powers to General Suharto, who had become head of the armed forces. In March 1967, the Provisional People's Consultative Assembly (MPRS) named General Suharto acting president. He was formally appointed president one year later. Sukarno lived under virtual house arrest until his death in 1970. In contrast to the stormy nationalism, revolutionary rhetoric, and economic failure that characterised the early 1960s under the left-leaning Sukarno, Suharto's pro-Western \"New Order\" stabilised the economy but continued the official state philosophy of Pancasila.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Sukarno-Indonesia's first national figure and president-dissolved the elected assembly, introduced a concept known as Guided Democracy, and reinstated the 1945 constitution in 1959. The period of Guided Democracy was marked by the creation of a plethora of ministries, by the rise of the Indonesia Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia; PKI) to a position of political dominance, and by the emergence of the army as a major anticommunist political force. The structure collapsed with an attempted coup d'etat in 1965, which led to the downfall of Sukarno. Under Suharto, Sukarno's successor, Indonesia entered a new political era, officially called the New Order",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The New Order (Indonesian: Orde Baru) is the term coined by President Suharto to characterise his regime as he came to power in 1966. He used this term to contrast his rule with that of his predecessor, Sukarno (dubbed the \"Old Order,\" or Orde Lama). The term \"New Order\" in more recent times has become synonymous with the Suharto years (1966–1998).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Immediately following the attempted coup in 1965, the political situation was uncertain, but the New Order found much popular support from groups wanting a separation from Indonesia's problems since its independence. The 'generation of 66' (Angkatan 66) epitomised talk of a new group of young leaders and new intellectual thought. Following communal and political conflicts, and economic collapse and social breakdown of the late 1950s through to the mid-1960s, the New Order was committed to achieving and maintaining political order, economic development, and the removal of mass participation in the political process. The features of the New Order established from the late 1960s were thus a strong political role for the military, the bureaucratisation and corporatisation of political and societal organisations, and selective but effective repression of opponents. Strident anti-communism remained a hallmark of the regime for its subsequent 32 years.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Within a few years, however, many of its original allies had become indifferent or averse to the New Order, which comprised a military faction supported by a narrow civilian group. Among much of the pro-democracy movement which forced Suharto to resign in 1998 and then gained power, the term \"New Order\" has come to be used pejoratively. It is frequently employed to describe figures who were either tied to the New Order, or who upheld the practises of his authoritarian regime, such as corruption, collusion and nepotism (widely known by the acronym KKN: korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Post-Suharto era began with the fall of Suharto in 1998 during which Indonesia has been in a period of transition, an era known as Reformasi (English: Reform). This period has seen a more open and liberal political-social environment.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Indonesia’s transition to democracy was a key part of the broader reform era. Democratic transitions tend to be grouped into two categories: bottom-up transitions where people rise up and overthrow an existing regime, and top-down transitions where an authoritarian ruler introduces liberalizing reforms leading to democratic transition. Indonesia experienced a transition toward democratic rule that involved both bottom-up and top-down forces after the fall of the authoritarian regime in 1998, thus altering the political structure of the country. Differences in democratization across developing countries, including Indonesia, is common and may be explained by different theoretical models. While Indonesia has been considered a democracy since the fall of the authoritarian regime in 1998, democratic consolidation has not completely been achieved.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A process of constitutional reform lasted from 1999 to 2002, with four amendments producing major changes. Among these were term limits of up to two five-year terms for the president and vice president and measures to institute checks and balances. The highest state institution is the People's Consultative Assembly (Indonesian: Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, MPR), whose functions previously included electing the president and vice-president (since 2004 the president has been elected directly by the people), establishing broad guidelines of state policy, and amending the constitution. The 695-member MPR includes all 550 members of the House of Representatives (Indonesian: Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR) plus 130 members of Regional Representative Council (Indonesian: Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, DPD) elected by the 26 provincial parliaments and 65 appointed members from societal groups.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The DPR, which is the premier legislative institution, originally included 462 members elected through a mixed proportional/district representational system and thirty-eight appointed members of the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) and police (POLRI). TNI/POLRI representation in the DPR and MPR ended in 2004. Societal group representation in the MPR was eliminated in 2004 through further constitutional change. Having served as rubberstamp bodies in the past, the DPR and MPR have gained considerable power and are increasingly assertive in oversight of the executive branch. Under constitutional changes in 2004, the MPR became a bicameral legislature, with the creation of the DPD, in which each province is represented by four members, although its legislative powers are more limited than those of the DPR. Through his/her appointed cabinet, the president retains the authority to conduct the administration of the government.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "A general election in June 1999 produced the first freely elected national, provincial and regional parliaments in over 40 years. In October 1999, the MPR elected a compromise candidate, Abdurrahman Wahid, as the country's fourth president, and Megawati Sukarnoputri—a daughter of Sukarno—as the vice-president. Megawati's PDI-P party had won the largest share of the vote (34%) in the general election, while Golkar, the dominant party during the New Order, came in second (22%). Several other, mostly Islamic parties won shares large enough to be seated in the DPR. Other nationwide democratic elections took place in 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In Indonesia, while free and fair elections have been held and a constitution guaranteeing certain rights and freedoms exists, corruption and involvement of money in politics persists. Corruption in regional government is often revenue-related, involving bribery and theft of public goods for personal gain, and identifies political corruption, such as fraudulent behavior and deviant lobbying techniques, as the type committed by government officials. Additionally, one of the primary reasons Indonesia may not be considered a consolidated democracy is due to their lack of “civilian control over the military”. Indonesia has created democratic institutions, but there is still progress that must be made to address the challenges the country currently faces in order to consolidate democracy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Civil society is a term that has been coined by both sides of the political spectrum for their respective interests. It is defined broadly by David Rieff as the wide range of organizations operating outside the governmental and business sectors. It has taken on ambiguous connotations as Robert Putnam has associated it with the strengthening of Democratic government while Sheri Berman has demonstrated how civil associations helped to collapse Weimar Germany. As with any other country, Indonesian civil society spans an array of organizations including professional, religious, intermediary, and mass-based. Under Suharto, civil society organizations (CSOs) often fought for democracy and human rights.",
"title": "Civil society in Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Under Suharto, civil society in Indonesia was massively contained. The mass murders of the left limited CSOs to advocacy relating to human rights and democracy. After his fall, civil society established itself in the reformed era. CSOs in Indonesia are reflective of the unique politics of the country. They exist on a spectrum of opinion on Islam’s proper role in the government. For example, in 2017, the Indonesian government prohibited the Indonesian Chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Using the Law on Mass-Based Organizations (ORMAS). Some CSOs condemned the action as a violation of human rights while others saw the move as a necessity in curbing extremist ideology. ORMAS represents new bureaucratic regulations and restrictions on CSOs. The passage of this law has been associated with the Indonesian government’s continued crackdown on free speech and expression.",
"title": "Civil society in Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Humanprogress.org provides a Civil Society Participation Index which measures whether “major CSOs routinely consulted by policymakers; how large is the involvement of people in CSOs; are women prevented from participating;” among a variety of other factors. Indonesia’s Civil Society Index has fluctuated throughout the 20th century. During the period of liberal democracy before Sukarno, Indonesia reached a Civil Society Participation score of 0.74. During the presidencies of Sukarno and Suharto, the score plunged to 0.12. As Indonesia entered its Reform Era, the score climbed to 0.95; however in recent years Indonesia’s Civil Society Participation Index has declined to 0.82. Compared to its neighbors in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has been hailed as a champion for free expression in the region. Other tools to measure civil society are the CSO Sustainability Index Explorer by csosi.org and the Civil Society Index provided by the United Nations Development Programme.",
"title": "Civil society in Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The executive branch of Indonesia is headed by a president, who is head of government and head of state. The president is elected by general election and can serve up to two five-year terms if re-elected. The executive branch also includes a vice-president and a cabinet. All bills need joint approval between the executive and the legislature to become law, meaning the president has veto power over all legislation. The president also has the power to issue presidential decrees that have policy effects, and is also in charge of Indonesia's foreign relations, although treaties require legislative approval. Prior to 2004, the president was selected by the MPR, but following the third amendment to the constitution, enacted in 2001, the president is now directly elected.The last election was held in April 2019, and incumbent Joko Widodo was re-elected.",
"title": "Executive branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The MPR is the legislative branch of Indonesia's political system. The MPR is composed of two houses: the DPR, which is commonly called the House of Representatives, and the DPD, which is called the Regional Representative Council. The 575 DPR members are elected through multi-member electoral districts, whereas 4 DPD senators are elected in each of Indonesia's 34 provinces. The DPR holds most of the legislative power because it has the sole power to pass laws. The DPD acts as a supplementary body to the DPR; it can propose bills, offer its opinion and participate in discussions, but it has no legal power. The MPR itself has power outside of those given to the individual houses. It can amend the constitution, inaugurate the president and conduct impeachment procedures. When the MPR acts in this function, it does so by simply combining the members of the two houses.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The General Elections Commission (Indonesian: Komisi Pemilihan Umum, KPU) is the body that is responsible for running both parliamentary and presidential elections. Article 22E(5) of the Constitution rules that the KPU is national, permanent, and independent. Prior to the 2004 elections, the KPU was made up of members who were also members of political parties. However, members of KPU must now be non-partisan.",
"title": "Political parties and elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Both the Supreme Court of Indonesia (Mahkamah Agung) and the Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi) are the highest level of the judicial branch. The Constitutional Court listens to disputes concerning legality of law, general elections, dissolution of political parties, and the scope of authority of state institution. It has 9 judges appointed by the DPR, the President and the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of Indonesia hears final cessation appeals and conducts case reviews. It has 51 judges divided into 8 chambers. Its judges are nominated by the Judicial Commission of Indonesia and appointed by the President. Most civil disputes appear before the State Court (Pengadilan Negeri); appeals are heard before the High Court (Pengadilan Tinggi). Other courts include the Commercial Court, which handles bankruptcy and insolvency; the State Administrative Court (Pengadilan Tata Usaha Negara) to hear administrative law cases against the government; and the Religious Court (Pengadilan Agama) to deal with codified Islamic personal law (sharia) cases. Additionally, the Judicial Commission (Komisi Yudisial) monitors the performance of judges.",
"title": "Judicial branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "During the regime of president Suharto, Indonesia built strong relations with the United States and had difficult relations with the People's Republic of China owing to Indonesia's anti-communist policies and domestic tensions with the Chinese community. It received international denunciation for its annexation of East Timor and the related genocide against the East Timorese in 1978. Indonesia is a founding member of the Association of South East Asian Nations, and thereby a member of both ASEAN+3 and the East Asia Summit.",
"title": "Foreign relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Since the 1980s, Indonesia has worked to develop close political and economic ties between Southeast Asian countries, and is also influential in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Indonesia was heavily criticised between 1975 and 1999 for allegedly suppressing human rights in East Timor, and for supporting violence against the East Timorese following the latter's secession and independence in 1999. Since 2001, the government of Indonesia has co-operated with the US in cracking down on Islamic fundamentalism and terrorist groups.",
"title": "Foreign relations"
}
]
| The politics of Indonesia take place in the framework of a presidential representative democratic republic whereby the President of Indonesia is both head of state and head of government and of a multi-party system. Executive power is exercised by the government. Legislative power is vested in both the government and the bicameral People's Consultative Assembly. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. The 1945 constitution provided for a limited separation of executive, legislative and judicial power. The governmental system has been described as "presidential with parliamentary characteristics". Following the Indonesian riots of May 1998 and the resignation of President Suharto, several political reforms were set in motion via amendments to the Constitution of Indonesia, which resulted in changes to all branches of government. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Indonesia a "flawed democracy" in 2022. Indonesia's political parties have been characterized as cartel parties with extensive power-sharing among parties and limited accountability to voters. Currently, scholars are conflicted about the strength and durability of Indonesia’s democracy. Indonesia scores well on certain characteristics of democracy, such as political rights, classifying it as a democracy in the minimalist interpretation of the word. However, the country lacks other aspects of democracy that are usually required for a regime to reach democratic consolidation, such as adequate civil rights protections. A minimalist view of democracy classifies political regimes purely in terms of their institutions and procedures rather than the outcomes they produce. Specifically, a regime must implement free and fair elections. In Indonesia, the president is directly elected and can serve up to two five-year terms. There are limited voting irregularities, and international election monitors consider the elections free and fair. Additionally, in 2019, the Constitutional Court rejected claims of widespread voter fraud. The right to organize competing political parties is respected, and the system allows for the competition of several political parties. Thus, according to the minimalist definition, Indonesia is a democracy. However, a maximalist approach to democracy claims that free and fair elections are insufficient to consider a regime a democracy. Maximalists argue that these countries must also guarantee other social, political, and economic rights, often those found in consolidated democracies. These include human rights protections, civil rights, egalitarianism, judicial independence, and more. Individuals in Indonesia are generally not free to practice and express their religious faith. Atheists and those who practice one of the “unrecognized” faiths in Indonesia can be penalized and face discrimination. Additionally, the court system often has many instances of corruption, and there is no due process in civil and criminal matters. Thus, Indonesia fails to meet many of the civil requirements for a consolidated, or maximalist, democracy. The durability of democracies can be attributed to a few key characteristics, such as per capita income, the control of political parties, and the frequency of elections. Indonesia scores very well in each of these categories. Indonesia has a relatively high per capita income of $5,000 USD, has multiple competing political parties, and has new leadership elected every five years. So, although Indonesia may not yet be a consolidated democracy, the country has made tremendous progress in advancing its score in democratic processes and durability. | 2001-08-04T14:49:29Z | 2023-11-08T02:16:07Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Indonesia |
14,647 | Economy of Indonesia | The economy of Indonesia is one of the emerging market economies in the world and the largest in Southeast Asia. As an upper-middle income country and member of the G20, Indonesia is classified as a newly industrialized country. Estimated at over 21 quadrillion rupiah in 2023, it is the 16th largest economy in the world by nominal GDP and the 7th largest in terms of GDP (PPP). Indonesia's internet economy reach US$77 billion in 2022, and is expected to cross the US$130 billion mark by 2025. Indonesia depends on the domestic market and government budget spending and its ownership of state-owned enterprises (the central government owns 141 enterprises). The administration of prices of a range of basic goods (including rice and electricity) also plays a significant role in Indonesia's market economy. However, since the 1990s, the majority of the economy has been controlled by individual Indonesians and foreign companies.
In the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the government took custody of a significant portion of private sector assets through the acquisition of nonperforming bank loans and corporate assets through the debt restructuring process, and the companies in custody were sold for privatization several years later. Since 1999, the economy has recovered, and growth accelerated to over 4–6% in the early 2000s. In 2012, Indonesia was the second fastest-growing G-20 economy, behind China, and the annual growth rate fluctuated around 5% in the following years. Indonesia faced a recession in 2020 when the economic growth collapsed to −2.07% due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its worst economic performance since the 1997 crisis.
In 2022, gross domestic product expanded by 5.31%,due to the removal of COVID-19 restrictions as well as record-high exports driven by stronger commodity prices.
Indonesia is predicted to be the 4th largest economy in the world by 2045. Joko Widodo has stated that his cabinet's calculations showed that by 2045, Indonesia will have a population of 309 million people. By Widodo's estimate, there would be economic growth of 5−6% and GDP of US$9.1 trillion. Indonesia's income per capita is expected to reach US$29,000.
In the years immediately following the proclamation of Indonesian independence, both the Japanese occupation and the conflict between Dutch and Republican forces had crippled the country's production, with exports of commodities such as rubber and oil being reduced to 12 and 5% of their pre-WW2 levels, respectively. The first Republican government-controlled bank, the Indonesian State Bank (Bank Negara Indonesia, BNI) was founded on 5 July 1946. It initially acted as the manufacturer and distributor of ORI (Oeang Republik Indonesia/Money of the Republic of Indonesia), a currency issued by the Republican Government which was the predecessor of Rupiah. Despite this, currency issued during the Japanese occupation and by Dutch authorities was still in circulation, and the simplicity of the ORI made its counterfeiting relatively easy, worsening matters. Between 1949 and 1960, Indonesia experienced several economic disruptions. The country's independence recognized by the Netherlands, the dissolution of the United States of Indonesia in 1950, the subsequent liberal democracy period, the nationalization of De Javasche Bank into the modern Bank Indonesia, and the takeover of Dutch corporate assets following the West New Guinea dispute, which all resulted in the devaluation of Dutch banknotes into half their value.
During the guided democracy era in the 1960s, the economy deteriorated drastically as a result of political instability. The government was inexperienced in implementing macroeconomic policies, which resulted in severe poverty and hunger. By the time of Sukarno's downfall in the mid-1960s, the economy was in chaos with 1,000% annual inflation, shrinking export revenues, crumbling infrastructure, factories operating at minimal capacity, and negligible investment. Nevertheless, Indonesia's post-1960 economic improvement was considered remarkable when taking into consideration how few indigenous Indonesians in the 1950s had received a formal education under Dutch colonial policies.
Following President Sukarno's downfall, the New Order administration brought a degree of discipline to economic policy that quickly brought inflation down, stabilized the currency, rescheduled foreign debt, and attracted foreign aid and investment. (See Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia and Berkeley Mafia). Indonesia was until recently Southeast Asia's only member of OPEC, and the 1970s oil price rise provided an export revenue windfall that contributed to sustained high economic growth rates, averaging over 7% from 1968 to 1981.
With high levels of regulation and dependence on declining oil prices, growth slowed to an average of 4.5% per annum between 1981 and 1988. A range of economic reforms was introduced in the late 1980s, including a managed devaluation of the rupiah to improve export competitiveness, and deregulation of the financial sector. Foreign investment flowed into Indonesia, particularly into the rapidly developing export-oriented manufacturing sector, and from 1989 to 1997, the Indonesian economy grew by an average of over 7%. GDP per capita grew 545% from 1970 to 1980 as a result of the sudden increase in oil export revenues from 1973 to 1979. High levels of economic growth masked several structural weaknesses in the economy. It came at a high cost in terms of weak and corrupt governmental institutions, severe public indebtedness through mismanagement of the financial sector, rapid depletion of natural resources, and culture of favors and corruption in the business elite.
Corruption particularly gained momentum in the 1990s, reaching to the highest levels of the political hierarchy as Suharto became the most corrupt leader according to Transparency International. As a result, the legal system was weak, and there was no effective way to enforce contracts, collect debts, or sue for bankruptcy. Banking practices were very unsophisticated, with collateral-based lending the norm and widespread violation of prudential regulations, including limits on connected lending. Non-tariff barriers, rent-seeking by state-owned enterprises, domestic subsidies, barriers to domestic trade and export restrictions all created economic distortions.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis that began to affect Indonesia became an economic and political crisis. The initial response was to float the rupiah, raise key domestic interest rates, and tighten fiscal policy. In October 1997, Indonesia and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reached an agreement on an economic reform program aimed at macroeconomic stabilization and the elimination of some of the country's most damaging economic policies, such as the National Car Program and the clove monopoly, both involving family members of Suharto. The rupiah remained weak, however, and Suharto was forced to resign in May 1998 after massive riots erupted. In August 1998, Indonesia and the IMF agreed on an Extended Fund Facility (EFF) under President B. J. Habibie that included significant structural reform targets. President Abdurrahman Wahid took office in October 1999, and Indonesia and the IMF signed another EFF in January 2000. The new program also has a range of economic, structural reform, and governance targets.
The effects of the crisis were severe. By November 1997, rapid currency depreciation had seen public debt reach US$60 billion, imposing severe strains on the government's budget. In 1998, real GDP contracted by 13.1%, and the economy reached its low point in mid-1999 with 0.8% real GDP growth. Inflation reached 72% in 1998 but slowed to 2% in 1999. The rupiah, which had been in the RP 2,600/USD1 range at the start of August 1997 fell to 11,000/USD1 by January 1998, with spot rates around 15,000 for brief periods during the first half of 1998. It returned to the 8,000/USD1 range at the end of 1998 and has generally traded in the Rp 8,000–10,000/USD1 range ever since, with fluctuations that are relatively predictable and gradual. However, the rupiah began devaluing past 11,000 in 2013, and as of November 2016 is around 13,000 Rp/USD1.
Since an inflation target was introduced in 2000, the GDP deflator and the CPI have grown at an average annual pace of 10¾% and 9%, respectively, similar to the pace recorded in the two decades prior to the 1997 crisis, but well below the pace in the 1960s and 1970s. Inflation has also generally trended lower through the 2000s, with some of the fluctuations in inflation reflecting government policy initiatives such as the changes in fiscal subsidies in 2005 and 2008, which caused large temporary spikes in CPI growth.
In late 2004, Indonesia faced a 'mini-crisis' due to international oil prices rises and imports. The currency exchange rate reached Rp 12,000/USD1 before stabilizing. Under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), the government was forced to cut its massive fuel subsidies, which were planned to cost $14 billion in October 2005. This led to a more than doubling in the price of consumer fuels, resulting in double-digit inflation. The situation had stabilized but the economy continued to struggle with inflation at 17% in late 2005. Economic outlook became more positive as the 2000s progressed. Growth accelerated to 5.1% in 2004 and reached 5.6% in 2005. Real per capita income has reached fiscal levels in 1996–1997. Growth was driven primarily by domestic consumption, which accounts for roughly three-fourths of Indonesia's gross domestic product (GDP). The Jakarta Stock Exchange was the best performing market in Asia in 2004, up by 42%. Problems that continue to put a drag on growth include low foreign investment levels, bureaucratic red tape, and widespread corruption which costs RP. 51.4 trillion (US$5.6 billion) or approximately 1.4% of GDP annually. However, there is a robust economic optimism due to the conclusion of the peaceful 2004 elections.
As of February 2007, the unemployment rate was 9.75%. Despite a slowing global economy, Indonesia's economic growth accelerated to a ten-year high of 6.3% in 2007. This growth rate was sufficient to reduce poverty from 17.8% to 16.6% based on the government's poverty line and reversed the recent trend towards jobless growth, with unemployment falling to 8.46% in February 2008. Unlike many of its more export-dependent neighbors, Indonesia has managed to skirt the recession helped by strong domestic demand (which makes up about two-thirds of the economy) and a government fiscal stimulus package of about 1.4% of GDP. After India and China, Indonesia was the third-fastest growing economy in the G20. With the $512 billion economy expanded 4.4% in the first quarter from a year earlier and last month, the IMF revised its 2009 Indonesia forecast to 3–4% from 2.5%. Indonesia enjoyed stronger fundamentals with the authorities implemented wide-ranging economic and financial reforms, including a rapid reduction in public and external debt, strengthening of corporate and banking sector balance sheets and reducing bank vulnerabilities through higher capitalization and better supervision.
In 2012, Indonesia's real GDP growth reached 6%, then it steadily decreased below 5% until 2015. After Joko Widodo succeeded SBY, the government took measures to ease regulations for foreign direct investments to stimulate the economy. Indonesia managed to increase their GDP growth slightly above 5% in 2016–2017. However, the government is currently still facing problems such as currency weakening, decreasing exports and stagnating consumer spending. The current unemployment rate for 2019 is at 5.3%.
Reform happened in Indonesia around the 1980s, when the Indonesian government states it will be attempting to economically integrate with global economies. They stated in 2017 that "Globalisation has made it difficult for the Indonesian economy to balance all other factors of the economy".
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2022 (with IMF staff estimates in 2023–2028). Inflation under 5% is in green.
Indonesia faced a recession in 2020 when the economic growth collapsed to -2.07% due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst growth since 1997 crisis. Transportation and accommodation were significantly affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, since many hotels were forced to close and not operate to reduce the spread of the virus.
Source: Indonesian Central Agency on Statistics (Badan Pusat Statistik).
Agriculture is a key sector which contributed to 14.43% of GDP. Currently, there are around 30% of the land area used for agriculture and employed about 49 million people (41% of the total workforce). Primary agriculture commodities include rice, cassava (tapioca), peanuts, natural rubber, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, copra; poultry, beef, pork, and eggs. Palm oil production is vital to the economy as Indonesia is the world's biggest producer and consumer of the commodity, providing about half of the world's supply. Plantations in the country stretch across 6 million hectares as of 2007, with a replanting plan set for an additional 4.7 million to boost productivity in 2017. There are a number of negative social and environmental impacts of palm oil production in Southeast Asia.
In 2015, the total production of seafood reached about 22.31 million metric tons, valued at around 18.10 billion US dollars. For capture of wild fish (both inland and marine), the production trend was steady in 2011–2015, while there was a steep increase in the production from aquaculture during the same period.
Indonesia was the only South East Asian member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) until its suspension in 2009. The country currently remains a net oil importer despite its large petroleum production industry. In 1999, crude and condensate output averaged 1.5 million barrels (240,000 m) per day, and in 1998, the oil and gas sector including refining, contributed approximately 9% to GDP. As of 2005, crude oil and condensate output were 1.07 million barrels (170,000 m) per day. It indicates a substantial decline from the 1990s, due primarily to ageing oil fields and a lack of investment in oil production equipment. This decline in production has been accompanied by a substantial increase in domestic consumption, about 5.4% per year, leading to an estimated US$1.2 billion cost for importing oil in 2005. The state owns all petroleum and mineral rights. Foreign firms participate through production-sharing and work contracts. Oil and gas contractors are required to finance all exploration, production, and development costs in their contract areas and are entitled to recover operating, exploration, and development costs out of the oil and gas produced. Indonesia had previously subsidized fuel prices to keep prices low, costing US$7 billion in 2004. SBY has mandated a significant reduction of government subsidy of fuel prices in several stages. The government has stated that cuts in subsidies are aimed at reducing the budget deficit to 1% of GDP in 2005, down from around 1.6% last year. At the same time, the government has offered one-time subsidies for qualified citizens, to alleviate hardships.
Indonesia is the world's largest tin market. Although mineral production traditionally centered on bauxite, silver, and tin, it is expanding its copper, nickel, gold, and coal output for export markets. In mid-1993, the Department of Mines and Energy reopened the coal sector to foreign investment, resulting in a joint venture between Indonesian coal producer and BP and Rio Tinto Group. Total coal production reached 74 million metric tons in 1999, including exports of 55 million tons, and in 2011, production was 353 million. As of 2014, Indonesia is the third-largest producer with a total output of 458 Mt and export of 382 Mt. At this rate, the reserves will be used up in 61 years until 2075. Not all of the productions can be exported due to Domestic Market Obligation (DMO) regulation, which should fulfill the domestic market. In 2012, the DMO was 24.72%. Starting from 2014, no low-grade coal exports are allowed, so the upgraded brown coal process that cranks up the calorie value of coal from 4,500 to 6,100 kcal/kg will be built in South Kalimantan and South Sumatra. Indonesia is also the world's largest producer of nickel, and the second-largest producer of cobalt in 2022.
Two US firms operate three copper/gold mines in Indonesia, with a Canadian and British firm holding significant other investments in nickel and gold, respectively. India's fortune groups like Vedanta Resources and Tata Group also have substantial mining operations in Indonesia. In 1998, the value of Indonesian gold and copper production was $1 billion and $843 million respectively. Receipts from gold, copper, and coal accounted for 84% of the $3 billion earned in 1998 by the mineral mining sector. With the addition of Alumina project that produces 5% of the world's alumina production, Indonesia would be the world's second-largest Alumina producer. The project will not make the ores to become aluminum, as there are 100 types of Alumina derivatives that can be developed further by other companies in Indonesia.
Joko Widodo's administration continued the resource nationalism policy of SBY, nationalizing some assets controlled by multinational companies such as Freeport McMoRan, TotalEnergies and Chevron. In 2018, in a move aimed to cut imports, oil companies operating in Indonesia were ordered to sell their crude oil to state-owned Pertamina.
Indonesia's manufacturing sector has historically played a key role in the country's economic development and now contributes to 20 percent of GDP. The government has ambitious plans to propel the country into the top ten biggest economies in the world by 2030, with manufacturing at the heart of this goal. The main areas of production include textiles and garments, food and beverages (F&B), electronics, automotive, and chemicals, with the majority of manufacturers in this sector consisting of micro, small, or medium-sized enterprises. The sector has posted a consistent four percent growth year-on-year since 2016 and registered 147 trillion rupiah (US$8.9 billion) in investments from January to September 2019.
Indonesia recently became the 10th-largest manufacturing nation in the world. Its large manufacturing sector accounts for almost a quarter of the nation's total GDP and employs over a fifth of Indonesia's working age population (around 25 million workers). Put into perspective, Indonesia's manufacturing sector is now larger than the manufacturing sectors of the United Kingdom, Russia and Mexico. Industry sector (including manufacturing) which accounts for 21% of local workers (having become more prominent in recent years). Indonesia's labour pool is estimated at 120 million people, and is growing annually by approximately 2.4 million. As the economy has progressed beyond its predominantly agricultural base to a mixed composition, more workers – particularly women – are now employed in manufacturing and service-related professional industries.
With its rapidly growing middle class and competitive workforce, more foreign investors than ever before are taking advantage of Indonesia's strong manufacturing sector. However, the sector has significant challenges, including intense international competition, particularly from China, increasing labour costs, high transportation and logistics costs, difficulties getting credit, and varying levels of transparency and clarity in regulations.
Indonesia has significant potential for developing renewable energy, however, the country continues to rely heavily on the use of fossil fuels in domestic electricity production. Continued investment in and reliance on fossil fuels, such as coal, may result in fossil fuels becoming stranded assets, leading to significant investments lost that the country could have received from renewable energy investors.
In 2010, Indonesia sold 7.6 million motorcycles, which were mainly produced in the country with almost 100% local components. Honda led the market with a 50.95% market share, followed by Yamaha with 41.37%. In 2011, the retail car sales total was 888,335 units, a 19.26% increase from last year. Toyota dominated the domestic car market (35.34%), followed by Daihatsu and Mitsubishi with 15.44% and 14.56%, respectively. Since 2011, some local carmakers have introduced some Indonesian national cars which can be categorized as Low-Cost Green Car (LCGC). In 2012, sales increased significantly by 24%, making it the first time that there were more than one million units in automobile sales.
In August 2014, Indonesia exported 126,935 Completely Build Up (CBU) vehicle units and 71,000 Completely Knock Down (CKD) vehicle units, while total production reached 878,000 vehicle units, constituting 22.5% of total output. Automotive export is more than double of its import. By 2020, it is predicted that the automotive exports will be the third after CPO and shoe export. In August 2015, Indonesia exported 123,790 motorcycles. In the same year, Yamaha Motor Company, which exported 82,641, announced to make Indonesia as a base of exporting of its products.
In 2017, the country produced almost 1.2 million motor vehicles, ranking it as the 18th largest producer in the world. Nowadays, Indonesian automotive companies can produce cars with a high ratio of local content (80%–90%).
In 2018, the country produced 1.34 million cars and exported 346,000 cars, mainly to the Philippines and Vietnam.
There are 50 million small businesses in Indonesia, with online usage growth of 48% in 2010. Google announced that it would open a local office in Indonesia before 2012. According to Deloitte in 2011, Internet-related activities have generated 1.6% of the GDP. It is bigger than electronic and electrical equipment exports and liquefied natural gas at 1.51% and 1.45% respectively.
Up to the end of June 2011, the fixed state assets were Rp 1,265 trillion ($128 billion). The value of state stocks was Rp 50 trillion ($5 billion) while other state assets were Rp 24 trillion ($2.4 billion).
In 2015, financial services covered Rp 7,2 trillion. Fifty domestic and foreign conglomerations held around 70.5%. Fourteen of it were vertical conglomerations, 28 were horizontal, and eight are mixed. Thirty-five entities are mainly in the bank industries, 13 were in non-bank industries and one each in special financial industries and capital market industries.
The Indonesian Textile Association has reported that in 2013, the textile sector is likely to attract investment of around $175 million. In 2012, the investment in this sector was $247 million, of which only $51 million was for new textile machinery. Exports from the textile sector in 2012 were $13.7 billion.
In 2011, Indonesia released 55,010 working visas for foreigners, an increase of 10% compared to 2010, while the number of foreign residents in Indonesia, excluding tourists and foreign emissaries was 111,752, rose by 6% compared to last year. Those who received visas for six months to one year were mostly Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans, Indians, Americans and Australians. A few of them were entrepreneurs who made new businesses. Malaysia is the most common destination of Indonesian migrant workers (including illegal workers). In 2010, according to a World Bank report, Indonesia was among the world's top ten remittance-receiving countries with a value totaling $7 billion. In May 2011, six million Indonesian citizens were working overseas, 2.2 million of whom reside in Malaysia and another 1.5 million in Saudi Arabia.
There are 34 provinces in Indonesia. Below are the top 15 provinces in Indonesia ranked by GDP in 2019:
Until the end of 2010, intra-ASEAN trade was still low as trade involved mainly exports to countries outside the region, with the exception of Laos and Myanmar, whose foreign trade was ASEAN-oriented. In 2009, realised foreign direct investment (FDI) was US$37.9 billion and increased two-fold in 2010 to US$75.8 billion.
The ASEAN Framework Agreement on Trade in Services (AFAS) was adopted at the ASEAN Summit in Bangkok in December 1995. Under the agreement, member states enter into successive rounds of negotiations to liberalise trade in services with the aim of submitting increasingly higher levels of commitment. ASEAN has concluded seven packages of commitments under AFAS.
Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) have been agreed upon by ASEAN for eight professions: physicians, dentists, nurses, architects, engineers, accountants, surveyors, and tourism professionals. Individuals in these professions will be free to work in any ASEAN states effective 31 December 2015.
In addition, six member states (Malaysia, Vietnam (2 exchanges), Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore) have collaborated on integrating their stock exchanges, which includes 70% of its transaction values with the goal to compete with international exchanges.
Single market will also include the ASEAN Single Aviation Market (ASEAN-SAM), the region's aviation policy geared towards the development of a unified and single aviation market in Southeast Asia. It was proposed by the ASEAN Air Transport Working Group, supported by the ASEAN Senior Transport Officials Meeting, and endorsed by the ASEAN Transport Ministers. It is expected to liberalise air travel between member states allowing ASEAN airlines to benefit directly from the growth in air travel, and also free up tourism, trade, investment, and service flows. This policy supersedes existing unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral air services agreements among member states which are inconsistent with its provisions.
Indonesia and Japan signed the Indonesia–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (IJEPA), which had come into effect on 1 July 2008. The agreement was Indonesia's first bilateral free-trade agreement to ease the cross-border flow of goods and people as well as investment between both countries. In 2012, there were between 1,200 and 1,300 Japanese corporates operating in Indonesia, with some 12,000 Japanese nationals living in Indonesia. Japan has been investing in Indonesia for decades, particularly in the automotive, electronic goods, energy, and mining sectors. Prior to the formation of the Indonesian Republic, the Japanese had viewed Indonesia as an important source of natural resources. The Japanese need of natural resources was among the reasons that led the nation to advance further to the south in their military conquests during World War II. Today Indonesia is Japan's major supplier for natural rubber, liquefied natural gas, coal, minerals, paper pulp, seafood such as shrimp and tuna, and coffee. Traditionally Indonesia has been regarded as a major market of Japanese automotive and electronic goods. For Japanese businesses, Indonesia has been a location for low-cost manufacturing operations as well as being the source of various natural resources required by those operations. Approximately 1,000 Japanese companies operate in Indonesia which employ approximately 300,000 people. Major Japanese factories are concentrated east of Jakarta with high concentrations in Bekasi, Cikarang and Karawang, West Java.
Trade with China has increased since the 1990s, and in 2014, China became Indonesia's second-largest export destination after Japan. Trade between China and Indonesia is on the rise, especially after the implementation of ACFTA since early 2010. Indeed, while in 2003 trade between Indonesia and China reached only US$3.8 billion, in 2010 it multiplied almost 10 times and reached US$36.1 billion. China's transformation into Fastest growing country in the 21st century has led to an increase of foreign investments in the bamboo network, a network of overseas Chinese businesses operating in the markets of Southeast Asia that share common family and cultural ties. However the free trade with China has caused much anxiety in Indonesia, since inflows of cheap products from China could harm Indonesian industry. Indonesian private sector and civil society organizations vigorously lobbied the Indonesian government and members of parliament, insisting that Indonesia should either pull out of the agreement or renegotiate its terms with Beijing.
China has remained on top of Indonesia's key major trading partners, serving as the country's largest export and import market. China serves as Indonesia's largest export destination after overtaking Japan and United States, reaching US$16.8 billion. China is also Indonesia's most important source of imports, reaching US$30.8 billion, or 22.7% of Indonesian imports in 2016. The balance however was in favour of China as Indonesia booked a trade deficit of US$14 billion in 2016.
From China's perspective, since 2010 ASEAN as a whole has become its fourth-largest trading partner after the European Union, Japan and the United States. Among ASEAN member countries, Indonesia was China's fourth-largest trading partner, which, according to data as of May 2010 from the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China, amounted to US$12.4 billion, after Malaysia (US$22.2 billion), Singapore (US$17.9 billion) and Thailand (US$15.7 billion). With China's economic rise, Indonesia has been intensifying its trade relationship with China to counterbalance its ties with the West. By 2020, China had become Indonesia's largest export destination.
In the past, the relations were only developed around trade and investments, such as the forestry and garment sectors. Today the cooperation has been expanded to a number of mega projects and advanced industries. With US$27 billion in bilateral trade, South Korea became the fourth biggest trading partner of Indonesia in 2012. It became the third-biggest foreign investor in Indonesia, with US$1.94 billion in investment.
There are large numbers of South Korean companies that have been investing and operating in Indonesia, such as Miwon (Daesang Corporation), Lotte, Yong Ma, Hankook Tire, Samsung, LG, Kia Motors, and Hyundai. In 2011, Hankook announced a US$353 million investment into a production plant located in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia.
In 2019, trade between Indonesia and South Korea was worth $15.65 billion, and between 2015 and 2019 South Korean companies invested nearly $7 billion in Indonesia. In December 2020, Indonesia and South Korea signed a comprehensive economic partnership. It is equivalent to a free trade agreement, though focuses on a broader scope of economic cooperation. Under the deal, Indonesia will scrap 94.8% of tariffs on South Korean products while South Korea will scrap 95.8% of tariffs on Indonesian products.
At the beginning of the post-Suharto era, US exports to Indonesia in 1999 totaled $2 billion, down significantly from $4.5 billion in 1997. The main exports were construction equipment, machinery, aviation parts, chemicals, and agricultural products. US imports from Indonesia in 1999 totaled $9.5 billion and consisted primarily of clothing, machinery and transportation equipment, petroleum, natural rubber, and footwear. Financial assistance to Indonesia is coordinated through the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) formed in 1989. It includes 19 donor countries and 13 international organizations that meet annually to coordinate donor assistance. In 2019, as Indonesia's share of global trade exceeded 0.5 percent, the United States Trade Representatives decided not to classify Indonesia as a "developing country." Despite a revocation of this status, the Indonesian government has assured that this would not change the current Generalized System of Preferences facilities that Indonesia had enjoyed from the United States.
The EU and Indonesia have built robust commercial relations, with bilateral trade amounting to approximately €25 billion in 2012 resulting in a sizeable €5.7 billion trade surplus for Indonesia with the EU. In the past few years trade between EU and Indonesia has been marked by an upward trend. Whereas total trade was worth almost €16 billion in 2009, by 2011 it had already reached €23.5 billion. For the EU, Indonesia is the 24th largest import source (share 0.9%) and the 30th largest export destination (share 0.6%). Inside the ASEAN-region, Indonesia ranks fourth in terms of total trade. The EU is Indonesia's 4th largest trading partner after Japan, China and Singapore, representing almost 10% of its total external trade. The EU is the second largest investor in the Indonesian economy. Indonesia mostly exports to the EU agricultural products and processed resources, mainly palm oil, fuels and mining products, textiles and furniture. EU exports to Indonesia consist mainly of high-tech machinery and transport equipment, chemicals and various manufactured goods. Essentially, trade flows between Indonesia and the EU complement each other. After negotiations on a free trade agreement with ASEAN got increasingly difficult, the EU began pursuing negotiations with individual ASEAN states. The EU and Indonesia are currently working towards an ambitious Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement covering trade, investment and services.
On 25 January 2011, after talks by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and visiting President of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, India and Indonesia had signed business deals worth billions of dollars and set an ambitious target of doubling trade over the next five years. India also has further economic ties with Indonesia through its free trade agreement with ASEAN, of which Indonesia is a member. The two countries target to achieve bilateral trade of $25 billion by 2015, with cumulative Indian investments of $20 billion in Indonesia.
This is a chart of trend of Indonesia's GDP at market prices by the IMF with figures in millions of rupiah.
For purchasing power parity comparisons, the exchange rate for 1 US dollar is set at 3,094.57 rupiah.
Average net wage in Indonesia varies by sector. In February 2017 the electricity, gas, and water sector has the highest average net wage, while the agriculture sector has the lowest.
Since the late 1980s, Indonesia has made significant changes to its regulatory framework to encourage economic growth. This growth was financed mostly from private investment, both foreign and domestic. US investors dominated the oil and gas sector and undertook some of Indonesia's largest mining projects. In addition, the presence of US banks, manufacturers, and service providers expanded, especially after the industrial and financial sector reforms of the 1980s. Other major foreign investors included India, Japan, the UK, Singapore, the Netherlands, Qatar, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.
The 1997 crisis made continued private financing imperative but problematic. New foreign investment approvals fell by almost two-thirds between 1997 and 1999. The crisis further highlighted areas where additional reform was needed. Frequently cited areas for improving the investment climate were the establishment of a functioning legal and judicial system, adherence to competitive processes, and adoption of internationally acceptable accounting and disclosure standards. Despite improvements of laws in recent years, Indonesia's intellectual property rights regime remains weak, and lack of effective enforcement is a significant concern. Under Suharto, Indonesia had moved towards the private provision of public infrastructure, including electric power, toll roads, and telecommunications. The 1997 crisis brought to light a severe weakness in the process of dispute resolution, however, particularly in the area of private infrastructure projects. Although Indonesia continued to have the advantages of a large labour force, abundant natural resources and modern infrastructure, private investment in new projects largely ceased during the crisis.
As of 28 June 2010, the Indonesia Stock Exchange had 341 listed companies with a combined market capitalization of $269.9 billion. As of November 2010, two-thirds of the market capitalization was in the form of foreign funds, and only around 1% of the population have stock investments. Efforts are further being made to improve the business and investment environment. Within the World Bank's Doing Business Survey, Indonesia rose to 122 out of 178 countries in 2010, from 129 in the previous year. Despite these efforts, the rank is still below regional peers, and an unfavorable investment climate persists. For example, potential foreign investors and their executive staff cannot maintain their own bank accounts in Indonesia, unless they are tax-paying local residents (paying tax in Indonesia for their worldwide income).
From 1990 to 2010, Indonesian companies have been involved in 3,757 mergers and acquisitions as either acquirer or target with a total known value of $137 billion. In 2010, 609 transactions were announced, which is a new record. Numbers had increased by 19% compared to 2009. The value of deals in 2010 was US$17 billion, which is the second-highest number ever. In 2012, Indonesia realized total investments of $32.5 billion, surpassing its annual target $25 billion, as reported by Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM) on 22 January. The primary investments were in the mining, transport and chemicals sectors. In 2011, the Indonesian government announced a new Masterplan (known as the MP3EI, or Masterplan Percepatan dan Perluasan Pembangunan Ekonomi Indonesia, the Masterplan to Accelerate and Expand Economic Development in Indonesia). The aim was to encourage increased investment, particularly in infrastructure projects across Indonesia.
Indonesia regained its investment grade rating from Fitch Rating in late 2011, and from Moody's Rating in early 2012, after losing it in the 1997 crisis, during which Indonesia spent more than Rp. 450 trillion ($50 billion) to bail out lenders from banks. Fitch raised Indonesia's long-term and local currency debt rating to BBB− from BB+ with both ratings is stable. Fitch also predicted that the economy would grow at least 6% on average per year through 2013, despite a less conducive global economic climate. Moody's raised Indonesia's foreign and local currency bond ratings to Baa3 from Ba1 with a stable outlook. In May 2017, S&P Global raised Indonesia's investment grade from BB+ to BBB− with a stable outlook, due to the economy experiencing a rebound in exports and strong consumer spending during early 2017.
Indonesia's foreign direct investment surged 44.2% on a yearly basis in 2022, with the base metals sector drawing in the biggest inflows. Indonesia's received 654.4 trillion rupiah worth of FDI last year, or equivalent to $45.6 billion in the investment ministry's official calculation, which assumes an exchange rate of 14,350 to the dollar. The data excludes investment in the banking and oil and gas sectors. Foreign direct investment in base metals and mining reached $11 billion and $5.1 billion, respectively, last year, the biggest recipients of FDI. The biggest sources were Singapore, China and Hong Kong. Total investment, including from domestic sources, reached 1,207.2 trillion rupiah ($81.02 billion), roughly in line with the government's target. FDI in the final quarter of last year was up 43.3% on an annual basis, amounting to 175.2 trillion rupiah in rupiah terms, or $12.2 billion in the official U.S. dollar equivalent.
List of the 10 largest foreign investment origin countries in Indonesia in 2022: 1. Singapore: $10.54 billion 2. China: $5.18 billion 3. Hong Kong, PRC: $3.91 billion 4. Japan: $2.76 billion 5. Malaysia: $2.21 billion 6. United States: $2.12 billion 7. South Korea: $1.66 billion 8. Netherlands: $1.09 billion 9. Bermuda: $0.76 billion 10. UK: $0.51 billion
Foreign direct investment into Indonesia (excluding investment in banking and the oil and gas sectors) increased 20.2 percent year-on-year to a new record peak of IDR 177 trillion (US$11.96 billion) in the Q1 of 2023, amid efforts by the government to ease business and licensing rules. Singapore (US$4.3 billion) was the biggest source of investment, followed by Hong Kong (US$1.5 billion), China (US$1.2 billion), and Japan (US$1 billion) while base metals were the biggest recipient amid efforts to boost investment in processed minerals. In total, Indonesia recorded IDR 328.9 trillion of foreign and domestic investment during the first quarter, up 16.5 percent from a year earlier, boosted by a rise in investment in base metals, transportation, and the mining sector. For 2023, the government has set a target to draw IDR 1,400 trillion (US$95.5 billion) of investment from domestic and foreign sources.
Indonesia has 1 company that rank in the Fortune Global 500 ranking for 2022.
Indonesia has 7 companies that rank in the Forbes Global 2000 ranking for 2022.
In 2015, total public spending was Rp 1,806 trillion (US$130.88 billion, 15.7% of GDP). Government revenues, including those from state-owned enterprises (BUMN), totaled Rp 1,508 trillion (US$109.28 billion, 13.1% of GDP) resulting in a deficit of 2.6%. Since the 1997 crisis that caused an increase in debt and public subsidies and a decrease in development spending, Indonesia's public finances have undergone a major transformation. As a result of a series macroeconomic policies, including a low budget deficit, Indonesia is considered to have moved into a situation of financial resources sufficiency to address development needs. Decentralization, enacted during the Habibie administration, has changed the manner of government spending, which has resulted in around 40% of public funds being transferred to regional governments by 2006.
In 2005, rising international oil prices led to the government's decision of slashing fuel subsidies. It led to an extra US$10 billion for government spending on development, and by 2006, there were an additional 5 billion due to steady growth, and declining debt service payments. It was the country's first "fiscal space" since the revenue windfall during the 1970s oil boom. Due to decentralization and fiscal space, Indonesia has the potential to improve the quality of its public services. Such potential also enables the country to focus on further reforms, such as the provision of targeted infrastructure. Careful management of allocated funds has been described as Indonesia's main issue in public expenditure.
In 2018, President Joko Widodo substantially increased the amount of debt by taking foreign loans. Indonesia has increased the debt by Rp 1,815 trillion compared to his predecessor, SBY. He has insisted that the loan is used for productive long-term projects such as building roads, bridges, and airports. Finance Minister Sri Mulyani also stated that despite an increase of foreign loans and debt, the government has also increased the budget for infrastructure development, healthcare, education, and budget given to regencies and villages. The government is insisting that foreign debt is still under control, and complying with relevant laws that limit debt to be under 60% of GDP.
Based on the regional administration implementation performance evaluation of 2009, by order, the best performance were:
Based on JBIC Fiscal Year 2010 survey (22nd Annual Survey Report) found that in 2009, Indonesia has the highest satisfaction level in net sales and profits for Japanese companies.
National net wealth, also known as national net worth, is the total sum of the value of a nation's assets minus its liabilities. It refers to the total value of net wealth possessed by the citizens of a nation at a set point in time. This figure is an important indicator of a nation's ability to take on debt and sustain spending and is influenced not only by real estate prices, equity market prices, exchange rates, liabilities and incidence in a country of the adult population but also by human resources, natural resources and capital and technological advancements, which may create new assets or render others worthless in the future. According to Credit Suisse, Indonesia has national net wealth of approximately $3.199 trillion, or about 0.765% of world net wealth, placing Indonesia at 17th, above Russia, Brazil, and Sweden.
According to Asia Wealth Report, Indonesia has the highest growth rate of high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) predicted among the 10 largest Asian economies. The 2015 Knight Frank Wealth Report reported that in 2014 there were 24 individuals with a net worth above US$1 billion. 18 of them lived in Jakarta while the others were spread among other large cities in Indonesia. 192 persons can be categorized as centamillionaires with over US$100 million of wealth and 650 persons as high-net-worth individuals whose wealth exceeded US$30 million.
Corruption is pervasive in the Indonesian government, affecting many fields that are central to barrier the country's economic development from local governments, the police, the private sector even various ministerial institutions which are close to the president. It is related to problems of human capacities and technical resources remains a major challenge in merging effectiveness and integrity in public administration, especially in regencies and cities. A 2018 World Economic Forum survey reports that corruption is the most problematic issue regarding doing business in Indonesia, as well as inefficient government bureaucracy policies. The survey also showed that 70% of entrepreneurs believe that corruption has grown in Indonesia, while low trust in the private sector is a major obstacle to foreign investment in the country.
In 2019, a controversial bill regarding the anti-corruption body (Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK)) reduced the commission's effectiveness in tackling widespread corruption problems and stripped its independence was passed despite massive protests across the country. There were 26 points in the revised law that crippled the commission and might further undermine efforts to eradicate corruption in Indonesia.
As of 2011, labour militancy was growing with a major strike at the Grasberg mine, the world's largest gold mine as well as the second-largest copper mine, and numerous strikes elsewhere. A common issue was the attempts by foreign-owned enterprises to evade Indonesia's strict labour laws by calling their employees' contract workers. The New York Times expressed concern that Indonesia's cheap labor advantage might be lost. However, a large pool of the unemployed who will accept substandard wages and conditions remains available. One factor in the increase of militancy is increased awareness via the Internet of prevailing wages in other countries, and the generous profits foreign companies are making in Indonesia.
On 1 September 2015, thousands of workers in Indonesia staged large demonstrations across the country in pursuit of higher wages and improved labour laws. Approximately 35,000 people rallied in total. They demanded a 22% to 25% increase in the minimum wage by 2016 and lower prices on essential goods, including fuel. The unions also want the government to ensure job security and ensure the fundamental rights of the workers.
In 2020, thousands of workers across the country held a massive march to protest against the Omnibus Law on Job Creation that included several controversial rules, which revised minimum wages, lowered severance pay, relaxed firing rules, among other disadvantaging regulations for labors and factory workers.
Economic disparity and the flow of natural resource profits to Jakarta has led to discontent and contributed to separatist movements in areas such as Aceh and Papua. Geographically, the poorest fifth regions account for just 8% of consumption, while the wealthiest fifth account for 45%. While there are new laws on decentralization that may address the problem of uneven growth and satisfaction partially, there are many hindrances in putting this new policy into practice. At a 2011 Makassar Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) meeting, Disadvantaged Regions Minister said there are 184 regencies classified as disadvantaged areas, with around 120 in eastern Indonesia. 1% of Indonesia's population has 49.3% of the country's $1.8 trillion wealth, down from 53.5%. However, it is ranked fourth after Russia (74.5%), India (58.4%) and Thailand (58%).
Inflation has long been a problem in Indonesia. Because of political turmoil, the country once suffered hyperinflation, with 1,000% annual inflation between 1964 and 1967, resulting in severe poverty and hunger. Even though the economy recovered quickly during the first decade of the New Order administration (1970–1981), never once was the inflation less than 10% annually. The inflation slowed during the mid-1980s; however, the economy was also languid due to the decrease in oil price that reduced its export revenue dramatically. The economy was again experiencing rapid growth between 1989 and 1997 due to the improving export-oriented manufacturing sector. Still, the inflation rate was higher than economic growth, and this caused a widening gap among Indonesians. Inflation peaked in 1998 during the 1997 crisis at over 58%, causing poverty to rise to the levels of the 1960s. During the economic recovery and growth in recent years, the government has been trying to lower the inflation rate. However, it seems that inflation has been affected by global fluctuation and domestic market competition. As of 2010, the inflation rate was approximately 7%, when its economic growth was 6%. To date, inflation is affecting the Indonesian lower middle class, especially those who are not able to afford food after price hikes. At the end of 2017, Indonesia's inflation rate was 3.61%, or higher than the government-set forecast of 3.0–3.5%. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The economy of Indonesia is one of the emerging market economies in the world and the largest in Southeast Asia. As an upper-middle income country and member of the G20, Indonesia is classified as a newly industrialized country. Estimated at over 21 quadrillion rupiah in 2023, it is the 16th largest economy in the world by nominal GDP and the 7th largest in terms of GDP (PPP). Indonesia's internet economy reach US$77 billion in 2022, and is expected to cross the US$130 billion mark by 2025. Indonesia depends on the domestic market and government budget spending and its ownership of state-owned enterprises (the central government owns 141 enterprises). The administration of prices of a range of basic goods (including rice and electricity) also plays a significant role in Indonesia's market economy. However, since the 1990s, the majority of the economy has been controlled by individual Indonesians and foreign companies.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the government took custody of a significant portion of private sector assets through the acquisition of nonperforming bank loans and corporate assets through the debt restructuring process, and the companies in custody were sold for privatization several years later. Since 1999, the economy has recovered, and growth accelerated to over 4–6% in the early 2000s. In 2012, Indonesia was the second fastest-growing G-20 economy, behind China, and the annual growth rate fluctuated around 5% in the following years. Indonesia faced a recession in 2020 when the economic growth collapsed to −2.07% due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its worst economic performance since the 1997 crisis.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 2022, gross domestic product expanded by 5.31%,due to the removal of COVID-19 restrictions as well as record-high exports driven by stronger commodity prices.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Indonesia is predicted to be the 4th largest economy in the world by 2045. Joko Widodo has stated that his cabinet's calculations showed that by 2045, Indonesia will have a population of 309 million people. By Widodo's estimate, there would be economic growth of 5−6% and GDP of US$9.1 trillion. Indonesia's income per capita is expected to reach US$29,000.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the years immediately following the proclamation of Indonesian independence, both the Japanese occupation and the conflict between Dutch and Republican forces had crippled the country's production, with exports of commodities such as rubber and oil being reduced to 12 and 5% of their pre-WW2 levels, respectively. The first Republican government-controlled bank, the Indonesian State Bank (Bank Negara Indonesia, BNI) was founded on 5 July 1946. It initially acted as the manufacturer and distributor of ORI (Oeang Republik Indonesia/Money of the Republic of Indonesia), a currency issued by the Republican Government which was the predecessor of Rupiah. Despite this, currency issued during the Japanese occupation and by Dutch authorities was still in circulation, and the simplicity of the ORI made its counterfeiting relatively easy, worsening matters. Between 1949 and 1960, Indonesia experienced several economic disruptions. The country's independence recognized by the Netherlands, the dissolution of the United States of Indonesia in 1950, the subsequent liberal democracy period, the nationalization of De Javasche Bank into the modern Bank Indonesia, and the takeover of Dutch corporate assets following the West New Guinea dispute, which all resulted in the devaluation of Dutch banknotes into half their value.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "During the guided democracy era in the 1960s, the economy deteriorated drastically as a result of political instability. The government was inexperienced in implementing macroeconomic policies, which resulted in severe poverty and hunger. By the time of Sukarno's downfall in the mid-1960s, the economy was in chaos with 1,000% annual inflation, shrinking export revenues, crumbling infrastructure, factories operating at minimal capacity, and negligible investment. Nevertheless, Indonesia's post-1960 economic improvement was considered remarkable when taking into consideration how few indigenous Indonesians in the 1950s had received a formal education under Dutch colonial policies.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Following President Sukarno's downfall, the New Order administration brought a degree of discipline to economic policy that quickly brought inflation down, stabilized the currency, rescheduled foreign debt, and attracted foreign aid and investment. (See Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia and Berkeley Mafia). Indonesia was until recently Southeast Asia's only member of OPEC, and the 1970s oil price rise provided an export revenue windfall that contributed to sustained high economic growth rates, averaging over 7% from 1968 to 1981.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "With high levels of regulation and dependence on declining oil prices, growth slowed to an average of 4.5% per annum between 1981 and 1988. A range of economic reforms was introduced in the late 1980s, including a managed devaluation of the rupiah to improve export competitiveness, and deregulation of the financial sector. Foreign investment flowed into Indonesia, particularly into the rapidly developing export-oriented manufacturing sector, and from 1989 to 1997, the Indonesian economy grew by an average of over 7%. GDP per capita grew 545% from 1970 to 1980 as a result of the sudden increase in oil export revenues from 1973 to 1979. High levels of economic growth masked several structural weaknesses in the economy. It came at a high cost in terms of weak and corrupt governmental institutions, severe public indebtedness through mismanagement of the financial sector, rapid depletion of natural resources, and culture of favors and corruption in the business elite.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Corruption particularly gained momentum in the 1990s, reaching to the highest levels of the political hierarchy as Suharto became the most corrupt leader according to Transparency International. As a result, the legal system was weak, and there was no effective way to enforce contracts, collect debts, or sue for bankruptcy. Banking practices were very unsophisticated, with collateral-based lending the norm and widespread violation of prudential regulations, including limits on connected lending. Non-tariff barriers, rent-seeking by state-owned enterprises, domestic subsidies, barriers to domestic trade and export restrictions all created economic distortions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The 1997 Asian financial crisis that began to affect Indonesia became an economic and political crisis. The initial response was to float the rupiah, raise key domestic interest rates, and tighten fiscal policy. In October 1997, Indonesia and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reached an agreement on an economic reform program aimed at macroeconomic stabilization and the elimination of some of the country's most damaging economic policies, such as the National Car Program and the clove monopoly, both involving family members of Suharto. The rupiah remained weak, however, and Suharto was forced to resign in May 1998 after massive riots erupted. In August 1998, Indonesia and the IMF agreed on an Extended Fund Facility (EFF) under President B. J. Habibie that included significant structural reform targets. President Abdurrahman Wahid took office in October 1999, and Indonesia and the IMF signed another EFF in January 2000. The new program also has a range of economic, structural reform, and governance targets.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The effects of the crisis were severe. By November 1997, rapid currency depreciation had seen public debt reach US$60 billion, imposing severe strains on the government's budget. In 1998, real GDP contracted by 13.1%, and the economy reached its low point in mid-1999 with 0.8% real GDP growth. Inflation reached 72% in 1998 but slowed to 2% in 1999. The rupiah, which had been in the RP 2,600/USD1 range at the start of August 1997 fell to 11,000/USD1 by January 1998, with spot rates around 15,000 for brief periods during the first half of 1998. It returned to the 8,000/USD1 range at the end of 1998 and has generally traded in the Rp 8,000–10,000/USD1 range ever since, with fluctuations that are relatively predictable and gradual. However, the rupiah began devaluing past 11,000 in 2013, and as of November 2016 is around 13,000 Rp/USD1.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Since an inflation target was introduced in 2000, the GDP deflator and the CPI have grown at an average annual pace of 10¾% and 9%, respectively, similar to the pace recorded in the two decades prior to the 1997 crisis, but well below the pace in the 1960s and 1970s. Inflation has also generally trended lower through the 2000s, with some of the fluctuations in inflation reflecting government policy initiatives such as the changes in fiscal subsidies in 2005 and 2008, which caused large temporary spikes in CPI growth.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In late 2004, Indonesia faced a 'mini-crisis' due to international oil prices rises and imports. The currency exchange rate reached Rp 12,000/USD1 before stabilizing. Under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), the government was forced to cut its massive fuel subsidies, which were planned to cost $14 billion in October 2005. This led to a more than doubling in the price of consumer fuels, resulting in double-digit inflation. The situation had stabilized but the economy continued to struggle with inflation at 17% in late 2005. Economic outlook became more positive as the 2000s progressed. Growth accelerated to 5.1% in 2004 and reached 5.6% in 2005. Real per capita income has reached fiscal levels in 1996–1997. Growth was driven primarily by domestic consumption, which accounts for roughly three-fourths of Indonesia's gross domestic product (GDP). The Jakarta Stock Exchange was the best performing market in Asia in 2004, up by 42%. Problems that continue to put a drag on growth include low foreign investment levels, bureaucratic red tape, and widespread corruption which costs RP. 51.4 trillion (US$5.6 billion) or approximately 1.4% of GDP annually. However, there is a robust economic optimism due to the conclusion of the peaceful 2004 elections.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "As of February 2007, the unemployment rate was 9.75%. Despite a slowing global economy, Indonesia's economic growth accelerated to a ten-year high of 6.3% in 2007. This growth rate was sufficient to reduce poverty from 17.8% to 16.6% based on the government's poverty line and reversed the recent trend towards jobless growth, with unemployment falling to 8.46% in February 2008. Unlike many of its more export-dependent neighbors, Indonesia has managed to skirt the recession helped by strong domestic demand (which makes up about two-thirds of the economy) and a government fiscal stimulus package of about 1.4% of GDP. After India and China, Indonesia was the third-fastest growing economy in the G20. With the $512 billion economy expanded 4.4% in the first quarter from a year earlier and last month, the IMF revised its 2009 Indonesia forecast to 3–4% from 2.5%. Indonesia enjoyed stronger fundamentals with the authorities implemented wide-ranging economic and financial reforms, including a rapid reduction in public and external debt, strengthening of corporate and banking sector balance sheets and reducing bank vulnerabilities through higher capitalization and better supervision.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 2012, Indonesia's real GDP growth reached 6%, then it steadily decreased below 5% until 2015. After Joko Widodo succeeded SBY, the government took measures to ease regulations for foreign direct investments to stimulate the economy. Indonesia managed to increase their GDP growth slightly above 5% in 2016–2017. However, the government is currently still facing problems such as currency weakening, decreasing exports and stagnating consumer spending. The current unemployment rate for 2019 is at 5.3%.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Reform happened in Indonesia around the 1980s, when the Indonesian government states it will be attempting to economically integrate with global economies. They stated in 2017 that \"Globalisation has made it difficult for the Indonesian economy to balance all other factors of the economy\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2022 (with IMF staff estimates in 2023–2028). Inflation under 5% is in green.",
"title": "Data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Indonesia faced a recession in 2020 when the economic growth collapsed to -2.07% due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst growth since 1997 crisis. Transportation and accommodation were significantly affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, since many hotels were forced to close and not operate to reduce the spread of the virus.",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Source: Indonesian Central Agency on Statistics (Badan Pusat Statistik).",
"title": "Structure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Agriculture is a key sector which contributed to 14.43% of GDP. Currently, there are around 30% of the land area used for agriculture and employed about 49 million people (41% of the total workforce). Primary agriculture commodities include rice, cassava (tapioca), peanuts, natural rubber, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, copra; poultry, beef, pork, and eggs. Palm oil production is vital to the economy as Indonesia is the world's biggest producer and consumer of the commodity, providing about half of the world's supply. Plantations in the country stretch across 6 million hectares as of 2007, with a replanting plan set for an additional 4.7 million to boost productivity in 2017. There are a number of negative social and environmental impacts of palm oil production in Southeast Asia.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2015, the total production of seafood reached about 22.31 million metric tons, valued at around 18.10 billion US dollars. For capture of wild fish (both inland and marine), the production trend was steady in 2011–2015, while there was a steep increase in the production from aquaculture during the same period.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Indonesia was the only South East Asian member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) until its suspension in 2009. The country currently remains a net oil importer despite its large petroleum production industry. In 1999, crude and condensate output averaged 1.5 million barrels (240,000 m) per day, and in 1998, the oil and gas sector including refining, contributed approximately 9% to GDP. As of 2005, crude oil and condensate output were 1.07 million barrels (170,000 m) per day. It indicates a substantial decline from the 1990s, due primarily to ageing oil fields and a lack of investment in oil production equipment. This decline in production has been accompanied by a substantial increase in domestic consumption, about 5.4% per year, leading to an estimated US$1.2 billion cost for importing oil in 2005. The state owns all petroleum and mineral rights. Foreign firms participate through production-sharing and work contracts. Oil and gas contractors are required to finance all exploration, production, and development costs in their contract areas and are entitled to recover operating, exploration, and development costs out of the oil and gas produced. Indonesia had previously subsidized fuel prices to keep prices low, costing US$7 billion in 2004. SBY has mandated a significant reduction of government subsidy of fuel prices in several stages. The government has stated that cuts in subsidies are aimed at reducing the budget deficit to 1% of GDP in 2005, down from around 1.6% last year. At the same time, the government has offered one-time subsidies for qualified citizens, to alleviate hardships.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Indonesia is the world's largest tin market. Although mineral production traditionally centered on bauxite, silver, and tin, it is expanding its copper, nickel, gold, and coal output for export markets. In mid-1993, the Department of Mines and Energy reopened the coal sector to foreign investment, resulting in a joint venture between Indonesian coal producer and BP and Rio Tinto Group. Total coal production reached 74 million metric tons in 1999, including exports of 55 million tons, and in 2011, production was 353 million. As of 2014, Indonesia is the third-largest producer with a total output of 458 Mt and export of 382 Mt. At this rate, the reserves will be used up in 61 years until 2075. Not all of the productions can be exported due to Domestic Market Obligation (DMO) regulation, which should fulfill the domestic market. In 2012, the DMO was 24.72%. Starting from 2014, no low-grade coal exports are allowed, so the upgraded brown coal process that cranks up the calorie value of coal from 4,500 to 6,100 kcal/kg will be built in South Kalimantan and South Sumatra. Indonesia is also the world's largest producer of nickel, and the second-largest producer of cobalt in 2022.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Two US firms operate three copper/gold mines in Indonesia, with a Canadian and British firm holding significant other investments in nickel and gold, respectively. India's fortune groups like Vedanta Resources and Tata Group also have substantial mining operations in Indonesia. In 1998, the value of Indonesian gold and copper production was $1 billion and $843 million respectively. Receipts from gold, copper, and coal accounted for 84% of the $3 billion earned in 1998 by the mineral mining sector. With the addition of Alumina project that produces 5% of the world's alumina production, Indonesia would be the world's second-largest Alumina producer. The project will not make the ores to become aluminum, as there are 100 types of Alumina derivatives that can be developed further by other companies in Indonesia.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Joko Widodo's administration continued the resource nationalism policy of SBY, nationalizing some assets controlled by multinational companies such as Freeport McMoRan, TotalEnergies and Chevron. In 2018, in a move aimed to cut imports, oil companies operating in Indonesia were ordered to sell their crude oil to state-owned Pertamina.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Indonesia's manufacturing sector has historically played a key role in the country's economic development and now contributes to 20 percent of GDP. The government has ambitious plans to propel the country into the top ten biggest economies in the world by 2030, with manufacturing at the heart of this goal. The main areas of production include textiles and garments, food and beverages (F&B), electronics, automotive, and chemicals, with the majority of manufacturers in this sector consisting of micro, small, or medium-sized enterprises. The sector has posted a consistent four percent growth year-on-year since 2016 and registered 147 trillion rupiah (US$8.9 billion) in investments from January to September 2019.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Indonesia recently became the 10th-largest manufacturing nation in the world. Its large manufacturing sector accounts for almost a quarter of the nation's total GDP and employs over a fifth of Indonesia's working age population (around 25 million workers). Put into perspective, Indonesia's manufacturing sector is now larger than the manufacturing sectors of the United Kingdom, Russia and Mexico. Industry sector (including manufacturing) which accounts for 21% of local workers (having become more prominent in recent years). Indonesia's labour pool is estimated at 120 million people, and is growing annually by approximately 2.4 million. As the economy has progressed beyond its predominantly agricultural base to a mixed composition, more workers – particularly women – are now employed in manufacturing and service-related professional industries.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "With its rapidly growing middle class and competitive workforce, more foreign investors than ever before are taking advantage of Indonesia's strong manufacturing sector. However, the sector has significant challenges, including intense international competition, particularly from China, increasing labour costs, high transportation and logistics costs, difficulties getting credit, and varying levels of transparency and clarity in regulations.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Indonesia has significant potential for developing renewable energy, however, the country continues to rely heavily on the use of fossil fuels in domestic electricity production. Continued investment in and reliance on fossil fuels, such as coal, may result in fossil fuels becoming stranded assets, leading to significant investments lost that the country could have received from renewable energy investors.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 2010, Indonesia sold 7.6 million motorcycles, which were mainly produced in the country with almost 100% local components. Honda led the market with a 50.95% market share, followed by Yamaha with 41.37%. In 2011, the retail car sales total was 888,335 units, a 19.26% increase from last year. Toyota dominated the domestic car market (35.34%), followed by Daihatsu and Mitsubishi with 15.44% and 14.56%, respectively. Since 2011, some local carmakers have introduced some Indonesian national cars which can be categorized as Low-Cost Green Car (LCGC). In 2012, sales increased significantly by 24%, making it the first time that there were more than one million units in automobile sales.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In August 2014, Indonesia exported 126,935 Completely Build Up (CBU) vehicle units and 71,000 Completely Knock Down (CKD) vehicle units, while total production reached 878,000 vehicle units, constituting 22.5% of total output. Automotive export is more than double of its import. By 2020, it is predicted that the automotive exports will be the third after CPO and shoe export. In August 2015, Indonesia exported 123,790 motorcycles. In the same year, Yamaha Motor Company, which exported 82,641, announced to make Indonesia as a base of exporting of its products.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 2017, the country produced almost 1.2 million motor vehicles, ranking it as the 18th largest producer in the world. Nowadays, Indonesian automotive companies can produce cars with a high ratio of local content (80%–90%).",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 2018, the country produced 1.34 million cars and exported 346,000 cars, mainly to the Philippines and Vietnam.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "There are 50 million small businesses in Indonesia, with online usage growth of 48% in 2010. Google announced that it would open a local office in Indonesia before 2012. According to Deloitte in 2011, Internet-related activities have generated 1.6% of the GDP. It is bigger than electronic and electrical equipment exports and liquefied natural gas at 1.51% and 1.45% respectively.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Up to the end of June 2011, the fixed state assets were Rp 1,265 trillion ($128 billion). The value of state stocks was Rp 50 trillion ($5 billion) while other state assets were Rp 24 trillion ($2.4 billion).",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In 2015, financial services covered Rp 7,2 trillion. Fifty domestic and foreign conglomerations held around 70.5%. Fourteen of it were vertical conglomerations, 28 were horizontal, and eight are mixed. Thirty-five entities are mainly in the bank industries, 13 were in non-bank industries and one each in special financial industries and capital market industries.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Indonesian Textile Association has reported that in 2013, the textile sector is likely to attract investment of around $175 million. In 2012, the investment in this sector was $247 million, of which only $51 million was for new textile machinery. Exports from the textile sector in 2012 were $13.7 billion.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 2011, Indonesia released 55,010 working visas for foreigners, an increase of 10% compared to 2010, while the number of foreign residents in Indonesia, excluding tourists and foreign emissaries was 111,752, rose by 6% compared to last year. Those who received visas for six months to one year were mostly Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans, Indians, Americans and Australians. A few of them were entrepreneurs who made new businesses. Malaysia is the most common destination of Indonesian migrant workers (including illegal workers). In 2010, according to a World Bank report, Indonesia was among the world's top ten remittance-receiving countries with a value totaling $7 billion. In May 2011, six million Indonesian citizens were working overseas, 2.2 million of whom reside in Malaysia and another 1.5 million in Saudi Arabia.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "There are 34 provinces in Indonesia. Below are the top 15 provinces in Indonesia ranked by GDP in 2019:",
"title": "Regional economies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Until the end of 2010, intra-ASEAN trade was still low as trade involved mainly exports to countries outside the region, with the exception of Laos and Myanmar, whose foreign trade was ASEAN-oriented. In 2009, realised foreign direct investment (FDI) was US$37.9 billion and increased two-fold in 2010 to US$75.8 billion.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The ASEAN Framework Agreement on Trade in Services (AFAS) was adopted at the ASEAN Summit in Bangkok in December 1995. Under the agreement, member states enter into successive rounds of negotiations to liberalise trade in services with the aim of submitting increasingly higher levels of commitment. ASEAN has concluded seven packages of commitments under AFAS.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) have been agreed upon by ASEAN for eight professions: physicians, dentists, nurses, architects, engineers, accountants, surveyors, and tourism professionals. Individuals in these professions will be free to work in any ASEAN states effective 31 December 2015.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In addition, six member states (Malaysia, Vietnam (2 exchanges), Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore) have collaborated on integrating their stock exchanges, which includes 70% of its transaction values with the goal to compete with international exchanges.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Single market will also include the ASEAN Single Aviation Market (ASEAN-SAM), the region's aviation policy geared towards the development of a unified and single aviation market in Southeast Asia. It was proposed by the ASEAN Air Transport Working Group, supported by the ASEAN Senior Transport Officials Meeting, and endorsed by the ASEAN Transport Ministers. It is expected to liberalise air travel between member states allowing ASEAN airlines to benefit directly from the growth in air travel, and also free up tourism, trade, investment, and service flows. This policy supersedes existing unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral air services agreements among member states which are inconsistent with its provisions.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Indonesia and Japan signed the Indonesia–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement (IJEPA), which had come into effect on 1 July 2008. The agreement was Indonesia's first bilateral free-trade agreement to ease the cross-border flow of goods and people as well as investment between both countries. In 2012, there were between 1,200 and 1,300 Japanese corporates operating in Indonesia, with some 12,000 Japanese nationals living in Indonesia. Japan has been investing in Indonesia for decades, particularly in the automotive, electronic goods, energy, and mining sectors. Prior to the formation of the Indonesian Republic, the Japanese had viewed Indonesia as an important source of natural resources. The Japanese need of natural resources was among the reasons that led the nation to advance further to the south in their military conquests during World War II. Today Indonesia is Japan's major supplier for natural rubber, liquefied natural gas, coal, minerals, paper pulp, seafood such as shrimp and tuna, and coffee. Traditionally Indonesia has been regarded as a major market of Japanese automotive and electronic goods. For Japanese businesses, Indonesia has been a location for low-cost manufacturing operations as well as being the source of various natural resources required by those operations. Approximately 1,000 Japanese companies operate in Indonesia which employ approximately 300,000 people. Major Japanese factories are concentrated east of Jakarta with high concentrations in Bekasi, Cikarang and Karawang, West Java.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Trade with China has increased since the 1990s, and in 2014, China became Indonesia's second-largest export destination after Japan. Trade between China and Indonesia is on the rise, especially after the implementation of ACFTA since early 2010. Indeed, while in 2003 trade between Indonesia and China reached only US$3.8 billion, in 2010 it multiplied almost 10 times and reached US$36.1 billion. China's transformation into Fastest growing country in the 21st century has led to an increase of foreign investments in the bamboo network, a network of overseas Chinese businesses operating in the markets of Southeast Asia that share common family and cultural ties. However the free trade with China has caused much anxiety in Indonesia, since inflows of cheap products from China could harm Indonesian industry. Indonesian private sector and civil society organizations vigorously lobbied the Indonesian government and members of parliament, insisting that Indonesia should either pull out of the agreement or renegotiate its terms with Beijing.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "China has remained on top of Indonesia's key major trading partners, serving as the country's largest export and import market. China serves as Indonesia's largest export destination after overtaking Japan and United States, reaching US$16.8 billion. China is also Indonesia's most important source of imports, reaching US$30.8 billion, or 22.7% of Indonesian imports in 2016. The balance however was in favour of China as Indonesia booked a trade deficit of US$14 billion in 2016.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "From China's perspective, since 2010 ASEAN as a whole has become its fourth-largest trading partner after the European Union, Japan and the United States. Among ASEAN member countries, Indonesia was China's fourth-largest trading partner, which, according to data as of May 2010 from the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China, amounted to US$12.4 billion, after Malaysia (US$22.2 billion), Singapore (US$17.9 billion) and Thailand (US$15.7 billion). With China's economic rise, Indonesia has been intensifying its trade relationship with China to counterbalance its ties with the West. By 2020, China had become Indonesia's largest export destination.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In the past, the relations were only developed around trade and investments, such as the forestry and garment sectors. Today the cooperation has been expanded to a number of mega projects and advanced industries. With US$27 billion in bilateral trade, South Korea became the fourth biggest trading partner of Indonesia in 2012. It became the third-biggest foreign investor in Indonesia, with US$1.94 billion in investment.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "There are large numbers of South Korean companies that have been investing and operating in Indonesia, such as Miwon (Daesang Corporation), Lotte, Yong Ma, Hankook Tire, Samsung, LG, Kia Motors, and Hyundai. In 2011, Hankook announced a US$353 million investment into a production plant located in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In 2019, trade between Indonesia and South Korea was worth $15.65 billion, and between 2015 and 2019 South Korean companies invested nearly $7 billion in Indonesia. In December 2020, Indonesia and South Korea signed a comprehensive economic partnership. It is equivalent to a free trade agreement, though focuses on a broader scope of economic cooperation. Under the deal, Indonesia will scrap 94.8% of tariffs on South Korean products while South Korea will scrap 95.8% of tariffs on Indonesian products.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "At the beginning of the post-Suharto era, US exports to Indonesia in 1999 totaled $2 billion, down significantly from $4.5 billion in 1997. The main exports were construction equipment, machinery, aviation parts, chemicals, and agricultural products. US imports from Indonesia in 1999 totaled $9.5 billion and consisted primarily of clothing, machinery and transportation equipment, petroleum, natural rubber, and footwear. Financial assistance to Indonesia is coordinated through the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) formed in 1989. It includes 19 donor countries and 13 international organizations that meet annually to coordinate donor assistance. In 2019, as Indonesia's share of global trade exceeded 0.5 percent, the United States Trade Representatives decided not to classify Indonesia as a \"developing country.\" Despite a revocation of this status, the Indonesian government has assured that this would not change the current Generalized System of Preferences facilities that Indonesia had enjoyed from the United States.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The EU and Indonesia have built robust commercial relations, with bilateral trade amounting to approximately €25 billion in 2012 resulting in a sizeable €5.7 billion trade surplus for Indonesia with the EU. In the past few years trade between EU and Indonesia has been marked by an upward trend. Whereas total trade was worth almost €16 billion in 2009, by 2011 it had already reached €23.5 billion. For the EU, Indonesia is the 24th largest import source (share 0.9%) and the 30th largest export destination (share 0.6%). Inside the ASEAN-region, Indonesia ranks fourth in terms of total trade. The EU is Indonesia's 4th largest trading partner after Japan, China and Singapore, representing almost 10% of its total external trade. The EU is the second largest investor in the Indonesian economy. Indonesia mostly exports to the EU agricultural products and processed resources, mainly palm oil, fuels and mining products, textiles and furniture. EU exports to Indonesia consist mainly of high-tech machinery and transport equipment, chemicals and various manufactured goods. Essentially, trade flows between Indonesia and the EU complement each other. After negotiations on a free trade agreement with ASEAN got increasingly difficult, the EU began pursuing negotiations with individual ASEAN states. The EU and Indonesia are currently working towards an ambitious Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement covering trade, investment and services.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "On 25 January 2011, after talks by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and visiting President of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, India and Indonesia had signed business deals worth billions of dollars and set an ambitious target of doubling trade over the next five years. India also has further economic ties with Indonesia through its free trade agreement with ASEAN, of which Indonesia is a member. The two countries target to achieve bilateral trade of $25 billion by 2015, with cumulative Indian investments of $20 billion in Indonesia.",
"title": "Foreign economic relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "This is a chart of trend of Indonesia's GDP at market prices by the IMF with figures in millions of rupiah.",
"title": "Macro-economic trend"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "For purchasing power parity comparisons, the exchange rate for 1 US dollar is set at 3,094.57 rupiah.",
"title": "Macro-economic trend"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Average net wage in Indonesia varies by sector. In February 2017 the electricity, gas, and water sector has the highest average net wage, while the agriculture sector has the lowest.",
"title": "Macro-economic trend"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Since the late 1980s, Indonesia has made significant changes to its regulatory framework to encourage economic growth. This growth was financed mostly from private investment, both foreign and domestic. US investors dominated the oil and gas sector and undertook some of Indonesia's largest mining projects. In addition, the presence of US banks, manufacturers, and service providers expanded, especially after the industrial and financial sector reforms of the 1980s. Other major foreign investors included India, Japan, the UK, Singapore, the Netherlands, Qatar, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.",
"title": "Investment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The 1997 crisis made continued private financing imperative but problematic. New foreign investment approvals fell by almost two-thirds between 1997 and 1999. The crisis further highlighted areas where additional reform was needed. Frequently cited areas for improving the investment climate were the establishment of a functioning legal and judicial system, adherence to competitive processes, and adoption of internationally acceptable accounting and disclosure standards. Despite improvements of laws in recent years, Indonesia's intellectual property rights regime remains weak, and lack of effective enforcement is a significant concern. Under Suharto, Indonesia had moved towards the private provision of public infrastructure, including electric power, toll roads, and telecommunications. The 1997 crisis brought to light a severe weakness in the process of dispute resolution, however, particularly in the area of private infrastructure projects. Although Indonesia continued to have the advantages of a large labour force, abundant natural resources and modern infrastructure, private investment in new projects largely ceased during the crisis.",
"title": "Investment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "As of 28 June 2010, the Indonesia Stock Exchange had 341 listed companies with a combined market capitalization of $269.9 billion. As of November 2010, two-thirds of the market capitalization was in the form of foreign funds, and only around 1% of the population have stock investments. Efforts are further being made to improve the business and investment environment. Within the World Bank's Doing Business Survey, Indonesia rose to 122 out of 178 countries in 2010, from 129 in the previous year. Despite these efforts, the rank is still below regional peers, and an unfavorable investment climate persists. For example, potential foreign investors and their executive staff cannot maintain their own bank accounts in Indonesia, unless they are tax-paying local residents (paying tax in Indonesia for their worldwide income).",
"title": "Investment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "From 1990 to 2010, Indonesian companies have been involved in 3,757 mergers and acquisitions as either acquirer or target with a total known value of $137 billion. In 2010, 609 transactions were announced, which is a new record. Numbers had increased by 19% compared to 2009. The value of deals in 2010 was US$17 billion, which is the second-highest number ever. In 2012, Indonesia realized total investments of $32.5 billion, surpassing its annual target $25 billion, as reported by Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM) on 22 January. The primary investments were in the mining, transport and chemicals sectors. In 2011, the Indonesian government announced a new Masterplan (known as the MP3EI, or Masterplan Percepatan dan Perluasan Pembangunan Ekonomi Indonesia, the Masterplan to Accelerate and Expand Economic Development in Indonesia). The aim was to encourage increased investment, particularly in infrastructure projects across Indonesia.",
"title": "Investment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Indonesia regained its investment grade rating from Fitch Rating in late 2011, and from Moody's Rating in early 2012, after losing it in the 1997 crisis, during which Indonesia spent more than Rp. 450 trillion ($50 billion) to bail out lenders from banks. Fitch raised Indonesia's long-term and local currency debt rating to BBB− from BB+ with both ratings is stable. Fitch also predicted that the economy would grow at least 6% on average per year through 2013, despite a less conducive global economic climate. Moody's raised Indonesia's foreign and local currency bond ratings to Baa3 from Ba1 with a stable outlook. In May 2017, S&P Global raised Indonesia's investment grade from BB+ to BBB− with a stable outlook, due to the economy experiencing a rebound in exports and strong consumer spending during early 2017.",
"title": "Investment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Indonesia's foreign direct investment surged 44.2% on a yearly basis in 2022, with the base metals sector drawing in the biggest inflows. Indonesia's received 654.4 trillion rupiah worth of FDI last year, or equivalent to $45.6 billion in the investment ministry's official calculation, which assumes an exchange rate of 14,350 to the dollar. The data excludes investment in the banking and oil and gas sectors. Foreign direct investment in base metals and mining reached $11 billion and $5.1 billion, respectively, last year, the biggest recipients of FDI. The biggest sources were Singapore, China and Hong Kong. Total investment, including from domestic sources, reached 1,207.2 trillion rupiah ($81.02 billion), roughly in line with the government's target. FDI in the final quarter of last year was up 43.3% on an annual basis, amounting to 175.2 trillion rupiah in rupiah terms, or $12.2 billion in the official U.S. dollar equivalent.",
"title": "Investment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "List of the 10 largest foreign investment origin countries in Indonesia in 2022: 1. Singapore: $10.54 billion 2. China: $5.18 billion 3. Hong Kong, PRC: $3.91 billion 4. Japan: $2.76 billion 5. Malaysia: $2.21 billion 6. United States: $2.12 billion 7. South Korea: $1.66 billion 8. Netherlands: $1.09 billion 9. Bermuda: $0.76 billion 10. UK: $0.51 billion",
"title": "Investment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Foreign direct investment into Indonesia (excluding investment in banking and the oil and gas sectors) increased 20.2 percent year-on-year to a new record peak of IDR 177 trillion (US$11.96 billion) in the Q1 of 2023, amid efforts by the government to ease business and licensing rules. Singapore (US$4.3 billion) was the biggest source of investment, followed by Hong Kong (US$1.5 billion), China (US$1.2 billion), and Japan (US$1 billion) while base metals were the biggest recipient amid efforts to boost investment in processed minerals. In total, Indonesia recorded IDR 328.9 trillion of foreign and domestic investment during the first quarter, up 16.5 percent from a year earlier, boosted by a rise in investment in base metals, transportation, and the mining sector. For 2023, the government has set a target to draw IDR 1,400 trillion (US$95.5 billion) of investment from domestic and foreign sources.",
"title": "Investment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Indonesia has 1 company that rank in the Fortune Global 500 ranking for 2022.",
"title": "Largest public Indonesian companies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Indonesia has 7 companies that rank in the Forbes Global 2000 ranking for 2022.",
"title": "Largest public Indonesian companies"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In 2015, total public spending was Rp 1,806 trillion (US$130.88 billion, 15.7% of GDP). Government revenues, including those from state-owned enterprises (BUMN), totaled Rp 1,508 trillion (US$109.28 billion, 13.1% of GDP) resulting in a deficit of 2.6%. Since the 1997 crisis that caused an increase in debt and public subsidies and a decrease in development spending, Indonesia's public finances have undergone a major transformation. As a result of a series macroeconomic policies, including a low budget deficit, Indonesia is considered to have moved into a situation of financial resources sufficiency to address development needs. Decentralization, enacted during the Habibie administration, has changed the manner of government spending, which has resulted in around 40% of public funds being transferred to regional governments by 2006.",
"title": "Public expenditure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 2005, rising international oil prices led to the government's decision of slashing fuel subsidies. It led to an extra US$10 billion for government spending on development, and by 2006, there were an additional 5 billion due to steady growth, and declining debt service payments. It was the country's first \"fiscal space\" since the revenue windfall during the 1970s oil boom. Due to decentralization and fiscal space, Indonesia has the potential to improve the quality of its public services. Such potential also enables the country to focus on further reforms, such as the provision of targeted infrastructure. Careful management of allocated funds has been described as Indonesia's main issue in public expenditure.",
"title": "Public expenditure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In 2018, President Joko Widodo substantially increased the amount of debt by taking foreign loans. Indonesia has increased the debt by Rp 1,815 trillion compared to his predecessor, SBY. He has insisted that the loan is used for productive long-term projects such as building roads, bridges, and airports. Finance Minister Sri Mulyani also stated that despite an increase of foreign loans and debt, the government has also increased the budget for infrastructure development, healthcare, education, and budget given to regencies and villages. The government is insisting that foreign debt is still under control, and complying with relevant laws that limit debt to be under 60% of GDP.",
"title": "Public expenditure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Based on the regional administration implementation performance evaluation of 2009, by order, the best performance were:",
"title": "Regional performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Based on JBIC Fiscal Year 2010 survey (22nd Annual Survey Report) found that in 2009, Indonesia has the highest satisfaction level in net sales and profits for Japanese companies.",
"title": "Regional performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "National net wealth, also known as national net worth, is the total sum of the value of a nation's assets minus its liabilities. It refers to the total value of net wealth possessed by the citizens of a nation at a set point in time. This figure is an important indicator of a nation's ability to take on debt and sustain spending and is influenced not only by real estate prices, equity market prices, exchange rates, liabilities and incidence in a country of the adult population but also by human resources, natural resources and capital and technological advancements, which may create new assets or render others worthless in the future. According to Credit Suisse, Indonesia has national net wealth of approximately $3.199 trillion, or about 0.765% of world net wealth, placing Indonesia at 17th, above Russia, Brazil, and Sweden.",
"title": "Wealth"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "According to Asia Wealth Report, Indonesia has the highest growth rate of high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) predicted among the 10 largest Asian economies. The 2015 Knight Frank Wealth Report reported that in 2014 there were 24 individuals with a net worth above US$1 billion. 18 of them lived in Jakarta while the others were spread among other large cities in Indonesia. 192 persons can be categorized as centamillionaires with over US$100 million of wealth and 650 persons as high-net-worth individuals whose wealth exceeded US$30 million.",
"title": "Wealth"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Corruption is pervasive in the Indonesian government, affecting many fields that are central to barrier the country's economic development from local governments, the police, the private sector even various ministerial institutions which are close to the president. It is related to problems of human capacities and technical resources remains a major challenge in merging effectiveness and integrity in public administration, especially in regencies and cities. A 2018 World Economic Forum survey reports that corruption is the most problematic issue regarding doing business in Indonesia, as well as inefficient government bureaucracy policies. The survey also showed that 70% of entrepreneurs believe that corruption has grown in Indonesia, while low trust in the private sector is a major obstacle to foreign investment in the country.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In 2019, a controversial bill regarding the anti-corruption body (Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK)) reduced the commission's effectiveness in tackling widespread corruption problems and stripped its independence was passed despite massive protests across the country. There were 26 points in the revised law that crippled the commission and might further undermine efforts to eradicate corruption in Indonesia.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "As of 2011, labour militancy was growing with a major strike at the Grasberg mine, the world's largest gold mine as well as the second-largest copper mine, and numerous strikes elsewhere. A common issue was the attempts by foreign-owned enterprises to evade Indonesia's strict labour laws by calling their employees' contract workers. The New York Times expressed concern that Indonesia's cheap labor advantage might be lost. However, a large pool of the unemployed who will accept substandard wages and conditions remains available. One factor in the increase of militancy is increased awareness via the Internet of prevailing wages in other countries, and the generous profits foreign companies are making in Indonesia.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "On 1 September 2015, thousands of workers in Indonesia staged large demonstrations across the country in pursuit of higher wages and improved labour laws. Approximately 35,000 people rallied in total. They demanded a 22% to 25% increase in the minimum wage by 2016 and lower prices on essential goods, including fuel. The unions also want the government to ensure job security and ensure the fundamental rights of the workers.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In 2020, thousands of workers across the country held a massive march to protest against the Omnibus Law on Job Creation that included several controversial rules, which revised minimum wages, lowered severance pay, relaxed firing rules, among other disadvantaging regulations for labors and factory workers.",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Economic disparity and the flow of natural resource profits to Jakarta has led to discontent and contributed to separatist movements in areas such as Aceh and Papua. Geographically, the poorest fifth regions account for just 8% of consumption, while the wealthiest fifth account for 45%. While there are new laws on decentralization that may address the problem of uneven growth and satisfaction partially, there are many hindrances in putting this new policy into practice. At a 2011 Makassar Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) meeting, Disadvantaged Regions Minister said there are 184 regencies classified as disadvantaged areas, with around 120 in eastern Indonesia. 1% of Indonesia's population has 49.3% of the country's $1.8 trillion wealth, down from 53.5%. However, it is ranked fourth after Russia (74.5%), India (58.4%) and Thailand (58%).",
"title": "Challenges"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Inflation has long been a problem in Indonesia. Because of political turmoil, the country once suffered hyperinflation, with 1,000% annual inflation between 1964 and 1967, resulting in severe poverty and hunger. Even though the economy recovered quickly during the first decade of the New Order administration (1970–1981), never once was the inflation less than 10% annually. The inflation slowed during the mid-1980s; however, the economy was also languid due to the decrease in oil price that reduced its export revenue dramatically. The economy was again experiencing rapid growth between 1989 and 1997 due to the improving export-oriented manufacturing sector. Still, the inflation rate was higher than economic growth, and this caused a widening gap among Indonesians. Inflation peaked in 1998 during the 1997 crisis at over 58%, causing poverty to rise to the levels of the 1960s. During the economic recovery and growth in recent years, the government has been trying to lower the inflation rate. However, it seems that inflation has been affected by global fluctuation and domestic market competition. As of 2010, the inflation rate was approximately 7%, when its economic growth was 6%. To date, inflation is affecting the Indonesian lower middle class, especially those who are not able to afford food after price hikes. At the end of 2017, Indonesia's inflation rate was 3.61%, or higher than the government-set forecast of 3.0–3.5%.",
"title": "Challenges"
}
]
| The economy of Indonesia is one of the emerging market economies in the world and the largest in Southeast Asia. As an upper-middle income country and member of the G20, Indonesia is classified as a newly industrialized country. Estimated at over 21 quadrillion rupiah in 2023, it is the 16th largest economy in the world by nominal GDP and the 7th largest in terms of GDP (PPP). Indonesia's internet economy reach US$77 billion in 2022, and is expected to cross the US$130 billion mark by 2025. Indonesia depends on the domestic market and government budget spending and its ownership of state-owned enterprises. The administration of prices of a range of basic goods also plays a significant role in Indonesia's market economy. However, since the 1990s, the majority of the economy has been controlled by individual Indonesians and foreign companies. In the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the government took custody of a significant portion of private sector assets through the acquisition of nonperforming bank loans and corporate assets through the debt restructuring process, and the companies in custody were sold for privatization several years later. Since 1999, the economy has recovered, and growth accelerated to over 4–6% in the early 2000s. In 2012, Indonesia was the second fastest-growing G-20 economy, behind China, and the annual growth rate fluctuated around 5% in the following years. Indonesia faced a recession in 2020 when the economic growth collapsed to −2.07% due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its worst economic performance since the 1997 crisis. In 2022, gross domestic product expanded by 5.31%,due to the removal of COVID-19 restrictions as well as record-high exports driven by stronger commodity prices. Indonesia is predicted to be the 4th largest economy in the world by 2045. Joko Widodo has stated that his cabinet's calculations showed that by 2045, Indonesia will have a population of 309 million people. By Widodo's estimate, there would be economic growth of 5−6% and GDP of US$9.1 trillion. Indonesia's income per capita is expected to reach US$29,000. | 2001-07-09T10:00:54Z | 2023-12-31T04:18:14Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Indonesia |
14,648 | Communications in Indonesia | Communications in Indonesia has a complex history due to the need to reach an extended archipelago of over 17,500 islands. The once important non-electronic communication methods of the past have given way to a considerable telecommunications infrastructure in contemporary Indonesia.
Indonesia has long been using traditional forms of communications between various islands and villages. It was not until the sixteenth century when the Dutch colonised Indonesia, constructing a more elaborate communication system, both within Indonesia and to other countries. The first connection to Australia was an undersea telegraph cable that was completed on 18 November 1871, connecting Java to Darwin, and eventually to the Australian Overland Telegraph Line across Australia.
After gaining Independence, Indonesia started to develop its own communication systems, generally following the rest of the world. The construction of communication towers and launch of the Palapa series of communication satellites was done during the New Order period.
A number of lines connect Indonesia to international communication routes. For example, the SEA-ME-WE 3 optical submarine telecommunications cable lands at both Medan and Jakarta connecting Europe with South eastern Asia (several countries up to Japan) and Australia (Perth).
Domestically, Indonesia has good coverage for media across most major islands, although smaller and less populated Islands do not always receive attention from media companies, and rely on satellite communication.
Indonesia has a long list of print media, in the form of newspapers and magazines. Some, such as Kompas, Media Indonesia, Koran Sindo and Koran Tempo are circulated daily and are relatively simple to obtain. Others are island- or city-specific, and are usually not distributed to other regions.
By June 2011, all sub-districts in Indonesia will be connected to the Internet.
The media in Indonesia is regulated by the Ministry of Communications and Informatics.
LIRNEasia's Telecommunications Regulatory Environment (TRE) index, which summarises stakeholders' perception on certain TRE dimensions, provides insight into how conducive the environment is for further development and progress. The most recent survey was conducted in July 2008 in eight Asian countries, including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines. The tool measured seven dimensions: i) market entry; ii) access to scarce resources; iii) interconnection; iv) tariff regulation; v) anti-competitive practices; and vi) universal services; vii) quality of service, for the fixed, mobile and broadband sectors.
Below-average scores received in all sectors and across dimensions reflect general dissatisfaction of the TRE in Indonesia. However, this does not mean that respondents have ignored recent developments. The relatively healthy growth in mobile sector is reflected in the higher TRE scores received by the sector for most dimensions, when compared to the fixed sector. On average, the mobile sector scores best, with fixed and broadband following. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Communications in Indonesia has a complex history due to the need to reach an extended archipelago of over 17,500 islands. The once important non-electronic communication methods of the past have given way to a considerable telecommunications infrastructure in contemporary Indonesia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Indonesia has long been using traditional forms of communications between various islands and villages. It was not until the sixteenth century when the Dutch colonised Indonesia, constructing a more elaborate communication system, both within Indonesia and to other countries. The first connection to Australia was an undersea telegraph cable that was completed on 18 November 1871, connecting Java to Darwin, and eventually to the Australian Overland Telegraph Line across Australia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "After gaining Independence, Indonesia started to develop its own communication systems, generally following the rest of the world. The construction of communication towers and launch of the Palapa series of communication satellites was done during the New Order period.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A number of lines connect Indonesia to international communication routes. For example, the SEA-ME-WE 3 optical submarine telecommunications cable lands at both Medan and Jakarta connecting Europe with South eastern Asia (several countries up to Japan) and Australia (Perth).",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Domestically, Indonesia has good coverage for media across most major islands, although smaller and less populated Islands do not always receive attention from media companies, and rely on satellite communication.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Indonesia has a long list of print media, in the form of newspapers and magazines. Some, such as Kompas, Media Indonesia, Koran Sindo and Koran Tempo are circulated daily and are relatively simple to obtain. Others are island- or city-specific, and are usually not distributed to other regions.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "By June 2011, all sub-districts in Indonesia will be connected to the Internet.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The media in Indonesia is regulated by the Ministry of Communications and Informatics.",
"title": "Regulatory environment in Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "LIRNEasia's Telecommunications Regulatory Environment (TRE) index, which summarises stakeholders' perception on certain TRE dimensions, provides insight into how conducive the environment is for further development and progress. The most recent survey was conducted in July 2008 in eight Asian countries, including Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines. The tool measured seven dimensions: i) market entry; ii) access to scarce resources; iii) interconnection; iv) tariff regulation; v) anti-competitive practices; and vi) universal services; vii) quality of service, for the fixed, mobile and broadband sectors.",
"title": "Regulatory environment in Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Below-average scores received in all sectors and across dimensions reflect general dissatisfaction of the TRE in Indonesia. However, this does not mean that respondents have ignored recent developments. The relatively healthy growth in mobile sector is reflected in the higher TRE scores received by the sector for most dimensions, when compared to the fixed sector. On average, the mobile sector scores best, with fixed and broadband following.",
"title": "Regulatory environment in Indonesia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
}
]
| Communications in Indonesia has a complex history due to the need to reach an extended archipelago of over 17,500 islands. The once important non-electronic communication methods of the past have given way to a considerable telecommunications infrastructure in contemporary Indonesia. | 2022-05-25T13:11:49Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Indonesia |
|
14,649 | Transport in Indonesia | Indonesia's transport system has been shaped over time by the economic resource base of an archipelago with thousands of islands, and the distribution of its more than 200 million people concentrated mainly on a single island, Java.
All modes of transport play a role in the country's transport system and are generally complementary rather than competitive. Road transport is predominant, with a total system length of 548,366 kilometres (340,739 miles) in 2020. The railway system has five unconnected networks in Java and Sumatra primarily dedicated to transport bulk commodities and long-distance passenger traffic.
Sea transport is extremely important for economic integration, as well as for domestic and foreign trade. It is well developed, with each of the major islands having at least one significant port city. The role of inland waterways is relatively minor and is limited to certain areas of Eastern Sumatra and Kalimantan.
The function of air transport is significant, particularly where land or water transport is deficient or non-existent. It is based on an extensive domestic airline network in which all major cities can be reached by passenger plane.
Because Indonesia encompasses a sprawling archipelago, maritime shipping provides essential links between different parts of the country. Boats in common use include large container ships, a variety of ferries, passenger ships, sailing ships, and smaller motorised vessels. The traditional wooden pinisi vessel is still widely used as the inter-island freight service within Indonesian archipelago. Main pinisi traditional harbours are Sunda Kelapa in Jakarta and Paotere harbour in Makassar.
Frequent ferry services cross the straits between nearby islands, especially in the chain of islands stretching from Sumatra through Java to the Lesser Sunda Islands. On the busy crossings between Sumatra, Java, and Bali, multiple car ferries run frequently twenty-four hours per day. There are also international ferry services between across the Straits of Malacca between Sumatra and Malaysia, and between Singapore and nearby Indonesian islands, such as Batam. Ferry services are operated by state-owned ASDP Indonesia Ferry and several private operators.
A network of passenger ships makes longer connections to more remote islands, especially in the eastern part of the archipelago. The national shipping line, Pelni, provides passenger service to ports throughout the country on a two to four week schedule. These ships generally provide the least expensive way to cover long distances between islands. Smaller privately run boats provide service between islands.
On some islands, major rivers provide a key transportation link in the absence of good roads. On Kalimantan, longboats running on the rivers are the only way to reach many inland areas.
Indonesia has 21,579 km (13,409 mi) of navigable waterways (as of 2005), of which about one half are on Kalimantan, and a quarter each on Sumatra and Papua. Waterways are highly needed because the rivers on these islands are not wide enough to hold medium-sized ships. In addition to this, roads and railways are not good options since Kalimantan and Papua are not like Java, which is a highly developed island. With the current length of waterways, Indonesia ranked seventh on the countries with longest waterways.
Major ports and harbours include Bitung, Cilacap, Cirebon, Jakarta, Kupang, Palembang, Semarang, Surabaya, and Makassar. Ports are managed by the various Indonesia Port Corporations, of which there are four, numbered I through IV. Each has jurisdiction over various regions of the country, with I in the west and IV in the east. Port of Tanjung Priok in Jakarta is the Indonesia's busiest port, handling over 5.20 million TEUs.
A two-phase "New Tanjung Priok" extension project is currently underway, which will triple the existing annual capacity when fully operational in 2023. In 2015, ground breaking of the strategic North Sumatra's Kuala Tanjung Port has been completed. It is expected to accommodate 500,000 TEUs per year, overtaking Johor's Tanjung Pelepas Port and could even compete with the port of Singapore.
A wide variety of vehicles are used for transportation on Indonesia's roads. Bus services are available in most areas connected to the road network. Between major cities, especially on Sumatra, Java, and Bali, services are frequent and direct; many express services are available with no stops until the final destination.
The intercity bus service has become the major provider of land transportation service connecting Indonesian cities, either within an island or inter-island connected through ferry crossings. The intercity bus operator companies are called P.O. (perusahaan otobus in Indonesian) with several major companies operating mainly in Java and Sumatra. The longest intercity bus service in Indonesia is a route operated by P.O. Antar Lintas Sumatera (ALS) connecting Medan in North Sumatra and Jember in East Java. It is a week long bus travel covering a distance of 2,920 kilometers.
The surge of intercity bus travel in Indonesia took place after the completion of Trans-Java highway section connecting Jakarta and Surabaya in 2018. During this time, some intercity bus services began operating fleet of double decker busses.
Some major cities has urban transit bus service, or a more sophisticated form of bus rapid transit (BRT). There are usually also bus services of various kinds such as the Kopaja in Jakarta. The largest one, Transjakarta system in Jakarta, is the longest bus rapid transit system in the world that boasts some 230.9 kilometres (143.5 miles) in 13 corridors and 10 cross-corridor routes and carrying 430,000 passengers daily in 2016. Other cities such as Yogyakarta (Trans Jogja), Surabaya (Suroboyo Bus & Trans Semanggi Suroboyo), Palembang, Bandung (Trans Metro Pasundan), Surakarta (Batik Solo Trans), Denpasar, Pekanbaru, Semarang (Trans Semarang), Makassar, Bogor, and Padang also have BRT systems in place without segregated lanes.
Many cities and towns have some form of transportation for hire available as well such as taxis. Many cities also have motorised autorickshaws (bajaj) of various kinds. Cycle rickshaws, called becak in Indonesia, are a regular sight on city roads and provide inexpensive transportation. They have been blamed for causing traffic congestion and, consequently, banned from most parts of Jakarta in 1972. Horse-drawn carts are found in some cities and towns.
Ridesharing companies have become serious competition to both taxicabs and motorcycle taxis (ojek), with the four providers being Gojek, Maxim, Anterin, Grab and others.
In more remote areas, and between smaller towns, most services are provided with minibuses or minivans (angkot). Buses and vans are also the primary form of transportation within cities. Often, these are operated as share taxis, running semi-fixed routes.
Due to the increasing purchasing power of Indonesians, private cars are becoming more common especially in major cities. However the growth of the number of cars increasingly outpaces the construction of new roads, resulting in frequently crippling traffic jams in large parts in major cities especially in Jakarta, which often also happen on highways. Jakarta also has one of the worst traffic jams in the world.
Indonesia has been gradually introducing an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) since 2012. ITS Indonesia was formed on 26 April 2011.
Indonesia has about 283,102 kilometres (175,911 mi) of paved highways and 213,505 kilometres (132,666 mi) of unpaved highways (As of 2011 estimate). Four of Indonesia's main highways are classified as parts of Asian Highway Network: AH2 section in Java and Bali, AH25 and AH151 in Sumatra, AH152 in Java and AH150 section in Kalimantan. Some of them has been numbered, currently only in Java and (partially) Sumatera.
National routes of Indonesia pass through the hearts of most main cities, and are designed to connect between city centres. They act as main inter-city route outside the tollways. A national route has to be passable by logistic trucks, while simultaneously handling the common traffic. National routes in Java are numbered, while those outside Java aren't. In some cities, even in crowded districts, national routes often form bypasses or ring roads (Indonesian: jalan lingkar) around the city to prevent inter-city traffic entering the city center.
Ministry of Public Works and People's Housing is responsible to these networks, except DKI Jakarta part from Jakarta Inner Ring Road to Jakarta Outer Ring Road. A national route can be revised if it serves unable to handle the traffic. It would usually be handled by the province/regional government.
Below were lists of some national routes in Indonesia:
All expressways in Indonesia are toll roads, known locally as jalan tol (lit. toll road). The first expressway in Indonesia is the Jagorawi Toll Road, opened in 1978. 2,386 kilometers of expressways are operating as of 2021. Over 568 kilometres (353 mi) of expressways opened during the first term of President Joko Widodo, surpassing previous administrations. Since 2018, all expressways do not accept any cash tolls; all tolls must be paid with certain contactless money cards.
The high cost of building and maintaining a national highway system means that Indonesia has to outsource the construction and maintenance to private and state-owned companies. Indonesia has an extensive system of highways consisting of:
Serangan-Tanjung Benoa Toll Road: The toll road between Tanjung Benoa to Airport and from Airport to Serangan, all in direct line (not curve) is 12.7 kilometres and is equipped also with motorcycle lanes. The toll road is formally opened on 23 September 2013, about a week before APEC Summit in Bali is opened.
Indonesia's main railways, operated by Kereta Api Indonesia and its subsidiaries, is used for both passenger and freight transport.
The majority of railways is located on Java. There are four separate railway networks on Sumatra: one in Aceh, one in North Sumatra (Aceh connection proposed to be finished in 2020s), another in West Sumatra, and the final one in South Sumatra and Lampung. South Sulawesi has railway network in Barru Regency as the impact of Trans-Sulawesi Railway construction, the first phase includes 146 kilometers route from Makassar to Parepare, which was completed in November 2022 and has been operating ever since. There are no railways in other parts of Indonesia, although new networks are being developed on islands such as Kalimantan and Papua.
The inter-city rail network is complemented by local commuter rail services, particularly in Jakarta metropolitan area and Surabaya. In Jakarta, the KRL Commuterline service carries more than a million passengers a day. Urban rail networks are also exists in few cities. Palembang LRT began operations in 2018, the first of such kind. The Jakarta MRT and Jakarta LRT began operations in 2019, with the Greater Jakarta LRT system being constructed and it commenced official commercial operations on 28 August 2023, after 11 days of Indonesian Independence Day.
The government's plan to build a high-speed rail (HSR) was announced in 2015, the first in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. It is expected to connect the capital Jakarta with Bandung, covering a distance of around 140 kilometres (87 miles). Plans were also mentioned for its possible extension to Surabaya, the country's second largest city. In 2023, the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Rail construction partially finished and is set to start commercial operation starting October 2023. The Jakarta-Bandung HSR began trial operation with passengers on 7 September 2023 and commercial operations on 2 October 2023.
As of 2013, Indonesia has pipelines for condensate 1,064 km (661 mi), condensate/gas 150 km (93 mi), gas 11,702 km (7,271 mi), liquid petroleum gas 119 km (74 mi), oil 7,767 km (4,826 mi), oil/gas/water 77 km (48 mi), refined products 728 km (452 mi), and water 44 km (27 mi).
Air transport in Indonesia serves as a critical means of connecting the thousands of islands throughout the archipelago. Indonesia is the largest archipelagic country in the world, extending 5,120 km (3,181 mi) from east to west and 1,760 km (1,094 mi) from north to south, comprising 13,466 islands, with 922 of those permanently inhabited. With an estimated population of over 255 million people – making it the world's fourth-most-populous country – and also due to the growth of the middle-class, the boom of low-cost carriers in the recent decade, and overall economic growth, many domestic travellers shifted from land and sea transport to faster and more comfortable air travel. Indonesia is widely regarded as an emerging market for air travel in the region. Between 2009 and 2014, the number of Indonesian air passengers increased from 27,421,235 to 94,504,086, an increase of over threefold.
However, safety issues continue to be a persistent problem in Indonesian aviation. Several accidents have given Indonesia's air transport system the reputation of the least safe in the world. Indonesian aviation faces numerous challenges, including poorly maintained, outdated, and often overwhelmed infrastructure, the factor of human error, bad weather, haze problems caused by plantation fires, and volcanic ash spewed by numerous volcanoes that disrupts air transportation.
The Indonesian Air Force has 34,930 personnel equipped with 224 aircraft, among them 110 combat aircraft. The Indonesian Air Force possesses and operates numerous military air bases and military airstrips across the archipelago.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has predicted that Indonesia will become the world's sixth largest air travel market by 2034. Around 270 million passengers are predicted to fly from and within Indonesia by 2034.
As of 2013, there are 673 airports in Indonesia, 186 of those have paved runways, and 487 have unpaved runways. As of 2013, there are 76 heliports in Indonesia. Jakarta's Soekarno–Hatta International Airport serves as the country's main air transportation hub as well as the nation's busiest. Since 2010, it has become the busiest airport in Southeast Asia, surpassing Suvarnabhumi and Changi airports. In 2017, it became the 17th busiest airport in the world with 62.1 million passengers.
In Indonesia, there are 22 commercial scheduled airlines that carry more than 30 passengers, and 32 commercial scheduled airlines that transport 30 or less passengers, as well as chartered airlines. Some notable Indonesian airlines, among others, include Garuda Indonesia, the government-owned flag carrier of Indonesia, Lion Air, currently the largest private low-cost carrier airline in Indonesia, Sriwijaya Air, currently the largest medium service regional carrier in Indonesia, also the country's third largest carrier, and Indonesia AirAsia, the Indonesian branch of Malaysian-based AirAsia.
Mudik, or Pulang Kampung, is an Indonesian term for the activity where migrants or migrant workers return to their hometown or village during or before major holidays, especially Lebaran (Eid al-Fitr). Although the mudik homecoming travel before Lebaran takes place in most Indonesian urban centers, the highlight is on the nation's largest urban agglomeration; Greater Jakarta, as millions of Jakartans exit the city by various means of transportation, overwhelming train stations and airports and also clogging highways, especially the Trans-Java toll road and Java's Northern Coast Road.
In 2023 it was estimated that the people that took annual mudik travel reached 123 million people. The demand for train and airplane tickets usually spikes a month or two prior to Lebaran, prompting an unusually higher cost for tickets for highly sought days of departure. Some airlines might add extra flights or operate larger airplanes to deal with the surge in demand.
Indonesian train operator Kereta Api Indonesia usually offers additional train trips or introduces longer trains with more cars in order to meet the demand. The private operators of intercity and interprovince buses usually charge higher ticket costs during this period. The impact is indeed tremendous as millions of buses, cars and motorcycles jam the roads and highways, causing kilometres of traffic jams each year. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Indonesia's transport system has been shaped over time by the economic resource base of an archipelago with thousands of islands, and the distribution of its more than 200 million people concentrated mainly on a single island, Java.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "All modes of transport play a role in the country's transport system and are generally complementary rather than competitive. Road transport is predominant, with a total system length of 548,366 kilometres (340,739 miles) in 2020. The railway system has five unconnected networks in Java and Sumatra primarily dedicated to transport bulk commodities and long-distance passenger traffic.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Sea transport is extremely important for economic integration, as well as for domestic and foreign trade. It is well developed, with each of the major islands having at least one significant port city. The role of inland waterways is relatively minor and is limited to certain areas of Eastern Sumatra and Kalimantan.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The function of air transport is significant, particularly where land or water transport is deficient or non-existent. It is based on an extensive domestic airline network in which all major cities can be reached by passenger plane.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Because Indonesia encompasses a sprawling archipelago, maritime shipping provides essential links between different parts of the country. Boats in common use include large container ships, a variety of ferries, passenger ships, sailing ships, and smaller motorised vessels. The traditional wooden pinisi vessel is still widely used as the inter-island freight service within Indonesian archipelago. Main pinisi traditional harbours are Sunda Kelapa in Jakarta and Paotere harbour in Makassar.",
"title": "Water transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Frequent ferry services cross the straits between nearby islands, especially in the chain of islands stretching from Sumatra through Java to the Lesser Sunda Islands. On the busy crossings between Sumatra, Java, and Bali, multiple car ferries run frequently twenty-four hours per day. There are also international ferry services between across the Straits of Malacca between Sumatra and Malaysia, and between Singapore and nearby Indonesian islands, such as Batam. Ferry services are operated by state-owned ASDP Indonesia Ferry and several private operators.",
"title": "Water transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A network of passenger ships makes longer connections to more remote islands, especially in the eastern part of the archipelago. The national shipping line, Pelni, provides passenger service to ports throughout the country on a two to four week schedule. These ships generally provide the least expensive way to cover long distances between islands. Smaller privately run boats provide service between islands.",
"title": "Water transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "On some islands, major rivers provide a key transportation link in the absence of good roads. On Kalimantan, longboats running on the rivers are the only way to reach many inland areas.",
"title": "Water transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Indonesia has 21,579 km (13,409 mi) of navigable waterways (as of 2005), of which about one half are on Kalimantan, and a quarter each on Sumatra and Papua. Waterways are highly needed because the rivers on these islands are not wide enough to hold medium-sized ships. In addition to this, roads and railways are not good options since Kalimantan and Papua are not like Java, which is a highly developed island. With the current length of waterways, Indonesia ranked seventh on the countries with longest waterways.",
"title": "Water transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Major ports and harbours include Bitung, Cilacap, Cirebon, Jakarta, Kupang, Palembang, Semarang, Surabaya, and Makassar. Ports are managed by the various Indonesia Port Corporations, of which there are four, numbered I through IV. Each has jurisdiction over various regions of the country, with I in the west and IV in the east. Port of Tanjung Priok in Jakarta is the Indonesia's busiest port, handling over 5.20 million TEUs.",
"title": "Water transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "A two-phase \"New Tanjung Priok\" extension project is currently underway, which will triple the existing annual capacity when fully operational in 2023. In 2015, ground breaking of the strategic North Sumatra's Kuala Tanjung Port has been completed. It is expected to accommodate 500,000 TEUs per year, overtaking Johor's Tanjung Pelepas Port and could even compete with the port of Singapore.",
"title": "Water transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A wide variety of vehicles are used for transportation on Indonesia's roads. Bus services are available in most areas connected to the road network. Between major cities, especially on Sumatra, Java, and Bali, services are frequent and direct; many express services are available with no stops until the final destination.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The intercity bus service has become the major provider of land transportation service connecting Indonesian cities, either within an island or inter-island connected through ferry crossings. The intercity bus operator companies are called P.O. (perusahaan otobus in Indonesian) with several major companies operating mainly in Java and Sumatra. The longest intercity bus service in Indonesia is a route operated by P.O. Antar Lintas Sumatera (ALS) connecting Medan in North Sumatra and Jember in East Java. It is a week long bus travel covering a distance of 2,920 kilometers.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The surge of intercity bus travel in Indonesia took place after the completion of Trans-Java highway section connecting Jakarta and Surabaya in 2018. During this time, some intercity bus services began operating fleet of double decker busses.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Some major cities has urban transit bus service, or a more sophisticated form of bus rapid transit (BRT). There are usually also bus services of various kinds such as the Kopaja in Jakarta. The largest one, Transjakarta system in Jakarta, is the longest bus rapid transit system in the world that boasts some 230.9 kilometres (143.5 miles) in 13 corridors and 10 cross-corridor routes and carrying 430,000 passengers daily in 2016. Other cities such as Yogyakarta (Trans Jogja), Surabaya (Suroboyo Bus & Trans Semanggi Suroboyo), Palembang, Bandung (Trans Metro Pasundan), Surakarta (Batik Solo Trans), Denpasar, Pekanbaru, Semarang (Trans Semarang), Makassar, Bogor, and Padang also have BRT systems in place without segregated lanes.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Many cities and towns have some form of transportation for hire available as well such as taxis. Many cities also have motorised autorickshaws (bajaj) of various kinds. Cycle rickshaws, called becak in Indonesia, are a regular sight on city roads and provide inexpensive transportation. They have been blamed for causing traffic congestion and, consequently, banned from most parts of Jakarta in 1972. Horse-drawn carts are found in some cities and towns.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Ridesharing companies have become serious competition to both taxicabs and motorcycle taxis (ojek), with the four providers being Gojek, Maxim, Anterin, Grab and others.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In more remote areas, and between smaller towns, most services are provided with minibuses or minivans (angkot). Buses and vans are also the primary form of transportation within cities. Often, these are operated as share taxis, running semi-fixed routes.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Due to the increasing purchasing power of Indonesians, private cars are becoming more common especially in major cities. However the growth of the number of cars increasingly outpaces the construction of new roads, resulting in frequently crippling traffic jams in large parts in major cities especially in Jakarta, which often also happen on highways. Jakarta also has one of the worst traffic jams in the world.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Indonesia has been gradually introducing an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) since 2012. ITS Indonesia was formed on 26 April 2011.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Indonesia has about 283,102 kilometres (175,911 mi) of paved highways and 213,505 kilometres (132,666 mi) of unpaved highways (As of 2011 estimate). Four of Indonesia's main highways are classified as parts of Asian Highway Network: AH2 section in Java and Bali, AH25 and AH151 in Sumatra, AH152 in Java and AH150 section in Kalimantan. Some of them has been numbered, currently only in Java and (partially) Sumatera.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "National routes of Indonesia pass through the hearts of most main cities, and are designed to connect between city centres. They act as main inter-city route outside the tollways. A national route has to be passable by logistic trucks, while simultaneously handling the common traffic. National routes in Java are numbered, while those outside Java aren't. In some cities, even in crowded districts, national routes often form bypasses or ring roads (Indonesian: jalan lingkar) around the city to prevent inter-city traffic entering the city center.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Ministry of Public Works and People's Housing is responsible to these networks, except DKI Jakarta part from Jakarta Inner Ring Road to Jakarta Outer Ring Road. A national route can be revised if it serves unable to handle the traffic. It would usually be handled by the province/regional government.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Below were lists of some national routes in Indonesia:",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "All expressways in Indonesia are toll roads, known locally as jalan tol (lit. toll road). The first expressway in Indonesia is the Jagorawi Toll Road, opened in 1978. 2,386 kilometers of expressways are operating as of 2021. Over 568 kilometres (353 mi) of expressways opened during the first term of President Joko Widodo, surpassing previous administrations. Since 2018, all expressways do not accept any cash tolls; all tolls must be paid with certain contactless money cards.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The high cost of building and maintaining a national highway system means that Indonesia has to outsource the construction and maintenance to private and state-owned companies. Indonesia has an extensive system of highways consisting of:",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Serangan-Tanjung Benoa Toll Road: The toll road between Tanjung Benoa to Airport and from Airport to Serangan, all in direct line (not curve) is 12.7 kilometres and is equipped also with motorcycle lanes. The toll road is formally opened on 23 September 2013, about a week before APEC Summit in Bali is opened.",
"title": "Roads and highways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Indonesia's main railways, operated by Kereta Api Indonesia and its subsidiaries, is used for both passenger and freight transport.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The majority of railways is located on Java. There are four separate railway networks on Sumatra: one in Aceh, one in North Sumatra (Aceh connection proposed to be finished in 2020s), another in West Sumatra, and the final one in South Sumatra and Lampung. South Sulawesi has railway network in Barru Regency as the impact of Trans-Sulawesi Railway construction, the first phase includes 146 kilometers route from Makassar to Parepare, which was completed in November 2022 and has been operating ever since. There are no railways in other parts of Indonesia, although new networks are being developed on islands such as Kalimantan and Papua.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The inter-city rail network is complemented by local commuter rail services, particularly in Jakarta metropolitan area and Surabaya. In Jakarta, the KRL Commuterline service carries more than a million passengers a day. Urban rail networks are also exists in few cities. Palembang LRT began operations in 2018, the first of such kind. The Jakarta MRT and Jakarta LRT began operations in 2019, with the Greater Jakarta LRT system being constructed and it commenced official commercial operations on 28 August 2023, after 11 days of Indonesian Independence Day.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The government's plan to build a high-speed rail (HSR) was announced in 2015, the first in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. It is expected to connect the capital Jakarta with Bandung, covering a distance of around 140 kilometres (87 miles). Plans were also mentioned for its possible extension to Surabaya, the country's second largest city. In 2023, the Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Rail construction partially finished and is set to start commercial operation starting October 2023. The Jakarta-Bandung HSR began trial operation with passengers on 7 September 2023 and commercial operations on 2 October 2023.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "As of 2013, Indonesia has pipelines for condensate 1,064 km (661 mi), condensate/gas 150 km (93 mi), gas 11,702 km (7,271 mi), liquid petroleum gas 119 km (74 mi), oil 7,767 km (4,826 mi), oil/gas/water 77 km (48 mi), refined products 728 km (452 mi), and water 44 km (27 mi).",
"title": "Pipelines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Air transport in Indonesia serves as a critical means of connecting the thousands of islands throughout the archipelago. Indonesia is the largest archipelagic country in the world, extending 5,120 km (3,181 mi) from east to west and 1,760 km (1,094 mi) from north to south, comprising 13,466 islands, with 922 of those permanently inhabited. With an estimated population of over 255 million people – making it the world's fourth-most-populous country – and also due to the growth of the middle-class, the boom of low-cost carriers in the recent decade, and overall economic growth, many domestic travellers shifted from land and sea transport to faster and more comfortable air travel. Indonesia is widely regarded as an emerging market for air travel in the region. Between 2009 and 2014, the number of Indonesian air passengers increased from 27,421,235 to 94,504,086, an increase of over threefold.",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "However, safety issues continue to be a persistent problem in Indonesian aviation. Several accidents have given Indonesia's air transport system the reputation of the least safe in the world. Indonesian aviation faces numerous challenges, including poorly maintained, outdated, and often overwhelmed infrastructure, the factor of human error, bad weather, haze problems caused by plantation fires, and volcanic ash spewed by numerous volcanoes that disrupts air transportation.",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Indonesian Air Force has 34,930 personnel equipped with 224 aircraft, among them 110 combat aircraft. The Indonesian Air Force possesses and operates numerous military air bases and military airstrips across the archipelago.",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has predicted that Indonesia will become the world's sixth largest air travel market by 2034. Around 270 million passengers are predicted to fly from and within Indonesia by 2034.",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "As of 2013, there are 673 airports in Indonesia, 186 of those have paved runways, and 487 have unpaved runways. As of 2013, there are 76 heliports in Indonesia. Jakarta's Soekarno–Hatta International Airport serves as the country's main air transportation hub as well as the nation's busiest. Since 2010, it has become the busiest airport in Southeast Asia, surpassing Suvarnabhumi and Changi airports. In 2017, it became the 17th busiest airport in the world with 62.1 million passengers.",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In Indonesia, there are 22 commercial scheduled airlines that carry more than 30 passengers, and 32 commercial scheduled airlines that transport 30 or less passengers, as well as chartered airlines. Some notable Indonesian airlines, among others, include Garuda Indonesia, the government-owned flag carrier of Indonesia, Lion Air, currently the largest private low-cost carrier airline in Indonesia, Sriwijaya Air, currently the largest medium service regional carrier in Indonesia, also the country's third largest carrier, and Indonesia AirAsia, the Indonesian branch of Malaysian-based AirAsia.",
"title": "Air transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Mudik, or Pulang Kampung, is an Indonesian term for the activity where migrants or migrant workers return to their hometown or village during or before major holidays, especially Lebaran (Eid al-Fitr). Although the mudik homecoming travel before Lebaran takes place in most Indonesian urban centers, the highlight is on the nation's largest urban agglomeration; Greater Jakarta, as millions of Jakartans exit the city by various means of transportation, overwhelming train stations and airports and also clogging highways, especially the Trans-Java toll road and Java's Northern Coast Road.",
"title": "Mudik"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 2023 it was estimated that the people that took annual mudik travel reached 123 million people. The demand for train and airplane tickets usually spikes a month or two prior to Lebaran, prompting an unusually higher cost for tickets for highly sought days of departure. Some airlines might add extra flights or operate larger airplanes to deal with the surge in demand.",
"title": "Mudik"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Indonesian train operator Kereta Api Indonesia usually offers additional train trips or introduces longer trains with more cars in order to meet the demand. The private operators of intercity and interprovince buses usually charge higher ticket costs during this period. The impact is indeed tremendous as millions of buses, cars and motorcycles jam the roads and highways, causing kilometres of traffic jams each year.",
"title": "Mudik"
}
]
| Indonesia's transport system has been shaped over time by the economic resource base of an archipelago with thousands of islands, and the distribution of its more than 200 million people concentrated mainly on a single island, Java. All modes of transport play a role in the country's transport system and are generally complementary rather than competitive. Road transport is predominant, with a total system length of 548,366 kilometres in 2020. The railway system has five unconnected networks in Java and Sumatra primarily dedicated to transport bulk commodities and long-distance passenger traffic. Sea transport is extremely important for economic integration, as well as for domestic and foreign trade. It is well developed, with each of the major islands having at least one significant port city. The role of inland waterways is relatively minor and is limited to certain areas of Eastern Sumatra and Kalimantan. The function of air transport is significant, particularly where land or water transport is deficient or non-existent. It is based on an extensive domestic airline network in which all major cities can be reached by passenger plane. | 2001-05-04T23:33:25Z | 2023-12-06T18:41:04Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Indonesia |
14,650 | Indonesian National Armed Forces | The Indonesian National Armed Forces (Indonesian: Tentara Nasional Indonesia, lit. 'Indonesian National Military'; abbreviated as TNI) are the military forces of the Republic of Indonesia. It consists of the Army (TNI-AD), Navy (TNI-AL), and Air Force (TNI-AU). The President of Indonesia is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces. As of 2023, it comprises approximately 400,000 military personnel including the Indonesian Marine Corps (Korps Marinir RI), which is a branch of the Navy.
Initially formed with the name of the People's Security Army (TKR), then later changed to the Republic of Indonesia Army (TRI) before changing again its name to the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) to the present. The Indonesian Armed Forces were formed during the Indonesian National Revolution, when it undertook a guerrilla war along with informal militia. As a result of this, and the need to maintain internal security, the Armed forces including the Army, Navy, and Air Force has been organised along territorial lines, aimed at defeating internal enemies of the state and potential external invaders.
Under the 1945 Constitution, all citizens are legally entitled and obliged to defend the nation. Conscription is provided for by law, however the Forces have been able to maintain mandated strength levels without resorting to a draft.
The Indonesian armed forces (military) personnel does not include members of law enforcement and paramilitary personnel such as the Indonesian National Police (Polri) consisting of approximately 440,000+ personnel, Mobile Brigade Corps (Brimob) of around 42,000+ armed personnel, and the Indonesian College Students' Regiment or Resimen Mahasiswa (Menwa) which is a collegiate military service consisting 26,000 trained personnel.
Before the formation of the Indonesian Republic, the military authority in the Dutch East Indies was held by the Royal Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL) and naval forces of the Royal Netherlands Navy (KM). Although both the KNIL and KM were not directly responsible for the formation of the future Indonesian armed forces, and mainly took the role of foe during Indonesian National Revolution in 1945 to 1949, the KNIL had also provided military training and infrastructure for some of the future TNI officers and other ranks. There were military training centers, military schools and academies in the Dutch East Indies. Next to Dutch volunteers and European mercenaries, the KNIL also recruited indigenous, especially Ambonese, Kai Islanders, Timorese, and Minahasan people. In 1940, with the Netherlands under German occupation and the Japanese pressing for access to Dutch East Indies oil supplies, the Dutch had opened up the KNIL to large intakes of previously excluded Javanese. Some of the indigenous soldiers that had enjoyed Dutch KNIL military academy education would later become important TNI officers, for example Soeharto and Nasution.
Indonesian nationalism and militarism started to gain momentum and support in World War II during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies. To gain support from the Indonesian people in their war against the Western Allied force, Japan started to encourage and back Indonesian nationalistic movements by providing Indonesian youth with military training and weapons. On 3 October 1943, the Japanese military formed the Indonesian volunteer army called PETA (Pembela Tanah Air – Defenders of the Homeland). The Japanese intended PETA to assist their forces oppose a possible invasion by the Allies. The Japanese military training for Indonesian youth originally was meant to rally the local's support for the Japanese Empire, but later it became the significant resource for the Republic of Indonesia during the Indonesian National Revolution from 1945 to 1949. Many of these men who served in PETA, both officers and NCOs alike like Soedirman, formed the majority of the personnel that would compose the future armed forces.
The Indonesian Armed Forces started out as the People's Security Agency (Badan Keamanan Rakyat – "People's Security Agency"; BKR), which was formed in the third PPKI meeting, on 29 August 1945. BKR united militias across the newly independent country to maintain civil order; it was more of a constabulary than an army. The decision to create a "security agency", and not an army, was taken to avoid the Allied forces seeing it as an armed revolution and invading in full force. One of the terms of surrender to Japan was to return the Asian colonies they had conquered to their previous rulers, certainly not to make them independent.
When confrontations became sharp and hostile between Indonesia and the Allied forces, on 5 October 1945 the People's Security Forces (Tentara Keamanan Rakyat – TKR ) was formed on the basis of existing BKR units; this was a move taken to formalize, unite, and organize the splintered pockets of independent troopers (laskar) across Indonesia, ensuing a more professional military approach, to contend with the Netherlands and the Allied force invaders.
The Indonesian armed forces have seen significant action since their establishment in 1945. Their first conflict was the 1945–1949 Indonesian National Revolution, in which the 1945 Battle of Surabaya was especially important as the baptism of fire of the young armed forces.
In January 1946, TKR renamed as the People's Safety Military Forces (Tentara Keselamatan Rakyat – TKR), then succeeded by Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia (Tentara Republik Indonesia – TRI ), in a further step to professionalize the armed forces and increase its ability to engage systematically.
In June 1947, the TRI, per a government decision, was renamed the Indonesian National Armed Forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia – TNI ) which is a merger between the TRI and the independent paramilitary organizations (laskar) across Indonesia, becoming by 1950 the APRIS or War Forces of the Republic of the United States of Indonesia (Angkatan Perang Republik Indonesia Serikat), by mid year the APRI or War Forces of the Republic of Indonesia (Angkatan Perang Republik Indonesia), also absolving native personnel from within both the former KNIL and KM within the expanded republic.
According to the official website of Indonesian veterans, there were 863,432 people who joined the struggle for Indonesian independence and this included those who were members of the militia, police, intelligence and auxiliary and as of July 2023, there are still 89,377 Indonesian National Revolution veterans alive.
On 21 June 1962, the name "Tentara Nasional Indonesia" (TNI) was changed to "Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia" (Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia, ABRI). The POLRI (Indonesian National Police) was integrated under the Armed Forces and changed its name to "Angkatan Kepolisian" (Police Force), and its commander maintained the concurrent status of Minister of Defense and Security, reporting to the President, who is commander in chief. The commanding generals (later chiefs of staff) and the Chief of the National Police then all held ministerial status as members of the cabinet of the republic, while a number of higher-ranking officers were appointed to other cabinet posts. On 1 July 1969, the Police Force's name was reverted to "POLRI".
After the fall of Suharto in 1998, the democratic and civil movement grew against the acute military role and involvements in Indonesian politics. As a result, the post-Suharto Indonesian military has undergone certain reforms, such as the revocation of the Dwifungsi doctrine and the terminations of military controlled business. The reforms also involved law enforcement in common civil society, which questioned the position of Indonesian police under the military corps umbrella. These reforms led to the separation of the police force from the military. In April 1999, the Indonesian National Police officially regained its independence and now is a separate entity from the armed forces proper. The official name of the Indonesian armed forces also changed from "Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia" (ABRI) back to "Tentara Nasional Indonesia" (TNI).
At the beginning of 2010, the Indonesian government sought to strengthen the TNI to achieve minimum standards of minimum strength called "Kekuatan Pokok Minimum" (Minimum Essential Force, or MEF). The MEF was divided into three strategic five-year plan stages, 2010–2014, 2015–2019, and 2020–2024. Initially the government budgeted Rp156 trillion (around US$16 billion at the time) for the provision of TNI's main weapon system equipment (known as alutsista, an abbreviation for Alat Utama Sistem Senjata or "Advanced Weapons System") in the MEF period 2010–2014.
*the name TNI was still used during ABRI era when it came to the military itself and the branches excluding the Police (e.g. TNI-AD/AL/AU). But when it was Armed Forces as a whole including the Police the term ABRI was used instead.
The Indonesian military philosophy about the defense of the archipelago is summarily civilian-military defence, called "Total People's Defense", consisting of a three-stage war: a short initial period in which an invader would defeat a conventional Indonesian military, a long period of territorial guerrilla warfare followed by a final stage of expulsion, with the military acting as a rallying point for defense from grass-roots village level upwards. The doctrine relies on a close bond between villager and soldier to encourage the support of the entire population and enable the armed forces to manage all war-related resources.
The civilian population would provide logistical support, intelligence, and upkeep with some of the population that is armed forces-trained to join the guerrilla struggle against the aggressor. The armed forces regularly engage in large-scale community and rural development. The "Armed Forces Enters the Village" (AMD/TMMD) program, begun in 1983, is held three times annually to organize and assist construction and development of civilian village projects.
The current developments in Indonesia's defense policies are framed within the concept of achieving "Minimum Essential Force" or MEF by 2024. This concept of MEF was first articulated in Presidential Decree No. 7/2008 on General Policy Guidelines on State Defense Policy which came into effect on 26 January 2008. MEF is defined as a capability based defense and force level that can guarantee the attainment of immediate strategic defense interests, where the procurement priority is given to the improvement of minimum defense strength and/or the replacement of outdated main weapon systems/equipment. To achieve this aim, MEF had been restructured into a series of 3 strategic programs with timeframes from 2010 to 2014, 2015 to 2019 and 2020 to 2024 as well as spending of up to1.5–2% of the GDP.
The identity of the Indonesian National Armed forces is as defined by the Article 2 of the Law No 34/2004 on Indonesian National Armed forces is the TNI must aim to become the:
The Indonesian armed forces have long been organized around territorial commands. Following independence, seven were established by 1958. No central reserve formation was formed until 1961 (when the 1st Army Corps of the Army General Reserve, "CADUAD", the precursor of today's Kostrad was established). It was only after the attempted coup d'état of 1 October 1965 and General Suharto's rise to the presidency that it became possible to integrate the armed forces and begin to develop a joint operations structure.
Following a decision in 1985, major reorganization separate the Ministry of Defense and Security from the ABRI (Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia, the name of the armed forces used during the New Order) headquarters and staff. MoDS was made responsible for planning, acquisition, and management tasks but had no command or control of troop units. The ABRI Commander in chief retained command and control of all armed forces and continued by tradition to be the senior military officer in the country, while continuing to be a part of the cabinet.
The administrative structure of Ministry of Defense and Security consisted of a minister, deputy minister, secretary general, inspector general, three directorates-general and a number of functional centers and institutes. The minister, deputy minister, inspector general, and three directors general were retired senior military officers; the secretary general (who acted as deputy minister) and most functional center chiefs were, as is the case today, active-duty military officers, while employees and staff were personnel of the armed forces and of the civil service.
The 1985 reorganization also made significant changes in the armed forces chain of command. The four multi-service Regional Defense Commands ("Kowilhans") and the National Strategic Command ("Kostranas") were eliminated from the defense structure, establishing the Military Regional Command ("Kodam"), or area command, as the key organization for strategic, tactical, and territorial operations for all services. The chain of command flowed directly from the "ABRI" commander in chief to the ten "Kodam" commanders, and then to subordinate army territorial commands. The former territorial commands of the air force and navy were eliminated from the structure altogether, with each of those services represented on the "Kodam" staff by a senior liaison officer. The navy and air force territorial commands were replaced by operational commands. The air force formed two Operational Commands ("Ko-Ops") while the navy had its two Fleet Commands, the Western and Eastern Armadas. The air force's National Air Defense Command ("Kohanudnas") remained under the "ABRI" commander in chief. It had an essentially defensive function that included responsibility for the early warning system.
After Suharto's presidential era collapsed in 1998, the Indonesian National Police was separated from the Armed Forces making the Indonesian Armed Forces under the direct auspices command of the Ministry of Defense and the Police Force under the direct auspices of the President of Indonesia. Before 1998, the Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia (the then name "ABRI") was composed of four service branches: Indonesian Army, Indonesian Navy, Indonesian Air Force, and the Indonesian National Police. Then after 1998 (After reformation from Soeharto), the Armed Forces' name, in 1999, was changed to TNI (Tentara Nasional Indonesia) literally meaning: "The National Military of Indonesia" and the independent Indonesian Police Force changed its name to POLRI (Kepolisian Negara Republik Indonesia) literally meaning: "The National Police Force of Indonesia". Now specifically, although the Armed Forces of Indonesia and the National Police of Indonesia has been separated, they still cooperate and conduct special duties and tasks together for the sake of the national security and integrity of Indonesia.
On 13 May 2018, Commander Hadi Tjahjanto reorganized the armed forces once more by inaugurating 4 new military units: Kostrad's 3rd Infantry Division, Navy's 3rd Fleet Command, Air Force's 3rd Air Force Operations Command, and Marine Force III. The new military units are intended to reduce response time against any threats and problems in Eastern Indonesia. He also officially renamed the Western and Eastern Fleet Commands to 1st and 2nd Fleet Commands.
The Indonesian National Armed Forces is structured into the following in accordance with Article 9 of Presidential Regulation No. 66/2019. The organization of the Indonesian National Armed Forces consists of Indonesian National Armed Forces General Headquarters (Markas Besar Tentara Nasional Indonesia) based in the Joint Armed Forces Headquarters in Cilangkap, East Jakarta, of which it oversee the headquarters of the three branch of the military:
The leadership elements of the Indonesian armed forces consist of the Commander of the Indonesian National Armed Forces (Panglima TNI) and the Deputy Commander of the Indonesian National Armed Forces, both position are held by four-star Generals/Admirals/Air Marshalls appointed by and reporting directly to the President of Indonesia, who is the overall commander-in-chief of the armed forces. As of Nov 2019, the position of deputy commander remains vacant.
The Principal Operational Commands (Komando Utama Operasi TNI) are the centralized TNI forces which are under the command of the Armed Forces General Headquarters. Some of these commands are actually part of the three military branches (such as Kostrad and Koarmada RI, armed and trained by the Army and Navy, respectively), but these are operationally controlled by the Armed Forces General Headquarters.
TNI has three service branches, the Army (TNI-AD), the Navy (TNI-AL), and the Air Force (TNI-AU). Each service branch is led by a Chief of Staff (Chief of Staff of the Army, Chief of Staff of the Navy, and Chief of Staff of the Air Force respectively) who is responsible for the administration and capability development for his/her own branch. These positions were previously called Commander or Panglima (for some period in 60s, it is a Minister-equivalent post) which was equipped with commanding authority until it was changed as Chief of Staffs (until now). In the present day, the Commander of The Indonesian National Armed Forces is the only military officer holding commanding authority for all the service branches under the overall authority of the President as Commander in Chief of the Forces.
Indonesian Military Special Forces
In the immediate aftermath of 2018 Surabaya bombings, President Widodo has agreed to revive the TNI Joint Special Operations Command (Koopsusgab) to assist the National Police in antiterrorism operations under certain conditions. This joint force is composed of special forces of the National Armed Forces as mentioned above, and is under the direct control of the Commander of the National Armed Forces. In July 2019, President Widodo officially formed the Armed Forces Special Operations Command (Koopsus TNI) which comprised 400 personnel each from Sat-81 Gultor of Kopassus, Denjaka, and Den Bravo of Kopasgat to conduct special operations to protect national interests within or outside Indonesian territory.
The Indonesian National Armed Forces Reserve Component (Komponen Cadangan TNI, abbreviated into KOMCAD) is the military reserve force element of the Indonesian National Armed Forces.
On January 12, 2021, President Joko Widodo, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, issued Government Regulation Number 3 of 2021 implementing Law 23 on the Management of National Resources for Defense of the Nation which established the Reserve as a directly reporting unit under the General Headquarters, in order to supplement the Principal Component, i.e. the Armed Forces and the National Police.
Under the regulation, the Reserve officially consists of army, naval, and air reserve forces. Membership in the reserve is voluntary for all citizens, even for members of the civil service.
*The 2020 budget was changed due to COVID-19 outbreak, while the budget for the Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Education and Culture has been increased.
The Indonesian National Armed Forces have three types of uniforms worn by its personnel, which are general service uniforms, specialized service uniforms and branch-specific uniforms.
General service uniforms have three subtypes of uniform, which are Dress uniform (Pakaian Dinas Upacara / PDU), Service uniform (Pakaian Dinas Harian / PDH) and Field Uniform (Pakaian Dinas Lapangan / PDL). Each uniform subtypes also consists of several categories, which are:
Each branches of the national armed forces have different color in their general service uniforms.
Specialized service uniform consists of:
Branch-specific uniforms consists of:
On 2 March 2022, the Army unveiled their field uniform with new camo pattern, called as "Loreng Angkatan Darat" (Army camo pattern), that is specific only to the Army. This camo is a variant of Multicam based on US Army OCP with local DPM color palette. A Desert/Arid variant intended to replace the older local Desert DPM Variant are also Present.
The Indonesian armed forces are voluntary. The active military strength is 395,500 with 400,000 reserves with available manpower fit for military service of males aged between 16 and 49 is 75,000,000, with a further 4,500,000 new suitable for service annually.
In the Indonesian Army, Navy (including Marine Corps), Air Force, and the Police Force, the rank consists of officer known as in Indonesian: "Perwira", NCO: "Bintara" and enlisted: "Tamtama". The rank titles of the Marine Corps are the same as those of the Army, but it still uses the Navy's style insignia (for lower-ranking enlisted men, blue are replacing the red colour).
The Sevenfold Way is a pledge of loyalty and fidelity of the military personnel to the government and people of Indonesia and to the principles of nationhood.
The Soldier's Oath is a statement of determination expressed since the inception of the Indonesian National Armed Forces, and has become a value system for Indonesian National Armed Forces soldiers that is still upheld and preserved. The Soldier's Oath as an oath, is uttered during the inauguration ceremony for each student soldier to become a soldier of the Indonesian National Armed Forces. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Indonesian National Armed Forces (Indonesian: Tentara Nasional Indonesia, lit. 'Indonesian National Military'; abbreviated as TNI) are the military forces of the Republic of Indonesia. It consists of the Army (TNI-AD), Navy (TNI-AL), and Air Force (TNI-AU). The President of Indonesia is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces. As of 2023, it comprises approximately 400,000 military personnel including the Indonesian Marine Corps (Korps Marinir RI), which is a branch of the Navy.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Initially formed with the name of the People's Security Army (TKR), then later changed to the Republic of Indonesia Army (TRI) before changing again its name to the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) to the present. The Indonesian Armed Forces were formed during the Indonesian National Revolution, when it undertook a guerrilla war along with informal militia. As a result of this, and the need to maintain internal security, the Armed forces including the Army, Navy, and Air Force has been organised along territorial lines, aimed at defeating internal enemies of the state and potential external invaders.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Under the 1945 Constitution, all citizens are legally entitled and obliged to defend the nation. Conscription is provided for by law, however the Forces have been able to maintain mandated strength levels without resorting to a draft.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Indonesian armed forces (military) personnel does not include members of law enforcement and paramilitary personnel such as the Indonesian National Police (Polri) consisting of approximately 440,000+ personnel, Mobile Brigade Corps (Brimob) of around 42,000+ armed personnel, and the Indonesian College Students' Regiment or Resimen Mahasiswa (Menwa) which is a collegiate military service consisting 26,000 trained personnel.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Before the formation of the Indonesian Republic, the military authority in the Dutch East Indies was held by the Royal Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL) and naval forces of the Royal Netherlands Navy (KM). Although both the KNIL and KM were not directly responsible for the formation of the future Indonesian armed forces, and mainly took the role of foe during Indonesian National Revolution in 1945 to 1949, the KNIL had also provided military training and infrastructure for some of the future TNI officers and other ranks. There were military training centers, military schools and academies in the Dutch East Indies. Next to Dutch volunteers and European mercenaries, the KNIL also recruited indigenous, especially Ambonese, Kai Islanders, Timorese, and Minahasan people. In 1940, with the Netherlands under German occupation and the Japanese pressing for access to Dutch East Indies oil supplies, the Dutch had opened up the KNIL to large intakes of previously excluded Javanese. Some of the indigenous soldiers that had enjoyed Dutch KNIL military academy education would later become important TNI officers, for example Soeharto and Nasution.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Indonesian nationalism and militarism started to gain momentum and support in World War II during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies. To gain support from the Indonesian people in their war against the Western Allied force, Japan started to encourage and back Indonesian nationalistic movements by providing Indonesian youth with military training and weapons. On 3 October 1943, the Japanese military formed the Indonesian volunteer army called PETA (Pembela Tanah Air – Defenders of the Homeland). The Japanese intended PETA to assist their forces oppose a possible invasion by the Allies. The Japanese military training for Indonesian youth originally was meant to rally the local's support for the Japanese Empire, but later it became the significant resource for the Republic of Indonesia during the Indonesian National Revolution from 1945 to 1949. Many of these men who served in PETA, both officers and NCOs alike like Soedirman, formed the majority of the personnel that would compose the future armed forces.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Indonesian Armed Forces started out as the People's Security Agency (Badan Keamanan Rakyat – \"People's Security Agency\"; BKR), which was formed in the third PPKI meeting, on 29 August 1945. BKR united militias across the newly independent country to maintain civil order; it was more of a constabulary than an army. The decision to create a \"security agency\", and not an army, was taken to avoid the Allied forces seeing it as an armed revolution and invading in full force. One of the terms of surrender to Japan was to return the Asian colonies they had conquered to their previous rulers, certainly not to make them independent.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "When confrontations became sharp and hostile between Indonesia and the Allied forces, on 5 October 1945 the People's Security Forces (Tentara Keamanan Rakyat – TKR ) was formed on the basis of existing BKR units; this was a move taken to formalize, unite, and organize the splintered pockets of independent troopers (laskar) across Indonesia, ensuing a more professional military approach, to contend with the Netherlands and the Allied force invaders.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Indonesian armed forces have seen significant action since their establishment in 1945. Their first conflict was the 1945–1949 Indonesian National Revolution, in which the 1945 Battle of Surabaya was especially important as the baptism of fire of the young armed forces.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In January 1946, TKR renamed as the People's Safety Military Forces (Tentara Keselamatan Rakyat – TKR), then succeeded by Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia (Tentara Republik Indonesia – TRI ), in a further step to professionalize the armed forces and increase its ability to engage systematically.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In June 1947, the TRI, per a government decision, was renamed the Indonesian National Armed Forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia – TNI ) which is a merger between the TRI and the independent paramilitary organizations (laskar) across Indonesia, becoming by 1950 the APRIS or War Forces of the Republic of the United States of Indonesia (Angkatan Perang Republik Indonesia Serikat), by mid year the APRI or War Forces of the Republic of Indonesia (Angkatan Perang Republik Indonesia), also absolving native personnel from within both the former KNIL and KM within the expanded republic.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to the official website of Indonesian veterans, there were 863,432 people who joined the struggle for Indonesian independence and this included those who were members of the militia, police, intelligence and auxiliary and as of July 2023, there are still 89,377 Indonesian National Revolution veterans alive.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "On 21 June 1962, the name \"Tentara Nasional Indonesia\" (TNI) was changed to \"Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia\" (Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia, ABRI). The POLRI (Indonesian National Police) was integrated under the Armed Forces and changed its name to \"Angkatan Kepolisian\" (Police Force), and its commander maintained the concurrent status of Minister of Defense and Security, reporting to the President, who is commander in chief. The commanding generals (later chiefs of staff) and the Chief of the National Police then all held ministerial status as members of the cabinet of the republic, while a number of higher-ranking officers were appointed to other cabinet posts. On 1 July 1969, the Police Force's name was reverted to \"POLRI\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After the fall of Suharto in 1998, the democratic and civil movement grew against the acute military role and involvements in Indonesian politics. As a result, the post-Suharto Indonesian military has undergone certain reforms, such as the revocation of the Dwifungsi doctrine and the terminations of military controlled business. The reforms also involved law enforcement in common civil society, which questioned the position of Indonesian police under the military corps umbrella. These reforms led to the separation of the police force from the military. In April 1999, the Indonesian National Police officially regained its independence and now is a separate entity from the armed forces proper. The official name of the Indonesian armed forces also changed from \"Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia\" (ABRI) back to \"Tentara Nasional Indonesia\" (TNI).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "At the beginning of 2010, the Indonesian government sought to strengthen the TNI to achieve minimum standards of minimum strength called \"Kekuatan Pokok Minimum\" (Minimum Essential Force, or MEF). The MEF was divided into three strategic five-year plan stages, 2010–2014, 2015–2019, and 2020–2024. Initially the government budgeted Rp156 trillion (around US$16 billion at the time) for the provision of TNI's main weapon system equipment (known as alutsista, an abbreviation for Alat Utama Sistem Senjata or \"Advanced Weapons System\") in the MEF period 2010–2014.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "*the name TNI was still used during ABRI era when it came to the military itself and the branches excluding the Police (e.g. TNI-AD/AL/AU). But when it was Armed Forces as a whole including the Police the term ABRI was used instead.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Indonesian military philosophy about the defense of the archipelago is summarily civilian-military defence, called \"Total People's Defense\", consisting of a three-stage war: a short initial period in which an invader would defeat a conventional Indonesian military, a long period of territorial guerrilla warfare followed by a final stage of expulsion, with the military acting as a rallying point for defense from grass-roots village level upwards. The doctrine relies on a close bond between villager and soldier to encourage the support of the entire population and enable the armed forces to manage all war-related resources.",
"title": "Philosophy and doctrine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The civilian population would provide logistical support, intelligence, and upkeep with some of the population that is armed forces-trained to join the guerrilla struggle against the aggressor. The armed forces regularly engage in large-scale community and rural development. The \"Armed Forces Enters the Village\" (AMD/TMMD) program, begun in 1983, is held three times annually to organize and assist construction and development of civilian village projects.",
"title": "Philosophy and doctrine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The current developments in Indonesia's defense policies are framed within the concept of achieving \"Minimum Essential Force\" or MEF by 2024. This concept of MEF was first articulated in Presidential Decree No. 7/2008 on General Policy Guidelines on State Defense Policy which came into effect on 26 January 2008. MEF is defined as a capability based defense and force level that can guarantee the attainment of immediate strategic defense interests, where the procurement priority is given to the improvement of minimum defense strength and/or the replacement of outdated main weapon systems/equipment. To achieve this aim, MEF had been restructured into a series of 3 strategic programs with timeframes from 2010 to 2014, 2015 to 2019 and 2020 to 2024 as well as spending of up to1.5–2% of the GDP.",
"title": "Philosophy and doctrine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The identity of the Indonesian National Armed forces is as defined by the Article 2 of the Law No 34/2004 on Indonesian National Armed forces is the TNI must aim to become the:",
"title": "Philosophy and doctrine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Indonesian armed forces have long been organized around territorial commands. Following independence, seven were established by 1958. No central reserve formation was formed until 1961 (when the 1st Army Corps of the Army General Reserve, \"CADUAD\", the precursor of today's Kostrad was established). It was only after the attempted coup d'état of 1 October 1965 and General Suharto's rise to the presidency that it became possible to integrate the armed forces and begin to develop a joint operations structure.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Following a decision in 1985, major reorganization separate the Ministry of Defense and Security from the ABRI (Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia, the name of the armed forces used during the New Order) headquarters and staff. MoDS was made responsible for planning, acquisition, and management tasks but had no command or control of troop units. The ABRI Commander in chief retained command and control of all armed forces and continued by tradition to be the senior military officer in the country, while continuing to be a part of the cabinet.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The administrative structure of Ministry of Defense and Security consisted of a minister, deputy minister, secretary general, inspector general, three directorates-general and a number of functional centers and institutes. The minister, deputy minister, inspector general, and three directors general were retired senior military officers; the secretary general (who acted as deputy minister) and most functional center chiefs were, as is the case today, active-duty military officers, while employees and staff were personnel of the armed forces and of the civil service.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The 1985 reorganization also made significant changes in the armed forces chain of command. The four multi-service Regional Defense Commands (\"Kowilhans\") and the National Strategic Command (\"Kostranas\") were eliminated from the defense structure, establishing the Military Regional Command (\"Kodam\"), or area command, as the key organization for strategic, tactical, and territorial operations for all services. The chain of command flowed directly from the \"ABRI\" commander in chief to the ten \"Kodam\" commanders, and then to subordinate army territorial commands. The former territorial commands of the air force and navy were eliminated from the structure altogether, with each of those services represented on the \"Kodam\" staff by a senior liaison officer. The navy and air force territorial commands were replaced by operational commands. The air force formed two Operational Commands (\"Ko-Ops\") while the navy had its two Fleet Commands, the Western and Eastern Armadas. The air force's National Air Defense Command (\"Kohanudnas\") remained under the \"ABRI\" commander in chief. It had an essentially defensive function that included responsibility for the early warning system.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "After Suharto's presidential era collapsed in 1998, the Indonesian National Police was separated from the Armed Forces making the Indonesian Armed Forces under the direct auspices command of the Ministry of Defense and the Police Force under the direct auspices of the President of Indonesia. Before 1998, the Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia (the then name \"ABRI\") was composed of four service branches: Indonesian Army, Indonesian Navy, Indonesian Air Force, and the Indonesian National Police. Then after 1998 (After reformation from Soeharto), the Armed Forces' name, in 1999, was changed to TNI (Tentara Nasional Indonesia) literally meaning: \"The National Military of Indonesia\" and the independent Indonesian Police Force changed its name to POLRI (Kepolisian Negara Republik Indonesia) literally meaning: \"The National Police Force of Indonesia\". Now specifically, although the Armed Forces of Indonesia and the National Police of Indonesia has been separated, they still cooperate and conduct special duties and tasks together for the sake of the national security and integrity of Indonesia.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On 13 May 2018, Commander Hadi Tjahjanto reorganized the armed forces once more by inaugurating 4 new military units: Kostrad's 3rd Infantry Division, Navy's 3rd Fleet Command, Air Force's 3rd Air Force Operations Command, and Marine Force III. The new military units are intended to reduce response time against any threats and problems in Eastern Indonesia. He also officially renamed the Western and Eastern Fleet Commands to 1st and 2nd Fleet Commands.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Indonesian National Armed Forces is structured into the following in accordance with Article 9 of Presidential Regulation No. 66/2019. The organization of the Indonesian National Armed Forces consists of Indonesian National Armed Forces General Headquarters (Markas Besar Tentara Nasional Indonesia) based in the Joint Armed Forces Headquarters in Cilangkap, East Jakarta, of which it oversee the headquarters of the three branch of the military:",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The leadership elements of the Indonesian armed forces consist of the Commander of the Indonesian National Armed Forces (Panglima TNI) and the Deputy Commander of the Indonesian National Armed Forces, both position are held by four-star Generals/Admirals/Air Marshalls appointed by and reporting directly to the President of Indonesia, who is the overall commander-in-chief of the armed forces. As of Nov 2019, the position of deputy commander remains vacant.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Principal Operational Commands (Komando Utama Operasi TNI) are the centralized TNI forces which are under the command of the Armed Forces General Headquarters. Some of these commands are actually part of the three military branches (such as Kostrad and Koarmada RI, armed and trained by the Army and Navy, respectively), but these are operationally controlled by the Armed Forces General Headquarters.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "TNI has three service branches, the Army (TNI-AD), the Navy (TNI-AL), and the Air Force (TNI-AU). Each service branch is led by a Chief of Staff (Chief of Staff of the Army, Chief of Staff of the Navy, and Chief of Staff of the Air Force respectively) who is responsible for the administration and capability development for his/her own branch. These positions were previously called Commander or Panglima (for some period in 60s, it is a Minister-equivalent post) which was equipped with commanding authority until it was changed as Chief of Staffs (until now). In the present day, the Commander of The Indonesian National Armed Forces is the only military officer holding commanding authority for all the service branches under the overall authority of the President as Commander in Chief of the Forces.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Indonesian Military Special Forces",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In the immediate aftermath of 2018 Surabaya bombings, President Widodo has agreed to revive the TNI Joint Special Operations Command (Koopsusgab) to assist the National Police in antiterrorism operations under certain conditions. This joint force is composed of special forces of the National Armed Forces as mentioned above, and is under the direct control of the Commander of the National Armed Forces. In July 2019, President Widodo officially formed the Armed Forces Special Operations Command (Koopsus TNI) which comprised 400 personnel each from Sat-81 Gultor of Kopassus, Denjaka, and Den Bravo of Kopasgat to conduct special operations to protect national interests within or outside Indonesian territory.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Indonesian National Armed Forces Reserve Component (Komponen Cadangan TNI, abbreviated into KOMCAD) is the military reserve force element of the Indonesian National Armed Forces.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "On January 12, 2021, President Joko Widodo, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, issued Government Regulation Number 3 of 2021 implementing Law 23 on the Management of National Resources for Defense of the Nation which established the Reserve as a directly reporting unit under the General Headquarters, in order to supplement the Principal Component, i.e. the Armed Forces and the National Police.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Under the regulation, the Reserve officially consists of army, naval, and air reserve forces. Membership in the reserve is voluntary for all citizens, even for members of the civil service.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "*The 2020 budget was changed due to COVID-19 outbreak, while the budget for the Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Education and Culture has been increased.",
"title": "Budget"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The Indonesian National Armed Forces have three types of uniforms worn by its personnel, which are general service uniforms, specialized service uniforms and branch-specific uniforms.",
"title": "Uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "General service uniforms have three subtypes of uniform, which are Dress uniform (Pakaian Dinas Upacara / PDU), Service uniform (Pakaian Dinas Harian / PDH) and Field Uniform (Pakaian Dinas Lapangan / PDL). Each uniform subtypes also consists of several categories, which are:",
"title": "Uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Each branches of the national armed forces have different color in their general service uniforms.",
"title": "Uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Specialized service uniform consists of:",
"title": "Uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Branch-specific uniforms consists of:",
"title": "Uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "On 2 March 2022, the Army unveiled their field uniform with new camo pattern, called as \"Loreng Angkatan Darat\" (Army camo pattern), that is specific only to the Army. This camo is a variant of Multicam based on US Army OCP with local DPM color palette. A Desert/Arid variant intended to replace the older local Desert DPM Variant are also Present.",
"title": "Uniforms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Indonesian armed forces are voluntary. The active military strength is 395,500 with 400,000 reserves with available manpower fit for military service of males aged between 16 and 49 is 75,000,000, with a further 4,500,000 new suitable for service annually.",
"title": "Personnel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In the Indonesian Army, Navy (including Marine Corps), Air Force, and the Police Force, the rank consists of officer known as in Indonesian: \"Perwira\", NCO: \"Bintara\" and enlisted: \"Tamtama\". The rank titles of the Marine Corps are the same as those of the Army, but it still uses the Navy's style insignia (for lower-ranking enlisted men, blue are replacing the red colour).",
"title": "Personnel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Sevenfold Way is a pledge of loyalty and fidelity of the military personnel to the government and people of Indonesia and to the principles of nationhood.",
"title": "Personnel"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Soldier's Oath is a statement of determination expressed since the inception of the Indonesian National Armed Forces, and has become a value system for Indonesian National Armed Forces soldiers that is still upheld and preserved. The Soldier's Oath as an oath, is uttered during the inauguration ceremony for each student soldier to become a soldier of the Indonesian National Armed Forces.",
"title": "Personnel"
}
]
| The Indonesian National Armed Forces are the military forces of the Republic of Indonesia. It consists of the Army (TNI-AD), Navy (TNI-AL), and Air Force (TNI-AU). The President of Indonesia is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces. As of 2023, it comprises approximately 400,000 military personnel including the Indonesian Marine Corps, which is a branch of the Navy. Initially formed with the name of the People's Security Army (TKR), then later changed to the Republic of Indonesia Army (TRI) before changing again its name to the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) to the present. The Indonesian Armed Forces were formed during the Indonesian National Revolution, when it undertook a guerrilla war along with informal militia. As a result of this, and the need to maintain internal security, the Armed forces including the Army, Navy, and Air Force has been organised along territorial lines, aimed at defeating internal enemies of the state and potential external invaders. Under the 1945 Constitution, all citizens are legally entitled and obliged to defend the nation. Conscription is provided for by law, however the Forces have been able to maintain mandated strength levels without resorting to a draft. The Indonesian armed forces (military) personnel does not include members of law enforcement and paramilitary personnel such as the Indonesian National Police (Polri) consisting of approximately 440,000+ personnel, Mobile Brigade Corps (Brimob) of around 42,000+ armed personnel, and the Indonesian College Students' Regiment or Resimen Mahasiswa (Menwa) which is a collegiate military service consisting 26,000 trained personnel. | 2001-05-04T23:33:43Z | 2023-12-25T15:35:11Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_National_Armed_Forces |
14,651 | Foreign relations of Indonesia | Since independence, Indonesian foreign relations have adhered to a "free and active" foreign policy, seeking to play a role in regional affairs commensurate with its size and location but avoiding involvement in conflicts among major powers. During the presidency of Sukarno, Indonesia's foreign relations were marked by engagement with other newly independent nations in Asia and Africa, as exemplified by the Bandung Conference, the subsequent foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement and a confrontational attitude towards Western powers, justified by a belief in the CONEFO and opposition to what Sukarno termed as NEKOLIM (Neocolonialism and Imperialism).
After a US-backed ouster of Sukarno and left-wing elements in 1965, Indonesian foreign policy underwent a major shift under the "New Order" government, as President Suharto moved away from the stridently anti-Western, anti-American posturing that characterised the latter part of the Sukarno era. Following Suharto's ouster in 1998, Indonesia's government has preserved the broad outlines of Suharto's independent, moderate foreign policy. Preoccupation with domestic problems has not prevented successive presidents from travelling abroad.
Indonesia's relations with the international community were strained as a result of its invasion of neighbouring East Timor in December 1975, the subsequent annexation and occupation, the independence referendum in 1999, and the resulting violence afterwards. As one of the founding members of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), established in 1967, and also as the largest country in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has put ASEAN as the cornerstone of its foreign policy and outlook. After the transformation from Suharto's regime to a relatively open and democratic country in the 21st century, Indonesia today exercises its influence to promote co-operation, development, democracy, security, peace and stability in the region through its leadership in ASEAN. Currently, Israel is the only UN member state that does not have formal diplomatic relations with Indonesia, although they maintain informal relations.
Indonesia managed to play a role as a peacemaker in the Cambodia–Thailand conflict over the Preah Vihear temple. Indonesia and other ASEAN member countries collectively have also played a role in encouraging the government of Myanmar to open up its political system and introduce other reforms more quickly.
Given its geographic and demographic size, rising capabilities and diplomatic initiatives, scholars have classified Indonesia as one of Asia-Pacific's middle powers.
The foreign policy of Indonesia has evolved over time and has been shaped by various factors such as its historical context, geographic location, national interests, and leadership. Here is an overview of the historical context of Indonesia's foreign policy:
A cornerstone of Indonesia's contemporary foreign policy is its participation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which it was a founding member in 1967 with Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. Since then, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia also have joined ASEAN. While organised to promote shared economic, social, and cultural goals, ASEAN acquired a security dimension after Vietnam's liberation of Cambodia in 1979; this aspect of ASEAN expanded with the establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1994, which comprises 22 countries, including the US.
Indonesian national capital Jakarta is also the seat of ASEAN Secretariat, located at Jalan Sisingamangaraja No. 70A, Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta. Other than serving their diplomatic missions for Indonesia, numbers of foreign embassies and diplomatic mission in Jakarta are also accredited to ASEAN. ASEAN Headquarter has led to the prominence of Jakarta as a diplomatic hub in Southeast Asia.
In the late 1990s to early 2000s, Indonesia's continued domestic troubles have distracted it from ASEAN matters and consequently lessened its influence within the organisation. However, after the political and economic transformation, from the turmoil of 1998 Reformasi to the relatively open and democratic civil society with rapid economic growth in the 2010s, Indonesia returned to the region's diplomatic stage by assuming its leadership role in ASEAN in 2011. Indonesia is viewed to have weight, international legitimacy and global appeal to draw support and attention from around the world to ASEAN. Indonesia believes that ASEAN can contribute positively to the international community, by promoting economic development and co-operation, improving security, peace, the stability of ASEAN, and making the Southeast Asia region far from conflicts.
Indonesia's bilateral relations with three neighbouring ASEAN members—Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam—are not without challenges. If not appropriately managed, it would result in mutual mistrust and suspicion, thus hindering bilateral and regional co-operation. In the era of rising Indonesia, which might assert its leadership role within ASEAN, the problem could become more significant. Nevertheless, the rise of Indonesia should be regarded in the sense of optimism. First, although Indonesia is likely to become assertive, the general tone of its foreign policy is mainly liberal and accommodating. The consolidation of the Indonesian democratic government played a key role and influence in ASEAN. The second, institutional web of ASEAN will sustain engagements and regular meetings between regional elites, thus deepening their mutual understanding and personal connections.
Indonesia also was one of the founders of NAM and has taken moderate positions in its councils. As NAM Chairman in 1992–95, it led NAM positions away from the rhetoric of North-South confrontation, advocating the broadening of North-South co-operation instead in the area of development. Indonesia continues to be a prominent, and generally helpful, leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population and is a member of OIC. It carefully considers the interests of Islamic solidarity in its foreign policy decisions but generally has been an influence for moderation in the OIC.
Indonesia has been a strong supporter of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Mainly through the efforts of President Suharto at the 1994 meeting in Indonesia, APEC members agreed to implement free trade in the region by 2010 for industrialised economies and 2020 for developing economies. As the largest economy in Southeast Asia, Indonesia also belongs to other economic groupings such as G20 and Developing 8 Countries (D-8).
In 2008, Indonesia was admitted as a member of the G20, as the only ASEAN member state in the group. Through its membership in the global economic powerhouse that accounted of 85% of the global economy, Indonesia is keen to position itself as a mouthpiece for ASEAN countries, and as a representative of the developing world within the G20. Bali, Indonesia had played host to the 2022 G20 Summit.
After 1966, Indonesia welcomed and maintained close relations with the international donor community, particularly the United States, western Europe, Australia, and Japan, through the meetings of the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI) and its successor, the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI), which coordinated substantial foreign economic assistance. Problems in Timor and Indonesia's reluctance to implement economic reform at times complicated Indonesia's relationship with donors. In 1992 the IGGI aid coordination group ceased to meet and the coordination activities were transferred to meetings arranged by the World Bank through the CGI. The CGI, in turn, ceased activities in 2007 when the Indonesian government suggested that an internationally organised aid coordination program was no longer needed.
Indonesia has numerous outlying and remote islands, some of which are inhabited by numerous pirate groups that regularly attack ships in the Strait of Malacca in the north, and illegal fishing crews known for penetrating Australian and Filipino waters. While Indonesian waters itself is the target of many illegal fishing activities by numerous foreign vessels.
Indonesia has some present and historic territorial disputes with neighboring nations, such as:
List of countries which Indonesia maintains diplomatic relations with: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Since independence, Indonesian foreign relations have adhered to a \"free and active\" foreign policy, seeking to play a role in regional affairs commensurate with its size and location but avoiding involvement in conflicts among major powers. During the presidency of Sukarno, Indonesia's foreign relations were marked by engagement with other newly independent nations in Asia and Africa, as exemplified by the Bandung Conference, the subsequent foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement and a confrontational attitude towards Western powers, justified by a belief in the CONEFO and opposition to what Sukarno termed as NEKOLIM (Neocolonialism and Imperialism).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "After a US-backed ouster of Sukarno and left-wing elements in 1965, Indonesian foreign policy underwent a major shift under the \"New Order\" government, as President Suharto moved away from the stridently anti-Western, anti-American posturing that characterised the latter part of the Sukarno era. Following Suharto's ouster in 1998, Indonesia's government has preserved the broad outlines of Suharto's independent, moderate foreign policy. Preoccupation with domestic problems has not prevented successive presidents from travelling abroad.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Indonesia's relations with the international community were strained as a result of its invasion of neighbouring East Timor in December 1975, the subsequent annexation and occupation, the independence referendum in 1999, and the resulting violence afterwards. As one of the founding members of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), established in 1967, and also as the largest country in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has put ASEAN as the cornerstone of its foreign policy and outlook. After the transformation from Suharto's regime to a relatively open and democratic country in the 21st century, Indonesia today exercises its influence to promote co-operation, development, democracy, security, peace and stability in the region through its leadership in ASEAN. Currently, Israel is the only UN member state that does not have formal diplomatic relations with Indonesia, although they maintain informal relations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Indonesia managed to play a role as a peacemaker in the Cambodia–Thailand conflict over the Preah Vihear temple. Indonesia and other ASEAN member countries collectively have also played a role in encouraging the government of Myanmar to open up its political system and introduce other reforms more quickly.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Given its geographic and demographic size, rising capabilities and diplomatic initiatives, scholars have classified Indonesia as one of Asia-Pacific's middle powers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The foreign policy of Indonesia has evolved over time and has been shaped by various factors such as its historical context, geographic location, national interests, and leadership. Here is an overview of the historical context of Indonesia's foreign policy:",
"title": "Historical issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A cornerstone of Indonesia's contemporary foreign policy is its participation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which it was a founding member in 1967 with Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines. Since then, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia also have joined ASEAN. While organised to promote shared economic, social, and cultural goals, ASEAN acquired a security dimension after Vietnam's liberation of Cambodia in 1979; this aspect of ASEAN expanded with the establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1994, which comprises 22 countries, including the US.",
"title": "Significant international memberships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Indonesian national capital Jakarta is also the seat of ASEAN Secretariat, located at Jalan Sisingamangaraja No. 70A, Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta. Other than serving their diplomatic missions for Indonesia, numbers of foreign embassies and diplomatic mission in Jakarta are also accredited to ASEAN. ASEAN Headquarter has led to the prominence of Jakarta as a diplomatic hub in Southeast Asia.",
"title": "Significant international memberships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In the late 1990s to early 2000s, Indonesia's continued domestic troubles have distracted it from ASEAN matters and consequently lessened its influence within the organisation. However, after the political and economic transformation, from the turmoil of 1998 Reformasi to the relatively open and democratic civil society with rapid economic growth in the 2010s, Indonesia returned to the region's diplomatic stage by assuming its leadership role in ASEAN in 2011. Indonesia is viewed to have weight, international legitimacy and global appeal to draw support and attention from around the world to ASEAN. Indonesia believes that ASEAN can contribute positively to the international community, by promoting economic development and co-operation, improving security, peace, the stability of ASEAN, and making the Southeast Asia region far from conflicts.",
"title": "Significant international memberships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Indonesia's bilateral relations with three neighbouring ASEAN members—Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam—are not without challenges. If not appropriately managed, it would result in mutual mistrust and suspicion, thus hindering bilateral and regional co-operation. In the era of rising Indonesia, which might assert its leadership role within ASEAN, the problem could become more significant. Nevertheless, the rise of Indonesia should be regarded in the sense of optimism. First, although Indonesia is likely to become assertive, the general tone of its foreign policy is mainly liberal and accommodating. The consolidation of the Indonesian democratic government played a key role and influence in ASEAN. The second, institutional web of ASEAN will sustain engagements and regular meetings between regional elites, thus deepening their mutual understanding and personal connections.",
"title": "Significant international memberships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Indonesia also was one of the founders of NAM and has taken moderate positions in its councils. As NAM Chairman in 1992–95, it led NAM positions away from the rhetoric of North-South confrontation, advocating the broadening of North-South co-operation instead in the area of development. Indonesia continues to be a prominent, and generally helpful, leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.",
"title": "Significant international memberships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population and is a member of OIC. It carefully considers the interests of Islamic solidarity in its foreign policy decisions but generally has been an influence for moderation in the OIC.",
"title": "Significant international memberships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Indonesia has been a strong supporter of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Mainly through the efforts of President Suharto at the 1994 meeting in Indonesia, APEC members agreed to implement free trade in the region by 2010 for industrialised economies and 2020 for developing economies. As the largest economy in Southeast Asia, Indonesia also belongs to other economic groupings such as G20 and Developing 8 Countries (D-8).",
"title": "Significant international memberships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 2008, Indonesia was admitted as a member of the G20, as the only ASEAN member state in the group. Through its membership in the global economic powerhouse that accounted of 85% of the global economy, Indonesia is keen to position itself as a mouthpiece for ASEAN countries, and as a representative of the developing world within the G20. Bali, Indonesia had played host to the 2022 G20 Summit.",
"title": "Significant international memberships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "After 1966, Indonesia welcomed and maintained close relations with the international donor community, particularly the United States, western Europe, Australia, and Japan, through the meetings of the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI) and its successor, the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI), which coordinated substantial foreign economic assistance. Problems in Timor and Indonesia's reluctance to implement economic reform at times complicated Indonesia's relationship with donors. In 1992 the IGGI aid coordination group ceased to meet and the coordination activities were transferred to meetings arranged by the World Bank through the CGI. The CGI, in turn, ceased activities in 2007 when the Indonesian government suggested that an internationally organised aid coordination program was no longer needed.",
"title": "Significant international memberships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Indonesia has numerous outlying and remote islands, some of which are inhabited by numerous pirate groups that regularly attack ships in the Strait of Malacca in the north, and illegal fishing crews known for penetrating Australian and Filipino waters. While Indonesian waters itself is the target of many illegal fishing activities by numerous foreign vessels.",
"title": "International disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Indonesia has some present and historic territorial disputes with neighboring nations, such as:",
"title": "International disputes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "List of countries which Indonesia maintains diplomatic relations with:",
"title": "Diplomatic relations"
}
]
| Since independence, Indonesian foreign relations have adhered to a "free and active" foreign policy, seeking to play a role in regional affairs commensurate with its size and location but avoiding involvement in conflicts among major powers. During the presidency of Sukarno, Indonesia's foreign relations were marked by engagement with other newly independent nations in Asia and Africa, as exemplified by the Bandung Conference, the subsequent foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement and a confrontational attitude towards Western powers, justified by a belief in the CONEFO and opposition to what Sukarno termed as NEKOLIM. After a US-backed ouster of Sukarno and left-wing elements in 1965, Indonesian foreign policy underwent a major shift under the "New Order" government, as President Suharto moved away from the stridently anti-Western, anti-American posturing that characterised the latter part of the Sukarno era. Following Suharto's ouster in 1998, Indonesia's government has preserved the broad outlines of Suharto's independent, moderate foreign policy. Preoccupation with domestic problems has not prevented successive presidents from travelling abroad. Indonesia's relations with the international community were strained as a result of its invasion of neighbouring East Timor in December 1975, the subsequent annexation and occupation, the independence referendum in 1999, and the resulting violence afterwards. As one of the founding members of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), established in 1967, and also as the largest country in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has put ASEAN as the cornerstone of its foreign policy and outlook. After the transformation from Suharto's regime to a relatively open and democratic country in the 21st century, Indonesia today exercises its influence to promote co-operation, development, democracy, security, peace and stability in the region through its leadership in ASEAN. Currently, Israel is the only UN member state that does not have formal diplomatic relations with Indonesia, although they maintain informal relations. Indonesia managed to play a role as a peacemaker in the Cambodia–Thailand conflict over the Preah Vihear temple. Indonesia and other ASEAN member countries collectively have also played a role in encouraging the government of Myanmar to open up its political system and introduce other reforms more quickly. Given its geographic and demographic size, rising capabilities and diplomatic initiatives, scholars have classified Indonesia as one of Asia-Pacific's middle powers. | 2001-07-09T10:04:13Z | 2023-12-26T04:39:11Z | [
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14,652 | List of islands of Indonesia | The islands of Indonesia, also known as the Indonesian Archipelago (Indonesian: Kepulauan Indonesia) or Nusantara, may refer either to the islands composing the country of Indonesia or to the geographical groups which include its islands. Indonesia is the world's largest archipelagic state, stretching from Sumatra in Asia to the western part of New Guinea in Oceania.
The exact number of islands composing Indonesia varies among definitions and sources. According to the Law No 9/1996 on Maritime Territory of Indonesia, of 17,508 officially listed islands within the territory of the Republic of Indonesia. According to a geospatial survey conducted between 2007 and 2010 by the National Coordinating Agency for Survey and Mapping (Bakorsurtanal), Indonesia has 13,466 islands. According to the CIA World Factbook, there are 17,508 islands. The discrepancy of the numbers of Indonesian islands was because that the earlier surveys include "tidal islands"; sandy cays and rocky reefs that appear during low tide and are submerged during high tide. According to estimates made by the government of Indonesia 8,844 islands have been named, with 922 of those permanently inhabited. As of 2023, 17.024 island names have been verified by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN).
The following islands are listed by province:
Islands near the Indonesian half of New Guinea island. | [
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"text": "The islands of Indonesia, also known as the Indonesian Archipelago (Indonesian: Kepulauan Indonesia) or Nusantara, may refer either to the islands composing the country of Indonesia or to the geographical groups which include its islands. Indonesia is the world's largest archipelagic state, stretching from Sumatra in Asia to the western part of New Guinea in Oceania.",
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"text": "The exact number of islands composing Indonesia varies among definitions and sources. According to the Law No 9/1996 on Maritime Territory of Indonesia, of 17,508 officially listed islands within the territory of the Republic of Indonesia. According to a geospatial survey conducted between 2007 and 2010 by the National Coordinating Agency for Survey and Mapping (Bakorsurtanal), Indonesia has 13,466 islands. According to the CIA World Factbook, there are 17,508 islands. The discrepancy of the numbers of Indonesian islands was because that the earlier surveys include \"tidal islands\"; sandy cays and rocky reefs that appear during low tide and are submerged during high tide. According to estimates made by the government of Indonesia 8,844 islands have been named, with 922 of those permanently inhabited. As of 2023, 17.024 island names have been verified by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN).",
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| The islands of Indonesia, also known as the Indonesian Archipelago or Nusantara, may refer either to the islands composing the country of Indonesia or to the geographical groups which include its islands. Indonesia is the world's largest archipelagic state, stretching from Sumatra in Asia to the western part of New Guinea in Oceania. | 2001-07-09T10:43:27Z | 2023-11-27T04:34:42Z | [
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14,653 | Iran | Iran, also known as Persia and officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a country located at the crossroads of West, Central, and South Asia. It is bordered by Iraq to the west and Turkey to the northwest, Azerbaijan, Armenia, the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan to the north, Afghanistan to the east, Pakistan to the southeast, the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf to the south. It covers an area of 1.64 million square kilometers (0.63 million square miles), making it the world's 17th-largest country. Iran has around 90 million people, making it the world's 17th most populous country. Its capital and largest city is Tehran with around 16 million in its metropolitan area.
Iran is home to one of the world's oldest civilizations, beginning with the formation of the Elamite kingdoms in the fourth millennium BC. It was first unified by the Medes in the seventh century BC and reached its territorial height in the sixth century BC, when Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire. Alexander the Great conquered the empire in the fourth century BC, and it was subsequently divided into several Hellenistic states. An Iranian rebellion established the Parthian Empire in the third century BC, which was succeeded in the third century AD by the Sasanian Empire. Arab Muslims conquered the empire in the seventh century AD, leading to its Islamization; Iran thereafter became a major center of Islamic culture and learning. Over the next two centuries, a series of native Iranian Muslim dynasties emerged before the Seljuk and the Mongols conquered the region. In the 16th century, the native Safavids re-established a unified Iranian state. Under the reign of Nader Shah in the 18th century, Iran presided over the most powerful military in the world, though by the 19th century, a series of conflicts with the Russian Empire led to significant territorial losses. The early 20th century saw the Persian Constitutional Revolution. Efforts to nationalise its fossil fuel supply led to an Anglo-American coup in 1953. After the Iranian Revolution, the current Islamic Republic was established in 1979 by Ruhollah Khomeini, who became the country's first supreme leader.
The Iranian government is an Islamic republic with a presidential system, though ultimate authority is vested in a theocratic "Rahbar"; the position has been held by Ali Khamenei since Khomeini's death in 1989. The Iranian government is authoritarian, and has attracted widespread criticism for its significant constraints and violations of human rights and civil liberties. It is also a focal point for Shia Islam within the Middle East. Since the Iranian Revolution, the country is considered to be the most determined adversary of Israel and Saudi Arabia. On March 10, 2023, Iran and Saudi Arabia normalized relations after years of hostility. The Iranian government has been criticised for various policies such as its alleged sponsorship of terrorism, funding of proxy militias and its involvement in the majority of modern Middle Eastern conflicts.
Iran is a regional and middle power and occupies a strategic location in the Asian continent. It is a founding member of the United Nations, the ECO, the OIC, the OPEC, the SCO, and is expected to join BRICS on 1 January 2024. It has large reserves of fossil fuels—including the second largest natural gas supply and the third-largest proven oil reserves. Historically a multi-ethnic country, Iran remains a pluralistic society comprising numerous ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. The country's rich cultural legacy is reflected in part by its 27 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, which ranks 10th worldwide. Iran places 5th globally in terms of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The term Iran derives from Middle Persian Ērān, first attested in a third-century inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam, with the accompanying Parthian inscription using the term Aryān, in reference to the Iranians. The Middle Iranian ērān and aryān are oblique plural forms of gentilic nouns ēr- (Middle Persian) and ary- (Parthian), both deriving from Proto-Iranian language *arya- (meaning "Aryan", i.e. "of the Iranians"), recognised as a derivative of Proto-Indo-European language *ar-yo-, meaning "one who assembles (skilfully)". According to the Iranian mythology, the country's name comes from the name of Iraj, a legendary prince and king.
Historically, Iran has been referred to as Persia by the West, due mainly to the writings of Greek historians who referred to all of Iran as Persís (Ancient Greek: Περσίς; from Old Persian 𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿 Pârsa), meaning "land of the Persians", while Persis was one of the provinces of ancient Iran.
In 1935, Reza Pahlavi requested the international community to refer to the country by its native name, Iran. Opposition to the name change led to the reversal of the decision in 1959, and Professor Ehsan Yarshater, editor of Encyclopædia Iranica, propagated a move to use Persia and Iran interchangeably. Today, both Iran and Persia are used in cultural contexts, while Iran remains mandatory in official state contexts.
The Persian pronunciation of Iran is [ʔiːˈɾɒːn]. Common Commonwealth English pronunciations of Iran are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as /ɪˈrɑːn/ and /ɪˈræn/, while American English dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster's provide pronunciations which map to /ɪˈrɑːn, -ˈræn, aɪˈræn/, or likewise in Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary as /ɪˈræn, ɪˈrɑːn, aɪˈræn/. The Cambridge Dictionary lists /ɪˈrɑːn/ as the British pronunciation and /ɪˈræn/ as the American pronunciation. The pronunciation guide from Voice of America also provides /ɪˈrɑːn/. The American English pronunciation /aɪˈræn/ may be heard in U.S. media.
The earliest attested archaeological artifacts in Iran confirm a human presence in Iran since the Lower Paleolithic. Iran's Neanderthal artifacts from the Middle Paleolithic have been found mainly in the Zagros region, at sites such as Warwasi and Yafteh. From the tenth to the seventh millennium BC, early agricultural communities began to flourish in and around the Zagros region in western Iran, including Chogha Golan, Chogha Bonut, and Chogha Mish.
The occupation of grouped hamlets in the area of Susa, as determined by radiocarbon dating, ranges from 4395 to 3955 to 3680–3490 BC. There are dozens of prehistoric sites across the Iranian Plateau, pointing to the existence of ancient cultures and urban settlements in the fourth millennium BC. During the Bronze Age, the territory of present-day Iran was home to several civilizations, including Elam, Jiroft, and Zayanderud. Elam, the most prominent of these civilizations, developed in the southwest alongside those in Mesopotamia, and continued its existence until the emergence of the Iranian empires. The advent of writing in Elam was paralleled to Sumer, and the Elamite cuneiform was developed since the third millennium BC.
From the 34th to the 20th century BC, northwestern Iran was part of the Kura-Araxes culture, which stretched into the neighboring Caucasus and Anatolia. Since the earliest second millennium BC, Assyrians settled in swaths of western Iran and incorporated the region into their territories.
By the second millennium BC, the ancient Iranian peoples arrived in what is now Iran from the Eurasian Steppe, rivaling the native settlers of the region. As the Iranians dispersed into the wider area of Greater Iran and beyond, the boundaries of modern-day Iran were dominated by Median, Persian, and Parthian tribes.
From the late tenth to the late seventh century BC, the Iranian peoples, together with the "pre-Iranian" kingdoms, fell under the domination of the Assyrian Empire, based in northern Mesopotamia. Under king Cyaxares, the Medes and Persians entered into an alliance with Babylonian ruler Nabopolassar, as well as the fellow Iranian Scythians and Cimmerians, and together they attacked the Assyrian Empire. The civil war ravaged the Assyrian Empire between 616 and 605 BC, thus freeing their respective peoples from three centuries of Assyrian rule. The unification of the Median tribes under king Deioces in 728 BC led to the foundation of the Median Empire and their capital Ecbatana, which by 612 BC, controlled almost the entire territory of present-day Iran and eastern Anatolia. This marked the end of the Kingdom of Urartu as well, which was subsequently conquered and dissolve
In 550 BC, Cyrus the Great, the son of Mandane and Cambyses I, took over the Median Empire, and founded the Achaemenid Empire by unifying other city-states. Pasargadae was the capital of the Achaemenid Empire during the time of Cyrus the Great. The conquest of Media was a result of what is called the Persian Revolt. Later conquests under Cyrus and his successors expanded the empire to include Lydia, Babylon, Egypt, parts of the Balkans and Eastern Europe proper, as well as the lands to the west of the Indus and Oxus rivers. In 539 BC Persian forces defeated the Babylonian army at Opis, and marked the end of around four centuries of Mesopotamian domination of the region by conquering the Neo-Babylonian Empire.
At around 518 BC, Persepolis was founded by Darius the Great as the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire. Susa and Ecbatana were the winter and summer capital of the empire, respectively. its greatest extent, the Achaemenid Empire included territories of modern-day Iran, Republic of Azerbaijan (Arran and Shirvan), Armenia, Georgia, Turkey (Anatolia), much of the Black Sea coastal regions, northeastern Greece and southern Bulgaria (Thrace), northern Greece and North Macedonia (Paeonia and Macedon), Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, all significant population centers of ancient Egypt as far west as Libya, Kuwait, northern Saudi Arabia, parts of the United Arab Emirates and Oman, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and much of Central Asia, making it the largest empire the world had yet seen. It is estimated that in 480 BC, 50 million people lived in the Achaemenid Empire. The empire at its peak ruled over 44% of the world's population, the highest for any empire in history.
The Achaemenid Empire is noted for the release of the Jewish exiles in Babylon, building infrastructures such as the Royal Road and the Chapar (postal service), and the use of an official language, Imperial Aramaic. The empire had a centralised, bureaucratic administration under the emperor, a large professional army, and civil services, inspiring similar developments in later empires. Eventual conflict on the western borders began with the Ionian Revolt, which erupted into the Greco-Persian Wars and continued through the first half of the fifth century BC and ended with the withdrawal of the Achaemenids from all of the territories in the Balkans and Eastern Europe proper.
In 334 BC, Alexander the Great defeated the last Achaemenid emperor, Darius III, at the Battle of Issus. Following the premature death of Alexander, Iran came under the control of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire. In the middle of the second century BC, the Parthian Empire rose to become the main power in Iran, and the century-long geopolitical arch-rivalry between the Romans and the Parthians began, culminating in the Roman–Parthian Wars. The Parthian Empire continued as a feudal monarchy for nearly five centuries, until 224 CE, when it was succeeded by the Sasanian Empire. Together with their neighboring arch-rival, the Roman-Byzantines, they made up the world's two most dominant powers at the time, for over four centuries.
The Sasanians established an empire within the frontiers achieved by the Achaemenids, with their capital at Ctesiphon. Late antiquity is considered one of Iran's most influential periods, as under the Sasanians, their influence reached the culture of ancient Rome (and through that as far as Western Europe), Africa, China, and India, and played a prominent role in the formation of the medieval art of both Europe and Asia.
The prolonged Byzantine–Sasanian wars, most importantly the climactic war of 602–628, as well as the social conflict within the Sasanian Empire, opened the way for an Arab invasion of Iran in the seventh century. The empire was initially defeated by the Rashidun Caliphate, which was succeeded by the Umayyad Caliphate, followed by the Abbasid Caliphate. A prolonged and gradual process of state-imposed Islamization followed, which targeted Iran's then Zoroastrian majority and included religious persecution, demolition of libraries and fire temples, a special tax penalty ("jizya"), and language shift.
In 750, the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads. Arabs Muslims and Persians of all strata made up the rebel army, which was united by the converted Persian Muslim, Abu Muslim. In their struggle for power, the society in their times gradually became cosmopolitan. Persians and Turks began to replace the Arabs in most fields. The fusion of the Arab nobility with the subject races, the practice of polygamy and concubinage, made for a social amalgam wherein loyalties became uncertain, and a hierarchy of officials emerged, a bureaucracy at first Persian and later Turkish which decreased Abbasid prestige and power for good.
After two centuries of Arab rule, semi-independent and independent Iranian kingdoms—including the Tahirids, Saffarids, Sajids, Samanids, Ziyarids, Buyids, Sallarids, Rawadids, Marwanids, Shaddadids, Kakuyids, Annazids and Hasanwayhids—began to appear on the fringes of the declining Abbasid Caliphate. They also focused on reviving the Persian language, the most significant one was Shahnameh written by Ferdowsi.
The blossoming literature, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, astronomy and art of Iran became major elements in the formation of a new age for the Iranian civilization, during a period known as the Islamic Golden Age. The Islamic Golden Age reached its peak by the 10th and 11th centuries, during which Iran was the main theater of scientific activities.
The tenth century saw a mass migration of Turkic tribes from Central Asia into the Iranian Plateau. Turkic tribesmen were first used in the Abbasid army as mamluks (slave-warriors). As a result, the Mamluks gained significant political power. In 999, large portions of Iran came briefly under the rule of the Ghaznavids, whose rulers were of mamluk Turkic origin, and longer subsequently under the Seljuk and Khwarezmian empires. The Seljuks subsequently gave rise to the Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia. The result of the adoption and patronage of Persian culture by Turkish rulers was the development of a distinct Turco-Persian tradition.
From 1219 to 1221, under the Khwarazmian Empire, Iran suffered a devastating invasion by the Mongol Empire army of Genghis Khan. According to Steven R. Ward, "Mongol violence and depredations killed up to three-fourths of the population of the Iranian Plateau, possibly 10 to 15 million people. Some historians have estimated that Iran's population did not again reach its pre-Mongol levels until the mid-20th century." Most modern historians either outright dismiss or are highly skeptical of such statistics and deem them to be exaggerations by Muslim chroniclers of that era. Indeed, as far as the Iranian plateau was concerned, the bulk of the Mongol onslaught and battles were in the northeast of what is modern-day Iran, such as in the cities of Nishapur and Tus.
Following the fracture of the Mongol Empire in 1256, Hulagu Khan established the Ilkhanate Empire in Iran. In 1357, the capital Tabriz was occupied by the Golden Horde khan Jani Beg and the centralised power collapsed, resulting in the emergence of rivaling dynasties. In 1370, yet another conqueror, Timur, took control over Persia, establishing the Timurid Empire. In 1387, Timur ordered the complete massacre of Isfahan, reportedly killing 70,000 citizens.
By the 1500s, Ismail I established the Safavid Empire, with his capital at Tabriz. Beginning with Azerbaijan, he subsequently extended his authority over all of the Iranian territories, and established an intermittent Iranian hegemony over the vast relative regions, reasserting the Iranian identity within large parts of Greater Iran. Iran was predominantly Sunni, but Ismail instigated a forced conversion to the Shia branch, spreading throughout the Safavid territories in the Caucasus, Iran, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia. As a result, modern-day Iran is the only official Shia nation of the world, with it holding an absolute majority in Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan. Meanwhile, the centuries-long geopolitical and ideological rivalry between Safavid Iran and the neighboring Ottoman Empire led to numerous Ottoman–Iranian wars. The Safavid era peaked in the reign of Abbas the Great (1587–1629), surpassing their Turkish archrivals in strength and making Iran a leading science and art hub in western Eurasia. The Safavid era saw the start of mass integration from Caucasian populations into new layers of the society of Iran, as well as mass resettlement of them within the heartlands of Iran. Following a gradual decline in the late 1600s and the early 1700s, which was caused by internal conflicts, the continuous wars with the Ottomans, and the foreign interference (most notably Russian), the Safavid rule was ended by the Pashtun rebels who besieged Isfahan and defeated Sultan Husayn in 1722.
In 1729, Nader Shah successfully drove out and conquered the Pashtun invaders. He subsequently took back the annexed Caucasian territories which were divided among the Ottoman and Russian authorities by the ongoing chaos in Iran. During the reign of Nader Shah, Iran reached its greatest extent since the Sasanian Empire, reestablishing the Iranian hegemony all over the Caucasus, as well as other major parts of the west and central Asia, and briefly possessing what was arguably the most powerful empire at the time.
Nader Shah invaded India and sacked Delhi by the late 1730s. His territorial expansion, as well as his military successes, went into a decline following the final campaigns in the Northern Caucasus against then revolting Lezgins. The assassination of Nader Shah sparked a brief period of civil war and turmoil, after which Karim Khan of the Zand dynasty came to power in 1750, bringing a period of relative peace and prosperity.
Compared to its preceding dynasties, the geopolitical reach of the Zand dynasty was limited. Many of the Iranian territories in the Caucasus gained de facto autonomy and were locally ruled through various Caucasian khanates. However, despite the self-ruling, they all remained subjects and vassals to the Zand king. Another civil war ensued after the death of Karim Khan in 1779, out of which Agha Mohammad Khan emerged, founding the Qajar dynasty in 1794.
In 1795, following the disobedience of the Georgian subjects and their alliance with the Russians, the Qajars captured Tbilisi by the Battle of Krtsanisi, and drove the Russians out of the entire Caucasus, reestablishing the Iranian suzerainty over the region. The Russo-Iranian wars of 1804–1813 and 1826–1828 resulted in large irrevocable territorial losses for Iran in the Caucasus, comprising all of the South Caucasus and Dagestan, which made part of the very concept of Iran for centuries, and thus substantial gains for the neighboring Russian Empire.
As a result of the 19th-century Russo-Iranian wars, the Russians took over the Caucasus, and Iran irrevocably lost control over its integral territories in the region (comprising modern-day Dagestan, Georgia, Armenia, and Republic of Azerbaijan), which got confirmed per the treaties of Gulistan and Turkmenchay. The area to the north of Aras River, among which the contemporary Republic of Azerbaijan, eastern Georgia, Dagestan, and Armenia are located, were Iranian territory until they were occupied by Russia in the 19th century. The weakening of Persia made it into a victim of the colonial struggle between Russia and Britain known as the Great Game. Especially after the treaty of Turkmenchay, Russia was the dominant force in Iran, while the Qajars would also play a role in several 'Great Game' battles such as the sieges of Herat in 1837 and 1856.
As Iran shrank, many South Caucasian and North Caucasian Muslims moved towards Iran, especially until the aftermath of the Circassian genocide, and the decades afterwards, while Iran's Armenians were encouraged to settle in the newly incorporated Russian territories, causing significant demographic shifts. Around 1.5 million people—20 to 25% of the population of Iran—died as a result of the Great Famine of 1870–1872.
Between 1872 and 1905, a series of protests took place in response to the sale of concessions to foreigners by Qajar monarchs Naser-ed-Din and Mozaffar-ed-Din, and led to the Constitutional Revolution in 1905. The first Iranian constitution and the first national parliament of Iran were founded in 1906, through the ongoing revolution. The Constitution included the official recognition of Iran's three religious minorities, namely Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians. The struggle related to the constitutional movement was followed by the Triumph of Tehran in 1909, when Mohammad Ali Shah was forced to abdicate. In 1907, the Anglo-Russian Convention divided Qajar Iran into influence zones, formalising many of the concessions. On the pretext of restoring order, the Russians occupied northern Iran and the city of Tabriz and maintained a military presence in the region for years to come. But this did not put an end to the civil uprisings and was soon followed by Mirza Kuchik Khan's Jungle Movement against both the Qajar monarchy and foreign invaders.
Despite Iran's neutrality during World War I, the Ottoman, Russian, and British Empires occupied the territory of western Iran and fought the Persian campaign before fully withdrawing their forces in 1921. At least 2 million Persian civilians died either directly in the fighting, the Ottoman perpetrated anti-Christian genocides or the war-induced famine of 1917–1919. A large number of Iranian Assyrian and Iranian Armenian Christians, as well as those Muslims who tried to protect them, were victims of mass murders committed by the invading Ottoman troops.
Apart from the rule of Agha Mohammad Khan, the Qajar rule is characterised as a century of misrule. The inability of Qajar Iran's government to maintain the country's sovereignty during and immediately after World War I led to the British directed 1921 Persian coup d'état and Reza Shah's establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty. Reza Shah became the new Prime Minister of Iran and was declared the new monarch in 1925.
In the midst of World War II, in July and August 1941 the British demanded that the Iranian government expel all Germans from Iran. Reza Shah refused to expel the Germans and on 25 August 1941, the British and Soviets launched a surprise invasion and Reza Shah's government quickly surrendered. The invasion's strategic purpose was to secure a supply line to the USSR (later named the Persian Corridor), secure the oil fields and Abadan Refinery (of the UK-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company), prevent a German advance on Baku's oil fields, and limit German influence in Iran. Following the invasion, on 16 September 1941 Reza Shah abdicated and was replaced by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
During the rest of World War II, Iran became a major conduit for British and American aid to the Soviet Union and an avenue through which over 120,000 Polish refugees and Polish Armed Forces fled the Axis advance. At the 1943 Tehran Conference, the Allied "Big Three"—Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill—issued the Tehran Declaration to guarantee the post-war independence and boundaries of Iran. However, at the end of the war, Soviet troops remained in Iran and established two puppet states in north-western Iran, namely the People's Government of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Mahabad. This led to the Iran crisis of 1946, one of the first confrontations of the Cold War, which ended after oil concessions were promised to the USSR and Soviet forces withdrew from Iran proper in May 1946. The two puppet states were soon overthrown, and the oil concessions were later revoked.
In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister of Pahlavi Iran. After the nationalization of Iran's oil industry, he became enormously popular. He was deposed in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, an Anglo-American covert operation that marked the first time the United States had participated in an overthrow of a foreign government during the Cold War.
After the coup, the Shah became increasingly autocratic and sultanistic, and Iran entered a decades-long phase of controversially close relations with the United States and other foreign governments. While the Shah increasingly modernised Iran and claimed to retain it as a fully secular state, arbitrary arrests and torture by his secret police, the SAVAK, were used for crushing political opposition.
Ruhollah Khomeini, a radical Muslim cleric, became an active critic of the Shah's reforms known as the White Revolution. Khomeini publicly denounced the government and was arrested and imprisoned for 18 months. After his release in 1964, he was eventually sent into exile.
Due to the 1973 spike in oil prices, the economy of Iran was flooded with foreign currency, which caused inflation. By 1974, the economy of Iran was experiencing a double-digit inflation rate, and despite the many large projects to modernise the country, corruption was rampant and caused large amounts of waste. By 1975 and 1976, an economic recession led to an increased unemployment rate, especially among millions of youths who had migrated to the cities of Iran looking for construction jobs during the boom years of the early 1970s. By the late 1970s, many of these people opposed the Shah's regime and began organizing and joining the protests against it.
The 1979 Revolution, later known as the Islamic Revolution, began in January 1978 with the first major demonstrations against the Shah. After a year of strikes and demonstrations paralyzing the country and its economy, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled to the United States, and Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran in February 1979, forming a new government. After holding a referendum, Iran officially became an Islamic republic in April 1979. A second referendum in December 1979 approved a theocratic constitution.
Immediate nationwide uprisings against the new government began with the 1979 Kurdish rebellion and the Khuzestan uprisings, along with uprisings in Sistan and Baluchestan and other areas. Over the next several years, these uprisings were subdued violently by the new government. The new government began purging itself of the non-Islamist political opposition, as well as Islamists who were not considered radical enough. Although both nationalists and Marxists had initially joined with Islamists to overthrow the Shah, tens of thousands were executed by the new regime. Following Khomeini's order to purge the new government of any remaining officials still loyal to the exiled Shah, many former ministers and officials in the Shah's government, including former prime minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, were executed.
On 4 November 1979, after the United States refused the extradition of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a group of Muslim students seized the United States Embassy and took the embassy with 52 personnel and citizens hostage. Attempts by the Jimmy Carter administration to negotiate for the release of the hostages, and a failed rescue attempt, helped with the falling popularity of Carter among US citizens and brought Ronald Reagan to power. On Jimmy Carter's final day in office, the last hostages were set free due to the Algiers Accords.
The Cultural Revolution began in 1980, with threats to close universities which did not conform to Islamization demands from the new government. These threats were followed by the closure of all universities indefinitely.
On 22 September 1980, the Iraqi army invaded the western Iranian province of Khuzestan, initiating the Iran–Iraq War. Although the forces of Saddam Hussein made several early advances, by mid-1982, the Iranian forces successfully managed to drive the Iraqi army back into Iraq. In July 1982, Iran decided to invade Iraq and conducted offensives to conquer Iraqi territory and capture cities, such as Basra. The war continued until 1988, when the Iraqi army defeated the Iranian forces inside Iraq and pushed the remaining Iranian troops back across the border. Subsequently, Khomeini accepted a truce mediated by the United Nations. The total Iranian casualties in the war were estimated to be 123,220–160,000 KIA, 60,711 MIA, and 11,000–16,000 civilians killed.
Following the Iran–Iraq War, in 1989, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani concentrated on a pragmatic pro-business policy of rebuilding and strengthening the economy without making any dramatic break with the ideology of the revolution. In 1997, Rafsanjani was succeeded by moderate reformist Mohammad Khatami, whose government attempted, unsuccessfully, to make the country freer and more democratic.
The 2005 presidential election brought conservative populist candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to power. By the time of the 2009 Iranian presidential election, the Interior Ministry announced incumbent President Ahmadinejad had won 62.63% of the vote. The election results were widely disputed, and resulted in widespread protests and the creation of the Iranian Green Movement.
Hassan Rouhani was elected as the president on 15 June 2013. The electoral victory of Rouhani relatively improved the relations of Iran with other countries.
The 2017–18 Iranian protests swept across the country in response to the economic and political situation. The scale of protests throughout the country and the number of people participating were significant, and it was formally confirmed that thousands of protesters were arrested. The 2019–20 Iranian protests started on 15 November in Ahvaz, spreading across the country within hours, after the government announced increases in the fuel price of up to 300%. A week-long total Internet shutdown throughout the country marked one of the most severe Internet blackouts in any country, and in the bloodiest governmental crackdown of the protestors in the history of Islamic Republic; tens of thousands were arrested and hundreds were killed within a few days according to multiple international observers, including Amnesty International.
On 3 January 2020, the revolutionary guard's general, Qasem Soleimani, was assassinated by the United States in Iraq, which considerably heightened the existing tensions between the two countries. Three days after, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched a retaliatory attack on US forces in Iraq and by accident shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing all members on board the plane and leading to nation-wide protests. An international investigation led to the government admitting to the shootdown, calling it a "human error".
Protests against the government began on 16 September 2022 after a woman named Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being arrested by the country's Guidance Patrol, known commonly as the "morality police".
Iran has an area of 1,648,195 km (636,372 sq mi). It is the fourth-largest country entirely in Asia and the second-largest country in West Asia behind Saudi Arabia. It lies between latitudes 24° and 40° N, and longitudes 44° and 64° E. It is bordered to the northwest by Armenia (35 km or 22 mi), the Azeri exclave of Nakhchivan (179 km or 111 mi), and the Republic of Azerbaijan (611 km or 380 mi); to the north by the Caspian Sea; to the northeast by Turkmenistan (992 km or 616 mi); to the east by Afghanistan (936 km or 582 mi) and Pakistan (909 km or 565 mi); to the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman; and to the west by Iraq (1,458 km or 906 mi) and Turkey (499 km or 310 mi).
Iran is in a seismically active area. On average, an earthquake of magnitude seven on the Richter scale occurs once every ten years. Most earthquakes are shallow-focus and can be very devastating, such as the tragic 2003 Bam earthquake.
Iran consists of the Iranian Plateau, with the exception of the coasts of the Caspian Sea and Khuzestan. It is one of the world's most mountainous countries, its landscape dominated by rugged mountain ranges that separate various basins or plateaus from one another. The populous western part is the most mountainous, with ranges such as the Caucasus, Zagros, and Alborz, the last containing Mount Damavand, Iran's highest point at 5,610 m (18,406 ft), which is also the highest mountain in Asia west of the Hindu Kush.
The northern part of Iran is covered by the lush lowland Caspian Hyrcanian mixed forests, located near the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. The eastern part consists mostly of desert basins, such as the Kavir Desert, which is the country's largest desert, and the Lut Desert, as well as some salt lakes. Iran had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 7.67/10, ranking it 34th out of 172 countries.
The Lut Desert is the hottest recored spot on the earth surface according to NASA. 70.7°C was recored in 2005, and the Lut has taken the hottest top spot annually.
The only large plains are found along the coast of the Caspian Sea and at the northern end of the Persian Gulf, where the country borders the mouth of the Arvand river. Smaller, discontinuous plains are found along the remaining coast of the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Gulf of Oman.
Iran's climate is diverse, ranging from arid and semi-arid, to subtropical along the Caspian coast and the northern forests. On the northern edge of the country (the Caspian coastal plain), temperatures rarely fall below freezing and the area remains humid for the rest of the year. Summer temperatures rarely exceed 29 °C (84.2 °F). Annual precipitation is 680 mm (26.8 in) in the eastern part of the plain and more than 1,700 mm (66.9 in) in the western part. Gary Lewis, the United Nations Resident Coordinator for Iran, has said that "Water scarcity poses the most severe human security challenge in Iran today".
To the west, settlements in the Zagros basin experience lower temperatures, severe winters with below zero average daily temperatures and heavy snowfall. The eastern and central basins are arid, with less than 200 mm (7.9 in) of rain and have occasional deserts. Average summer temperatures rarely exceed 38 °C (100.4 °F). The coastal plains of the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman in southern Iran have mild winters, and very humid and hot summers. The annual precipitation ranges from 135 to 355 mm (5.3 to 14.0 in).
Iran is the largest of the few countries in the world which have not ratified the Paris Agreement.
The wildlife of Iran includes bears, the Eurasian lynx, foxes, gazelles, gray wolves, jackals, panthers, and wild pigs. Eagles, falcons, partridges, pheasants, and storks are also native to Iran.
One of the most famous species of animal is the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah, also known as the Iranian cheetah, whose numbers were greatly reduced after the 1979 Revolution. The Persian leopard, which is the world's largest leopard subspecies and lives primarily in northern Iran, is also endangered. Iran lost all its Asiatic lions and the now extinct Caspian tigers by the earlier part of the 20th century.
At least 74 species of Iranian wildlife are on the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The Iranian Parliament has been showing disregard for wildlife by passing laws and regulations such as the act that lets the Ministry of Industries and Mines exploit mines without the involvement of the Department of Environment, and by approving large national development projects without demanding comprehensive study of their impact on wildlife habitats.
Iran is divided into five regions with 31 provinces (ostān, استان), each governed by an appointed governor (ostāndār, استاندار). The provinces are divided into counties (šahrestān, شهرستان), and subdivided into districts (baxš, بخش) and sub-districts (dehestān, دهستان).
The country has one of the highest urban growth rates in the world. From 1950 to 2002, the urban proportion of the population increased from 27% to 60%. Iran's population is concentrated in its western half, especially in the north, north-west and west of the country.
Tehran, with a population of around 8.8 million (2016 census), is Iran's capital and largest city. It is an economical and cultural center and is the hub of the country's communication and transport network. It is also home to the world's largest shopping mall, Iran Mall.
The country's second most populous city, Mashhad, has a population of around 3.3 million (2016 census), and is capital of the province of Razavi Khorasan. Being the site of the Imam Reza shrine, it is a holy city in Shia Islam. About 15 to 20 million pilgrims visit the shrine every year. Isfahan has a population of around 2.2 million (2016 census) and is Iran's third most populous city. It is the capital of Isfahan province and was also the third capital of the Safavid Empire. It is home to a wide variety of historical sites, including the famous Shah Square, Siosepol, and the churches at the Armenian district of New Julfa. It is also home to one of the world's largest shopping malls, Isfahan City Center.
The political system of the Islamic Republic is based on the 1979 Constitution. Juan José Linz wrote in 2000 that "it is difficult to fit the Iranian regime into the existing typology, as it combines the ideological bent of totalitarianism with the limited pluralism of authoritarianism and holds regular elections in which candidates advocating differing policies and incumbents are often defeated". Iran ranked 154th in the 2022 The Economist Democracy Index.
The Leader of the Revolution ("Rahbar") is the head of state of Iran and is responsible for delineation and supervision of policy. The Iranian president has limited power compared to the Rahbar Khamenei. The current longtime Rahbar is Ali Khamenei. Key ministers are selected with the Rahbar Ali Khamenei's agreement and he has the ultimate say on Iran's foreign policy. The Rahbar is directly involved in ministerial appointments for Defense, Intelligence and Foreign Affairs, as well as other top ministries after submission of candidates from the president. Iran's regional policy is directly controlled by the office of the Rahbar with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' task limited to protocol and ceremonial occasions. All of Iran's ambassadors to Arab countries, for example, are chosen by the Quds Corps, which directly reports to the Rahbar. The Rahbar can also order laws to be amended. Setad is estimated at $95 billion in 2013 by Reuters, accounts of which are secret even to the Iranian parliament.
The Rahbar is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, controls the military intelligence and security operations, and has sole power to declare war or peace. The heads of the judiciary, the state radio and television networks, the commanders of the police and military forces, and six of the twelve members of the Guardian Council are directly appointed by the Rahbar.
The Assembly of Experts is responsible for electing the Rahbar, and has the power to dismiss him on the basis of qualifications and popular esteem. To date, the Assembly of Experts has not challenged any of the Rahbar's decisions nor attempted to dismiss him. The previous head of the judicial system, Sadeq Larijani, appointed by the Rahbar, said that it is illegal for the Assembly of Experts to supervise the Rahbar. Many believe the Assembly of Experts has become a ceremonial body without any real power. There have been instances when the current Rahbar publicly criticised members of the Assembly of Experts, resulting in their arrest and dismissal.
Presidential candidates and parliamentary candidates must be approved by the Guardian Council (all members of which are directly or indirectly appointed by the Leader) or the Leader before running to ensure their allegiance. The Leader very rarely does the vetting himself directly but has the power to do so, in which case additional approval of the Guardian Council would not be needed. The Leader can also revert the decisions of the Guardian Council. The Guardian Council can and has dismissed elected members of the Iranian parliament in the past.
After the Rahbar, the Constitution defines the president of Iran as the highest state authority. The President is elected by universal suffrage for a term of four years, but is required to gain the Leader's official approval before being sworn in before the Parliament (Majlis). The Leader also has the power to dismiss the elected president. The President can only be re-elected for one term.
The President is responsible for the implementation of the constitution, and for the exercise of executive powers in implementing the decrees and general policies as outlined by the Rahbar, except for matters directly related to the Rahbar, who has the final say in all matters. Chapter IX of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran sets forth the qualifications for presidential candidates. The procedures for presidential election and all other elections in Iran are outlined by the Rahbar. The President functions as the executive of affairs such as signing treaties and other international agreements, and administering national planning, budget, and state employment affairs, all as approved by the Rahbar.
The President appoints the ministers, subject to the approval of the Parliament, as well as the approval of the Rahbar, who can dismiss or reinstate any of the ministers at any time, regardless of the decisions made by the President or the Parliament. The President supervises the Council of Ministers, coordinates government decisions, and selects government policies to be placed before the legislature. The current Rahbar, Ali Khamenei, has fired as well as reinstated Council of Ministers members. Eight Vice Presidents serve under the President, as well as a cabinet of twenty-two ministers, who must all be approved by the legislature.
The legislature of Iran, known as the Islamic Consultative Assembly, is a unicameral body comprising 290 members elected for four-year terms. It drafts legislation, ratifies international treaties, and approves the national budget. All parliamentary candidates and all legislation from the assembly must be approved by the Guardian Council.
The Guardian Council comprises twelve jurists, including six appointed by the Rahbar. Others are elected by the Parliament, from among the jurists nominated by the Head of the Judiciary. The Council interprets the constitution and may veto the Parliament. If a law is deemed incompatible with the constitution or Sharia (Islamic law), it is referred back to the Parliament for revision. The Expediency Council has the authority to mediate disputes between the Parliament and the Guardian Council, and serves as an advisory body to the Rahbar, making it one of the most powerful governing bodies in the country. Local city councils are elected by public vote to four-year terms in all cities and villages of Iran.
The Rahbar appoints the head of the country's judiciary, appointing the head of the Supreme Court and the chief public prosecutor. There are several types of courts, including public courts that deal with civil and criminal cases, and revolutionary courts which deal with certain categories of offenses, such as crimes against national security. The decisions of the revolutionary courts are final and cannot be appealed.
The Chief Justice of Iran is the head of the Judicial system of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is responsible for its administration and supervision. He is also the highest judge of the Supreme Court of Iran. The Rahbar of Iran appoints and can dismiss the Chief Justice. The Chief Justice nominates some candidates for serving as minister of justice, and then the President select one of them. The Chief Justice can serve for two five-year terms.
The Special Clerical Court handles crimes allegedly committed by clerics, although it has also taken on cases involving laypeople. The Special Clerical Court functions independently of the regular judicial framework and is accountable only to the Rahbar. The Court's rulings are final and cannot be appealed. The Assembly of Experts, which meets for one week annually, comprises 86 "virtuous and learned" clerics elected by adult suffrage for eight-year terms.
Since the time of the 1979 Revolution, Iran's foreign relations have often been portrayed as being based on two strategic principles: eliminating outside influences in its region and pursuing extensive diplomatic contacts with developing and non-aligned countries.
Since 2005, Iran's nuclear program has become the subject of contention with the international community, mainly the United States. Many countries have expressed concern that Iran's nuclear program could divert civilian nuclear technology into a weapons program. This has led the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions against Iran which had further isolated Iran politically and economically from the rest of the global community. In 2009, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence said that Iran, if choosing to, would not be able to develop a nuclear weapon until 2013.
As of 2009, the government of Iran maintains diplomatic relations with 99 members of the United Nations, but not with the United States, and not with Israel—a state which Iran's government has derecognised since the 1979 Revolution. Among Muslim nations, Iran has an adversarial relationship with Saudi Arabia due to different political and Islamic ideologies. Regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the government of Iran has recognised Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine, after Trump recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Since the 2000s, Iran's controversial nuclear program has raised concerns, which is part of the basis of the international sanctions against the country. On 14 July 2015, Iran and the P5+1 agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan on Action (JCPOA), aiming to end economic sanctions in exchange for Iran's restriction in producing enriched uranium after demonstrating a peaceful nuclear research project that would meet the International Atomic Energy Agency standards.
Iran is a member of dozens of international organizations, including the G-15, G-24, G-77, IAEA, IBRD, IDA, IDB, IFC, ILO, IMF, IMO, Interpol, OIC, OPEC, WHO, and the United Nations, and currently has observer status at the World Trade Organization.
Iran is fast approaching to become a nuclear-power state, and has uranium enriched to up to 60% purity as of November 2023, close to weapon grade. Iran has been seeking nuclear weapons for decades, a program which the US and other Western nations have vowed to stop, hammering the nation with sanctions. The country's ballistic missile, space, and nuclear programs are internationally hot political topics. Iran is one of the five countries in the world that has cyber-army capabilities, making the country a major player in terms of cyber-warfare operations.
Iran possesses the world's 17th strongest military. The Islamic Republic of Iran Armed Forces, or Artesh in Persian language, ranks 13th globally in terms of military strength. It is the 9th largest ground force in the world, the 9th largest armoured force globally and possesses the biggest Army Aviation fleet in the Middle East. It is also the largest Armed forces in West Asia. Iran ranks 7th globally in terms of active military personnel.
The Islamic Republic of Iran Armed Forces has several components: the regular forces of the Army, which includes the Ground Forces, the Air Defense Force, the Air Force, and the Navy, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), totaling about 610,000 active troops. Iran also has around 350,000 Reserve Force, totaling around 960,000 trained troops. These numbers do not include Law Enforcement Command or Basij. While the regular army protects the country's sovereignty in a traditional capacity, the IRGC's mandate is to ensure the integrity of the Islamic Republic.
As first introduced by Reza Pahlavi in June 1925, all young men who reach the age of 18 must spend about two years of compulsory military service in the Iranian army, or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Iran has a paramilitary, volunteer militia force within the IRGC, called the Basij, which includes about 90,000 full-time, active-duty uniformed members. Up to 25 million men and women are members of the Basij, with over 600,000 available for immediate call-up, 300,000 reservists, and some 1 million that could be mobilized when necessary. In 2021, Iran's military spending increased for the first time in four years, to $24.6 billion, 2.30% of country's GDP. Funding for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps accounted for %34 of Iran's total military spending in 2021. Iran is among the world's top 15 countries in terms of military budget.
Iran has significant influence and foothold in countries such as Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. The government of Iran supports the military activities of its allies in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon (Hezbollah) with military and financial aid. Iran and Syria are close strategic allies, and Iran has provided significant support for the Syrian Government in the Syrian civil war. According to some estimates, Iran controlled over 80,000 pro-Assad Shi'ite fighters in Syria.
Since the 1979 Revolution, to overcome foreign embargoes, the government of Iran has developed its own military industry, produced its own tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles, submarines, military vessels, missile destroyer, radar systems, helicopters, navies and fighter planes. In recent years, official announcements have highlighted the development of weapons such as the Hoot, Kowsar, Zelzal, Fateh-110, Shahab-3, Sejjil, Khorramahahr, Kheibar Shekan, Emad, Ghadr-110, Hormuz-1, Dezful, Qiam 1, Ashoura, Fajr-3, Haj Qasem, Persian Gulf, Raad-500, Zolfaghar and a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Iran has the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East. Iran is considered as a global leader and superpower in terms of drone production. Iran is the 5th country in the world with hypersonic missile technology, alongside Russia, China, United States and North Korea.
Iran's human rights record is exceptionally poor. The regime in Iran is undemocratic, has frequently persecuted and arrested critics of the government and its Rahbar, and severely restricts the participation of candidates in popular elections as well as other forms of political activity. Women's rights in Iran are described as seriously inadequate, and children's rights have been severely violated, with more child offenders being executed in Iran than in any other country in the world. Sexual activity between members of the same sex is illegal and is punishable by up to death.
UN Special Rapporteur Javaid Rehman has reported of several ethnic minorities in Iran facing discrimination. A group of UN experts in August 2022 urged Iran to stop "systematic persecution" of religious minorities, adding that members of the Baháʼí Faith were arrested, barred from university enrolment, or had their homes demolished. USCIRF Chair Nury Turkel in January 2023 noted that there was repression of Sunni Muslims, Gonabadi Sufi Muslims, Christians and Yarsanis in the country.
Over the past decade, numbers of anti-government protests have broken out throughout Iran (such as the 2019–20 Iranian protests), demanding reforms or the end to the Islamic Republic. However, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and police often suppressed mass protests violently, resulting in thousands of protesters being killed.
Censorship in Iran under the government of the Islamic Republic was ranked among the most extreme worldwide. Iran also has strict regulations when it comes to internet censorship, with the government and the IRGC persistently blocking social media and other websites. In January 2021, Iranian authorities added Signal to the list of blocked social media platforms, which included Facebook, Telegram, Twitter and YouTube. They carried out arbitrary arrests for social media postings deemed "counter-revolutionary" or "un-Islamic".
Iran's economy is a mixture of central planning, state ownership of oil and other large enterprises, village agriculture, and small-scale private trading and service ventures. In 2022, Iran's nominal GDP was $352.2 billion, while its nominal GDP per capita was $4,110. Iran is ranked as a lower-middle income economy by the World Bank. In the early 21st century, the service sector contributed the largest percentage of the GDP, followed by industry (mining and manufacturing) and agriculture.
The Central Bank of Iran is responsible for developing and maintaining the Iranian rial, the country's currency. The government does not recognise trade unions other than the Islamic labour councils, which are subject to the approval of employers and the security services. The minimum wage in June 2013 was 487 million rials a month ($134). Unemployment has remained above 10% since 1997, and the unemployment rate for women is almost double that of the men.
In 2006, about 45% of the government's budget came from oil and natural gas revenues, and 31% came from taxes and fees. As of 2007, Iran had earned $70 billion in foreign-exchange reserves, mostly (80%) from crude oil exports. Iranian budget deficits have been a chronic problem, mostly due to large-scale state subsidies, that include foodstuffs and especially gasoline, totaling more than $84 billion in 2008 for the energy sector alone. In 2010, the economic reform plan was approved by parliament to cut subsidies gradually and replace them with targeted social assistance. The objective is to move towards free market prices in a five-year period and increase productivity and social justice.
The administration continues to follow the market reform plans of the previous one, and indicates that it will diversify Iran's oil-reliant economy. Iran has also developed a biotechnology, nanotechnology, and pharmaceutical industry. However, nationalised industries such as the bonyads have often been managed badly, making them ineffective and uncompetitive. Currently, the government is trying to privatise these industries, and, despite successes, there are still several problems to overcome, such as the lagging corruption in the public sector and lack of competitiveness.
Iran has leading manufacturing industries in the fields of automobile manufacture, transportation, construction materials, home appliances, food and agricultural goods, armaments, pharmaceuticals, information technology, and petrochemicals in the Middle East. According to 2012 data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, Iran has been among the world's top five producers of apricots, cherries, sour cherries, cucumbers and gherkins, dates, eggplants, figs, pistachios, quinces, walnuts, and watermelons.
Economic sanctions against Iran have damaged the economy. In 2015, Iran and the P5+1 reached a deal on the nuclear program that removed the main sanctions pertaining to Iran's nuclear program by 2016. According to the BBC, renewed U.S. sanctions against Iran "have led to a sharp downturn in Iran's economy, pushing the value of its currency to record lows, quadrupling its annual inflation rate, driving away foreign investors, and triggering protests".
Although tourism declined significantly during the war with Iraq, it has been subsequently recovered. About 2.3 million foreign tourists visited Iran in 2009, mostly from Asian countries, including the republics of Central Asia, while about 10% came from the European Union and North America. Since the removal of some sanctions against Iran in 2015, tourism has re-surged in the country. Over 5 million tourists visited Iran in the fiscal year of 2014–2015, four percent more than the previous year.
Alongside the capital, the most popular tourist destinations are Isfahan, Shiraz and Mashhad. Iran has millions of medical tourists every year, fast emerging as a preferred destination for medical tourism. Iran had nearly 9 million foreign tourists in 2019, the world's third fastest-growing tourism destination before COVID. Domestic tourism in Iran is one of the largest in the world, with the Iranian tourists spent $33.3 billion in 2021. Iran projects investment of over $32 billion in the country's tourism sector and targets 20 million tourists by 2025.
Iran has a long paved road system linking most of its towns and all of its cities. In 2011 the country had 173,000 kilometers (107,000 mi) of roads, of which 73% were paved. In 2008 there were nearly 100 passenger cars for every 1,000 inhabitants.
The Tehran Metro is the largest metro system in the Middle East. It carries more than 3 million passengers a day. In 2018, 820 million trips were made on Tehran Metro. Trains operate on 11,106 km (6,942 mi) of railroad track. The country's major port of entry is Bandar-Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz. After arriving in Iran, imported goods are distributed throughout the country by trucks and freight trains. The Tehran–Bandar-Abbas railroad, opened in 1995, connects Bandar-Abbas to the railroad system of Central Asia via Tehran and Mashhad. Other major ports include Bandar e-Anzali and Bandar e-Torkeman on the Caspian Sea and Khorramshahr and Bandar-e Emam Khomeyni on the Persian Gulf.
Dozens of cities have airports that serve passenger and cargo planes. Iran Air, the national airline, was founded in 1962 and operated domestic and international flights. All large cities have mass transit systems using buses, and several private companies provide bus services between cities.
Transport in Iran is inexpensive because of the government's subsidization of the price of gasoline. The downside is a huge draw on government coffers, economic inefficiency because of highly wasteful consumption patterns, smuggling to neighboring countries and air pollution. In 2008, more than one million people worked in the transportation sector, accounting for 9% of GDP.
Iran has the world's second largest proved gas reserves after Russia, with 33.6 trillion cubic meters, and the third largest natural gas production after Indonesia and Russia. It also ranks fourth in oil reserves with an estimated 153,600,000,000 barrels. It is OPEC's second largest oil exporter. Despite this, Iran spent US$4 billion on fuel imports as of 2005 due to a lack of domestic refining capacity. Oil industry output averaged 4 million barrels per day (640,000 m/d) in 2005, compared with the peak of six million barrels per day reached in 1974.
In 2004, a large share of Iran's natural gas reserves were untapped. The addition of new hydroelectric stations and the streamlining of conventional coal and oil-fired stations increased installed capacity to 33,000 megawatts. Of that amount, about 75% was based on natural gas, 18% on oil, and 7% on hydroelectric power. In 2004, Iran opened its first wind-powered and geothermal plants, and the first solar thermal plant was to come online in 2009. Iran is the world's third country to have developed GTL technology.
Demographic trends and intensified industrialization have caused electric power demand to grow by 8% per year. The government's goal of 53,000 megawatts of installed capacity by 2010 is to be reached by bringing on line new gas-fired plants, and adding hydropower and nuclear power generation capacity. Iran's first nuclear power plant at Bushire went online in 2011. It is the second nuclear power plant ever built in the Middle East after the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant in Armenia.
Education in Iran is highly centralised. K–12 is supervised by the Ministry of Education, and higher education is under the supervision of the Ministry of Science and Technology.
The rate of adult literacy (among Iranians of ages 10 to 49) has reached 96% on March 19, 2020; while according to UNESCO it had rated 85.0% in 2008 (up from 36.5% in 1976).
According to the data provided by UNESCO, Iran's literacy rate among people aged 15 years and older was 85.54% as of 2016, with men (90.35%) being significantly more educated than women (80.79%), with the number of illiterate people of the same age amounting to around 8,700,000 of the country's 85 million population. According to this report, Iranian government's expenditure on education amounts to around 4% of the GDP.
The requirement to enter into higher education is to have a high school diploma and pass the Iranian University Entrance Exam (officially known as konkur (کنکور)), which is the equivalent of the SAT and ACT exams of the United States. Many students do a 1–2-year course of pre-university (piš-dānešgāh), which is the equivalent of the GCE A-levels and the International Baccalaureate. The completion of the pre-university course earns students the Pre-University Certificate.
Iran's higher education is sanctioned by different levels of diplomas, including an associate degree (kārdāni; also known as fowq e diplom) delivered in two years, a bachelor's degree (kāršenāsi; also known as lisāns) delivered in four years, and a master's degree (kāršenāsi e aršad) delivered in two years, after which another exam allows the candidate to pursue a doctoral program (PhD; known as doktorā).
According to the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (as of January 2017), Iran's top five universities include Tehran University of Medical Sciences (478th worldwide), the University of Tehran (514th worldwide), Sharif University of Technology (605th worldwide), Amirkabir University of Technology (726th worldwide), and the Tarbiat Modares University (789th worldwide). Iran was ranked 62nd in the Global Innovation Index in 2023, up from 67th in 2020.
Iran has increased its publication output nearly tenfold from 1996 through 2004, and has been ranked first in terms of output growth rate, followed by China. According to a study by SCImago in 2012, Iran would rank fourth in the world in terms of research output by 2018, if the current trend persists.
In 2009, a SUSE Linux-based HPC system made by the Aerospace Research Institute of Iran (ARI) was launched with 32 cores, and now runs 96 cores. Its performance was pegged at 192 GFLOPS. The Iranian humanoid robot Sorena 2, which was designed by engineers at the University of Tehran, was unveiled in 2010. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has placed the name of Surena among the five prominent robots of the world after analyzing its performance.
In the biomedical sciences, Iran's Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics has a UNESCO chair in biology. In late 2006, Iranian scientists successfully cloned a sheep by somatic cell nuclear transfer, at the Royan Research Center in Tehran.
According to a study by David Morrison and Ali Khadem Hosseini (Harvard-MIT and Cambridge), stem cell research in Iran is among the top 10 in the world. Iran ranks 15th in the world in nanotechnologies.
Iran placed its domestically built satellite Omid into orbit on the 30th anniversary of the 1979 Revolution, on 2 February 2009, through its first expendable launch vehicle Safir, becoming the ninth country in the world capable of both producing a satellite and sending it into space from a domestically made launcher.
The Iranian nuclear program was launched in the 1950s. Iran is the seventh country to produce uranium hexafluoride, and controls the entire nuclear fuel cycle.
Iranian scientists outside Iran have also made some major contributions to science. In 1960, Ali Javan co-invented the first gas laser, and fuzzy set theory was introduced by Lotfi A. Zadeh. Iranian cardiologist Tofigh Mussivand invented and developed the first artificial cardiac pump, the precursor of the artificial heart. Furthering research and treatment of diabetes, the HbA1c was discovered by Samuel Rahbar. A substantial number of papers in string theory are published in Iran. In August 2014, Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman, as well as the first Iranian, to receive the Fields Medal, the highest prize in mathematics.
Iran is a diverse country, consisting of numerous ethnic and linguistic groups that are unified through a shared Iranian nationality.
Iran's population grew rapidly during the latter half of the 20th century, increasing from about 19 million in 1956 to about 85 million by February 2023. However, Iran's fertility rate has dropped significantly in recent years, coming down from a fertility rate of 6.5 per woman to just a little more than 1.7 two decades later, leading to a population growth rate of about 1.39% as of 2018. Due to its young population, studies project that the growth will continue to slow until it stabilises around 105 million by 2050.
Iran hosts one of the largest refugee populations in the world, with almost one million refugees, mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 2006, Iranian officials have been working with the UNHCR and Afghan officials for their repatriation. According to estimates, about five million Iranian citizens have emigrated to other countries, mostly since the 1979 Revolution.
According to the Iranian Constitution, the government is required to provide every citizen of the country with access to social security, covering retirement, unemployment, old age, disability, accidents, calamities, health and medical treatment and care services. This is covered by tax revenues and income derived from public contributions.
The majority of the population speaks Persian, which is also the official language of the country. Others include speakers of several other Iranian languages within the greater Indo-European family and languages belonging to some other ethnicities living in Iran.
The Gilaki and Mazenderani languages are widely spoken in Gilan and Mazenderan, in northern Iran. The Talysh language is also spoken in parts of Gilan, stretching up to the neighboring Republic of Azerbaijan. Varieties of Kurdish are concentrated in the province of Kurdistan and nearby areas. In Khuzestan, several distinct varieties of Persian are spoken. Southern Iran also houses the Luri and Lari languages.
Azerbaijani, the most-spoken minority language in the country, and other Turkic languages and dialects are found in various regions of Iran, especially in the region of Azerbaijan.
Notable minority languages in Iran include Armenian, Georgian, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic. Khuzi Arabic is spoken by the Arabs in Khuzestan, as well as the wider group of Iranian Arabs. Circassian was also once widely spoken by the large Circassian minority, but, due to assimilation over the many years, no sizable number of Circassians speak the language anymore.
Percentages of spoken language continue to be a point of debate, as many opt that they are politically motivated; most notably regarding the largest and second largest ethnicities in Iran, the Persians and Azerbaijanis. Percentages given by the CIA's World Factbook include 53% Persian, 16% Azerbaijani, 10% Kurdish, 7% Mazenderani and Gilaki, 7% Luri, 2% Turkmen, 2% Balochi, 2% Arabic, and 2% the remainder Armenian, Georgian, Neo-Aramaic, and Circassian.
As with the spoken languages, the ethnic group composition also remains a point of debate, mainly regarding the largest and second largest ethnic groups, the Persians and Azerbaijanis, due to the lack of Iranian state censuses based on ethnicity. The CIA's World Factbook has estimated that around 79% of the population of Iran is a diverse Indo-European ethno-linguistic group that comprise speakers of various Iranian languages, with Persians (including Mazenderanis and Gilaks) constituting 61% of the population, Kurds 10%, Lurs 6%, and Balochs 2%. Peoples of other ethnolinguistic groups make up the remaining 21%, with Azerbaijanis constituting 16%, Arabs 2%, Turkmens and other Turkic tribes 2%, and others (such as Armenians, Talysh, Georgians, Circassians, Assyrians) 1%.
The Library of Congress issued slightly different estimates: 65% Persians (including Mazenderanis, Gilaks, and the Talysh), 16% Azerbaijanis, 7% Kurds, 6% Lurs, 2% Baloch, 1% Turkic tribal groups (incl. Qashqai and Turkmens), and non-Iranian, non-Turkic groups (incl. Armenians, Georgians, Assyrians, Circassians, and Arabs) less than 3%. It determined that Persian is the first language of at least 65% of the country's population, and is the second language for most of the remaining 35%.
Twelver Shia Islam is the official state religion, to which about 90% to 95% of the population adhere. The official motto of the country is the Islamic takbir. About 4% to 8% of the population are Sunni Muslims, mainly Kurds and Baloches. The remaining 2% are non-Muslim religious minorities, including Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Baháʼís, Mandaeans, and Yarsanis.
A 2020 survey by the World Values Survey found that 96.6% of Iranians believe in Islam. On the other hand, another 2020 survey conducted online by an organization based outside of Iran found a much smaller percentage of Iranians identifying as Muslim (32.2% as Shia, 5.0% as Sunni, and 3.2% as Sufi), and a significant fraction not identifying with any organised religion (22.2% identifying as "None," and some others identifying as atheists, spiritual, agnostics, and secular humanists). In 2021, Gamaan, a Dutch research group, conducted an online poll with around 50,000 Iranian respondents, revealing that roughly half reported a change or loss in their religious affiliation. Less than a third adhere to Sh'ia Islam. Despite the ban on proselytizing in the country, there is a noticeable surge in interest in non-Muslim faiths like Zoroastrianism, Christianity and the Baha'i Faith. According to the CIA World Factbook, around 90–95% of Iranian Muslims associate themselves with the Shia branch of Islam, the official state religion, and about 5–10% with the Sunni and Sufi branches.
There are a large population of adherents of Yarsanism, a Kurdish indigenous religion, making it the largest (unrecognised) minority religion in Iran. Its followers are mainly Gorani Kurds and certain groups of Lurs. They are based in Kurdistan Province, Kermanshah Province and Lorestan mainly.Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and the Sunni branch of Islam are officially recognised by the government and have reserved seats in the Iranian Parliament. Historically, early Iranian religions such as the Proto-Iranic religion and the subsequent Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism were the dominant religions in Iran, particularly during the Median, Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian eras. This changed after the fall of the Sasanian Empire by the centuries-long Islamization that followed the Muslim Conquest of Iran. Iran was predominantly Sunni until the conversion of the country (as well as the people of what is today the neighboring Republic of Azerbaijan) to Shia Islam by order of the Safavid dynasty in the 16th century.
Judaism has a long history in Iran, dating back to the Achaemenid conquest of Babylonia. Although many left in the wake of the establishment of the State of Israel and the 1979 Revolution, about 8,756 to 25,000 Jewish people live in Iran. Iran has the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel.
Around 250,000 to 370,000 Christians reside in Iran, and Christianity is the country's largest recognised minority religion. Most are of Armenian background, as well as a sizable minority of Assyrians. A large number of Iranians have converted to Christianity from the predominant Shia Islam.
The Baháʼí Faith is not officially recognised and has been subject to official persecution. According to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, Baháʼís are the largest non-Muslim religious minority in Iran, with an estimated 350,000 adherents. Since the 1979 Revolution, the persecution of Baháʼís has increased.
Iranian officials have continued to support the rebuilding and renovation of Armenian churches in Iran. The Armenian Monastic Ensembles of Iran has also received continued support. In 2019, the Iranian government registered the Holy Savior Cathedral, commonly referred to as Vank Cathedral, in the New Julfa district of Isfahan, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with significant expenditures for its congregation. Currently three Armenian churches in Iran have been included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
The art of Iran encompasses many disciplines, including architecture, stonemasonry, metalworking, weaving, pottery, painting, and calligraphy. Iranian works of art show a great variety in style, in different regions and periods. The art of the Medes remains obscure, but has been theoretically attributed to the Scythian style. The Achaemenids borrowed heavily from the art of their neighboring civilizations, but produced a synthesis of a unique style, with an eclectic architecture remaining at sites such as Persepolis and Pasargadae. Greek iconography was imported by the Seleucids, followed by the recombination of Hellenistic and earlier Near Eastern elements in the art of the Parthians, with remains such as the Temple of Anahita and the Statue of the Parthian Nobleman.
By the time of the Sasanians, Iranian art came across a general renaissance. Taq-e-Bostan, Taq-e-Kasra, Naqsh-e-Rostam, and the Shapur-Khwast Castle are among the surviving monuments from the Sasanian period. During the Middle Ages, Sasanian art played a prominent role in the formation of both European and Asian medieval art, which carried forward to the Islamic world, and much of what later became known as Islamic learning—including medicine, architecture, philosophy, philology, and literature—were of Sasanian basis. The Safavid era is known as the Golden Age of Iranian art. Safavid art exerted noticeable influences upon the neighboring Ottomans, the Mughals, and the Deccans, and was also influential through its fashion and garden architecture on 11th–17th-century Europe.
Iran's contemporary art traces its origins back to the time of Kamal-ol-molk, a prominent realist painter at the court of the Qajar dynasty who affected the norms of painting and adopted a naturalistic style that would compete with photographic works. A new Iranian school of fine art was established by Kamal-ol-Molk in 1928, and was followed by the so-called "coffeehouse" style of painting.
Iran's avant-garde modernists emerged by the arrival of new western influences during World War II. The vibrant contemporary art scene originates in the late 1940s, and Tehran's first modern art gallery, Apadana, was opened in September 1949 by painters Mahmud Javadipur, Hosein Kazemi, and Hushang Ajudani. The new movements received official encouragement by the mid-1950s, which led to the emergence of artists such as Marcos Grigorian.
The history of architecture in Iran goes back to the seventh millennium BC, and the Iranians made early use of mathematics, geometry and astronomy in their architecture, yielding a tradition with both great structural and aesthetic variety developed out of earlier forms. The guiding motif of Iranian architecture is its cosmic symbolism. Iran ranks seventh among UNESCO's list of countries with the most archaeological ruins and attractions from antiquity.
Iran's carpet-weaving has its origins in the Bronze Age and is one of the most distinguished manifestations of Iranian art. Iran is the world's largest producer and exporter of handmade carpets, producing three-quarters of the world's total output and having a share of 30% of world's export markets.
Iran's oldest literary tradition is that of Avestan, the Old Iranian sacred language of the Avesta, which consists of the legendary and religious texts of Zoroastrianism and the ancient Iranian religion, with its earliest records dating back to the pre-Achaemenid times.
Of the various modern languages used in Iran, Persian, various dialects of which are spoken throughout the Iranian Plateau, has the most influential literature. Persian has been dubbed as a worthy language to serve as a conduit for poetry, and is considered one of the four main bodies of world literature. Despite originating from the region of Persis (better known as Persia) in southwestern Iran, the Persian language was used and developed further through Persianate societies in Asia Minor, Central Asia, and South Asia, leaving massive influences on Ottoman and Mughal literatures, among others.
Iran has a number of famous medieval poets, most notably Rumi, Ferdowsi, Hafez, Sa'adi, Omar Khayyam, and Nezami Ganjavi. Iranian literature also inspired writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Iranian philosophy originates from Indo-European roots, with Zoroaster's reforms having major influences. According to The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, the chronology of the subject and science of philosophy starts with the Indo-Iranians, dating this event to 1500 BC.
The Cyrus Cylinder, which is known as "the first charter of human rights", is often seen as a reflection of the questions and thoughts expressed by Zoroaster and developed in Zoroastrian schools of the Achaemenid era. The earliest tenets of Zoroastrian schools are part of the extant scriptures of the Zoroastrian religion in Avestan. Among them are treatises such as the Zatspram, Shkand-gumanik Vizar, and Denkard, as well as older passages of the Avesta and the Gathas. Contemporary Iranian philosophy has been limited in its scope by the intellectual repression in the country.
Iranian mythology consists of ancient Iranian folklore and stories of extraordinary beings reflecting on good and evil, actions of the gods, and the exploits of heroes and fabulous creatures. The tenth-century Persian poet, Ferdowsi, is the author of the epic poem known as the Šāhnāme ("Book of Kings"), which is for the most part based on Xwadāynāmag, a Middle Persian compilation of the history of Iranian kings and heroes from mythical times down to the reign of Chosroes II. The Shahnameh is considered the national epic of Iran and draws heavily on the stories and characters of the Zoroastrian tradition, from the texts of the Avesta, the Denkard, and the Bundahishn.
Iran is the apparent birthplace of the earliest complex instruments, dating back to the third millennium BC. The use of both vertical and horizontal angular harps have been documented at the sites Madaktu and Kul-e Farah, with the largest collection of Elamite instruments documented at Kul-e Farah. Multiple depictions of horizontal harps were also sculpted in Assyrian palaces, dating back between 865 and 650 BC.
Xenophon's Cyropaedia mentions a great number of singing women at the court of the Achaemenid Empire. Athenaeus of Naucratis, in his Deipnosophistae, points out to the capture of Achaemenid singing girls at the court of the last Achaemenid king Darius III (336–330 BC) by Macedonian general Parmenion. Under the Parthian Empire, the gōsān (Parthian for "minstrel") had a prominent role in the society.
The history of Sasanian music is better documented than the earlier periods and is especially more evident in Avestan texts. By the time of Chosroes II, the Sasanian royal court hosted a number of prominent musicians, namely Azad, Bamshad, Barbad, Nagisa, Ramtin, and Sarkash.
Iranian traditional musical instruments include string instruments such as chang (harp), qanun, santur, rud (oud, barbat), tar, dotar, setar, tanbur, and kamanche, wind instruments such as sorna (zurna, karna) and ney, and percussion instruments such as tompak, kus, daf (dayere), and naqare.
Iran's first symphony orchestra, the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, was founded by Qolam-Hoseyn Minbashian in 1933. It was reformed by Parviz Mahmoud in 1946 and is currently Iran's oldest and largest symphony orchestra. Later, by the late 1940s, Ruhollah Khaleqi founded the country's first national music society and established the School of National Music in 1949.
Iranian pop music has its origins in the Qajar era. It was significantly developed since the 1950s, using indigenous instruments and forms accompanied by electric guitar and other imported characteristics. The emergence of genres such as rock in the 1960s and hip hop in the 2000s also resulted in major movements and influences in Iranian music.
The earliest recorded representations of dancing figures within Iran were found in prehistoric sites such as Tepe Sialk and Tepe Mūsīān. The oldest Iranian initiation of theater and the phenomena of acting can be traced in the ancient epic ceremonial theaters such as Sug-e Siāvuš ("mourning of Siāvaš"), as well as dances and theater narrations of Iranian mythological tales reported by Herodotus and Xenophon.
Iran's traditional theatrical genres include Baqqāl-bāzi ("grocer play", a form of slapstick comedy), Ruhowzi (or Taxt-howzi, comedy performed over a courtyard pool covered with boards), Siāh-bāzi (in which the central comedian appears in blackface), Sāye-bāzi (shadow play), Xeyme-šab-bāzi (marionette), and Arusak-bāzi (puppetry), and Ta'zie (religious tragedy plays).
Before the 1979 Revolution, the Iranian national stage had become a famous performing scene for known international artists and troupes, with the Roudaki Hall of Tehran constructed to function as the national stage for opera and ballet. Opened on 26 October 1967, the hall is home to the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, the Tehran Opera Orchestra, and the Iranian National Ballet Company, and was officially renamed Vahdat Hall after the 1979 Revolution.
A third-millennium BC earthen goblet discovered at the Burnt City, a Bronze Age urban settlement in southeastern Iran, depicts what could possibly be the world's oldest example of animation. The artifact, associated with Jiroft, bears five sequential images depicting a wild goat jumping up to eat the leaves of a tree. The earliest attested Iranian examples of visual representations, however, are traced back to the bas-reliefs of Persepolis, the ritual center of the Achaemenid Empire. The figures at Persepolis remain bound by the rules of grammar and syntax of visual language. The Iranian visual arts reached a pinnacle by the Sasanian era, and several works from this period have been found to articulate movements and actions in a highly sophisticated manner.
The first Iranian filmmaker was probably Mirza Ebrahim (Akkas Bashi), the court photographer of Mozaffar-ed-Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty. Mirza Ebrahim obtained a camera and filmed the Qajar ruler's visit to Europe. Later in 1904, Mirza Ebrahim (Sahhaf Bashi), a businessman, opened the first public movie theater in Tehran. After him, several others like Russi Khan, Ardeshir Khan, and Ali Vakili tried to establish new movie theaters in Tehran. Until the early 1930s, there were around 15 cinema theaters in Tehran and 11 in other provinces. The first Iranian feature film, Abi and Rabi, was a silent comedy directed by Ovanes Ohanian in 1930. The first sounded one, Lor Girl, was produced by Ardeshir Irani and Abd-ol-Hosein Sepanta in 1932.
Iran's animation industry began by the 1950s and was followed by the establishment of the influential Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in January 1965. The 1960s was a significant decade for Iranian cinema, with 25 commercial films produced annually on average throughout the early 60s, increasing to 65 by the end of the decade. The majority of the production focused on melodrama and thrillers. With the screening of the films Qeysar and The Cow, directed by Masoud Kimiai and Dariush Mehrjui respectively in 1969, alternative films set out to establish their status in the film industry and Bahram Beyzai's Downpour and Nasser Taghvai's Tranquility in the Presence of Others followed soon. Attempts to organise a film festival, which had begun in 1954 within the framework of the Golrizan Festival, resulted in the festival of Sepas in 1969. The endeavors also resulted in the formation of Tehran's World Film Festival in 1973. After the Revolution of 1979, and following the Cultural Revolution, a new age emerged in Iranian cinema, starting with Long Live! by Khosrow Sinai and followed by many other directors, such as Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. Kiarostami, an acclaimed Iranian director, planted Iran firmly on the map of world cinema when he won the Palme d'Or for Taste of Cherry in 1997. The continuous presence of Iranian films in prestigious international festivals, such as the Cannes Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, and the Berlin International Film Festival, attracted world attention to Iranian masterpieces. In 2006, six Iranian films, of six different styles, represented Iranian cinema at the Berlin International Film Festival. Critics considered this a remarkable event in the history of Iranian cinema.
Asghar Farhadi, a well-known Iranian director, has received a Golden Globe Award and two Academy Awards, representing Iran for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012 and 2017.
Iran's official New Year begins with Nowruz, an ancient Iranian tradition celebrated annually on the vernal equinox and described as the Persian New Year. It is enjoyed by people adhering to different religions but is considered a holiday for the Zoroastrians. It was registered on the UNESCO's list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2009. On the eve of the last Wednesday of the preceding year, as a prelude to Nowruz, the ancient festival of Čāršanbe Suri celebrates Ātar ("fire") by performing rituals such as jumping over bonfires and lighting off firecrackers and fireworks.
Yaldā, another ancient tradition, commemorates the ancient goddess Mithra and marks the longest night of the year on the eve of the winter solstice (čelle ye zemestān; usually falling on 20 or 21 December), during which families gather together to recite poetry and eat fruits. In some regions of the provinces of Mazanderan and Markazi, there is also the midsummer festival of Tirgān, which is observed on Tir 13 (2 or 3 July) as a celebration of water.
Alongside the ancient Iranian celebrations, Islamic annual events such as Ramezān, Eid e Fetr, and Ruz e Āšurā are marked by the country's large Muslim population, Christian traditions such as Noel, Čelle ye Ruze, and Eid e Pāk are observed by the Christian communities, Jewish traditions such as Purim, Hanukā, and Eid e Fatir (Pesah) are observed by the Jewish communities, and Zoroastrian traditions such as Sade and Mehrgān are observed by the Zoroastrians.
Iran's official calendar is the Solar Hejri calendar, beginning at the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, which was first enacted by the Iranian Parliament on 31 March 1925. Each of the 12 months of the Solar Hejri calendar correspond with a zodiac sign, and the length of each year is absolutely solar. The months are named after the ancient Iranian months, namely Farvardin (Fravaši), Ordibehešt (Aša Vahišta), Xordād (Haurvatāt), Tir (Tištrya), Amordād (Amərətāt), Šahrivar (Xšaθra Vairya), Mehr (Miθra), Ābān (Āpō), Āzar (Ātar), Dey (Daθuš), Bahman (Vohu Manah), and Esfand (Spəntā Ārmaiti).
Alternatively, the Lunar Hejri calendar is used to indicate Islamic events, and the Gregorian calendar remarks the international events.
Legal public holidays based on the Iranian solar calendar include the cultural celebrations of Nowruz (Farvardin 1–4; 21–24 March) and Sizdebedar (Farvardin 13; 2 April), and the political events of Islamic Republic Day (Farvardin 12; 1 April), the death of Ruhollah Khomeini (Khordad 14; 4 June), the Khordad 15 event (Khordad 15; 5 June), the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution (Bahman 22; 10 February), and Oil Nationalization Day (Esfand 29; 19 March).
Lunar Islamic public holidays include Tasua (Muharram 9), Ashura (Muharram 10), Arba'een (Safar 20), the death of Muhammad (Safar 28), the death of Ali al-Ridha (Safar 29 or 30), the birthday of Muhammad (Rabi-al-Awwal 17), the death of Fatimah (Jumada-al-Thani 3), the birthday of Ali (Rajab 13), Muhammad's first revelation (Rajab 27), the birthday of Muhammad al-Mahdi (Sha'ban 15), the death of Ali (Ramadan 21), Eid al-Fitr (Shawwal 1–2), the death of Ja'far al-Sadiq (Shawwal 25), Eid al-Qurban (Zulhijja 10), and Eid al-Qadir (Zulhijja 18).
Iranian cuisine includes a wide range of main dishes, including various types of kebab, pilaf, stew (khoresh), soup and āsh, and omelette. Lunch and dinner meals are commonly accompanied by side dishes such as plain yogurt or mast-o-khiar, sabzi, salad Shirazi, and torshi, and might follow dishes such as borani, Mirza Qasemi, or kashk e bademjan as the starter.
In Iranian culture, tea (čāy) is widely consumed. Iran is the world's seventh major tea producer, and a cup of tea is typically the first thing offered to a guest. One of Iran's most popular desserts is the falude, consisting of vermicelli in a rose water syrup, which has its roots in the fourth century BC. There is also the popular saffron ice cream, known as Bastani Sonnati ("traditional ice cream"), which is sometimes accompanied with carrot juice. Iran is also famous for its caviar.
Iran is most likely the birthplace of polo, locally known as čowgān, with its earliest records attributed to the ancient Medes. Freestyle wrestling is traditionally considered the national sport of Iran, and the national wrestlers have been world champions on many occasions. Iran's traditional wrestling, called košti e pahlevāni ("heroic wrestling"), is registered on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list. With a history of great wrestlers, such as Gholamreza Takhti (two-time champion at freestyle wrestling World Championships: 1959 and 1961), Iran is considered among the elite nations in this sport.
Being a mountainous country, Iran is a venue for skiing, snowboarding, hiking, rock climbing, and mountain climbing. It is home to several ski resorts, the most famous being Tochal, Dizin, and Shemshak, all within one to three hours traveling from the capital city Tehran. The resort of Tochal, located in the Alborz mountain rage, is the world's fifth-highest ski resort (3,730 m or 12,238 ft at its highest station). Dizin is the largest Iranian ski resort, and its officially granted the title by FIS for its capability in administering official and international competitions.
Iran's National Olympic Committee was founded in 1947. Wrestlers and weightlifters have achieved the country's highest records at the Olympics. In September 1974, Iran became the first country in West Asia to host the Asian Games.
Football has been regarded as the most popular sport in Iran, with the men's national team having won the Asian Cup on three occasions. The men's national team has maintained its position as Asia's best team, ranking first in Asia and 22nd in the world according to the FIFA World Rankings (as of September 2021). The Azadi Stadium in Tehran is the 1st largest association football stadium in Western Asia, and it was on the list of top-20 best stadiums in the world. The Guardian also regarded the Azadi as one of the world's biggest football stadiums.
Volleyball is the second most popular sport in Iran. Having won the 2011 and 2013 Asian Men's Volleyball Championships, the men's national team is currently the strongest team in Asia, and ranks eighth in the FIVB World Rankings (as of July 2017).
Basketball is also popular, with the men's national team having won three Asian Championships since 2007.
In 2016, Iran made global headlines for international female champions boycotting tournaments in Iran in chess (U.S. Woman Grandmaster Nazí Paikidze) and in shooting (Indian world champion Heena Sidhu), as they refused to enter a country where they would be forced to wear a hijab.
According to the Press Freedom Index, Iran holds one of the lowest positions, ranking 174th out of 180 countries as of 2021. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance is Iran's main government department responsible for the cultural policy, including activities regarding communications and information.
Iran's first newspapers were published during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty in the mid-19th century. Most of the newspapers published in Iran are in Persian, the country's official language. The country's most widely circulated periodicals are based in Tehran, among which are Etemad, Ettela'at, Kayhan, Hamshahri, Resalat, and Shargh. Tehran Times, Iran Daily, and Financial Tribune are among English-language newspapers based in Iran.
Television was introduced in Iran in 1958. Although the 1974 Asian Games were broadcast in color, full color programming began in 1978. Since the 1979 Revolution, Iran's largest media corporation is the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). Despite the restrictions on non-domestic television, about 65% of the residents of the capital city and about 30 to 40% of the residents outside the capital city access worldwide television channels through satellite dishes, although observers state that the figures are likely to be higher.
According to Internet World Stats, as of 2017, around 69.1% of the population of Iran are Internet users. Iran ranks 17th among countries by number of Internet users. According to the statistics provided by the web information company of Alexa, Google Search is Iran's most widely used search engine and Instagram is the most popular online social networking service. Direct access to many worldwide mainstream websites has been blocked in Iran, including Facebook, which has been blocked since 2009 due to the organization of anti-governmental protests on the website. However, as of 2017, Facebook has around 40 million subscribers based in Iran (48.8% of the population) who use virtual private networks and proxy servers to access the website. About 90% of Iran's e-commerce takes place on the Iranian online store of Digikala, which has around 750,000 visitors per day and more than 2.3 million subscribers and is the most visited online store in the Middle East.
Fashion in Iran is divided into several historical periods. The exact date of the emergence of weaving in Iran is not yet known, but it is likely to coincide with the emergence of civilization. Ferdowsi and many historians have considered Keyumars to be the inventor of the use of animals' skin and hair as clothing. Some historians have also mentioned Hushang as the first inventor of the use of living skins as clothing. Ferdowsi considers Tahmuras to be a kind of textile initiator in Iran. The clothing of ancient Iran took an advanced form, and the fabric and color of clothing became very important at that time. Depending on the social status, eminence, climate of the region and the season, Persian clothing during the Achaemenian period took various forms. The philosophy used in this clothing, in addition to being functional, also had an aesthetic role.
#invoke:Authority control
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"text": "Iran, also known as Persia and officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a country located at the crossroads of West, Central, and South Asia. It is bordered by Iraq to the west and Turkey to the northwest, Azerbaijan, Armenia, the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan to the north, Afghanistan to the east, Pakistan to the southeast, the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf to the south. It covers an area of 1.64 million square kilometers (0.63 million square miles), making it the world's 17th-largest country. Iran has around 90 million people, making it the world's 17th most populous country. Its capital and largest city is Tehran with around 16 million in its metropolitan area.",
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"text": "Iran is home to one of the world's oldest civilizations, beginning with the formation of the Elamite kingdoms in the fourth millennium BC. It was first unified by the Medes in the seventh century BC and reached its territorial height in the sixth century BC, when Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire. Alexander the Great conquered the empire in the fourth century BC, and it was subsequently divided into several Hellenistic states. An Iranian rebellion established the Parthian Empire in the third century BC, which was succeeded in the third century AD by the Sasanian Empire. Arab Muslims conquered the empire in the seventh century AD, leading to its Islamization; Iran thereafter became a major center of Islamic culture and learning. Over the next two centuries, a series of native Iranian Muslim dynasties emerged before the Seljuk and the Mongols conquered the region. In the 16th century, the native Safavids re-established a unified Iranian state. Under the reign of Nader Shah in the 18th century, Iran presided over the most powerful military in the world, though by the 19th century, a series of conflicts with the Russian Empire led to significant territorial losses. The early 20th century saw the Persian Constitutional Revolution. Efforts to nationalise its fossil fuel supply led to an Anglo-American coup in 1953. After the Iranian Revolution, the current Islamic Republic was established in 1979 by Ruhollah Khomeini, who became the country's first supreme leader.",
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"text": "The Iranian government is an Islamic republic with a presidential system, though ultimate authority is vested in a theocratic \"Rahbar\"; the position has been held by Ali Khamenei since Khomeini's death in 1989. The Iranian government is authoritarian, and has attracted widespread criticism for its significant constraints and violations of human rights and civil liberties. It is also a focal point for Shia Islam within the Middle East. Since the Iranian Revolution, the country is considered to be the most determined adversary of Israel and Saudi Arabia. On March 10, 2023, Iran and Saudi Arabia normalized relations after years of hostility. The Iranian government has been criticised for various policies such as its alleged sponsorship of terrorism, funding of proxy militias and its involvement in the majority of modern Middle Eastern conflicts.",
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"text": "Iran is a regional and middle power and occupies a strategic location in the Asian continent. It is a founding member of the United Nations, the ECO, the OIC, the OPEC, the SCO, and is expected to join BRICS on 1 January 2024. It has large reserves of fossil fuels—including the second largest natural gas supply and the third-largest proven oil reserves. Historically a multi-ethnic country, Iran remains a pluralistic society comprising numerous ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. The country's rich cultural legacy is reflected in part by its 27 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, which ranks 10th worldwide. Iran places 5th globally in terms of Intangible Cultural Heritage.",
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{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The term Iran derives from Middle Persian Ērān, first attested in a third-century inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam, with the accompanying Parthian inscription using the term Aryān, in reference to the Iranians. The Middle Iranian ērān and aryān are oblique plural forms of gentilic nouns ēr- (Middle Persian) and ary- (Parthian), both deriving from Proto-Iranian language *arya- (meaning \"Aryan\", i.e. \"of the Iranians\"), recognised as a derivative of Proto-Indo-European language *ar-yo-, meaning \"one who assembles (skilfully)\". According to the Iranian mythology, the country's name comes from the name of Iraj, a legendary prince and king.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Historically, Iran has been referred to as Persia by the West, due mainly to the writings of Greek historians who referred to all of Iran as Persís (Ancient Greek: Περσίς; from Old Persian 𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿 Pârsa), meaning \"land of the Persians\", while Persis was one of the provinces of ancient Iran.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1935, Reza Pahlavi requested the international community to refer to the country by its native name, Iran. Opposition to the name change led to the reversal of the decision in 1959, and Professor Ehsan Yarshater, editor of Encyclopædia Iranica, propagated a move to use Persia and Iran interchangeably. Today, both Iran and Persia are used in cultural contexts, while Iran remains mandatory in official state contexts.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Persian pronunciation of Iran is [ʔiːˈɾɒːn]. Common Commonwealth English pronunciations of Iran are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as /ɪˈrɑːn/ and /ɪˈræn/, while American English dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster's provide pronunciations which map to /ɪˈrɑːn, -ˈræn, aɪˈræn/, or likewise in Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary as /ɪˈræn, ɪˈrɑːn, aɪˈræn/. The Cambridge Dictionary lists /ɪˈrɑːn/ as the British pronunciation and /ɪˈræn/ as the American pronunciation. The pronunciation guide from Voice of America also provides /ɪˈrɑːn/. The American English pronunciation /aɪˈræn/ may be heard in U.S. media.",
"title": "Name"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The earliest attested archaeological artifacts in Iran confirm a human presence in Iran since the Lower Paleolithic. Iran's Neanderthal artifacts from the Middle Paleolithic have been found mainly in the Zagros region, at sites such as Warwasi and Yafteh. From the tenth to the seventh millennium BC, early agricultural communities began to flourish in and around the Zagros region in western Iran, including Chogha Golan, Chogha Bonut, and Chogha Mish.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The occupation of grouped hamlets in the area of Susa, as determined by radiocarbon dating, ranges from 4395 to 3955 to 3680–3490 BC. There are dozens of prehistoric sites across the Iranian Plateau, pointing to the existence of ancient cultures and urban settlements in the fourth millennium BC. During the Bronze Age, the territory of present-day Iran was home to several civilizations, including Elam, Jiroft, and Zayanderud. Elam, the most prominent of these civilizations, developed in the southwest alongside those in Mesopotamia, and continued its existence until the emergence of the Iranian empires. The advent of writing in Elam was paralleled to Sumer, and the Elamite cuneiform was developed since the third millennium BC.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "From the 34th to the 20th century BC, northwestern Iran was part of the Kura-Araxes culture, which stretched into the neighboring Caucasus and Anatolia. Since the earliest second millennium BC, Assyrians settled in swaths of western Iran and incorporated the region into their territories.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "By the second millennium BC, the ancient Iranian peoples arrived in what is now Iran from the Eurasian Steppe, rivaling the native settlers of the region. As the Iranians dispersed into the wider area of Greater Iran and beyond, the boundaries of modern-day Iran were dominated by Median, Persian, and Parthian tribes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "From the late tenth to the late seventh century BC, the Iranian peoples, together with the \"pre-Iranian\" kingdoms, fell under the domination of the Assyrian Empire, based in northern Mesopotamia. Under king Cyaxares, the Medes and Persians entered into an alliance with Babylonian ruler Nabopolassar, as well as the fellow Iranian Scythians and Cimmerians, and together they attacked the Assyrian Empire. The civil war ravaged the Assyrian Empire between 616 and 605 BC, thus freeing their respective peoples from three centuries of Assyrian rule. The unification of the Median tribes under king Deioces in 728 BC led to the foundation of the Median Empire and their capital Ecbatana, which by 612 BC, controlled almost the entire territory of present-day Iran and eastern Anatolia. This marked the end of the Kingdom of Urartu as well, which was subsequently conquered and dissolve",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 550 BC, Cyrus the Great, the son of Mandane and Cambyses I, took over the Median Empire, and founded the Achaemenid Empire by unifying other city-states. Pasargadae was the capital of the Achaemenid Empire during the time of Cyrus the Great. The conquest of Media was a result of what is called the Persian Revolt. Later conquests under Cyrus and his successors expanded the empire to include Lydia, Babylon, Egypt, parts of the Balkans and Eastern Europe proper, as well as the lands to the west of the Indus and Oxus rivers. In 539 BC Persian forces defeated the Babylonian army at Opis, and marked the end of around four centuries of Mesopotamian domination of the region by conquering the Neo-Babylonian Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "At around 518 BC, Persepolis was founded by Darius the Great as the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire. Susa and Ecbatana were the winter and summer capital of the empire, respectively. its greatest extent, the Achaemenid Empire included territories of modern-day Iran, Republic of Azerbaijan (Arran and Shirvan), Armenia, Georgia, Turkey (Anatolia), much of the Black Sea coastal regions, northeastern Greece and southern Bulgaria (Thrace), northern Greece and North Macedonia (Paeonia and Macedon), Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, all significant population centers of ancient Egypt as far west as Libya, Kuwait, northern Saudi Arabia, parts of the United Arab Emirates and Oman, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and much of Central Asia, making it the largest empire the world had yet seen. It is estimated that in 480 BC, 50 million people lived in the Achaemenid Empire. The empire at its peak ruled over 44% of the world's population, the highest for any empire in history.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Achaemenid Empire is noted for the release of the Jewish exiles in Babylon, building infrastructures such as the Royal Road and the Chapar (postal service), and the use of an official language, Imperial Aramaic. The empire had a centralised, bureaucratic administration under the emperor, a large professional army, and civil services, inspiring similar developments in later empires. Eventual conflict on the western borders began with the Ionian Revolt, which erupted into the Greco-Persian Wars and continued through the first half of the fifth century BC and ended with the withdrawal of the Achaemenids from all of the territories in the Balkans and Eastern Europe proper.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 334 BC, Alexander the Great defeated the last Achaemenid emperor, Darius III, at the Battle of Issus. Following the premature death of Alexander, Iran came under the control of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire. In the middle of the second century BC, the Parthian Empire rose to become the main power in Iran, and the century-long geopolitical arch-rivalry between the Romans and the Parthians began, culminating in the Roman–Parthian Wars. The Parthian Empire continued as a feudal monarchy for nearly five centuries, until 224 CE, when it was succeeded by the Sasanian Empire. Together with their neighboring arch-rival, the Roman-Byzantines, they made up the world's two most dominant powers at the time, for over four centuries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Sasanians established an empire within the frontiers achieved by the Achaemenids, with their capital at Ctesiphon. Late antiquity is considered one of Iran's most influential periods, as under the Sasanians, their influence reached the culture of ancient Rome (and through that as far as Western Europe), Africa, China, and India, and played a prominent role in the formation of the medieval art of both Europe and Asia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The prolonged Byzantine–Sasanian wars, most importantly the climactic war of 602–628, as well as the social conflict within the Sasanian Empire, opened the way for an Arab invasion of Iran in the seventh century. The empire was initially defeated by the Rashidun Caliphate, which was succeeded by the Umayyad Caliphate, followed by the Abbasid Caliphate. A prolonged and gradual process of state-imposed Islamization followed, which targeted Iran's then Zoroastrian majority and included religious persecution, demolition of libraries and fire temples, a special tax penalty (\"jizya\"), and language shift.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 750, the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads. Arabs Muslims and Persians of all strata made up the rebel army, which was united by the converted Persian Muslim, Abu Muslim. In their struggle for power, the society in their times gradually became cosmopolitan. Persians and Turks began to replace the Arabs in most fields. The fusion of the Arab nobility with the subject races, the practice of polygamy and concubinage, made for a social amalgam wherein loyalties became uncertain, and a hierarchy of officials emerged, a bureaucracy at first Persian and later Turkish which decreased Abbasid prestige and power for good.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "After two centuries of Arab rule, semi-independent and independent Iranian kingdoms—including the Tahirids, Saffarids, Sajids, Samanids, Ziyarids, Buyids, Sallarids, Rawadids, Marwanids, Shaddadids, Kakuyids, Annazids and Hasanwayhids—began to appear on the fringes of the declining Abbasid Caliphate. They also focused on reviving the Persian language, the most significant one was Shahnameh written by Ferdowsi.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The blossoming literature, philosophy, mathematics, medicine, astronomy and art of Iran became major elements in the formation of a new age for the Iranian civilization, during a period known as the Islamic Golden Age. The Islamic Golden Age reached its peak by the 10th and 11th centuries, during which Iran was the main theater of scientific activities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The tenth century saw a mass migration of Turkic tribes from Central Asia into the Iranian Plateau. Turkic tribesmen were first used in the Abbasid army as mamluks (slave-warriors). As a result, the Mamluks gained significant political power. In 999, large portions of Iran came briefly under the rule of the Ghaznavids, whose rulers were of mamluk Turkic origin, and longer subsequently under the Seljuk and Khwarezmian empires. The Seljuks subsequently gave rise to the Sultanate of Rum in Anatolia. The result of the adoption and patronage of Persian culture by Turkish rulers was the development of a distinct Turco-Persian tradition.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "From 1219 to 1221, under the Khwarazmian Empire, Iran suffered a devastating invasion by the Mongol Empire army of Genghis Khan. According to Steven R. Ward, \"Mongol violence and depredations killed up to three-fourths of the population of the Iranian Plateau, possibly 10 to 15 million people. Some historians have estimated that Iran's population did not again reach its pre-Mongol levels until the mid-20th century.\" Most modern historians either outright dismiss or are highly skeptical of such statistics and deem them to be exaggerations by Muslim chroniclers of that era. Indeed, as far as the Iranian plateau was concerned, the bulk of the Mongol onslaught and battles were in the northeast of what is modern-day Iran, such as in the cities of Nishapur and Tus.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Following the fracture of the Mongol Empire in 1256, Hulagu Khan established the Ilkhanate Empire in Iran. In 1357, the capital Tabriz was occupied by the Golden Horde khan Jani Beg and the centralised power collapsed, resulting in the emergence of rivaling dynasties. In 1370, yet another conqueror, Timur, took control over Persia, establishing the Timurid Empire. In 1387, Timur ordered the complete massacre of Isfahan, reportedly killing 70,000 citizens.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "By the 1500s, Ismail I established the Safavid Empire, with his capital at Tabriz. Beginning with Azerbaijan, he subsequently extended his authority over all of the Iranian territories, and established an intermittent Iranian hegemony over the vast relative regions, reasserting the Iranian identity within large parts of Greater Iran. Iran was predominantly Sunni, but Ismail instigated a forced conversion to the Shia branch, spreading throughout the Safavid territories in the Caucasus, Iran, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia. As a result, modern-day Iran is the only official Shia nation of the world, with it holding an absolute majority in Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan. Meanwhile, the centuries-long geopolitical and ideological rivalry between Safavid Iran and the neighboring Ottoman Empire led to numerous Ottoman–Iranian wars. The Safavid era peaked in the reign of Abbas the Great (1587–1629), surpassing their Turkish archrivals in strength and making Iran a leading science and art hub in western Eurasia. The Safavid era saw the start of mass integration from Caucasian populations into new layers of the society of Iran, as well as mass resettlement of them within the heartlands of Iran. Following a gradual decline in the late 1600s and the early 1700s, which was caused by internal conflicts, the continuous wars with the Ottomans, and the foreign interference (most notably Russian), the Safavid rule was ended by the Pashtun rebels who besieged Isfahan and defeated Sultan Husayn in 1722.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1729, Nader Shah successfully drove out and conquered the Pashtun invaders. He subsequently took back the annexed Caucasian territories which were divided among the Ottoman and Russian authorities by the ongoing chaos in Iran. During the reign of Nader Shah, Iran reached its greatest extent since the Sasanian Empire, reestablishing the Iranian hegemony all over the Caucasus, as well as other major parts of the west and central Asia, and briefly possessing what was arguably the most powerful empire at the time.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Nader Shah invaded India and sacked Delhi by the late 1730s. His territorial expansion, as well as his military successes, went into a decline following the final campaigns in the Northern Caucasus against then revolting Lezgins. The assassination of Nader Shah sparked a brief period of civil war and turmoil, after which Karim Khan of the Zand dynasty came to power in 1750, bringing a period of relative peace and prosperity.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Compared to its preceding dynasties, the geopolitical reach of the Zand dynasty was limited. Many of the Iranian territories in the Caucasus gained de facto autonomy and were locally ruled through various Caucasian khanates. However, despite the self-ruling, they all remained subjects and vassals to the Zand king. Another civil war ensued after the death of Karim Khan in 1779, out of which Agha Mohammad Khan emerged, founding the Qajar dynasty in 1794.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1795, following the disobedience of the Georgian subjects and their alliance with the Russians, the Qajars captured Tbilisi by the Battle of Krtsanisi, and drove the Russians out of the entire Caucasus, reestablishing the Iranian suzerainty over the region. The Russo-Iranian wars of 1804–1813 and 1826–1828 resulted in large irrevocable territorial losses for Iran in the Caucasus, comprising all of the South Caucasus and Dagestan, which made part of the very concept of Iran for centuries, and thus substantial gains for the neighboring Russian Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "As a result of the 19th-century Russo-Iranian wars, the Russians took over the Caucasus, and Iran irrevocably lost control over its integral territories in the region (comprising modern-day Dagestan, Georgia, Armenia, and Republic of Azerbaijan), which got confirmed per the treaties of Gulistan and Turkmenchay. The area to the north of Aras River, among which the contemporary Republic of Azerbaijan, eastern Georgia, Dagestan, and Armenia are located, were Iranian territory until they were occupied by Russia in the 19th century. The weakening of Persia made it into a victim of the colonial struggle between Russia and Britain known as the Great Game. Especially after the treaty of Turkmenchay, Russia was the dominant force in Iran, while the Qajars would also play a role in several 'Great Game' battles such as the sieges of Herat in 1837 and 1856.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "As Iran shrank, many South Caucasian and North Caucasian Muslims moved towards Iran, especially until the aftermath of the Circassian genocide, and the decades afterwards, while Iran's Armenians were encouraged to settle in the newly incorporated Russian territories, causing significant demographic shifts. Around 1.5 million people—20 to 25% of the population of Iran—died as a result of the Great Famine of 1870–1872.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Between 1872 and 1905, a series of protests took place in response to the sale of concessions to foreigners by Qajar monarchs Naser-ed-Din and Mozaffar-ed-Din, and led to the Constitutional Revolution in 1905. The first Iranian constitution and the first national parliament of Iran were founded in 1906, through the ongoing revolution. The Constitution included the official recognition of Iran's three religious minorities, namely Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians. The struggle related to the constitutional movement was followed by the Triumph of Tehran in 1909, when Mohammad Ali Shah was forced to abdicate. In 1907, the Anglo-Russian Convention divided Qajar Iran into influence zones, formalising many of the concessions. On the pretext of restoring order, the Russians occupied northern Iran and the city of Tabriz and maintained a military presence in the region for years to come. But this did not put an end to the civil uprisings and was soon followed by Mirza Kuchik Khan's Jungle Movement against both the Qajar monarchy and foreign invaders.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Despite Iran's neutrality during World War I, the Ottoman, Russian, and British Empires occupied the territory of western Iran and fought the Persian campaign before fully withdrawing their forces in 1921. At least 2 million Persian civilians died either directly in the fighting, the Ottoman perpetrated anti-Christian genocides or the war-induced famine of 1917–1919. A large number of Iranian Assyrian and Iranian Armenian Christians, as well as those Muslims who tried to protect them, were victims of mass murders committed by the invading Ottoman troops.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Apart from the rule of Agha Mohammad Khan, the Qajar rule is characterised as a century of misrule. The inability of Qajar Iran's government to maintain the country's sovereignty during and immediately after World War I led to the British directed 1921 Persian coup d'état and Reza Shah's establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty. Reza Shah became the new Prime Minister of Iran and was declared the new monarch in 1925.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In the midst of World War II, in July and August 1941 the British demanded that the Iranian government expel all Germans from Iran. Reza Shah refused to expel the Germans and on 25 August 1941, the British and Soviets launched a surprise invasion and Reza Shah's government quickly surrendered. The invasion's strategic purpose was to secure a supply line to the USSR (later named the Persian Corridor), secure the oil fields and Abadan Refinery (of the UK-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company), prevent a German advance on Baku's oil fields, and limit German influence in Iran. Following the invasion, on 16 September 1941 Reza Shah abdicated and was replaced by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "During the rest of World War II, Iran became a major conduit for British and American aid to the Soviet Union and an avenue through which over 120,000 Polish refugees and Polish Armed Forces fled the Axis advance. At the 1943 Tehran Conference, the Allied \"Big Three\"—Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill—issued the Tehran Declaration to guarantee the post-war independence and boundaries of Iran. However, at the end of the war, Soviet troops remained in Iran and established two puppet states in north-western Iran, namely the People's Government of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Mahabad. This led to the Iran crisis of 1946, one of the first confrontations of the Cold War, which ended after oil concessions were promised to the USSR and Soviet forces withdrew from Iran proper in May 1946. The two puppet states were soon overthrown, and the oil concessions were later revoked.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister of Pahlavi Iran. After the nationalization of Iran's oil industry, he became enormously popular. He was deposed in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, an Anglo-American covert operation that marked the first time the United States had participated in an overthrow of a foreign government during the Cold War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "After the coup, the Shah became increasingly autocratic and sultanistic, and Iran entered a decades-long phase of controversially close relations with the United States and other foreign governments. While the Shah increasingly modernised Iran and claimed to retain it as a fully secular state, arbitrary arrests and torture by his secret police, the SAVAK, were used for crushing political opposition.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Ruhollah Khomeini, a radical Muslim cleric, became an active critic of the Shah's reforms known as the White Revolution. Khomeini publicly denounced the government and was arrested and imprisoned for 18 months. After his release in 1964, he was eventually sent into exile.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Due to the 1973 spike in oil prices, the economy of Iran was flooded with foreign currency, which caused inflation. By 1974, the economy of Iran was experiencing a double-digit inflation rate, and despite the many large projects to modernise the country, corruption was rampant and caused large amounts of waste. By 1975 and 1976, an economic recession led to an increased unemployment rate, especially among millions of youths who had migrated to the cities of Iran looking for construction jobs during the boom years of the early 1970s. By the late 1970s, many of these people opposed the Shah's regime and began organizing and joining the protests against it.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The 1979 Revolution, later known as the Islamic Revolution, began in January 1978 with the first major demonstrations against the Shah. After a year of strikes and demonstrations paralyzing the country and its economy, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled to the United States, and Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran in February 1979, forming a new government. After holding a referendum, Iran officially became an Islamic republic in April 1979. A second referendum in December 1979 approved a theocratic constitution.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Immediate nationwide uprisings against the new government began with the 1979 Kurdish rebellion and the Khuzestan uprisings, along with uprisings in Sistan and Baluchestan and other areas. Over the next several years, these uprisings were subdued violently by the new government. The new government began purging itself of the non-Islamist political opposition, as well as Islamists who were not considered radical enough. Although both nationalists and Marxists had initially joined with Islamists to overthrow the Shah, tens of thousands were executed by the new regime. Following Khomeini's order to purge the new government of any remaining officials still loyal to the exiled Shah, many former ministers and officials in the Shah's government, including former prime minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, were executed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "On 4 November 1979, after the United States refused the extradition of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a group of Muslim students seized the United States Embassy and took the embassy with 52 personnel and citizens hostage. Attempts by the Jimmy Carter administration to negotiate for the release of the hostages, and a failed rescue attempt, helped with the falling popularity of Carter among US citizens and brought Ronald Reagan to power. On Jimmy Carter's final day in office, the last hostages were set free due to the Algiers Accords.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Cultural Revolution began in 1980, with threats to close universities which did not conform to Islamization demands from the new government. These threats were followed by the closure of all universities indefinitely.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "On 22 September 1980, the Iraqi army invaded the western Iranian province of Khuzestan, initiating the Iran–Iraq War. Although the forces of Saddam Hussein made several early advances, by mid-1982, the Iranian forces successfully managed to drive the Iraqi army back into Iraq. In July 1982, Iran decided to invade Iraq and conducted offensives to conquer Iraqi territory and capture cities, such as Basra. The war continued until 1988, when the Iraqi army defeated the Iranian forces inside Iraq and pushed the remaining Iranian troops back across the border. Subsequently, Khomeini accepted a truce mediated by the United Nations. The total Iranian casualties in the war were estimated to be 123,220–160,000 KIA, 60,711 MIA, and 11,000–16,000 civilians killed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Following the Iran–Iraq War, in 1989, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani concentrated on a pragmatic pro-business policy of rebuilding and strengthening the economy without making any dramatic break with the ideology of the revolution. In 1997, Rafsanjani was succeeded by moderate reformist Mohammad Khatami, whose government attempted, unsuccessfully, to make the country freer and more democratic.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The 2005 presidential election brought conservative populist candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to power. By the time of the 2009 Iranian presidential election, the Interior Ministry announced incumbent President Ahmadinejad had won 62.63% of the vote. The election results were widely disputed, and resulted in widespread protests and the creation of the Iranian Green Movement.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Hassan Rouhani was elected as the president on 15 June 2013. The electoral victory of Rouhani relatively improved the relations of Iran with other countries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The 2017–18 Iranian protests swept across the country in response to the economic and political situation. The scale of protests throughout the country and the number of people participating were significant, and it was formally confirmed that thousands of protesters were arrested. The 2019–20 Iranian protests started on 15 November in Ahvaz, spreading across the country within hours, after the government announced increases in the fuel price of up to 300%. A week-long total Internet shutdown throughout the country marked one of the most severe Internet blackouts in any country, and in the bloodiest governmental crackdown of the protestors in the history of Islamic Republic; tens of thousands were arrested and hundreds were killed within a few days according to multiple international observers, including Amnesty International.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "On 3 January 2020, the revolutionary guard's general, Qasem Soleimani, was assassinated by the United States in Iraq, which considerably heightened the existing tensions between the two countries. Three days after, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched a retaliatory attack on US forces in Iraq and by accident shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing all members on board the plane and leading to nation-wide protests. An international investigation led to the government admitting to the shootdown, calling it a \"human error\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Protests against the government began on 16 September 2022 after a woman named Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being arrested by the country's Guidance Patrol, known commonly as the \"morality police\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Iran has an area of 1,648,195 km (636,372 sq mi). It is the fourth-largest country entirely in Asia and the second-largest country in West Asia behind Saudi Arabia. It lies between latitudes 24° and 40° N, and longitudes 44° and 64° E. It is bordered to the northwest by Armenia (35 km or 22 mi), the Azeri exclave of Nakhchivan (179 km or 111 mi), and the Republic of Azerbaijan (611 km or 380 mi); to the north by the Caspian Sea; to the northeast by Turkmenistan (992 km or 616 mi); to the east by Afghanistan (936 km or 582 mi) and Pakistan (909 km or 565 mi); to the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman; and to the west by Iraq (1,458 km or 906 mi) and Turkey (499 km or 310 mi).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Iran is in a seismically active area. On average, an earthquake of magnitude seven on the Richter scale occurs once every ten years. Most earthquakes are shallow-focus and can be very devastating, such as the tragic 2003 Bam earthquake.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Iran consists of the Iranian Plateau, with the exception of the coasts of the Caspian Sea and Khuzestan. It is one of the world's most mountainous countries, its landscape dominated by rugged mountain ranges that separate various basins or plateaus from one another. The populous western part is the most mountainous, with ranges such as the Caucasus, Zagros, and Alborz, the last containing Mount Damavand, Iran's highest point at 5,610 m (18,406 ft), which is also the highest mountain in Asia west of the Hindu Kush.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The northern part of Iran is covered by the lush lowland Caspian Hyrcanian mixed forests, located near the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. The eastern part consists mostly of desert basins, such as the Kavir Desert, which is the country's largest desert, and the Lut Desert, as well as some salt lakes. Iran had a 2019 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 7.67/10, ranking it 34th out of 172 countries.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Lut Desert is the hottest recored spot on the earth surface according to NASA. 70.7°C was recored in 2005, and the Lut has taken the hottest top spot annually.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The only large plains are found along the coast of the Caspian Sea and at the northern end of the Persian Gulf, where the country borders the mouth of the Arvand river. Smaller, discontinuous plains are found along the remaining coast of the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Gulf of Oman.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Iran's climate is diverse, ranging from arid and semi-arid, to subtropical along the Caspian coast and the northern forests. On the northern edge of the country (the Caspian coastal plain), temperatures rarely fall below freezing and the area remains humid for the rest of the year. Summer temperatures rarely exceed 29 °C (84.2 °F). Annual precipitation is 680 mm (26.8 in) in the eastern part of the plain and more than 1,700 mm (66.9 in) in the western part. Gary Lewis, the United Nations Resident Coordinator for Iran, has said that \"Water scarcity poses the most severe human security challenge in Iran today\".",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "To the west, settlements in the Zagros basin experience lower temperatures, severe winters with below zero average daily temperatures and heavy snowfall. The eastern and central basins are arid, with less than 200 mm (7.9 in) of rain and have occasional deserts. Average summer temperatures rarely exceed 38 °C (100.4 °F). The coastal plains of the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman in southern Iran have mild winters, and very humid and hot summers. The annual precipitation ranges from 135 to 355 mm (5.3 to 14.0 in).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Iran is the largest of the few countries in the world which have not ratified the Paris Agreement.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The wildlife of Iran includes bears, the Eurasian lynx, foxes, gazelles, gray wolves, jackals, panthers, and wild pigs. Eagles, falcons, partridges, pheasants, and storks are also native to Iran.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "One of the most famous species of animal is the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah, also known as the Iranian cheetah, whose numbers were greatly reduced after the 1979 Revolution. The Persian leopard, which is the world's largest leopard subspecies and lives primarily in northern Iran, is also endangered. Iran lost all its Asiatic lions and the now extinct Caspian tigers by the earlier part of the 20th century.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "At least 74 species of Iranian wildlife are on the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The Iranian Parliament has been showing disregard for wildlife by passing laws and regulations such as the act that lets the Ministry of Industries and Mines exploit mines without the involvement of the Department of Environment, and by approving large national development projects without demanding comprehensive study of their impact on wildlife habitats.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Iran is divided into five regions with 31 provinces (ostān, استان), each governed by an appointed governor (ostāndār, استاندار). The provinces are divided into counties (šahrestān, شهرستان), and subdivided into districts (baxš, بخش) and sub-districts (dehestān, دهستان).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The country has one of the highest urban growth rates in the world. From 1950 to 2002, the urban proportion of the population increased from 27% to 60%. Iran's population is concentrated in its western half, especially in the north, north-west and west of the country.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Tehran, with a population of around 8.8 million (2016 census), is Iran's capital and largest city. It is an economical and cultural center and is the hub of the country's communication and transport network. It is also home to the world's largest shopping mall, Iran Mall.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The country's second most populous city, Mashhad, has a population of around 3.3 million (2016 census), and is capital of the province of Razavi Khorasan. Being the site of the Imam Reza shrine, it is a holy city in Shia Islam. About 15 to 20 million pilgrims visit the shrine every year. Isfahan has a population of around 2.2 million (2016 census) and is Iran's third most populous city. It is the capital of Isfahan province and was also the third capital of the Safavid Empire. It is home to a wide variety of historical sites, including the famous Shah Square, Siosepol, and the churches at the Armenian district of New Julfa. It is also home to one of the world's largest shopping malls, Isfahan City Center.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The political system of the Islamic Republic is based on the 1979 Constitution. Juan José Linz wrote in 2000 that \"it is difficult to fit the Iranian regime into the existing typology, as it combines the ideological bent of totalitarianism with the limited pluralism of authoritarianism and holds regular elections in which candidates advocating differing policies and incumbents are often defeated\". Iran ranked 154th in the 2022 The Economist Democracy Index.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Leader of the Revolution (\"Rahbar\") is the head of state of Iran and is responsible for delineation and supervision of policy. The Iranian president has limited power compared to the Rahbar Khamenei. The current longtime Rahbar is Ali Khamenei. Key ministers are selected with the Rahbar Ali Khamenei's agreement and he has the ultimate say on Iran's foreign policy. The Rahbar is directly involved in ministerial appointments for Defense, Intelligence and Foreign Affairs, as well as other top ministries after submission of candidates from the president. Iran's regional policy is directly controlled by the office of the Rahbar with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' task limited to protocol and ceremonial occasions. All of Iran's ambassadors to Arab countries, for example, are chosen by the Quds Corps, which directly reports to the Rahbar. The Rahbar can also order laws to be amended. Setad is estimated at $95 billion in 2013 by Reuters, accounts of which are secret even to the Iranian parliament.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The Rahbar is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, controls the military intelligence and security operations, and has sole power to declare war or peace. The heads of the judiciary, the state radio and television networks, the commanders of the police and military forces, and six of the twelve members of the Guardian Council are directly appointed by the Rahbar.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The Assembly of Experts is responsible for electing the Rahbar, and has the power to dismiss him on the basis of qualifications and popular esteem. To date, the Assembly of Experts has not challenged any of the Rahbar's decisions nor attempted to dismiss him. The previous head of the judicial system, Sadeq Larijani, appointed by the Rahbar, said that it is illegal for the Assembly of Experts to supervise the Rahbar. Many believe the Assembly of Experts has become a ceremonial body without any real power. There have been instances when the current Rahbar publicly criticised members of the Assembly of Experts, resulting in their arrest and dismissal.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Presidential candidates and parliamentary candidates must be approved by the Guardian Council (all members of which are directly or indirectly appointed by the Leader) or the Leader before running to ensure their allegiance. The Leader very rarely does the vetting himself directly but has the power to do so, in which case additional approval of the Guardian Council would not be needed. The Leader can also revert the decisions of the Guardian Council. The Guardian Council can and has dismissed elected members of the Iranian parliament in the past.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "After the Rahbar, the Constitution defines the president of Iran as the highest state authority. The President is elected by universal suffrage for a term of four years, but is required to gain the Leader's official approval before being sworn in before the Parliament (Majlis). The Leader also has the power to dismiss the elected president. The President can only be re-elected for one term.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "The President is responsible for the implementation of the constitution, and for the exercise of executive powers in implementing the decrees and general policies as outlined by the Rahbar, except for matters directly related to the Rahbar, who has the final say in all matters. Chapter IX of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran sets forth the qualifications for presidential candidates. The procedures for presidential election and all other elections in Iran are outlined by the Rahbar. The President functions as the executive of affairs such as signing treaties and other international agreements, and administering national planning, budget, and state employment affairs, all as approved by the Rahbar.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The President appoints the ministers, subject to the approval of the Parliament, as well as the approval of the Rahbar, who can dismiss or reinstate any of the ministers at any time, regardless of the decisions made by the President or the Parliament. The President supervises the Council of Ministers, coordinates government decisions, and selects government policies to be placed before the legislature. The current Rahbar, Ali Khamenei, has fired as well as reinstated Council of Ministers members. Eight Vice Presidents serve under the President, as well as a cabinet of twenty-two ministers, who must all be approved by the legislature.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The legislature of Iran, known as the Islamic Consultative Assembly, is a unicameral body comprising 290 members elected for four-year terms. It drafts legislation, ratifies international treaties, and approves the national budget. All parliamentary candidates and all legislation from the assembly must be approved by the Guardian Council.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The Guardian Council comprises twelve jurists, including six appointed by the Rahbar. Others are elected by the Parliament, from among the jurists nominated by the Head of the Judiciary. The Council interprets the constitution and may veto the Parliament. If a law is deemed incompatible with the constitution or Sharia (Islamic law), it is referred back to the Parliament for revision. The Expediency Council has the authority to mediate disputes between the Parliament and the Guardian Council, and serves as an advisory body to the Rahbar, making it one of the most powerful governing bodies in the country. Local city councils are elected by public vote to four-year terms in all cities and villages of Iran.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The Rahbar appoints the head of the country's judiciary, appointing the head of the Supreme Court and the chief public prosecutor. There are several types of courts, including public courts that deal with civil and criminal cases, and revolutionary courts which deal with certain categories of offenses, such as crimes against national security. The decisions of the revolutionary courts are final and cannot be appealed.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The Chief Justice of Iran is the head of the Judicial system of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is responsible for its administration and supervision. He is also the highest judge of the Supreme Court of Iran. The Rahbar of Iran appoints and can dismiss the Chief Justice. The Chief Justice nominates some candidates for serving as minister of justice, and then the President select one of them. The Chief Justice can serve for two five-year terms.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The Special Clerical Court handles crimes allegedly committed by clerics, although it has also taken on cases involving laypeople. The Special Clerical Court functions independently of the regular judicial framework and is accountable only to the Rahbar. The Court's rulings are final and cannot be appealed. The Assembly of Experts, which meets for one week annually, comprises 86 \"virtuous and learned\" clerics elected by adult suffrage for eight-year terms.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Since the time of the 1979 Revolution, Iran's foreign relations have often been portrayed as being based on two strategic principles: eliminating outside influences in its region and pursuing extensive diplomatic contacts with developing and non-aligned countries.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Since 2005, Iran's nuclear program has become the subject of contention with the international community, mainly the United States. Many countries have expressed concern that Iran's nuclear program could divert civilian nuclear technology into a weapons program. This has led the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions against Iran which had further isolated Iran politically and economically from the rest of the global community. In 2009, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence said that Iran, if choosing to, would not be able to develop a nuclear weapon until 2013.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "As of 2009, the government of Iran maintains diplomatic relations with 99 members of the United Nations, but not with the United States, and not with Israel—a state which Iran's government has derecognised since the 1979 Revolution. Among Muslim nations, Iran has an adversarial relationship with Saudi Arabia due to different political and Islamic ideologies. Regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the government of Iran has recognised Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine, after Trump recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Since the 2000s, Iran's controversial nuclear program has raised concerns, which is part of the basis of the international sanctions against the country. On 14 July 2015, Iran and the P5+1 agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan on Action (JCPOA), aiming to end economic sanctions in exchange for Iran's restriction in producing enriched uranium after demonstrating a peaceful nuclear research project that would meet the International Atomic Energy Agency standards.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Iran is a member of dozens of international organizations, including the G-15, G-24, G-77, IAEA, IBRD, IDA, IDB, IFC, ILO, IMF, IMO, Interpol, OIC, OPEC, WHO, and the United Nations, and currently has observer status at the World Trade Organization.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Iran is fast approaching to become a nuclear-power state, and has uranium enriched to up to 60% purity as of November 2023, close to weapon grade. Iran has been seeking nuclear weapons for decades, a program which the US and other Western nations have vowed to stop, hammering the nation with sanctions. The country's ballistic missile, space, and nuclear programs are internationally hot political topics. Iran is one of the five countries in the world that has cyber-army capabilities, making the country a major player in terms of cyber-warfare operations.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Iran possesses the world's 17th strongest military. The Islamic Republic of Iran Armed Forces, or Artesh in Persian language, ranks 13th globally in terms of military strength. It is the 9th largest ground force in the world, the 9th largest armoured force globally and possesses the biggest Army Aviation fleet in the Middle East. It is also the largest Armed forces in West Asia. Iran ranks 7th globally in terms of active military personnel.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The Islamic Republic of Iran Armed Forces has several components: the regular forces of the Army, which includes the Ground Forces, the Air Defense Force, the Air Force, and the Navy, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), totaling about 610,000 active troops. Iran also has around 350,000 Reserve Force, totaling around 960,000 trained troops. These numbers do not include Law Enforcement Command or Basij. While the regular army protects the country's sovereignty in a traditional capacity, the IRGC's mandate is to ensure the integrity of the Islamic Republic.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "As first introduced by Reza Pahlavi in June 1925, all young men who reach the age of 18 must spend about two years of compulsory military service in the Iranian army, or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Iran has a paramilitary, volunteer militia force within the IRGC, called the Basij, which includes about 90,000 full-time, active-duty uniformed members. Up to 25 million men and women are members of the Basij, with over 600,000 available for immediate call-up, 300,000 reservists, and some 1 million that could be mobilized when necessary. In 2021, Iran's military spending increased for the first time in four years, to $24.6 billion, 2.30% of country's GDP. Funding for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps accounted for %34 of Iran's total military spending in 2021. Iran is among the world's top 15 countries in terms of military budget.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Iran has significant influence and foothold in countries such as Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. The government of Iran supports the military activities of its allies in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon (Hezbollah) with military and financial aid. Iran and Syria are close strategic allies, and Iran has provided significant support for the Syrian Government in the Syrian civil war. According to some estimates, Iran controlled over 80,000 pro-Assad Shi'ite fighters in Syria.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Since the 1979 Revolution, to overcome foreign embargoes, the government of Iran has developed its own military industry, produced its own tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles, submarines, military vessels, missile destroyer, radar systems, helicopters, navies and fighter planes. In recent years, official announcements have highlighted the development of weapons such as the Hoot, Kowsar, Zelzal, Fateh-110, Shahab-3, Sejjil, Khorramahahr, Kheibar Shekan, Emad, Ghadr-110, Hormuz-1, Dezful, Qiam 1, Ashoura, Fajr-3, Haj Qasem, Persian Gulf, Raad-500, Zolfaghar and a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Iran has the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East. Iran is considered as a global leader and superpower in terms of drone production. Iran is the 5th country in the world with hypersonic missile technology, alongside Russia, China, United States and North Korea.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Iran's human rights record is exceptionally poor. The regime in Iran is undemocratic, has frequently persecuted and arrested critics of the government and its Rahbar, and severely restricts the participation of candidates in popular elections as well as other forms of political activity. Women's rights in Iran are described as seriously inadequate, and children's rights have been severely violated, with more child offenders being executed in Iran than in any other country in the world. Sexual activity between members of the same sex is illegal and is punishable by up to death.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "UN Special Rapporteur Javaid Rehman has reported of several ethnic minorities in Iran facing discrimination. A group of UN experts in August 2022 urged Iran to stop \"systematic persecution\" of religious minorities, adding that members of the Baháʼí Faith were arrested, barred from university enrolment, or had their homes demolished. USCIRF Chair Nury Turkel in January 2023 noted that there was repression of Sunni Muslims, Gonabadi Sufi Muslims, Christians and Yarsanis in the country.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Over the past decade, numbers of anti-government protests have broken out throughout Iran (such as the 2019–20 Iranian protests), demanding reforms or the end to the Islamic Republic. However, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and police often suppressed mass protests violently, resulting in thousands of protesters being killed.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Censorship in Iran under the government of the Islamic Republic was ranked among the most extreme worldwide. Iran also has strict regulations when it comes to internet censorship, with the government and the IRGC persistently blocking social media and other websites. In January 2021, Iranian authorities added Signal to the list of blocked social media platforms, which included Facebook, Telegram, Twitter and YouTube. They carried out arbitrary arrests for social media postings deemed \"counter-revolutionary\" or \"un-Islamic\".",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Iran's economy is a mixture of central planning, state ownership of oil and other large enterprises, village agriculture, and small-scale private trading and service ventures. In 2022, Iran's nominal GDP was $352.2 billion, while its nominal GDP per capita was $4,110. Iran is ranked as a lower-middle income economy by the World Bank. In the early 21st century, the service sector contributed the largest percentage of the GDP, followed by industry (mining and manufacturing) and agriculture.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The Central Bank of Iran is responsible for developing and maintaining the Iranian rial, the country's currency. The government does not recognise trade unions other than the Islamic labour councils, which are subject to the approval of employers and the security services. The minimum wage in June 2013 was 487 million rials a month ($134). Unemployment has remained above 10% since 1997, and the unemployment rate for women is almost double that of the men.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "In 2006, about 45% of the government's budget came from oil and natural gas revenues, and 31% came from taxes and fees. As of 2007, Iran had earned $70 billion in foreign-exchange reserves, mostly (80%) from crude oil exports. Iranian budget deficits have been a chronic problem, mostly due to large-scale state subsidies, that include foodstuffs and especially gasoline, totaling more than $84 billion in 2008 for the energy sector alone. In 2010, the economic reform plan was approved by parliament to cut subsidies gradually and replace them with targeted social assistance. The objective is to move towards free market prices in a five-year period and increase productivity and social justice.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The administration continues to follow the market reform plans of the previous one, and indicates that it will diversify Iran's oil-reliant economy. Iran has also developed a biotechnology, nanotechnology, and pharmaceutical industry. However, nationalised industries such as the bonyads have often been managed badly, making them ineffective and uncompetitive. Currently, the government is trying to privatise these industries, and, despite successes, there are still several problems to overcome, such as the lagging corruption in the public sector and lack of competitiveness.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Iran has leading manufacturing industries in the fields of automobile manufacture, transportation, construction materials, home appliances, food and agricultural goods, armaments, pharmaceuticals, information technology, and petrochemicals in the Middle East. According to 2012 data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, Iran has been among the world's top five producers of apricots, cherries, sour cherries, cucumbers and gherkins, dates, eggplants, figs, pistachios, quinces, walnuts, and watermelons.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Economic sanctions against Iran have damaged the economy. In 2015, Iran and the P5+1 reached a deal on the nuclear program that removed the main sanctions pertaining to Iran's nuclear program by 2016. According to the BBC, renewed U.S. sanctions against Iran \"have led to a sharp downturn in Iran's economy, pushing the value of its currency to record lows, quadrupling its annual inflation rate, driving away foreign investors, and triggering protests\".",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Although tourism declined significantly during the war with Iraq, it has been subsequently recovered. About 2.3 million foreign tourists visited Iran in 2009, mostly from Asian countries, including the republics of Central Asia, while about 10% came from the European Union and North America. Since the removal of some sanctions against Iran in 2015, tourism has re-surged in the country. Over 5 million tourists visited Iran in the fiscal year of 2014–2015, four percent more than the previous year.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Alongside the capital, the most popular tourist destinations are Isfahan, Shiraz and Mashhad. Iran has millions of medical tourists every year, fast emerging as a preferred destination for medical tourism. Iran had nearly 9 million foreign tourists in 2019, the world's third fastest-growing tourism destination before COVID. Domestic tourism in Iran is one of the largest in the world, with the Iranian tourists spent $33.3 billion in 2021. Iran projects investment of over $32 billion in the country's tourism sector and targets 20 million tourists by 2025.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Iran has a long paved road system linking most of its towns and all of its cities. In 2011 the country had 173,000 kilometers (107,000 mi) of roads, of which 73% were paved. In 2008 there were nearly 100 passenger cars for every 1,000 inhabitants.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "The Tehran Metro is the largest metro system in the Middle East. It carries more than 3 million passengers a day. In 2018, 820 million trips were made on Tehran Metro. Trains operate on 11,106 km (6,942 mi) of railroad track. The country's major port of entry is Bandar-Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz. After arriving in Iran, imported goods are distributed throughout the country by trucks and freight trains. The Tehran–Bandar-Abbas railroad, opened in 1995, connects Bandar-Abbas to the railroad system of Central Asia via Tehran and Mashhad. Other major ports include Bandar e-Anzali and Bandar e-Torkeman on the Caspian Sea and Khorramshahr and Bandar-e Emam Khomeyni on the Persian Gulf.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Dozens of cities have airports that serve passenger and cargo planes. Iran Air, the national airline, was founded in 1962 and operated domestic and international flights. All large cities have mass transit systems using buses, and several private companies provide bus services between cities.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Transport in Iran is inexpensive because of the government's subsidization of the price of gasoline. The downside is a huge draw on government coffers, economic inefficiency because of highly wasteful consumption patterns, smuggling to neighboring countries and air pollution. In 2008, more than one million people worked in the transportation sector, accounting for 9% of GDP.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Iran has the world's second largest proved gas reserves after Russia, with 33.6 trillion cubic meters, and the third largest natural gas production after Indonesia and Russia. It also ranks fourth in oil reserves with an estimated 153,600,000,000 barrels. It is OPEC's second largest oil exporter. Despite this, Iran spent US$4 billion on fuel imports as of 2005 due to a lack of domestic refining capacity. Oil industry output averaged 4 million barrels per day (640,000 m/d) in 2005, compared with the peak of six million barrels per day reached in 1974.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "In 2004, a large share of Iran's natural gas reserves were untapped. The addition of new hydroelectric stations and the streamlining of conventional coal and oil-fired stations increased installed capacity to 33,000 megawatts. Of that amount, about 75% was based on natural gas, 18% on oil, and 7% on hydroelectric power. In 2004, Iran opened its first wind-powered and geothermal plants, and the first solar thermal plant was to come online in 2009. Iran is the world's third country to have developed GTL technology.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Demographic trends and intensified industrialization have caused electric power demand to grow by 8% per year. The government's goal of 53,000 megawatts of installed capacity by 2010 is to be reached by bringing on line new gas-fired plants, and adding hydropower and nuclear power generation capacity. Iran's first nuclear power plant at Bushire went online in 2011. It is the second nuclear power plant ever built in the Middle East after the Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant in Armenia.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Education in Iran is highly centralised. K–12 is supervised by the Ministry of Education, and higher education is under the supervision of the Ministry of Science and Technology.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "The rate of adult literacy (among Iranians of ages 10 to 49) has reached 96% on March 19, 2020; while according to UNESCO it had rated 85.0% in 2008 (up from 36.5% in 1976).",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "According to the data provided by UNESCO, Iran's literacy rate among people aged 15 years and older was 85.54% as of 2016, with men (90.35%) being significantly more educated than women (80.79%), with the number of illiterate people of the same age amounting to around 8,700,000 of the country's 85 million population. According to this report, Iranian government's expenditure on education amounts to around 4% of the GDP.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "The requirement to enter into higher education is to have a high school diploma and pass the Iranian University Entrance Exam (officially known as konkur (کنکور)), which is the equivalent of the SAT and ACT exams of the United States. Many students do a 1–2-year course of pre-university (piš-dānešgāh), which is the equivalent of the GCE A-levels and the International Baccalaureate. The completion of the pre-university course earns students the Pre-University Certificate.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Iran's higher education is sanctioned by different levels of diplomas, including an associate degree (kārdāni; also known as fowq e diplom) delivered in two years, a bachelor's degree (kāršenāsi; also known as lisāns) delivered in four years, and a master's degree (kāršenāsi e aršad) delivered in two years, after which another exam allows the candidate to pursue a doctoral program (PhD; known as doktorā).",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "According to the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (as of January 2017), Iran's top five universities include Tehran University of Medical Sciences (478th worldwide), the University of Tehran (514th worldwide), Sharif University of Technology (605th worldwide), Amirkabir University of Technology (726th worldwide), and the Tarbiat Modares University (789th worldwide). Iran was ranked 62nd in the Global Innovation Index in 2023, up from 67th in 2020.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Iran has increased its publication output nearly tenfold from 1996 through 2004, and has been ranked first in terms of output growth rate, followed by China. According to a study by SCImago in 2012, Iran would rank fourth in the world in terms of research output by 2018, if the current trend persists.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "In 2009, a SUSE Linux-based HPC system made by the Aerospace Research Institute of Iran (ARI) was launched with 32 cores, and now runs 96 cores. Its performance was pegged at 192 GFLOPS. The Iranian humanoid robot Sorena 2, which was designed by engineers at the University of Tehran, was unveiled in 2010. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has placed the name of Surena among the five prominent robots of the world after analyzing its performance.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "In the biomedical sciences, Iran's Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics has a UNESCO chair in biology. In late 2006, Iranian scientists successfully cloned a sheep by somatic cell nuclear transfer, at the Royan Research Center in Tehran.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "According to a study by David Morrison and Ali Khadem Hosseini (Harvard-MIT and Cambridge), stem cell research in Iran is among the top 10 in the world. Iran ranks 15th in the world in nanotechnologies.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Iran placed its domestically built satellite Omid into orbit on the 30th anniversary of the 1979 Revolution, on 2 February 2009, through its first expendable launch vehicle Safir, becoming the ninth country in the world capable of both producing a satellite and sending it into space from a domestically made launcher.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "The Iranian nuclear program was launched in the 1950s. Iran is the seventh country to produce uranium hexafluoride, and controls the entire nuclear fuel cycle.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Iranian scientists outside Iran have also made some major contributions to science. In 1960, Ali Javan co-invented the first gas laser, and fuzzy set theory was introduced by Lotfi A. Zadeh. Iranian cardiologist Tofigh Mussivand invented and developed the first artificial cardiac pump, the precursor of the artificial heart. Furthering research and treatment of diabetes, the HbA1c was discovered by Samuel Rahbar. A substantial number of papers in string theory are published in Iran. In August 2014, Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman, as well as the first Iranian, to receive the Fields Medal, the highest prize in mathematics.",
"title": "Education, science and technology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "Iran is a diverse country, consisting of numerous ethnic and linguistic groups that are unified through a shared Iranian nationality.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "Iran's population grew rapidly during the latter half of the 20th century, increasing from about 19 million in 1956 to about 85 million by February 2023. However, Iran's fertility rate has dropped significantly in recent years, coming down from a fertility rate of 6.5 per woman to just a little more than 1.7 two decades later, leading to a population growth rate of about 1.39% as of 2018. Due to its young population, studies project that the growth will continue to slow until it stabilises around 105 million by 2050.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Iran hosts one of the largest refugee populations in the world, with almost one million refugees, mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq. Since 2006, Iranian officials have been working with the UNHCR and Afghan officials for their repatriation. According to estimates, about five million Iranian citizens have emigrated to other countries, mostly since the 1979 Revolution.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "According to the Iranian Constitution, the government is required to provide every citizen of the country with access to social security, covering retirement, unemployment, old age, disability, accidents, calamities, health and medical treatment and care services. This is covered by tax revenues and income derived from public contributions.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "The majority of the population speaks Persian, which is also the official language of the country. Others include speakers of several other Iranian languages within the greater Indo-European family and languages belonging to some other ethnicities living in Iran.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "The Gilaki and Mazenderani languages are widely spoken in Gilan and Mazenderan, in northern Iran. The Talysh language is also spoken in parts of Gilan, stretching up to the neighboring Republic of Azerbaijan. Varieties of Kurdish are concentrated in the province of Kurdistan and nearby areas. In Khuzestan, several distinct varieties of Persian are spoken. Southern Iran also houses the Luri and Lari languages.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "Azerbaijani, the most-spoken minority language in the country, and other Turkic languages and dialects are found in various regions of Iran, especially in the region of Azerbaijan.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "Notable minority languages in Iran include Armenian, Georgian, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic. Khuzi Arabic is spoken by the Arabs in Khuzestan, as well as the wider group of Iranian Arabs. Circassian was also once widely spoken by the large Circassian minority, but, due to assimilation over the many years, no sizable number of Circassians speak the language anymore.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "Percentages of spoken language continue to be a point of debate, as many opt that they are politically motivated; most notably regarding the largest and second largest ethnicities in Iran, the Persians and Azerbaijanis. Percentages given by the CIA's World Factbook include 53% Persian, 16% Azerbaijani, 10% Kurdish, 7% Mazenderani and Gilaki, 7% Luri, 2% Turkmen, 2% Balochi, 2% Arabic, and 2% the remainder Armenian, Georgian, Neo-Aramaic, and Circassian.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "As with the spoken languages, the ethnic group composition also remains a point of debate, mainly regarding the largest and second largest ethnic groups, the Persians and Azerbaijanis, due to the lack of Iranian state censuses based on ethnicity. The CIA's World Factbook has estimated that around 79% of the population of Iran is a diverse Indo-European ethno-linguistic group that comprise speakers of various Iranian languages, with Persians (including Mazenderanis and Gilaks) constituting 61% of the population, Kurds 10%, Lurs 6%, and Balochs 2%. Peoples of other ethnolinguistic groups make up the remaining 21%, with Azerbaijanis constituting 16%, Arabs 2%, Turkmens and other Turkic tribes 2%, and others (such as Armenians, Talysh, Georgians, Circassians, Assyrians) 1%.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "The Library of Congress issued slightly different estimates: 65% Persians (including Mazenderanis, Gilaks, and the Talysh), 16% Azerbaijanis, 7% Kurds, 6% Lurs, 2% Baloch, 1% Turkic tribal groups (incl. Qashqai and Turkmens), and non-Iranian, non-Turkic groups (incl. Armenians, Georgians, Assyrians, Circassians, and Arabs) less than 3%. It determined that Persian is the first language of at least 65% of the country's population, and is the second language for most of the remaining 35%.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "Twelver Shia Islam is the official state religion, to which about 90% to 95% of the population adhere. The official motto of the country is the Islamic takbir. About 4% to 8% of the population are Sunni Muslims, mainly Kurds and Baloches. The remaining 2% are non-Muslim religious minorities, including Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Baháʼís, Mandaeans, and Yarsanis.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "A 2020 survey by the World Values Survey found that 96.6% of Iranians believe in Islam. On the other hand, another 2020 survey conducted online by an organization based outside of Iran found a much smaller percentage of Iranians identifying as Muslim (32.2% as Shia, 5.0% as Sunni, and 3.2% as Sufi), and a significant fraction not identifying with any organised religion (22.2% identifying as \"None,\" and some others identifying as atheists, spiritual, agnostics, and secular humanists). In 2021, Gamaan, a Dutch research group, conducted an online poll with around 50,000 Iranian respondents, revealing that roughly half reported a change or loss in their religious affiliation. Less than a third adhere to Sh'ia Islam. Despite the ban on proselytizing in the country, there is a noticeable surge in interest in non-Muslim faiths like Zoroastrianism, Christianity and the Baha'i Faith. According to the CIA World Factbook, around 90–95% of Iranian Muslims associate themselves with the Shia branch of Islam, the official state religion, and about 5–10% with the Sunni and Sufi branches.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "There are a large population of adherents of Yarsanism, a Kurdish indigenous religion, making it the largest (unrecognised) minority religion in Iran. Its followers are mainly Gorani Kurds and certain groups of Lurs. They are based in Kurdistan Province, Kermanshah Province and Lorestan mainly.Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and the Sunni branch of Islam are officially recognised by the government and have reserved seats in the Iranian Parliament. Historically, early Iranian religions such as the Proto-Iranic religion and the subsequent Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism were the dominant religions in Iran, particularly during the Median, Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian eras. This changed after the fall of the Sasanian Empire by the centuries-long Islamization that followed the Muslim Conquest of Iran. Iran was predominantly Sunni until the conversion of the country (as well as the people of what is today the neighboring Republic of Azerbaijan) to Shia Islam by order of the Safavid dynasty in the 16th century.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Judaism has a long history in Iran, dating back to the Achaemenid conquest of Babylonia. Although many left in the wake of the establishment of the State of Israel and the 1979 Revolution, about 8,756 to 25,000 Jewish people live in Iran. Iran has the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Around 250,000 to 370,000 Christians reside in Iran, and Christianity is the country's largest recognised minority religion. Most are of Armenian background, as well as a sizable minority of Assyrians. A large number of Iranians have converted to Christianity from the predominant Shia Islam.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "The Baháʼí Faith is not officially recognised and has been subject to official persecution. According to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, Baháʼís are the largest non-Muslim religious minority in Iran, with an estimated 350,000 adherents. Since the 1979 Revolution, the persecution of Baháʼís has increased.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "Iranian officials have continued to support the rebuilding and renovation of Armenian churches in Iran. The Armenian Monastic Ensembles of Iran has also received continued support. In 2019, the Iranian government registered the Holy Savior Cathedral, commonly referred to as Vank Cathedral, in the New Julfa district of Isfahan, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with significant expenditures for its congregation. Currently three Armenian churches in Iran have been included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "The art of Iran encompasses many disciplines, including architecture, stonemasonry, metalworking, weaving, pottery, painting, and calligraphy. Iranian works of art show a great variety in style, in different regions and periods. The art of the Medes remains obscure, but has been theoretically attributed to the Scythian style. The Achaemenids borrowed heavily from the art of their neighboring civilizations, but produced a synthesis of a unique style, with an eclectic architecture remaining at sites such as Persepolis and Pasargadae. Greek iconography was imported by the Seleucids, followed by the recombination of Hellenistic and earlier Near Eastern elements in the art of the Parthians, with remains such as the Temple of Anahita and the Statue of the Parthian Nobleman.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "By the time of the Sasanians, Iranian art came across a general renaissance. Taq-e-Bostan, Taq-e-Kasra, Naqsh-e-Rostam, and the Shapur-Khwast Castle are among the surviving monuments from the Sasanian period. During the Middle Ages, Sasanian art played a prominent role in the formation of both European and Asian medieval art, which carried forward to the Islamic world, and much of what later became known as Islamic learning—including medicine, architecture, philosophy, philology, and literature—were of Sasanian basis. The Safavid era is known as the Golden Age of Iranian art. Safavid art exerted noticeable influences upon the neighboring Ottomans, the Mughals, and the Deccans, and was also influential through its fashion and garden architecture on 11th–17th-century Europe.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "Iran's contemporary art traces its origins back to the time of Kamal-ol-molk, a prominent realist painter at the court of the Qajar dynasty who affected the norms of painting and adopted a naturalistic style that would compete with photographic works. A new Iranian school of fine art was established by Kamal-ol-Molk in 1928, and was followed by the so-called \"coffeehouse\" style of painting.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "Iran's avant-garde modernists emerged by the arrival of new western influences during World War II. The vibrant contemporary art scene originates in the late 1940s, and Tehran's first modern art gallery, Apadana, was opened in September 1949 by painters Mahmud Javadipur, Hosein Kazemi, and Hushang Ajudani. The new movements received official encouragement by the mid-1950s, which led to the emergence of artists such as Marcos Grigorian.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "The history of architecture in Iran goes back to the seventh millennium BC, and the Iranians made early use of mathematics, geometry and astronomy in their architecture, yielding a tradition with both great structural and aesthetic variety developed out of earlier forms. The guiding motif of Iranian architecture is its cosmic symbolism. Iran ranks seventh among UNESCO's list of countries with the most archaeological ruins and attractions from antiquity.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "Iran's carpet-weaving has its origins in the Bronze Age and is one of the most distinguished manifestations of Iranian art. Iran is the world's largest producer and exporter of handmade carpets, producing three-quarters of the world's total output and having a share of 30% of world's export markets.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "Iran's oldest literary tradition is that of Avestan, the Old Iranian sacred language of the Avesta, which consists of the legendary and religious texts of Zoroastrianism and the ancient Iranian religion, with its earliest records dating back to the pre-Achaemenid times.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "Of the various modern languages used in Iran, Persian, various dialects of which are spoken throughout the Iranian Plateau, has the most influential literature. Persian has been dubbed as a worthy language to serve as a conduit for poetry, and is considered one of the four main bodies of world literature. Despite originating from the region of Persis (better known as Persia) in southwestern Iran, the Persian language was used and developed further through Persianate societies in Asia Minor, Central Asia, and South Asia, leaving massive influences on Ottoman and Mughal literatures, among others.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "Iran has a number of famous medieval poets, most notably Rumi, Ferdowsi, Hafez, Sa'adi, Omar Khayyam, and Nezami Ganjavi. Iranian literature also inspired writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "Iranian philosophy originates from Indo-European roots, with Zoroaster's reforms having major influences. According to The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, the chronology of the subject and science of philosophy starts with the Indo-Iranians, dating this event to 1500 BC.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "The Cyrus Cylinder, which is known as \"the first charter of human rights\", is often seen as a reflection of the questions and thoughts expressed by Zoroaster and developed in Zoroastrian schools of the Achaemenid era. The earliest tenets of Zoroastrian schools are part of the extant scriptures of the Zoroastrian religion in Avestan. Among them are treatises such as the Zatspram, Shkand-gumanik Vizar, and Denkard, as well as older passages of the Avesta and the Gathas. Contemporary Iranian philosophy has been limited in its scope by the intellectual repression in the country.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "Iranian mythology consists of ancient Iranian folklore and stories of extraordinary beings reflecting on good and evil, actions of the gods, and the exploits of heroes and fabulous creatures. The tenth-century Persian poet, Ferdowsi, is the author of the epic poem known as the Šāhnāme (\"Book of Kings\"), which is for the most part based on Xwadāynāmag, a Middle Persian compilation of the history of Iranian kings and heroes from mythical times down to the reign of Chosroes II. The Shahnameh is considered the national epic of Iran and draws heavily on the stories and characters of the Zoroastrian tradition, from the texts of the Avesta, the Denkard, and the Bundahishn.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 156,
"text": "Iran is the apparent birthplace of the earliest complex instruments, dating back to the third millennium BC. The use of both vertical and horizontal angular harps have been documented at the sites Madaktu and Kul-e Farah, with the largest collection of Elamite instruments documented at Kul-e Farah. Multiple depictions of horizontal harps were also sculpted in Assyrian palaces, dating back between 865 and 650 BC.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 157,
"text": "Xenophon's Cyropaedia mentions a great number of singing women at the court of the Achaemenid Empire. Athenaeus of Naucratis, in his Deipnosophistae, points out to the capture of Achaemenid singing girls at the court of the last Achaemenid king Darius III (336–330 BC) by Macedonian general Parmenion. Under the Parthian Empire, the gōsān (Parthian for \"minstrel\") had a prominent role in the society.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 158,
"text": "The history of Sasanian music is better documented than the earlier periods and is especially more evident in Avestan texts. By the time of Chosroes II, the Sasanian royal court hosted a number of prominent musicians, namely Azad, Bamshad, Barbad, Nagisa, Ramtin, and Sarkash.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 159,
"text": "Iranian traditional musical instruments include string instruments such as chang (harp), qanun, santur, rud (oud, barbat), tar, dotar, setar, tanbur, and kamanche, wind instruments such as sorna (zurna, karna) and ney, and percussion instruments such as tompak, kus, daf (dayere), and naqare.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 160,
"text": "Iran's first symphony orchestra, the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, was founded by Qolam-Hoseyn Minbashian in 1933. It was reformed by Parviz Mahmoud in 1946 and is currently Iran's oldest and largest symphony orchestra. Later, by the late 1940s, Ruhollah Khaleqi founded the country's first national music society and established the School of National Music in 1949.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 161,
"text": "Iranian pop music has its origins in the Qajar era. It was significantly developed since the 1950s, using indigenous instruments and forms accompanied by electric guitar and other imported characteristics. The emergence of genres such as rock in the 1960s and hip hop in the 2000s also resulted in major movements and influences in Iranian music.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 162,
"text": "The earliest recorded representations of dancing figures within Iran were found in prehistoric sites such as Tepe Sialk and Tepe Mūsīān. The oldest Iranian initiation of theater and the phenomena of acting can be traced in the ancient epic ceremonial theaters such as Sug-e Siāvuš (\"mourning of Siāvaš\"), as well as dances and theater narrations of Iranian mythological tales reported by Herodotus and Xenophon.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 163,
"text": "Iran's traditional theatrical genres include Baqqāl-bāzi (\"grocer play\", a form of slapstick comedy), Ruhowzi (or Taxt-howzi, comedy performed over a courtyard pool covered with boards), Siāh-bāzi (in which the central comedian appears in blackface), Sāye-bāzi (shadow play), Xeyme-šab-bāzi (marionette), and Arusak-bāzi (puppetry), and Ta'zie (religious tragedy plays).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 164,
"text": "Before the 1979 Revolution, the Iranian national stage had become a famous performing scene for known international artists and troupes, with the Roudaki Hall of Tehran constructed to function as the national stage for opera and ballet. Opened on 26 October 1967, the hall is home to the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, the Tehran Opera Orchestra, and the Iranian National Ballet Company, and was officially renamed Vahdat Hall after the 1979 Revolution.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 165,
"text": "A third-millennium BC earthen goblet discovered at the Burnt City, a Bronze Age urban settlement in southeastern Iran, depicts what could possibly be the world's oldest example of animation. The artifact, associated with Jiroft, bears five sequential images depicting a wild goat jumping up to eat the leaves of a tree. The earliest attested Iranian examples of visual representations, however, are traced back to the bas-reliefs of Persepolis, the ritual center of the Achaemenid Empire. The figures at Persepolis remain bound by the rules of grammar and syntax of visual language. The Iranian visual arts reached a pinnacle by the Sasanian era, and several works from this period have been found to articulate movements and actions in a highly sophisticated manner.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 166,
"text": "The first Iranian filmmaker was probably Mirza Ebrahim (Akkas Bashi), the court photographer of Mozaffar-ed-Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty. Mirza Ebrahim obtained a camera and filmed the Qajar ruler's visit to Europe. Later in 1904, Mirza Ebrahim (Sahhaf Bashi), a businessman, opened the first public movie theater in Tehran. After him, several others like Russi Khan, Ardeshir Khan, and Ali Vakili tried to establish new movie theaters in Tehran. Until the early 1930s, there were around 15 cinema theaters in Tehran and 11 in other provinces. The first Iranian feature film, Abi and Rabi, was a silent comedy directed by Ovanes Ohanian in 1930. The first sounded one, Lor Girl, was produced by Ardeshir Irani and Abd-ol-Hosein Sepanta in 1932.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 167,
"text": "Iran's animation industry began by the 1950s and was followed by the establishment of the influential Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in January 1965. The 1960s was a significant decade for Iranian cinema, with 25 commercial films produced annually on average throughout the early 60s, increasing to 65 by the end of the decade. The majority of the production focused on melodrama and thrillers. With the screening of the films Qeysar and The Cow, directed by Masoud Kimiai and Dariush Mehrjui respectively in 1969, alternative films set out to establish their status in the film industry and Bahram Beyzai's Downpour and Nasser Taghvai's Tranquility in the Presence of Others followed soon. Attempts to organise a film festival, which had begun in 1954 within the framework of the Golrizan Festival, resulted in the festival of Sepas in 1969. The endeavors also resulted in the formation of Tehran's World Film Festival in 1973. After the Revolution of 1979, and following the Cultural Revolution, a new age emerged in Iranian cinema, starting with Long Live! by Khosrow Sinai and followed by many other directors, such as Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. Kiarostami, an acclaimed Iranian director, planted Iran firmly on the map of world cinema when he won the Palme d'Or for Taste of Cherry in 1997. The continuous presence of Iranian films in prestigious international festivals, such as the Cannes Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, and the Berlin International Film Festival, attracted world attention to Iranian masterpieces. In 2006, six Iranian films, of six different styles, represented Iranian cinema at the Berlin International Film Festival. Critics considered this a remarkable event in the history of Iranian cinema.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 168,
"text": "Asghar Farhadi, a well-known Iranian director, has received a Golden Globe Award and two Academy Awards, representing Iran for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012 and 2017.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 169,
"text": "Iran's official New Year begins with Nowruz, an ancient Iranian tradition celebrated annually on the vernal equinox and described as the Persian New Year. It is enjoyed by people adhering to different religions but is considered a holiday for the Zoroastrians. It was registered on the UNESCO's list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2009. On the eve of the last Wednesday of the preceding year, as a prelude to Nowruz, the ancient festival of Čāršanbe Suri celebrates Ātar (\"fire\") by performing rituals such as jumping over bonfires and lighting off firecrackers and fireworks.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 170,
"text": "Yaldā, another ancient tradition, commemorates the ancient goddess Mithra and marks the longest night of the year on the eve of the winter solstice (čelle ye zemestān; usually falling on 20 or 21 December), during which families gather together to recite poetry and eat fruits. In some regions of the provinces of Mazanderan and Markazi, there is also the midsummer festival of Tirgān, which is observed on Tir 13 (2 or 3 July) as a celebration of water.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 171,
"text": "Alongside the ancient Iranian celebrations, Islamic annual events such as Ramezān, Eid e Fetr, and Ruz e Āšurā are marked by the country's large Muslim population, Christian traditions such as Noel, Čelle ye Ruze, and Eid e Pāk are observed by the Christian communities, Jewish traditions such as Purim, Hanukā, and Eid e Fatir (Pesah) are observed by the Jewish communities, and Zoroastrian traditions such as Sade and Mehrgān are observed by the Zoroastrians.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 172,
"text": "Iran's official calendar is the Solar Hejri calendar, beginning at the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, which was first enacted by the Iranian Parliament on 31 March 1925. Each of the 12 months of the Solar Hejri calendar correspond with a zodiac sign, and the length of each year is absolutely solar. The months are named after the ancient Iranian months, namely Farvardin (Fravaši), Ordibehešt (Aša Vahišta), Xordād (Haurvatāt), Tir (Tištrya), Amordād (Amərətāt), Šahrivar (Xšaθra Vairya), Mehr (Miθra), Ābān (Āpō), Āzar (Ātar), Dey (Daθuš), Bahman (Vohu Manah), and Esfand (Spəntā Ārmaiti).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 173,
"text": "Alternatively, the Lunar Hejri calendar is used to indicate Islamic events, and the Gregorian calendar remarks the international events.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 174,
"text": "Legal public holidays based on the Iranian solar calendar include the cultural celebrations of Nowruz (Farvardin 1–4; 21–24 March) and Sizdebedar (Farvardin 13; 2 April), and the political events of Islamic Republic Day (Farvardin 12; 1 April), the death of Ruhollah Khomeini (Khordad 14; 4 June), the Khordad 15 event (Khordad 15; 5 June), the anniversary of the 1979 Revolution (Bahman 22; 10 February), and Oil Nationalization Day (Esfand 29; 19 March).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 175,
"text": "Lunar Islamic public holidays include Tasua (Muharram 9), Ashura (Muharram 10), Arba'een (Safar 20), the death of Muhammad (Safar 28), the death of Ali al-Ridha (Safar 29 or 30), the birthday of Muhammad (Rabi-al-Awwal 17), the death of Fatimah (Jumada-al-Thani 3), the birthday of Ali (Rajab 13), Muhammad's first revelation (Rajab 27), the birthday of Muhammad al-Mahdi (Sha'ban 15), the death of Ali (Ramadan 21), Eid al-Fitr (Shawwal 1–2), the death of Ja'far al-Sadiq (Shawwal 25), Eid al-Qurban (Zulhijja 10), and Eid al-Qadir (Zulhijja 18).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 176,
"text": "Iranian cuisine includes a wide range of main dishes, including various types of kebab, pilaf, stew (khoresh), soup and āsh, and omelette. Lunch and dinner meals are commonly accompanied by side dishes such as plain yogurt or mast-o-khiar, sabzi, salad Shirazi, and torshi, and might follow dishes such as borani, Mirza Qasemi, or kashk e bademjan as the starter.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 177,
"text": "In Iranian culture, tea (čāy) is widely consumed. Iran is the world's seventh major tea producer, and a cup of tea is typically the first thing offered to a guest. One of Iran's most popular desserts is the falude, consisting of vermicelli in a rose water syrup, which has its roots in the fourth century BC. There is also the popular saffron ice cream, known as Bastani Sonnati (\"traditional ice cream\"), which is sometimes accompanied with carrot juice. Iran is also famous for its caviar.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 178,
"text": "Iran is most likely the birthplace of polo, locally known as čowgān, with its earliest records attributed to the ancient Medes. Freestyle wrestling is traditionally considered the national sport of Iran, and the national wrestlers have been world champions on many occasions. Iran's traditional wrestling, called košti e pahlevāni (\"heroic wrestling\"), is registered on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list. With a history of great wrestlers, such as Gholamreza Takhti (two-time champion at freestyle wrestling World Championships: 1959 and 1961), Iran is considered among the elite nations in this sport.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 179,
"text": "Being a mountainous country, Iran is a venue for skiing, snowboarding, hiking, rock climbing, and mountain climbing. It is home to several ski resorts, the most famous being Tochal, Dizin, and Shemshak, all within one to three hours traveling from the capital city Tehran. The resort of Tochal, located in the Alborz mountain rage, is the world's fifth-highest ski resort (3,730 m or 12,238 ft at its highest station). Dizin is the largest Iranian ski resort, and its officially granted the title by FIS for its capability in administering official and international competitions.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 180,
"text": "Iran's National Olympic Committee was founded in 1947. Wrestlers and weightlifters have achieved the country's highest records at the Olympics. In September 1974, Iran became the first country in West Asia to host the Asian Games.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 181,
"text": "Football has been regarded as the most popular sport in Iran, with the men's national team having won the Asian Cup on three occasions. The men's national team has maintained its position as Asia's best team, ranking first in Asia and 22nd in the world according to the FIFA World Rankings (as of September 2021). The Azadi Stadium in Tehran is the 1st largest association football stadium in Western Asia, and it was on the list of top-20 best stadiums in the world. The Guardian also regarded the Azadi as one of the world's biggest football stadiums.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 182,
"text": "Volleyball is the second most popular sport in Iran. Having won the 2011 and 2013 Asian Men's Volleyball Championships, the men's national team is currently the strongest team in Asia, and ranks eighth in the FIVB World Rankings (as of July 2017).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 183,
"text": "Basketball is also popular, with the men's national team having won three Asian Championships since 2007.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 184,
"text": "In 2016, Iran made global headlines for international female champions boycotting tournaments in Iran in chess (U.S. Woman Grandmaster Nazí Paikidze) and in shooting (Indian world champion Heena Sidhu), as they refused to enter a country where they would be forced to wear a hijab.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 185,
"text": "According to the Press Freedom Index, Iran holds one of the lowest positions, ranking 174th out of 180 countries as of 2021. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance is Iran's main government department responsible for the cultural policy, including activities regarding communications and information.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 186,
"text": "Iran's first newspapers were published during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty in the mid-19th century. Most of the newspapers published in Iran are in Persian, the country's official language. The country's most widely circulated periodicals are based in Tehran, among which are Etemad, Ettela'at, Kayhan, Hamshahri, Resalat, and Shargh. Tehran Times, Iran Daily, and Financial Tribune are among English-language newspapers based in Iran.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 187,
"text": "Television was introduced in Iran in 1958. Although the 1974 Asian Games were broadcast in color, full color programming began in 1978. Since the 1979 Revolution, Iran's largest media corporation is the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). Despite the restrictions on non-domestic television, about 65% of the residents of the capital city and about 30 to 40% of the residents outside the capital city access worldwide television channels through satellite dishes, although observers state that the figures are likely to be higher.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 188,
"text": "According to Internet World Stats, as of 2017, around 69.1% of the population of Iran are Internet users. Iran ranks 17th among countries by number of Internet users. According to the statistics provided by the web information company of Alexa, Google Search is Iran's most widely used search engine and Instagram is the most popular online social networking service. Direct access to many worldwide mainstream websites has been blocked in Iran, including Facebook, which has been blocked since 2009 due to the organization of anti-governmental protests on the website. However, as of 2017, Facebook has around 40 million subscribers based in Iran (48.8% of the population) who use virtual private networks and proxy servers to access the website. About 90% of Iran's e-commerce takes place on the Iranian online store of Digikala, which has around 750,000 visitors per day and more than 2.3 million subscribers and is the most visited online store in the Middle East.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 189,
"text": "Fashion in Iran is divided into several historical periods. The exact date of the emergence of weaving in Iran is not yet known, but it is likely to coincide with the emergence of civilization. Ferdowsi and many historians have considered Keyumars to be the inventor of the use of animals' skin and hair as clothing. Some historians have also mentioned Hushang as the first inventor of the use of living skins as clothing. Ferdowsi considers Tahmuras to be a kind of textile initiator in Iran. The clothing of ancient Iran took an advanced form, and the fabric and color of clothing became very important at that time. Depending on the social status, eminence, climate of the region and the season, Persian clothing during the Achaemenian period took various forms. The philosophy used in this clothing, in addition to being functional, also had an aesthetic role.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 190,
"text": "#invoke:Authority control",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 191,
"text": "32°N 53°E / 32°N 53°E / 32; 53",
"title": "External links"
}
]
| Iran, also known as Persia and officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a country located at the crossroads of West, Central, and South Asia. It is bordered by Iraq to the west and Turkey to the northwest, Azerbaijan, Armenia, the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan to the north, Afghanistan to the east, Pakistan to the southeast, the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf to the south. It covers an area of 1.64 million square kilometers, making it the world's 17th-largest country. Iran has around 90 million people, making it the world's 17th most populous country. Its capital and largest city is Tehran with around 16 million in its metropolitan area. Iran is home to one of the world's oldest civilizations, beginning with the formation of the Elamite kingdoms in the fourth millennium BC. It was first unified by the Medes in the seventh century BC and reached its territorial height in the sixth century BC, when Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire. Alexander the Great conquered the empire in the fourth century BC, and it was subsequently divided into several Hellenistic states. An Iranian rebellion established the Parthian Empire in the third century BC, which was succeeded in the third century AD by the Sasanian Empire. Arab Muslims conquered the empire in the seventh century AD, leading to its Islamization; Iran thereafter became a major center of Islamic culture and learning. Over the next two centuries, a series of native Iranian Muslim dynasties emerged before the Seljuk and the Mongols conquered the region. In the 16th century, the native Safavids re-established a unified Iranian state. Under the reign of Nader Shah in the 18th century, Iran presided over the most powerful military in the world, though by the 19th century, a series of conflicts with the Russian Empire led to significant territorial losses. The early 20th century saw the Persian Constitutional Revolution. Efforts to nationalise its fossil fuel supply led to an Anglo-American coup in 1953. After the Iranian Revolution, the current Islamic Republic was established in 1979 by Ruhollah Khomeini, who became the country's first supreme leader. The Iranian government is an Islamic republic with a presidential system, though ultimate authority is vested in a theocratic "Rahbar"; the position has been held by Ali Khamenei since Khomeini's death in 1989. The Iranian government is authoritarian, and has attracted widespread criticism for its significant constraints and violations of human rights and civil liberties. It is also a focal point for Shia Islam within the Middle East. Since the Iranian Revolution, the country is considered to be the most determined adversary of Israel and Saudi Arabia. On March 10, 2023, Iran and Saudi Arabia normalized relations after years of hostility. The Iranian government has been criticised for various policies such as its alleged sponsorship of terrorism, funding of proxy militias and its involvement in the majority of modern Middle Eastern conflicts. Iran is a regional and middle power and occupies a strategic location in the Asian continent. It is a founding member of the United Nations, the ECO, the OIC, the OPEC, the SCO, and is expected to join BRICS on 1 January 2024. It has large reserves of fossil fuels—including the second largest natural gas supply and the third-largest proven oil reserves. Historically a multi-ethnic country, Iran remains a pluralistic society comprising numerous ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. The country's rich cultural legacy is reflected in part by its 27 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, which ranks 10th worldwide. Iran places 5th globally in terms of Intangible Cultural Heritage. | 2001-10-22T21:00:00Z | 2023-12-31T23:19:33Z | [
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14,664 | History of Iraq | Iraq is a country in Western Asia that largely corresponds with the territory of ancient Mesopotamia. The history of Mesopotamia extends from the Lower Paleolithic period until the establishment of the Caliphate in the late 7th century AD, after which the region came to be known as Iraq. Encompassed within Iraqi territory is the ancient land of Sumer, which came into being between 6000 and 5000 BC during the Neolithic Ubaid period of Mesopotamian history, and is widely considered the oldest civilization in recorded history. It is also the historic center of the Akkadian, Neo-Sumerian, Babylonian, Neo-Assyrian, and Neo-Babylonian empires, a succession of local ruling dynasties that reigned over Mesopotamia and various other regions of the Ancient Near East during the Bronze and Iron Ages.
Iraq during antiquity witnessed some of the world's earliest writing, literature, sciences, mathematics, laws and philosophies; hence its common epithet, the Cradle of Civilization.
This era of self-rule lasted until 539 BC, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire was conquered by the neighbouring Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great, who proclaimed himself "King of Babylon". The ancient city of the same name, which had been the titular center of both Babylonian civilizations, became the most important of the four Achaemenid capitals.
Over the next 700 years, the regions forming modern Iraq came under Greek, Parthian, and Roman rule, with the Greeks and Parthians establishing new imperial capitals in the area with the cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, respectively. By the 3rd century AD, when the area once again fell under Persian (Sasanian) control, nomadic Arab tribesmen originating from South Arabia (consisting mostly of modern-day Yemen) began to migrate and settle within Lower Mesopotamia, culminating in the creation of the Sassanid-aligned Lakhmid Kingdom in around 300 AD; the Arabic name al-ʿIrāq dates to roughly this time. The Sassanid Empire was eventually conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate in the 7th century, with Iraq specifically falling under Islamic rule following the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah in 636. The city of Kufa was founded shortly thereafter, in close proximity to the previous Lakhmid capital of Al-Hirah, and it became the home of the Rashidun dynasty from 656 until their overthrow by the Umayyads in 661. With the rise of the Abbasids in 750, Iraq once again became the center of Caliphate rule—first in Kufa from 750–752, then in Anbar for the following decade, and finally in the city of Baghdad after its founding in 762. Baghdad would remain the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate for the majority of its existence, during which time it became the cultural and intellectual center of the world in what is known today as the Islamic Golden Age. Baghdad's rapid growth and prosperity in the 9th century would be followed by a period of stagnation in the 10th century due to the Buwayhid and Seljuq invasions, but it remained of central importance until the Mongol invasion of 1258. After this, Iraq became a province of the Turco-Mongol Ilkhanate and declined in importance. After the disintegration of the Ilkhanate, Iraq was ruled by the Jalairids and Kara Koyunlu until its eventual absorption into the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, intermittently falling under Iranian Safavid and Mamluk control.
Ottoman rule ended with World War I, after which the British Empire administered Mandatory Iraq alongside a nominally self-governing Hashemite monarchy headed by King Faisal I. The Kingdom of Iraq was eventually granted full independence in 1932 under the terms of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, signed by High Commissioner Francis Humphrys and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said two years prior. A republic formed in 1958 following a coup d'état. Saddam Hussein governed from 1968 to 2003, into which period fall the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein was deposed following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
During 1957–1961 Shanidar Cave was excavated by Ralph Solecki and his team from Columbia University, and nine skeletons of Neanderthal man of varying ages and states of preservation and completeness (labelled Shanidar I–IX) were discovered dating from 60,000–80,000 years BP. A tenth individual was recently discovered by M. Zeder during examination of a faunal assemblage from the site at the Smithsonian Institution. The remains seemed to Zeder to suggest that Neanderthals had funeral ceremonies, burying their dead with flowers (although the flowers are now thought to be a modern contaminant), and that they took care of injured and elderly individuals.
Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BC. It has been identified as having "inspired some of the most important developments in human history including the invention of the wheel, the planting of the first cereal crops and the development of cursive script, Mathematics, Astronomy and Agriculture."
Sumer emerged as the civilization of Lower Mesopotamia out of the prehistoric Ubaid period (mid-6th millennium BC) in the Early Bronze Age (Uruk period). Classical Sumer ends with the rise of the Akkadian Empire in the 24th century BC. Following the Gutian period, the Ur III kingdom was once again able to unite large parts of southern and central Mesopotamia under a single ruler in the 21st century. It may have eventually disintegrated due to Amorite incursions. The Amorite dynasty of Isin persisted until c. 1600 BC, when southern Mesopotamia was united under Kassite Babylonian rule.
The north of Mesopotamia had become the Akkadian-speaking state of Assyria by the late 25th century BC. Along with the rest of Mesopotamia it was ruled by Akkadian kings from the late 24th to mid 22nd centuries BC, after which it once again became independent.
Babylonia was a state in Lower Mesopotamia with Babylon as its capital. It was founded as an independent state by an Amorite king named Sumuabum in 1894 BC.
Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as the spoken language of Mesopotamia somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC, but Sumerian continued to be used as a written or ceremonial language in Mesopotamia well into the period of classical antiquity.
Babylonia emerged from the Amorite dynasties (c. 1900 BC) when Hammurabi (c. 1792–1750 BC), unified the territories of the former kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad. During the early centuries of what is called the "Amorite period", the most powerful city-states were Isin and Larsa, although Shamshi-Adad I came close to uniting the more northern regions around Assur and Mari. One of these Amorite dynasties was established in the city-state of Babylon, which would ultimately take over the others and form the first Babylonian empire, during what is also called the Old Babylonian Period.
Assyria was an Akkadian (East Semitic) kingdom in Upper Mesopotamia, that came to rule regional empires a number of times through history. It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur (Akkadian Aššūrāyu).
Of the early history of the kingdom of Assyria, little is positively known. In the Assyrian King List, the earliest king recorded was Tudiya. He was a contemporary of Ibrium of Ebla who appears to have lived in the late 25th or early 24th century BC, according to the king list. The foundation of the first true urbanised Assyrian monarchy was traditionally ascribed to Ushpia a contemporary of Ishbi-Erra of Isin and Naplanum of Larsa. c. 2030 BC.
Assyria had a period of empire from the 19th to 18th centuries BC. From the 14th to 11th centuries BC Assyria once more became a major power with the rise of the Middle Assyrian Empire.
The Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BC) was the dominant political force in the Ancient Near East during the Iron Age, eclipsing Babylonia, Egypt, Urartu and Elam. During this period, Aramaic was also made an official language of the empire, alongside the Akkadian language.
The Neo-Babylonian Empire (626–539 BC) marks the final period of the history of the Ancient Near East preceding Persian conquest. A year after the death of the last strong Assyrian ruler, Assurbanipal, in 627 BC, the Assyrian empire spiralled into a series of brutal civil wars. Babylonia rebelled under Nabopolassar, a member of the Chaldean tribe which had migrated from the Levant to south eastern Babylonia in the early 9th century BC. In alliance with the Medes, Persians, Scythians and Cimmerians, they sacked the city of Nineveh in 612 BC, and the seat of empire was transferred to Babylonia for the first time since the death of Hammurabi in the mid 18th century BC. This period witnessed a general improvement in economic life and agricultural production, and a great flourishing of architectural projects, the arts and science.
The Neo-Babylonian period ended with the reign of Nabonidus in 539 BC. To the east, the Persians had been growing in strength, and eventually Cyrus the Great established his dominion over Babylon.
Mesopotamia was conquered by the Achaemenid Persians under Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, and remained under Persian rule for two centuries.
The Persian Empire fell to Alexander of Macedon in 331 BC and came under Greek rule as part of the Seleucid Empire. Babylon declined after the founding of Seleucia on the Tigris, the new Seleucid Empire capital. The Seleucid Empire at the height of its power stretched from the Aegean in the west to India in the east. It was a major center of Hellenistic culture that maintained the preeminence of Greek customs where a Greek political elite dominated, mostly in the urban areas. The Greek population of the cities who formed the dominant elite were reinforced by immigration from Greece. Much of the eastern part of the empire was conquered by the Parthians under Mithridates I of Parthia in the mid-2nd century BC.
At the beginning of the 2nd century AD, the Romans, led by emperor Trajan, invaded Parthia and conquered Mesopotamia, making it an imperial province. It was returned to the Parthians shortly after by Trajan's successor, Hadrian.
Christianity reached Mesopotamia in the 1st century AD, and Roman Syria in particular became the center of Eastern Rite Christianity and the Syriac literary tradition. Mandeism is also believed to have either originated there around this time or entered as Mandaeans sought refuge from Palestine. Sumerian-Akkadian religious tradition disappeared during this period, as did the last remnants of cuneiform literacy, although temples were still being dedicated to the Assyrian national god Ashur in his home city as late as the 4th century.
In the 3rd century AD, the Parthians were in turn succeeded by the Sassanid dynasty, which ruled Mesopotamia until the 7th-century Islamic invasion. The Sassanids conquered the independent states of Adiabene, Osroene, Hatra and finally Assur during the 3rd century. In the mid-6th century the Persian Empire under the Sassanid dynasty was divided by Khosrow I into four quarters, of which the western one, called Khvārvarān, included most of modern Iraq, and subdivided to provinces of Mishān, Asuristān (Assyria), Adiabene and Lower Media. The term Iraq is widely used in the medieval Arabic sources for the area in the center and south of the modern republic as a geographic rather than a political term, implying no greater precision of boundaries than the term "Mesopotamia" or, indeed, many of the names of modern states before the 20th century.
There was a substantial influx of Arabs in the Sassanid period. Upper Mesopotamia came to be known as Al-Jazirah in Arabic (meaning "The Island" in reference to the "island" between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), and Lower Mesopotamia came to be known as ʿIrāq-i ʿArab, meaning "the escarpment of the Arabs" (viz. to the south and east of "the island".
Until 602, the desert frontier of the Persian Empire had been guarded by the Arab Lakhmid kings of Al-Hirah. In that year, Shahanshah Khosrow II Aparviz (Persian خسرو پرويز) abolished the Lakhmid kingdom and laid the frontier open to nomad incursions. Farther north, the western quarter was bounded by the Byzantine Empire. The frontier more or less followed the modern Syria-Iraq border and continued northward, passing between Nisibis (modern Nusaybin) as the Sassanian frontier fortress and Dara and Amida (modern Diyarbakır) held by the Byzantines.
The first organized conflict between invading Arab tribes and occupying Persian forces in Mesopotamia seems to have been in 634, when the Arabs were defeated at the Battle of the Bridge. There was a force of some 5,000 Muslims under Abū `Ubayd ath-Thaqafī, which was routed by the Persians. This was followed by Khalid ibn al-Walid's successful campaign which saw all of Iraq come under Arab rule within a year, with the exception of the Persian Empire's capital, Ctesiphon. Around 636, a larger Arab Muslim force under Sa`d ibn Abī Waqqās defeated the main Persian army at the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah and moved on to capture the Persian capital of Ctesiphon. By the end of 638, the Muslims had conquered all of the Western Sassanid provinces (including modern Iraq), and the last Sassanid Emperor, Yazdegerd III, had fled to central and then northern Persia, where he was killed in 651.
The Islamic expansions constituted the largest of the Semitic expansions in history. These new arrivals did not disperse and settle throughout the country; instead they established two new garrison cities, at al-Kūfah, near ancient Babylon, and at Basrah in the south, while the north remained largely Assyrian and Arab Christian in character.
The city of Baghdad was built in the 8th century and became the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. Baghdad soon became the primary cultural center of the Muslim world during the centuries of the incipient "Islamic Golden Age" of the 8th to 9th centuries.
In the 9th century, the Abbasid Caliphate entered a period of decline. During the late 9th to early 11th centuries, a period known as the "Iranian Intermezzo", parts of (the modern territory of) Iraq were governed by a number of minor Iranian emirates, including the Tahirids, Saffarids, Samanids, Buyids and Sallarids. Tughril, the founder of the Seljuk Empire, captured Baghdad in 1055. In spite of having lost all governance, the Abbasid caliphs nevertheless maintained a highly ritualized court in Baghdad and remained influential in religious matters, maintaining the orthodoxy of their Sunni sect in opposition to the Ismaili and Shia sects of Islam.
In the later 11th century, Iraq fell under the rule of the Khwarazmian dynasty. Both Turkic secular rule and Abbasid caliphate came to an end with the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. The Mongols under Genghis Khan had conquered Khwarezmia by 1221, but Iraq proper gained a respite due to the death of Genghis Khan in 1227 and the subsequent power struggles. Möngke Khan from 1251 began a renewed expansion of the Mongol Empire, and when caliph al-Mustasim refused to submit to the Mongols, Baghdad was besieged and captured by Hulagu Khan in 1258. With the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate, Hulagu had an open route to Syria and moved against the other Muslim powers in the region.
Iraq now became a province on the southwestern fringes of the Ilkhanate and Baghdad would never regain its former importance.
The Jalayirids were a Mongol Jalayir dynasty which ruled over Iraq and western Persia after the breakup of the Ilkhanate in the 1330s. The Jalayirid sultanate lasted about fifty years, until disrupted by Tamerlane's conquests and the revolts of the "Black Sheep Turks" or Qara Qoyunlu Turkmen. After Tamerlane's death in 1405, there was a brief attempt to re-establish the sultanate in southern Iraq and Khuzistan. The Jalayirids were finally eliminated by Kara Koyunlu in 1432.
During the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the Black Sheep Turkmen ruled the area now known as Iraq. In 1466, the White Sheep Turkmen defeated the Black Sheep and took control. Later, the White Sheep were defeated by the Safavids, who took control over Mesopotamia for some time. In the 16th century, most of the territory of present-day Iraq came under the control of Ottoman Empire as the pashalik of Baghdad. Throughout most of the period of Ottoman rule (1533–1918) the territory of present-day Iraq was a battle zone between the rival regional empires and tribal alliances. Iraq was divided into three vilayets:
The Safavid dynasty of Iran briefly asserted their hegemony over Iraq in the periods of 1508–1533 and 1622–1638. During the years 1747–1831 Iraq was ruled by the Mamluk officers of Georgian origin who succeeded in obtaining autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, suppressed tribal revolts, curbed the power of the Janissaries, restored order and introduced a program of modernization of economy and military. In 1831, the Ottomans managed to overthrow the Mamluk regime and again imposed their direct control over Iraq.
Ottoman rule over Iraq lasted until World War I, when the Ottomans sided with Germany and the Central Powers. In the Mesopotamian campaign against the Central Powers, British forces invaded the country and suffered a defeat at the hands of the Turkish army during the Siege of Kut (1915–16). However the British finally won in the Mesopotamian Campaign with the capture of Baghdad in March 1917. During the war the British employed the help of a number of Assyrian, Armenian and Arab tribes against the Ottomans, who in turn employed the Kurds as allies. After the war the Ottoman Empire was divided up, and the British Mandate of Mesopotamia was established by League of Nations mandate.
Britain imposed a Hāshimite monarchy on Iraq and defined the territorial limits of Iraq without taking into account the politics of the different ethnic and religious groups in the country, in particular those of the Kurds and the Christian Assyrians to the north. During the British occupation, the Kurds fought for independence, and the British employed Assyrian Levies to help quell these insurrections. Iraq also became an oligarchy government at this time.
Although the monarch Faisal I of Iraq was legitimized and proclaimed King by a plebiscite on 23 August 1921, simultaneously changing the official name of the country from Mesopotamia to Iraq, independence was achieved in 1932, when the British Mandate officially ended.
Establishment of Arab Sunni domination in Iraq was followed by Assyrian, Yazidi and Shi'a unrests, which were all brutally suppressed. In 1936, the first military coup took place in the Kingdom of Iraq, as Bakr Sidqi succeeded in replacing the acting Prime Minister with his associate. Multiple coups followed in a period of political instability, peaking in 1941.
During World War II, Iraqi regime of Regent 'Abd al-Ilah was overthrown in 1941 by the Golden Square officers, headed by Rashid Ali. The short lived pro-Nazi government of Iraq was defeated in May 1941 by the allied forces (with local Assyrian and Kurdish help) in the Anglo-Iraqi War. Iraq was later used as a base for allied attacks on Vichy-French held Mandate of Syria and support for the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran.
In 1945, Iraq joined the United Nations and became a founding member of the Arab League. At the same time, the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani led a rebellion against the central government in Baghdad. After the failure of the uprising, Barzani and his followers fled to the Soviet Union.
In 1948, massive violent protests known as the Al-Wathbah uprising broke out across Baghdad with partial communist support, having demands against the government's treaty with Britain. Protests continued into spring and were interrupted in May when martial law was enforced as Iraq entered the failed 1948 Arab–Israeli War along with other Arab League members.
In February 1958, King Hussein of Jordan and `Abd al-Ilāh proposed a union of Hāshimite monarchies to counter the recently formed Egyptian-Syrian union. The prime minister Nuri as-Said wanted Kuwait to be part of the proposed Arab-Hāshimite Union. Shaykh `Abd-Allāh as-Salīm, the ruler of Kuwait, was invited to Baghdad to discuss Kuwait's future. This policy brought the government of Iraq into direct conflict with Britain, which did not want to grant independence to Kuwait. At that point, the monarchy found itself completely isolated. Nuri as-Said was able to contain the rising discontent only by resorting to even greater political oppression.
Inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, officers from the Nineteenth Brigade, 3rd Division known as "The Four Colonials", under the leadership of Brigadier Abd al-Karīm Qāsim (known as "az-Za`īm", 'the leader') and Colonel Abdul Salam Arif overthrew the Hashemite monarchy on July 14, 1958. The new government proclaimed Iraq to be a republic and rejected the idea of a union with Jordan. Iraq's activity in the Baghdad Pact ceased.
Abd al-Karim Qasim promoted a civic nationalism in Iraq which asserts the belief that Iraqis are a nation and promotes the cultural unity of Iraqis of different ethnoreligious groups such as Mesopotamian Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Yazidis, Mandeans, Yarsans, and others.
Qasim's vision of nationalism involved the recognition of an Iraqi identity stemming from ancient Mesopotamia including its civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria.
In 1961, Kuwait gained independence from Britain and Iraq claimed sovereignty over Kuwait. A period of considerable instability followed.
The same year, Mustafa Barzani, who had been invited to return to Iraq by Qasim three years earlier, began engaging Iraqi government forces and establishing Kurdish control in the north in what was the beginning of the First Kurdish Iraqi War.
Qāsim was assassinated in February 1963, when the Ba'ath Party took power under the leadership of General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr (prime minister) and Colonel Abdul Salam Arif (president). In June 1963, Syria, which by then had also fallen under Ba'athist rule, took part in the Iraqi military campaign against the Kurds by providing aircraft, armoured vehicles and a force of 6,000 soldiers. Several months later, `Abd as-Salam Muhammad `Arif led a successful coup against the Ba'ath government. Arif declared a ceasefire in February 1964 which provoked a split among Kurdish urban radicals on one hand and Peshmerga (Freedom fighters) forces led by Barzani on the other.
On April 13, 1966, President Abdul Salam Arif died in a helicopter crash and was succeeded by his brother, General Abdul Rahman Arif. Following this unexpected death, the Iraqi government launched a last-ditch effort to defeat the Kurds. This campaign failed in May 1966, when Barzani forces thoroughly defeated the Iraqi Army at the Battle of Mount Handrin, near Rawanduz. Following the Six-Day War of 1967, the Ba'ath Party felt strong enough to retake power in 1968. Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr became president and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). The Ba'ath government started a campaign to end the Kurdish insurrection, which stalled in 1969. This can be partly attributed to the internal power struggle in Baghdad and also tensions with Iran. Moreover, the Soviet Union pressured the Iraqis to come to terms with Barzani. The war ended with more than 100,000 mortal casualties, with little achievements to both Kurdish rebels and the Iraqi government.
In the aftermath of the First Kurdish Iraqi War, a peace plan was announced in March 1970 and provided for broader Kurdish autonomy. The plan also gave Kurds representation in government bodies, to be implemented in four years. Despite this, the Iraqi government embarked on an Arabization program in the oil rich regions of Kirkuk and Khanaqin in the same period. In the following years, Baghdad government overcame its internal divisions and concluded a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in April 1972 and ended its isolation within the Arab world. On the other hand, Kurds remained dependent on the Iranian military support and could do little to strengthen their forces. By 1974 the situation in the north escalated again into the Second Kurdish Iraqi War, to last until 1975.
In July 1979, President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was forced to resign by Saddam Hussein, who assumed the offices of both President and Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. Saddam then purged his opponents including those from within the Baath party.
Iraq's territorial claims to neighboring countries were largely due to the plans and promises of the Entente countries in 1919–1920, when the Ottoman Empire was divided, to create a more extensive Arab state in Iraq and Jazeera, which would also include significant territories of eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, all of Kuwait and Iran’s border areas, which are shown on this English map of 1920.
Territorial disputes with Iran led to an inconclusive and costly eight-year war, the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988, termed Qādisiyyat-Saddām – 'Saddam's Qādisiyyah'), which devastated the economy. Iraq falsely declared victory in 1988 but actually only achieved a weary return to the status quo ante bellum, meaning both sides retained their original borders.
The war began when Iraq invaded Iran, launching a simultaneous invasion by air and land into Iranian territory on 22 September 1980, following a long history of border disputes, and fears of Shia insurgency among Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority influenced by the Iranian Revolution. Iraq was also aiming to replace Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state. The United States supported Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran. Although Iraq hoped to take advantage of the revolutionary chaos in Iran and attacked without formal warning, they made only limited progress into Iran and within several months were repelled by the Iranians who regained virtually all lost territory by June 1982. For the next six years, Iran was on the offensive. Despite calls for a ceasefire by the United Nations Security Council, hostilities continued until 20 August 1988. The war finally ended with a United Nations-brokered ceasefire in the form of United Nations Security Council Resolution 598, which was accepted by both sides. It took several weeks for the Iranian armed forces to evacuate Iraqi territory to honor pre-war international borders between the two nations (see 1975 Algiers Agreement). The last prisoners of war were exchanged in 2003.
The war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage—half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers, as well as civilians, are believed to have died in the war with many more injured—but it brought neither reparations nor change in borders. The conflict is often compared to World War I, in that the tactics used closely mirrored those of that conflict, including large scale trench warfare, manned machine-gun posts, bayonet charges, use of barbed wire across trenches, human wave attacks across no-man's land, and extensive use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas by the Iraqi government against Iranian troops and civilians as well as Iraqi Kurds. At the time, the UN Security Council issued statements that "chemical weapons had been used in the war." However, in these UN statements, it was never made clear that it was only Iraq that was using chemical weapons, so it has been said that "the international community remained silent as Iraq used weapons of mass destruction against Iranian as well as Iraqi Kurds" and it is believed.
A long-standing territorial dispute was the ostensible reason for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In November 1990, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 678, permitting member states to use all necessary means, authorizing military action against the Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait and demanded a complete withdrawal by January 15, 1991. When Saddam Hussein failed to comply with this demand, the Gulf War (Operation "Desert Storm") ensued on January 17, 1991. Estimates range from 1,500 to as many as 30,000 Iraqi soldiers killed, as well as less than a thousand civilians.
In March 1991 revolts in the Shia-dominated southern Iraq started involving demoralized Iraqi Army troops and the anti-government Shia parties. Another wave of insurgency broke out shortly afterwards in the Kurdish populated northern Iraq (see 1991 Iraqi uprisings). Although they presented a serious threat to the Iraqi Ba'ath Party regime, Saddam Hussein managed to suppress the rebellions with massive and indiscriminate force and maintained power. They were ruthlessly crushed by the loyalist forces spearheaded by the Iraqi Republican Guard and the population was successfully terrorized. During the few weeks of unrest tens of thousands of people were killed. Many more died during the following months, while nearly two million Iraqis fled for their lives. In the aftermath, the government intensified the forced relocating of Marsh Arabs and the draining of the Iraqi marshlands, while the Coalition established the Iraqi no-fly zones.
On 6 August 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 661 which imposed economic sanctions on Iraq, providing for a full trade embargo, excluding medical supplies, food and other items of humanitarian necessity, these to be determined by the Security Council sanctions committee. After the end of the Gulf War and after the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, the sanctions were linked to removal of weapons of mass destruction by Resolution 687. To varying degrees, the effects of government policy, the aftermath of Gulf War and the sanctions regime have been blamed for these conditions.
The effects of the sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq have been disputed. Whereas it was widely believed that the sanctions caused a major rise in child mortality, recent research has shown that commonly cited data were fabricated by the Iraqi government and that "there was no major rise in child mortality in Iraq after 1990 and during the period of the sanctions." An oil for food program was established in 1996 to ease the effects of sanctions.
Iraqi cooperation with UN weapons inspection teams was questioned on several occasions during the 1990s. UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Richard Butler withdrew his team from Iraq in November 1998 because of Iraq's lack of cooperation. The team returned in December. Butler prepared a report for the UN Security Council afterwards in which he expressed dissatisfaction with the level of compliance . The same month, US President Bill Clinton authorized air strikes on government targets and military facilities. Air strikes against military facilities and alleged WMD sites continued into 2002.
After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in the United States in 2001 were linked to the group formed by the multi-millionaire Saudi Osama bin Laden, American foreign policy began to call for the removal of the Ba'ath government in Iraq. Neoconservative think-tanks in Washington had for years been urging regime change in Baghdad. On August 14, 1998, President Clinton signed Public Law 105–235, which declared that ‘‘the Government of Iraq is in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations.’’ It urged the President ‘‘to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations.’’ Several months later, Congress enacted the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 on October 31, 1998. This law stated that it "should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime." It was passed 360 - 38 by the United States House of Representatives and 99–0 by the United States Senate in 1998.
The US urged the United Nations to take military action against Iraq. American president George W. Bush stated that Saddām had repeatedly violated 16 UN Security Council resolutions. The Iraqi government rejected Bush's assertions. A team of U.N. inspectors, led by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix was admitted, into the country; their final report stated that Iraqis capability in producing "weapons of mass destruction" was not significantly different from 1992 when the country dismantled the bulk of their remaining arsenals under terms of the ceasefire agreement with U.N. forces, but did not completely rule out the possibility that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction. The United States and the United Kingdom charged that Iraq was hiding WMD and opposed the team's requests for more time to further investigate the matter. Resolution 1441 was passed unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 8, 2002, offering Iraq "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations" that had been set out in several previous UN resolutions, threatening "serious consequences" if the obligations were not fulfilled. The UN Security Council did not issue a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.
In March 2003, the United States and the United Kingdom, with military aid from other nations, invaded Iraq.
Over the following years in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Iraq disintegrated into a civil war from 2006 to 2008, and the situation deteriorated in 2011 which later escalated into a renewed war following ISIL gains in the country in 2014. By 2015, Iraq was effectively divided, the central and southern part being controlled by the government, the northwest by the Kurdistan Regional Government and the western part by the Islamic State. IS was expelled from Iraq in 2017, but a low-intensity ISIL insurgency continues mostly in the rural parts of northern western parts of the country, due to Iraq's long border with Syria.
In 2003, after the American and British invasion, Iraq was occupied by U.S.-led Coalition forces. On May 23, 2003, the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution lifting all economic sanctions against Iraq. As the country struggled to rebuild after three wars and a decade of sanctions, it was plagued by violence between a growing Iraqi insurgency and occupation forces. Saddam Hussein, who vanished in April, was captured on December 13, 2003 in ad-Dawr, Saladin Governorate.
Jay Garner was appointed Interim Civil Administrator with three deputies, including Tim Cross. Garner was replaced in May 2003 by Paul Bremer, who was himself replaced by John Negroponte on April 19, 2004. Negroponte was the last US interim administrator and left Iraq in 2005. A parliamentary election was held in January 2005, followed by the drafting and ratification of a constitution and a further parliamentary election in December 2005.
Terrorism emerged as a threat to Iraq's people not long after the invasion of 2003. Al Qaeda now had a presence in the country, in the form of several terrorist groups formerly led by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. Al Zarqawi was a Jordanian militant Islamist who ran a militant training camp in Afghanistan. He became known after going to Iraq and being responsible for a series of bombings, beheadings and attacks during the Iraq war. Al Zarqawi was killed on June 7, 2006. Many foreign fighters and former Ba'ath Party officials also joined the insurgency, which was mainly aimed at attacking American forces and Iraqis who worked with them. The most dangerous insurgent area was the Sunni Triangle, a mostly Sunni-Muslim area just north of Baghdad.
Reported acts of violence conducted by an uneasy tapestry of insurgents steadily increased by the end of 2006. Sunni jihadist forces including Al Qaeda in Iraq continued to target Shia civilians, notably in the 23 February 2006 attack on the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra, one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest sites leading to a civil war between Sunni and Shia militants in Iraq. Analysis of the attack suggested that the Mujahideen Shura Council and Al-Qaeda in Iraq were responsible, and that the motivation was to provoke further violence by outraging the Shia population. In mid-October 2006, a statement was released stating that the Mujahideen Shura Council had been disbanded and was replaced by the "Islamic State of Iraq". It was formed to resist efforts by the U.S. and Iraqi authorities to win over Sunni supporters of the insurgency. Shia militias, some of whom were associated with elements in the Iraq government, reacted with reprisal acts against the Sunni minority. A cycle of violence thus ensued whereby Sunni insurgent attacks were followed reprisals by Shiite militias, often in the form of Shi'ite death squads that sought out and killed Sunnis. Following a surge in U.S. troops in 2007 and 2008, violence in Iraq began to decrease. The U.S. ended their main military presence in 2011, however, resulting in renewed escalation into war.
The departure of US troops from Iraq in 2011 triggered a renewed insurgency and by a spillover of the Syrian civil war into Iraq. By 2013, the insurgency escalated into a state renewed war, the central government of Iraq being opposed by various factions, primarily radical Sunni forces.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant invaded Iraq in 2013–14 and seized the majority of Al Anbar Governorate, including the cities of Fallujah, Al Qaim, Abu Ghraib and (in May 2015) Ramadi, leaving them in control of 90% of Anbar. Tikrit, Mosul and most of the Nineveh province, along with parts of Salahuddin, Kirkuk and Diyala provinces, were seized by insurgent forces in the June 2014 offensive. ISIL also captured Sinjar and a number of other towns in the August 2014 offensive, but were halted by the Sinjar offensive launched in December 2014 by Kurdish Peshmerga and YPG forces. The war ended with a government victory in December 2017.
On 30 April 2016, thousands of protesters entered the Green Zone in Baghdad and occupied the Iraqi parliament building. This happened after the Iraqi parliament did not approve new government ministers. The protesters included supporters of Shia cleric Muqtada Al Sadr. Although Iraqi security forces were present, they did not attempt to stop the protesters from entering the parliament building.
By 2018, violence in Iraq was at its lowest level in ten years.
Protests over deteriorating economic conditions and state corruption started in July 2018 in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, mainly in the central and southern provinces. The latest nationwide protests, erupting in October 2019, had a death toll of at least 93 people, including police.
In November 2021, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi survived a failed assassination attempt.
Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Sadrist Movement was the biggest winner in the 2021 parliamentary elections. Governmental stalemate lead to the 2022 Iraqi political crisis.
In October 2022, Abdul Latif Rashid was elected as the new President of Iraq after winning the parliamentary election against incumbent Barham Salih, who was running for a second term. The presidency is largely ceremonial and is traditionally held by a Kurd. On 27 October 2022, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, close ally of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, took the office to succeed Mustafa al-Kadhimi as new Prime Minister of Iraq. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iraq is a country in Western Asia that largely corresponds with the territory of ancient Mesopotamia. The history of Mesopotamia extends from the Lower Paleolithic period until the establishment of the Caliphate in the late 7th century AD, after which the region came to be known as Iraq. Encompassed within Iraqi territory is the ancient land of Sumer, which came into being between 6000 and 5000 BC during the Neolithic Ubaid period of Mesopotamian history, and is widely considered the oldest civilization in recorded history. It is also the historic center of the Akkadian, Neo-Sumerian, Babylonian, Neo-Assyrian, and Neo-Babylonian empires, a succession of local ruling dynasties that reigned over Mesopotamia and various other regions of the Ancient Near East during the Bronze and Iron Ages.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Iraq during antiquity witnessed some of the world's earliest writing, literature, sciences, mathematics, laws and philosophies; hence its common epithet, the Cradle of Civilization.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "This era of self-rule lasted until 539 BC, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire was conquered by the neighbouring Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great, who proclaimed himself \"King of Babylon\". The ancient city of the same name, which had been the titular center of both Babylonian civilizations, became the most important of the four Achaemenid capitals.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Over the next 700 years, the regions forming modern Iraq came under Greek, Parthian, and Roman rule, with the Greeks and Parthians establishing new imperial capitals in the area with the cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, respectively. By the 3rd century AD, when the area once again fell under Persian (Sasanian) control, nomadic Arab tribesmen originating from South Arabia (consisting mostly of modern-day Yemen) began to migrate and settle within Lower Mesopotamia, culminating in the creation of the Sassanid-aligned Lakhmid Kingdom in around 300 AD; the Arabic name al-ʿIrāq dates to roughly this time. The Sassanid Empire was eventually conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate in the 7th century, with Iraq specifically falling under Islamic rule following the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah in 636. The city of Kufa was founded shortly thereafter, in close proximity to the previous Lakhmid capital of Al-Hirah, and it became the home of the Rashidun dynasty from 656 until their overthrow by the Umayyads in 661. With the rise of the Abbasids in 750, Iraq once again became the center of Caliphate rule—first in Kufa from 750–752, then in Anbar for the following decade, and finally in the city of Baghdad after its founding in 762. Baghdad would remain the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate for the majority of its existence, during which time it became the cultural and intellectual center of the world in what is known today as the Islamic Golden Age. Baghdad's rapid growth and prosperity in the 9th century would be followed by a period of stagnation in the 10th century due to the Buwayhid and Seljuq invasions, but it remained of central importance until the Mongol invasion of 1258. After this, Iraq became a province of the Turco-Mongol Ilkhanate and declined in importance. After the disintegration of the Ilkhanate, Iraq was ruled by the Jalairids and Kara Koyunlu until its eventual absorption into the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, intermittently falling under Iranian Safavid and Mamluk control.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Ottoman rule ended with World War I, after which the British Empire administered Mandatory Iraq alongside a nominally self-governing Hashemite monarchy headed by King Faisal I. The Kingdom of Iraq was eventually granted full independence in 1932 under the terms of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, signed by High Commissioner Francis Humphrys and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said two years prior. A republic formed in 1958 following a coup d'état. Saddam Hussein governed from 1968 to 2003, into which period fall the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein was deposed following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "During 1957–1961 Shanidar Cave was excavated by Ralph Solecki and his team from Columbia University, and nine skeletons of Neanderthal man of varying ages and states of preservation and completeness (labelled Shanidar I–IX) were discovered dating from 60,000–80,000 years BP. A tenth individual was recently discovered by M. Zeder during examination of a faunal assemblage from the site at the Smithsonian Institution. The remains seemed to Zeder to suggest that Neanderthals had funeral ceremonies, burying their dead with flowers (although the flowers are now thought to be a modern contaminant), and that they took care of injured and elderly individuals.",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BC. It has been identified as having \"inspired some of the most important developments in human history including the invention of the wheel, the planting of the first cereal crops and the development of cursive script, Mathematics, Astronomy and Agriculture.\"",
"title": "Prehistory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Sumer emerged as the civilization of Lower Mesopotamia out of the prehistoric Ubaid period (mid-6th millennium BC) in the Early Bronze Age (Uruk period). Classical Sumer ends with the rise of the Akkadian Empire in the 24th century BC. Following the Gutian period, the Ur III kingdom was once again able to unite large parts of southern and central Mesopotamia under a single ruler in the 21st century. It may have eventually disintegrated due to Amorite incursions. The Amorite dynasty of Isin persisted until c. 1600 BC, when southern Mesopotamia was united under Kassite Babylonian rule.",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The north of Mesopotamia had become the Akkadian-speaking state of Assyria by the late 25th century BC. Along with the rest of Mesopotamia it was ruled by Akkadian kings from the late 24th to mid 22nd centuries BC, after which it once again became independent.",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Babylonia was a state in Lower Mesopotamia with Babylon as its capital. It was founded as an independent state by an Amorite king named Sumuabum in 1894 BC.",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as the spoken language of Mesopotamia somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium BC, but Sumerian continued to be used as a written or ceremonial language in Mesopotamia well into the period of classical antiquity.",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Babylonia emerged from the Amorite dynasties (c. 1900 BC) when Hammurabi (c. 1792–1750 BC), unified the territories of the former kingdoms of Sumer and Akkad. During the early centuries of what is called the \"Amorite period\", the most powerful city-states were Isin and Larsa, although Shamshi-Adad I came close to uniting the more northern regions around Assur and Mari. One of these Amorite dynasties was established in the city-state of Babylon, which would ultimately take over the others and form the first Babylonian empire, during what is also called the Old Babylonian Period.",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Assyria was an Akkadian (East Semitic) kingdom in Upper Mesopotamia, that came to rule regional empires a number of times through history. It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur (Akkadian Aššūrāyu).",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Of the early history of the kingdom of Assyria, little is positively known. In the Assyrian King List, the earliest king recorded was Tudiya. He was a contemporary of Ibrium of Ebla who appears to have lived in the late 25th or early 24th century BC, according to the king list. The foundation of the first true urbanised Assyrian monarchy was traditionally ascribed to Ushpia a contemporary of Ishbi-Erra of Isin and Naplanum of Larsa. c. 2030 BC.",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Assyria had a period of empire from the 19th to 18th centuries BC. From the 14th to 11th centuries BC Assyria once more became a major power with the rise of the Middle Assyrian Empire.",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BC) was the dominant political force in the Ancient Near East during the Iron Age, eclipsing Babylonia, Egypt, Urartu and Elam. During this period, Aramaic was also made an official language of the empire, alongside the Akkadian language.",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Neo-Babylonian Empire (626–539 BC) marks the final period of the history of the Ancient Near East preceding Persian conquest. A year after the death of the last strong Assyrian ruler, Assurbanipal, in 627 BC, the Assyrian empire spiralled into a series of brutal civil wars. Babylonia rebelled under Nabopolassar, a member of the Chaldean tribe which had migrated from the Levant to south eastern Babylonia in the early 9th century BC. In alliance with the Medes, Persians, Scythians and Cimmerians, they sacked the city of Nineveh in 612 BC, and the seat of empire was transferred to Babylonia for the first time since the death of Hammurabi in the mid 18th century BC. This period witnessed a general improvement in economic life and agricultural production, and a great flourishing of architectural projects, the arts and science.",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Neo-Babylonian period ended with the reign of Nabonidus in 539 BC. To the east, the Persians had been growing in strength, and eventually Cyrus the Great established his dominion over Babylon.",
"title": "Ancient Mesopotamia"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Mesopotamia was conquered by the Achaemenid Persians under Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, and remained under Persian rule for two centuries.",
"title": "Classical Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Persian Empire fell to Alexander of Macedon in 331 BC and came under Greek rule as part of the Seleucid Empire. Babylon declined after the founding of Seleucia on the Tigris, the new Seleucid Empire capital. The Seleucid Empire at the height of its power stretched from the Aegean in the west to India in the east. It was a major center of Hellenistic culture that maintained the preeminence of Greek customs where a Greek political elite dominated, mostly in the urban areas. The Greek population of the cities who formed the dominant elite were reinforced by immigration from Greece. Much of the eastern part of the empire was conquered by the Parthians under Mithridates I of Parthia in the mid-2nd century BC.",
"title": "Classical Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "At the beginning of the 2nd century AD, the Romans, led by emperor Trajan, invaded Parthia and conquered Mesopotamia, making it an imperial province. It was returned to the Parthians shortly after by Trajan's successor, Hadrian.",
"title": "Classical Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Christianity reached Mesopotamia in the 1st century AD, and Roman Syria in particular became the center of Eastern Rite Christianity and the Syriac literary tradition. Mandeism is also believed to have either originated there around this time or entered as Mandaeans sought refuge from Palestine. Sumerian-Akkadian religious tradition disappeared during this period, as did the last remnants of cuneiform literacy, although temples were still being dedicated to the Assyrian national god Ashur in his home city as late as the 4th century.",
"title": "Classical Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the 3rd century AD, the Parthians were in turn succeeded by the Sassanid dynasty, which ruled Mesopotamia until the 7th-century Islamic invasion. The Sassanids conquered the independent states of Adiabene, Osroene, Hatra and finally Assur during the 3rd century. In the mid-6th century the Persian Empire under the Sassanid dynasty was divided by Khosrow I into four quarters, of which the western one, called Khvārvarān, included most of modern Iraq, and subdivided to provinces of Mishān, Asuristān (Assyria), Adiabene and Lower Media. The term Iraq is widely used in the medieval Arabic sources for the area in the center and south of the modern republic as a geographic rather than a political term, implying no greater precision of boundaries than the term \"Mesopotamia\" or, indeed, many of the names of modern states before the 20th century.",
"title": "Classical Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "There was a substantial influx of Arabs in the Sassanid period. Upper Mesopotamia came to be known as Al-Jazirah in Arabic (meaning \"The Island\" in reference to the \"island\" between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), and Lower Mesopotamia came to be known as ʿIrāq-i ʿArab, meaning \"the escarpment of the Arabs\" (viz. to the south and east of \"the island\".",
"title": "Classical Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Until 602, the desert frontier of the Persian Empire had been guarded by the Arab Lakhmid kings of Al-Hirah. In that year, Shahanshah Khosrow II Aparviz (Persian خسرو پرويز) abolished the Lakhmid kingdom and laid the frontier open to nomad incursions. Farther north, the western quarter was bounded by the Byzantine Empire. The frontier more or less followed the modern Syria-Iraq border and continued northward, passing between Nisibis (modern Nusaybin) as the Sassanian frontier fortress and Dara and Amida (modern Diyarbakır) held by the Byzantines.",
"title": "Classical Antiquity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The first organized conflict between invading Arab tribes and occupying Persian forces in Mesopotamia seems to have been in 634, when the Arabs were defeated at the Battle of the Bridge. There was a force of some 5,000 Muslims under Abū `Ubayd ath-Thaqafī, which was routed by the Persians. This was followed by Khalid ibn al-Walid's successful campaign which saw all of Iraq come under Arab rule within a year, with the exception of the Persian Empire's capital, Ctesiphon. Around 636, a larger Arab Muslim force under Sa`d ibn Abī Waqqās defeated the main Persian army at the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah and moved on to capture the Persian capital of Ctesiphon. By the end of 638, the Muslims had conquered all of the Western Sassanid provinces (including modern Iraq), and the last Sassanid Emperor, Yazdegerd III, had fled to central and then northern Persia, where he was killed in 651.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Islamic expansions constituted the largest of the Semitic expansions in history. These new arrivals did not disperse and settle throughout the country; instead they established two new garrison cities, at al-Kūfah, near ancient Babylon, and at Basrah in the south, while the north remained largely Assyrian and Arab Christian in character.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The city of Baghdad was built in the 8th century and became the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. Baghdad soon became the primary cultural center of the Muslim world during the centuries of the incipient \"Islamic Golden Age\" of the 8th to 9th centuries.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In the 9th century, the Abbasid Caliphate entered a period of decline. During the late 9th to early 11th centuries, a period known as the \"Iranian Intermezzo\", parts of (the modern territory of) Iraq were governed by a number of minor Iranian emirates, including the Tahirids, Saffarids, Samanids, Buyids and Sallarids. Tughril, the founder of the Seljuk Empire, captured Baghdad in 1055. In spite of having lost all governance, the Abbasid caliphs nevertheless maintained a highly ritualized court in Baghdad and remained influential in religious matters, maintaining the orthodoxy of their Sunni sect in opposition to the Ismaili and Shia sects of Islam.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In the later 11th century, Iraq fell under the rule of the Khwarazmian dynasty. Both Turkic secular rule and Abbasid caliphate came to an end with the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. The Mongols under Genghis Khan had conquered Khwarezmia by 1221, but Iraq proper gained a respite due to the death of Genghis Khan in 1227 and the subsequent power struggles. Möngke Khan from 1251 began a renewed expansion of the Mongol Empire, and when caliph al-Mustasim refused to submit to the Mongols, Baghdad was besieged and captured by Hulagu Khan in 1258. With the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate, Hulagu had an open route to Syria and moved against the other Muslim powers in the region.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Iraq now became a province on the southwestern fringes of the Ilkhanate and Baghdad would never regain its former importance.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Jalayirids were a Mongol Jalayir dynasty which ruled over Iraq and western Persia after the breakup of the Ilkhanate in the 1330s. The Jalayirid sultanate lasted about fifty years, until disrupted by Tamerlane's conquests and the revolts of the \"Black Sheep Turks\" or Qara Qoyunlu Turkmen. After Tamerlane's death in 1405, there was a brief attempt to re-establish the sultanate in southern Iraq and Khuzistan. The Jalayirids were finally eliminated by Kara Koyunlu in 1432.",
"title": "Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "During the late 14th and early 15th centuries, the Black Sheep Turkmen ruled the area now known as Iraq. In 1466, the White Sheep Turkmen defeated the Black Sheep and took control. Later, the White Sheep were defeated by the Safavids, who took control over Mesopotamia for some time. In the 16th century, most of the territory of present-day Iraq came under the control of Ottoman Empire as the pashalik of Baghdad. Throughout most of the period of Ottoman rule (1533–1918) the territory of present-day Iraq was a battle zone between the rival regional empires and tribal alliances. Iraq was divided into three vilayets:",
"title": "Ottoman and Mamluk rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Safavid dynasty of Iran briefly asserted their hegemony over Iraq in the periods of 1508–1533 and 1622–1638. During the years 1747–1831 Iraq was ruled by the Mamluk officers of Georgian origin who succeeded in obtaining autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, suppressed tribal revolts, curbed the power of the Janissaries, restored order and introduced a program of modernization of economy and military. In 1831, the Ottomans managed to overthrow the Mamluk regime and again imposed their direct control over Iraq.",
"title": "Ottoman and Mamluk rule"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Ottoman rule over Iraq lasted until World War I, when the Ottomans sided with Germany and the Central Powers. In the Mesopotamian campaign against the Central Powers, British forces invaded the country and suffered a defeat at the hands of the Turkish army during the Siege of Kut (1915–16). However the British finally won in the Mesopotamian Campaign with the capture of Baghdad in March 1917. During the war the British employed the help of a number of Assyrian, Armenian and Arab tribes against the Ottomans, who in turn employed the Kurds as allies. After the war the Ottoman Empire was divided up, and the British Mandate of Mesopotamia was established by League of Nations mandate.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Britain imposed a Hāshimite monarchy on Iraq and defined the territorial limits of Iraq without taking into account the politics of the different ethnic and religious groups in the country, in particular those of the Kurds and the Christian Assyrians to the north. During the British occupation, the Kurds fought for independence, and the British employed Assyrian Levies to help quell these insurrections. Iraq also became an oligarchy government at this time.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Although the monarch Faisal I of Iraq was legitimized and proclaimed King by a plebiscite on 23 August 1921, simultaneously changing the official name of the country from Mesopotamia to Iraq, independence was achieved in 1932, when the British Mandate officially ended.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Establishment of Arab Sunni domination in Iraq was followed by Assyrian, Yazidi and Shi'a unrests, which were all brutally suppressed. In 1936, the first military coup took place in the Kingdom of Iraq, as Bakr Sidqi succeeded in replacing the acting Prime Minister with his associate. Multiple coups followed in a period of political instability, peaking in 1941.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "During World War II, Iraqi regime of Regent 'Abd al-Ilah was overthrown in 1941 by the Golden Square officers, headed by Rashid Ali. The short lived pro-Nazi government of Iraq was defeated in May 1941 by the allied forces (with local Assyrian and Kurdish help) in the Anglo-Iraqi War. Iraq was later used as a base for allied attacks on Vichy-French held Mandate of Syria and support for the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 1945, Iraq joined the United Nations and became a founding member of the Arab League. At the same time, the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani led a rebellion against the central government in Baghdad. After the failure of the uprising, Barzani and his followers fled to the Soviet Union.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In 1948, massive violent protests known as the Al-Wathbah uprising broke out across Baghdad with partial communist support, having demands against the government's treaty with Britain. Protests continued into spring and were interrupted in May when martial law was enforced as Iraq entered the failed 1948 Arab–Israeli War along with other Arab League members.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In February 1958, King Hussein of Jordan and `Abd al-Ilāh proposed a union of Hāshimite monarchies to counter the recently formed Egyptian-Syrian union. The prime minister Nuri as-Said wanted Kuwait to be part of the proposed Arab-Hāshimite Union. Shaykh `Abd-Allāh as-Salīm, the ruler of Kuwait, was invited to Baghdad to discuss Kuwait's future. This policy brought the government of Iraq into direct conflict with Britain, which did not want to grant independence to Kuwait. At that point, the monarchy found itself completely isolated. Nuri as-Said was able to contain the rising discontent only by resorting to even greater political oppression.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, officers from the Nineteenth Brigade, 3rd Division known as \"The Four Colonials\", under the leadership of Brigadier Abd al-Karīm Qāsim (known as \"az-Za`īm\", 'the leader') and Colonel Abdul Salam Arif overthrew the Hashemite monarchy on July 14, 1958. The new government proclaimed Iraq to be a republic and rejected the idea of a union with Jordan. Iraq's activity in the Baghdad Pact ceased.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Abd al-Karim Qasim promoted a civic nationalism in Iraq which asserts the belief that Iraqis are a nation and promotes the cultural unity of Iraqis of different ethnoreligious groups such as Mesopotamian Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Yazidis, Mandeans, Yarsans, and others.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Qasim's vision of nationalism involved the recognition of an Iraqi identity stemming from ancient Mesopotamia including its civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In 1961, Kuwait gained independence from Britain and Iraq claimed sovereignty over Kuwait. A period of considerable instability followed.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The same year, Mustafa Barzani, who had been invited to return to Iraq by Qasim three years earlier, began engaging Iraqi government forces and establishing Kurdish control in the north in what was the beginning of the First Kurdish Iraqi War.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Qāsim was assassinated in February 1963, when the Ba'ath Party took power under the leadership of General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr (prime minister) and Colonel Abdul Salam Arif (president). In June 1963, Syria, which by then had also fallen under Ba'athist rule, took part in the Iraqi military campaign against the Kurds by providing aircraft, armoured vehicles and a force of 6,000 soldiers. Several months later, `Abd as-Salam Muhammad `Arif led a successful coup against the Ba'ath government. Arif declared a ceasefire in February 1964 which provoked a split among Kurdish urban radicals on one hand and Peshmerga (Freedom fighters) forces led by Barzani on the other.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "On April 13, 1966, President Abdul Salam Arif died in a helicopter crash and was succeeded by his brother, General Abdul Rahman Arif. Following this unexpected death, the Iraqi government launched a last-ditch effort to defeat the Kurds. This campaign failed in May 1966, when Barzani forces thoroughly defeated the Iraqi Army at the Battle of Mount Handrin, near Rawanduz. Following the Six-Day War of 1967, the Ba'ath Party felt strong enough to retake power in 1968. Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr became president and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). The Ba'ath government started a campaign to end the Kurdish insurrection, which stalled in 1969. This can be partly attributed to the internal power struggle in Baghdad and also tensions with Iran. Moreover, the Soviet Union pressured the Iraqis to come to terms with Barzani. The war ended with more than 100,000 mortal casualties, with little achievements to both Kurdish rebels and the Iraqi government.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In the aftermath of the First Kurdish Iraqi War, a peace plan was announced in March 1970 and provided for broader Kurdish autonomy. The plan also gave Kurds representation in government bodies, to be implemented in four years. Despite this, the Iraqi government embarked on an Arabization program in the oil rich regions of Kirkuk and Khanaqin in the same period. In the following years, Baghdad government overcame its internal divisions and concluded a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in April 1972 and ended its isolation within the Arab world. On the other hand, Kurds remained dependent on the Iranian military support and could do little to strengthen their forces. By 1974 the situation in the north escalated again into the Second Kurdish Iraqi War, to last until 1975.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In July 1979, President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was forced to resign by Saddam Hussein, who assumed the offices of both President and Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. Saddam then purged his opponents including those from within the Baath party.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Iraq's territorial claims to neighboring countries were largely due to the plans and promises of the Entente countries in 1919–1920, when the Ottoman Empire was divided, to create a more extensive Arab state in Iraq and Jazeera, which would also include significant territories of eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, all of Kuwait and Iran’s border areas, which are shown on this English map of 1920.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Territorial disputes with Iran led to an inconclusive and costly eight-year war, the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988, termed Qādisiyyat-Saddām – 'Saddam's Qādisiyyah'), which devastated the economy. Iraq falsely declared victory in 1988 but actually only achieved a weary return to the status quo ante bellum, meaning both sides retained their original borders.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The war began when Iraq invaded Iran, launching a simultaneous invasion by air and land into Iranian territory on 22 September 1980, following a long history of border disputes, and fears of Shia insurgency among Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority influenced by the Iranian Revolution. Iraq was also aiming to replace Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state. The United States supported Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran. Although Iraq hoped to take advantage of the revolutionary chaos in Iran and attacked without formal warning, they made only limited progress into Iran and within several months were repelled by the Iranians who regained virtually all lost territory by June 1982. For the next six years, Iran was on the offensive. Despite calls for a ceasefire by the United Nations Security Council, hostilities continued until 20 August 1988. The war finally ended with a United Nations-brokered ceasefire in the form of United Nations Security Council Resolution 598, which was accepted by both sides. It took several weeks for the Iranian armed forces to evacuate Iraqi territory to honor pre-war international borders between the two nations (see 1975 Algiers Agreement). The last prisoners of war were exchanged in 2003.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The war came at a great cost in lives and economic damage—half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers, as well as civilians, are believed to have died in the war with many more injured—but it brought neither reparations nor change in borders. The conflict is often compared to World War I, in that the tactics used closely mirrored those of that conflict, including large scale trench warfare, manned machine-gun posts, bayonet charges, use of barbed wire across trenches, human wave attacks across no-man's land, and extensive use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas by the Iraqi government against Iranian troops and civilians as well as Iraqi Kurds. At the time, the UN Security Council issued statements that \"chemical weapons had been used in the war.\" However, in these UN statements, it was never made clear that it was only Iraq that was using chemical weapons, so it has been said that \"the international community remained silent as Iraq used weapons of mass destruction against Iranian as well as Iraqi Kurds\" and it is believed.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "A long-standing territorial dispute was the ostensible reason for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In November 1990, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 678, permitting member states to use all necessary means, authorizing military action against the Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait and demanded a complete withdrawal by January 15, 1991. When Saddam Hussein failed to comply with this demand, the Gulf War (Operation \"Desert Storm\") ensued on January 17, 1991. Estimates range from 1,500 to as many as 30,000 Iraqi soldiers killed, as well as less than a thousand civilians.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In March 1991 revolts in the Shia-dominated southern Iraq started involving demoralized Iraqi Army troops and the anti-government Shia parties. Another wave of insurgency broke out shortly afterwards in the Kurdish populated northern Iraq (see 1991 Iraqi uprisings). Although they presented a serious threat to the Iraqi Ba'ath Party regime, Saddam Hussein managed to suppress the rebellions with massive and indiscriminate force and maintained power. They were ruthlessly crushed by the loyalist forces spearheaded by the Iraqi Republican Guard and the population was successfully terrorized. During the few weeks of unrest tens of thousands of people were killed. Many more died during the following months, while nearly two million Iraqis fled for their lives. In the aftermath, the government intensified the forced relocating of Marsh Arabs and the draining of the Iraqi marshlands, while the Coalition established the Iraqi no-fly zones.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "On 6 August 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 661 which imposed economic sanctions on Iraq, providing for a full trade embargo, excluding medical supplies, food and other items of humanitarian necessity, these to be determined by the Security Council sanctions committee. After the end of the Gulf War and after the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, the sanctions were linked to removal of weapons of mass destruction by Resolution 687. To varying degrees, the effects of government policy, the aftermath of Gulf War and the sanctions regime have been blamed for these conditions.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The effects of the sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq have been disputed. Whereas it was widely believed that the sanctions caused a major rise in child mortality, recent research has shown that commonly cited data were fabricated by the Iraqi government and that \"there was no major rise in child mortality in Iraq after 1990 and during the period of the sanctions.\" An oil for food program was established in 1996 to ease the effects of sanctions.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Iraqi cooperation with UN weapons inspection teams was questioned on several occasions during the 1990s. UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Richard Butler withdrew his team from Iraq in November 1998 because of Iraq's lack of cooperation. The team returned in December. Butler prepared a report for the UN Security Council afterwards in which he expressed dissatisfaction with the level of compliance . The same month, US President Bill Clinton authorized air strikes on government targets and military facilities. Air strikes against military facilities and alleged WMD sites continued into 2002.",
"title": "20th century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in the United States in 2001 were linked to the group formed by the multi-millionaire Saudi Osama bin Laden, American foreign policy began to call for the removal of the Ba'ath government in Iraq. Neoconservative think-tanks in Washington had for years been urging regime change in Baghdad. On August 14, 1998, President Clinton signed Public Law 105–235, which declared that ‘‘the Government of Iraq is in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations.’’ It urged the President ‘‘to take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into compliance with its international obligations.’’ Several months later, Congress enacted the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 on October 31, 1998. This law stated that it \"should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.\" It was passed 360 - 38 by the United States House of Representatives and 99–0 by the United States Senate in 1998.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The US urged the United Nations to take military action against Iraq. American president George W. Bush stated that Saddām had repeatedly violated 16 UN Security Council resolutions. The Iraqi government rejected Bush's assertions. A team of U.N. inspectors, led by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix was admitted, into the country; their final report stated that Iraqis capability in producing \"weapons of mass destruction\" was not significantly different from 1992 when the country dismantled the bulk of their remaining arsenals under terms of the ceasefire agreement with U.N. forces, but did not completely rule out the possibility that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction. The United States and the United Kingdom charged that Iraq was hiding WMD and opposed the team's requests for more time to further investigate the matter. Resolution 1441 was passed unanimously by the UN Security Council on November 8, 2002, offering Iraq \"a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations\" that had been set out in several previous UN resolutions, threatening \"serious consequences\" if the obligations were not fulfilled. The UN Security Council did not issue a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In March 2003, the United States and the United Kingdom, with military aid from other nations, invaded Iraq.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Over the following years in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Iraq disintegrated into a civil war from 2006 to 2008, and the situation deteriorated in 2011 which later escalated into a renewed war following ISIL gains in the country in 2014. By 2015, Iraq was effectively divided, the central and southern part being controlled by the government, the northwest by the Kurdistan Regional Government and the western part by the Islamic State. IS was expelled from Iraq in 2017, but a low-intensity ISIL insurgency continues mostly in the rural parts of northern western parts of the country, due to Iraq's long border with Syria.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In 2003, after the American and British invasion, Iraq was occupied by U.S.-led Coalition forces. On May 23, 2003, the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution lifting all economic sanctions against Iraq. As the country struggled to rebuild after three wars and a decade of sanctions, it was plagued by violence between a growing Iraqi insurgency and occupation forces. Saddam Hussein, who vanished in April, was captured on December 13, 2003 in ad-Dawr, Saladin Governorate.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Jay Garner was appointed Interim Civil Administrator with three deputies, including Tim Cross. Garner was replaced in May 2003 by Paul Bremer, who was himself replaced by John Negroponte on April 19, 2004. Negroponte was the last US interim administrator and left Iraq in 2005. A parliamentary election was held in January 2005, followed by the drafting and ratification of a constitution and a further parliamentary election in December 2005.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Terrorism emerged as a threat to Iraq's people not long after the invasion of 2003. Al Qaeda now had a presence in the country, in the form of several terrorist groups formerly led by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. Al Zarqawi was a Jordanian militant Islamist who ran a militant training camp in Afghanistan. He became known after going to Iraq and being responsible for a series of bombings, beheadings and attacks during the Iraq war. Al Zarqawi was killed on June 7, 2006. Many foreign fighters and former Ba'ath Party officials also joined the insurgency, which was mainly aimed at attacking American forces and Iraqis who worked with them. The most dangerous insurgent area was the Sunni Triangle, a mostly Sunni-Muslim area just north of Baghdad.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Reported acts of violence conducted by an uneasy tapestry of insurgents steadily increased by the end of 2006. Sunni jihadist forces including Al Qaeda in Iraq continued to target Shia civilians, notably in the 23 February 2006 attack on the Al Askari Mosque in Samarra, one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest sites leading to a civil war between Sunni and Shia militants in Iraq. Analysis of the attack suggested that the Mujahideen Shura Council and Al-Qaeda in Iraq were responsible, and that the motivation was to provoke further violence by outraging the Shia population. In mid-October 2006, a statement was released stating that the Mujahideen Shura Council had been disbanded and was replaced by the \"Islamic State of Iraq\". It was formed to resist efforts by the U.S. and Iraqi authorities to win over Sunni supporters of the insurgency. Shia militias, some of whom were associated with elements in the Iraq government, reacted with reprisal acts against the Sunni minority. A cycle of violence thus ensued whereby Sunni insurgent attacks were followed reprisals by Shiite militias, often in the form of Shi'ite death squads that sought out and killed Sunnis. Following a surge in U.S. troops in 2007 and 2008, violence in Iraq began to decrease. The U.S. ended their main military presence in 2011, however, resulting in renewed escalation into war.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The departure of US troops from Iraq in 2011 triggered a renewed insurgency and by a spillover of the Syrian civil war into Iraq. By 2013, the insurgency escalated into a state renewed war, the central government of Iraq being opposed by various factions, primarily radical Sunni forces.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant invaded Iraq in 2013–14 and seized the majority of Al Anbar Governorate, including the cities of Fallujah, Al Qaim, Abu Ghraib and (in May 2015) Ramadi, leaving them in control of 90% of Anbar. Tikrit, Mosul and most of the Nineveh province, along with parts of Salahuddin, Kirkuk and Diyala provinces, were seized by insurgent forces in the June 2014 offensive. ISIL also captured Sinjar and a number of other towns in the August 2014 offensive, but were halted by the Sinjar offensive launched in December 2014 by Kurdish Peshmerga and YPG forces. The war ended with a government victory in December 2017.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "On 30 April 2016, thousands of protesters entered the Green Zone in Baghdad and occupied the Iraqi parliament building. This happened after the Iraqi parliament did not approve new government ministers. The protesters included supporters of Shia cleric Muqtada Al Sadr. Although Iraqi security forces were present, they did not attempt to stop the protesters from entering the parliament building.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "By 2018, violence in Iraq was at its lowest level in ten years.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Protests over deteriorating economic conditions and state corruption started in July 2018 in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, mainly in the central and southern provinces. The latest nationwide protests, erupting in October 2019, had a death toll of at least 93 people, including police.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "In November 2021, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi survived a failed assassination attempt.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Sadrist Movement was the biggest winner in the 2021 parliamentary elections. Governmental stalemate lead to the 2022 Iraqi political crisis.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In October 2022, Abdul Latif Rashid was elected as the new President of Iraq after winning the parliamentary election against incumbent Barham Salih, who was running for a second term. The presidency is largely ceremonial and is traditionally held by a Kurd. On 27 October 2022, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, close ally of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, took the office to succeed Mustafa al-Kadhimi as new Prime Minister of Iraq.",
"title": "U.S. invasion and the aftermath (2003–present)"
}
]
| Iraq is a country in Western Asia that largely corresponds with the territory of ancient Mesopotamia. The history of Mesopotamia extends from the Lower Paleolithic period until the establishment of the Caliphate in the late 7th century AD, after which the region came to be known as Iraq. Encompassed within Iraqi territory is the ancient land of Sumer, which came into being between 6000 and 5000 BC during the Neolithic Ubaid period of Mesopotamian history, and is widely considered the oldest civilization in recorded history. It is also the historic center of the Akkadian, Neo-Sumerian, Babylonian, Neo-Assyrian, and Neo-Babylonian empires, a succession of local ruling dynasties that reigned over Mesopotamia and various other regions of the Ancient Near East during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Iraq during antiquity witnessed some of the world's earliest writing, literature, sciences, mathematics, laws and philosophies; hence its common epithet, the Cradle of Civilization. This era of self-rule lasted until 539 BC, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire was conquered by the neighbouring Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great, who proclaimed himself "King of Babylon". The ancient city of the same name, which had been the titular center of both Babylonian civilizations, became the most important of the four Achaemenid capitals. Over the next 700 years, the regions forming modern Iraq came under Greek, Parthian, and Roman rule, with the Greeks and Parthians establishing new imperial capitals in the area with the cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, respectively. By the 3rd century AD, when the area once again fell under Persian (Sasanian) control, nomadic Arab tribesmen originating from South Arabia began to migrate and settle within Lower Mesopotamia, culminating in the creation of the Sassanid-aligned Lakhmid Kingdom in around 300 AD; the Arabic name al-ʿIrāq dates to roughly this time. The Sassanid Empire was eventually conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate in the 7th century, with Iraq specifically falling under Islamic rule following the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah in 636. The city of Kufa was founded shortly thereafter, in close proximity to the previous Lakhmid capital of Al-Hirah, and it became the home of the Rashidun dynasty from 656 until their overthrow by the Umayyads in 661. With the rise of the Abbasids in 750, Iraq once again became the center of Caliphate rule—first in Kufa from 750–752, then in Anbar for the following decade, and finally in the city of Baghdad after its founding in 762. Baghdad would remain the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate for the majority of its existence, during which time it became the cultural and intellectual center of the world in what is known today as the Islamic Golden Age. Baghdad's rapid growth and prosperity in the 9th century would be followed by a period of stagnation in the 10th century due to the Buwayhid and Seljuq invasions, but it remained of central importance until the Mongol invasion of 1258. After this, Iraq became a province of the Turco-Mongol Ilkhanate and declined in importance. After the disintegration of the Ilkhanate, Iraq was ruled by the Jalairids and Kara Koyunlu until its eventual absorption into the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, intermittently falling under Iranian Safavid and Mamluk control. Ottoman rule ended with World War I, after which the British Empire administered Mandatory Iraq alongside a nominally self-governing Hashemite monarchy headed by King Faisal I. The Kingdom of Iraq was eventually granted full independence in 1932 under the terms of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, signed by High Commissioner Francis Humphrys and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said two years prior. A republic formed in 1958 following a coup d'état. Saddam Hussein governed from 1968 to 2003, into which period fall the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein was deposed following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. | 2001-05-05T02:46:13Z | 2023-12-12T19:30:41Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iraq |
14,665 | Geography of Iraq | The geography of Iraq is diverse and falls into five main regions: the desert (west of the Euphrates), Upper Mesopotamia (between the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers), the northern highlands of Iraq, Lower Mesopotamia, and the alluvial plain extending from around Tikrit to the Persian Gulf.
The mountains in the northeast are an extension of the alpine system that runs eastward from the Balkans through southern Turkey, northern Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, eventually reaching the Himalayas in Pakistan. The desert lies in the southwest provinces along the borders with Saudi Arabia and Jordan and geographically belongs in the Arabian Peninsula.
Most geographers, including those of the Iraqi government, discuss the country's geography in terms of four main zones or regions: the desert in the west and southwest; the rolling upland between the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers (in Arabic the Dijla and Furat, respectively); the highlands in the north and northeast; and the alluvial plain through which the Tigris and Euphrates flow. Iraq's official statistical reports give the total land area as 438,446 km (169,285 sq mi), whereas a United States Department of State publication gives the area as 434,934 km (167,929 sq mi).
The uplands region, between the Tigris north of Hamrin Mountains and the Euphrates north of Hit, is known as Al Jazira (the island) and is part of a larger area that extends westward into Syria between the two rivers and into Turkey. Water in the area flows in deeply cut valleys, and irrigation is much more difficult than it is in the lower plain. The southwest areas of this zone are classified as desert or semi-desert. The northern parts, which include such places like the Nineveh Plains, Duhok, Zakho and Amedi, mainly consist of Mediterranean vegetation. The vegetation cyclically dries out and appear brown in the virtually arid summer and flourish in the wet winter.
An alluvial plain begins north of Baghdad and extends to the Persian Gulf. Here the Tigris and Euphrates rivers lie above the level of the plain in many places, and the whole area is a river delta interlaced by the channels of the two rivers and by irrigation canals. Intermittent lakes, fed by the rivers in flood, also characterize southeastern Iraq. A fairly large area (15,000 km or 5,800 sq mi) just above the confluence of the two rivers at Al Qurnah and extending east of the Tigris beyond the Iranian border is marshland, known as Hawr al Hammar, the result of centuries of flooding and inadequate drainage. Much of it is permanent marsh, but some parts dry out in early winter, and other parts become marshland only in years of great flood.
Because the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates above their confluence are heavily silt- laden, irrigation and fairly frequent flooding deposit large quantities of silty loam in much of the delta area. Windborne silt contributes to the total deposit of sediments. It has been estimated that the delta plains are built up at the rate of nearly twenty centimeters in a century. In some areas, major floods lead to the deposit in temporary lakes of as much as thirty centimeters of mud.
The Tigris and Euphrates also carry large quantities of salts. These, too, are spread on the land by sometimes excessive irrigation and flooding. A high water table and poor surface and subsurface drainage tend to concentrate the salts near the surface of the soil. In general, the salinity of the soil increases from Baghdad south to the Persian Gulf and severely limits productivity in the region south of Al Amarah. The salinity is reflected in the large lake in central Iraq, southwest of Baghdad, known as Bahr al Milh (Sea of Salt). There are two other major lakes in the country to the north of Bahr al Milh: Buhayrat ath Tharthar and Buhayrat al Habbaniyah.
Between Upper and Lower Mesopotamia is the urban area surrounding Baghdad. These "Baghdad Belts" can be described as the provinces adjacent to the Iraqi capital and can be divided into four quadrants: northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest. Beginning in the north, the belts include the province of Saladin, clockwise to Baghdad province, Diyala in the northeast, Babil and Wasit in the southeast and around to Al Anbar in the west.
The northeastern highlands begin just south of a line drawn from Mosul to Kirkuk and extend to the borders with Turkey and Iran. High ground, separated by broad, undulating steppes, gives way to mountains ranging from 1,000 to 3,611 meters (3,281 to 11,847 ft) near the Iranian and Turkish borders. Except for a few valleys, the mountain area proper is suitable only for grazing in the foothills and steppes; adequate soil and rainfall, however, make cultivation possible. Here, too, are the great oil fields near Mosul and Kirkuk. The northeast is the homeland of most Iraqi Kurds.
The desert zone, an area lying west and southwest of the Euphrates River, is a part of the Syrian Desert and Arabian Desert, which covers sections of Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia and most of the Arabian Peninsula. The region, sparsely inhabited by pastoral Bedouins, consists of a wide stony plain interspersed with rare sandy stretches. A widely ramified pattern of wadis–watercourses that are dry most of the year–runs from the border to the Euphrates. Some wadis are over 400 km (250 mi) long and carry brief but torrential floods during the winter rains.
Western and southern Iraq is a vast desert region covering some 64,900 square miles (168,000 square kilometres), almost two-fifths of the country. The western desert, an extension of the Syrian Desert, rises to elevations above 1,600 feet (490 metres). The southern desert is known as Al-Hajarah in the western part and as Al-Dibdibah in the east. Both deserts are part of the Arabian Desert. Al Hajarah has a complex topography of rocky desert, wadis, ridges, and depressions. Al-Dibdibah is a more sandy region with a covering of scrub vegetation. Elevation in the southern desert averages between 1,000 and 2,700 feet (300 and 820 metres). A height of 3,119 feet (951 metres) is reached at Mount 'Unayzah at the intersection of the borders of Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The deep Wadi Al-Batin runs 45 miles (72 km) in a northeast–southwest direction through Al-Dibdibah. It has been recognized since 1913 as the boundary between western Kuwait and Iraq.
The Euphrates originates in Turkey, is augmented by the Balikh and Khabur rivers in Syria, and enters Iraq in the northwest. Here it is fed only by the wadis of the western desert during the winter rains. It then winds through a gorge, which varies from two to 16 kilometers in width, until it flows out on the plain at Ar Ramadi. Beyond there the Euphrates continues to the Hindiya Barrage, which was constructed in 1914 to divert the river into the Hindiyah Channel; the present day Shatt al Hillah had been the main channel of the Euphrates before 1914. Below Al Kifl, the river follows two channels to As-Samawah, where it reappears as a single channel to join the Tigris at Al Qurnah. The Tigris also rises in Turkey but is significantly augmented by several rivers in Iraq, the most important of which are the Khabur, the Great Zab, the Little Zab, and the Adhaim, all of which join the Tigris above Baghdad, and the Diyala, which joins it about thirty-six kilometers below the city. At the Kut Barrage much of the water is diverted into the Shatt al-Hayy, which was once the main channel of the Tigris. Water from the Tigris thus enters the Euphrates through the Shatt al-Hayy well above the confluence of the two main channels at Al Qurnah.
Both the Tigris and the Euphrates break into a number of channels in the marshland area, and the flow of the rivers is substantially reduced by the time they come together at Al Qurnah. Moreover. the swamps act as silt traps, and the Shatt al Arab is relatively silt free as it flows south. Below Basra, however, the Karun River enters the Shatt al Arab from Iran, carrying large quantities of silt that present a continuous dredging problem in maintaining a channel for ocean-going vessels to reach the port at Basra. This problem has been superseded by a greater obstacle to river traffic, however, namely the presence of several sunken hulls that have been rusting in the Shatt al Arab since early in the Iran-Iraq war.
The waters of the Tigris and Euphrates are essential to the life of the country, but they sometimes threaten it. The rivers are at their lowest level in September and October and at flood in March, April, and May when they may carry forty times as much water as at low mark. Moreover, one season's flood may be ten or more times as great as that in another year. In 1954, for example, Baghdad was seriously threatened, and dikes protecting it were nearly topped by the flooding Tigris. Since Syria built a dam on the Euphrates, the flow of water has been considerably diminished and flooding was no longer a problem in the mid-1980s. In 1988 Turkey was also constructing a dam on the Euphrates that would further restrict the water flow.
Until the mid-twentieth century, most efforts to control the waters were primarily concerned with irrigation. Some attention was given to problems of flood control and drainage before the revolution of July 14, 1958, but development plans in the 1960s and 1970s were increasingly devoted to these matters, as well as to irrigation projects on the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates and the tributaries of the Tigris in the northeast. During the war, government officials stressed to foreign visitors that, with the conclusion of a peace settlement, problems of irrigation and flooding would receive top priority from the government.
Iraqi coastal waters boast a living coral reef, covering an area of 28 km in the Persian Gulf, at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab river (29°37′00″N 48°48′00″E / 29.61667°N 48.80000°E / 29.61667; 48.80000). The coral reef was discovered by joint Iraqi–German expeditions of scientific scuba divers carried out in September 2012 and in May 2013. Prior to its discovery, it was believed that Iraq lacks coral reefs as the local turbid waters prevented the detection of the potential presence of local coral reefs. Iraqi corals were found to be adapted to one of the most extreme coral-bearing environments in the world, as the seawater temperature in this area ranges between 14 and 34 °C. The reef harbors several living stone corals, octocorals, ophiuroids and bivalves. There are also silica-containing demo-sponges.
In the rural areas of the alluvial plain and in the lower Diyala region, settlement almost invariably clusters near the rivers, streams, and irrigation canals. The bases of the relationship between watercourse and settlement have been summarized by Robert McCormick Adams, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. He notes that the levees laid down by streams and canals provide advantages for both settlement and agriculture. Surface water drains more easily on the levees' back-slope, and the coarse soils of the levees are easier to cultivate and permit better subsurface drainage. The height of the levees gives some protection against floods and the frost that often affect low-lying areas and may kill and/or damage winter crops. Above all, those living or cultivating on the crest of a levee have easy access to water for irrigation and household use in a dry, hot country.
Although there are some isolated homesteads, most rural communities are nucleated settlements rather than dispersed farmsteads; that is, the farmer leaves his village to cultivate the fields outside it. The pattern holds for farming communities in the Kurdish highlands of the northeast as well as for those in the alluvial plain. The size of the settlement varies, generally with the volume of water available for household use and with the amount of land accessible to village dwellers. Sometimes, particularly in the lower Tigris and Euphrates valleys, soil salinity restricts the area of arable land and limits the size of the community dependent on it, and it also usually results in large unsettled and uncultivated stretches between the villages.
Fragmentary information suggests that most farmers in the alluvial plain tend to live in villages of over 100 persons. For example, in the mid-1970s a substantial number of the residents of Baqubah, the administrative center and major city of Diyala Governorate, were employed in agriculture.
The Marsh Arabs of the south usually live in small clusters of two or three houses kept above water by rushes that are constantly being replenished. Such clusters often are close together, but access from one to another is possible only by small boat. Here and there a few natural islands permit slightly larger clusters. Some of these people are primarily water buffalo herders and lead a semi-nomadic life. In the winter, when the waters are at a low point, they build fairly large temporary villages. In the summer they move their herds out of the marshes to the river banks.
The war has had its effect on the lives of these denizens of the marshes. With much of the fighting concentrated in their areas, they have either migrated to settled communities away from the marshes or have been forced by government decree to relocate within the marshes. Also, in early 1988, the marshes had become the refuge of deserters from the Iraqi army who attempted to maintain life in the fastness of the overgrown, desolate areas while hiding out from the authorities. These deserters in many instances have formed into large gangs that raid the marsh communities; this also has induced many of the marsh dwellers to abandon their villages.
The war has also affected settlement patterns in the northern Kurdish areas. There, the struggle for a Kurdish state by guerrillas was rejected by the government as it steadily escalated violence against the local communities. Starting in 1984, the government launched a scorched-earth campaign to drive a wedge between the villagers and the guerrillas in the remote areas of two provinces of Kurdistan in which Kurdish guerrillas were active. In the process whole villages were torched and subsequently bulldozed, which resulted in the Kurds flocking into the regional centers of Irbil and As Sulaymaniyah. Also as a "military precaution", the government has cleared a broad strip of territory in the Kurdish region along the Iranian border of all its inhabitants, hoping in this way to interdict the movement of Kurdish guerrillas back and forth between Iran and Iraq. The majority of Kurdish villages, however, remained intact in early 1988.
In the arid areas of Iraq to the west and south, cities and large towns are almost invariably situated on watercourses, usually on the major rivers or their larger tributaries. In the south this dependence has had its disadvantages. Until the recent development of flood control, Baghdad and other cities were subject to the threat of inundation. Moreover, the dikes needed for protection have effectively prevented the expansion of the urban areas in some directions. The growth of Baghdad, for example, was restricted by dikes on its eastern edge. The diversion of water to the Milhat ath Tharthar and the construction of a canal transferring water from the Tigris north of Baghdad to the Diyala River have permitted the irrigation of land outside the limits of the dikes and the expansion of settlement.
The climate of Iraq is mainly a hot desert climate or a hot semi-arid climate to the northernmost part. Averages high temperatures are generally above 40 °C (104 °F) at low elevations during summer months (June, July and August) while averages low temperatures can drop to below 0 °C (32 °F) during the coldest month of the year during winter The all-time record high temperature in Iraq of 52 °C (126 °F) was recorded near An Nasiriyah on 2 August 2011. Most of the rainfall occurs from December through April and averages between 100 and 180 millimeters (3.9 and 7.1 in) annually. The mountainous region of northern Iraq receives appreciably more precipitation than the central or southern desert region, where they tend to have a Mediterranean climate.
Roughly 90% of the annual rainfall occurs between November and April, most of it in the winter months from December through March. The remaining six months, particularly the hottest ones of June, July, and August, are extremely dry.
Except in the north and northeast, mean annual rainfall ranges between 100 and 190 millimeters (3.9 and 7.5 in). Data available from stations in the foothills and steppes south and southwest of the mountains suggest mean annual rainfall between 320 and 570 millimeters (12.6 and 22.4 in) for that area. Rainfall in the mountains is more abundant and may reach 1,000 millimeters (39.4 in) a year in some places, but the terrain precludes extensive cultivation. Cultivation on nonirrigated land is limited essentially to the mountain valleys, foothills, and steppes, which have 300 millimeters (11.8 in) or more of rainfall annually. Even in this zone, however, only one crop a year can be grown, and shortages of rain have often led to crop failures.
Mean minimum temperatures in the winter range from near freezing (just before dawn) in the northern and northeastern foothills and the western desert to 2 and 4 to 5 °C (35.6 and 39.2 to 41.0 °F) in the alluvial plains of southern Iraq. They rise to a mean maximum of about 16 °C (60.8 °F) in the western desert and the northeast, and 17 °C (62.6 °F) in the south. In the summer mean minimum temperatures range from about 27 to 31 °C (80.6 to 87.8 °F) and rise to maxima between roughly 41 and 45 °C (105.8 and 113.0 °F). Temperatures sometimes fall below freezing and have fallen as low as −14 °C (6.8 °F) at Ar Rutbah in the western desert. Such summer heat, even in a hot desert, is high and this can be easily explained by the very low elevations of deserts regions which experience these exceptionally searing high temperatures. In fact, the elevations of cities such as Baghdad or Basra are near the sea level (0 m) because deserts are located predominantly along the Persian Gulf. That's why some Gulf's countries like Iraq, Iran and Kuwait experience extreme heat during summer, even more extreme than the normal level. The searing summer heat only exists in low elevations in these countries while mountains and higher elevations know much more moderated summer temperatures.
The summer months are marked by two kinds of wind phenomena. The southern and southeasterly sharqi, a dry, dusty wind with occasional gusts of 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph), occurs from April to early June and again from late September through November. It may last for a day at the beginning and end of the season but for several days at other times. This wind is often accompanied by violent duststorms that may rise to heights of several thousand meters and close airports for brief periods. From mid-June to mid-September the prevailing wind, called the shamal, is from the north and northwest. It is a steady wind, absent only occasionally during this period. The very dry air brought by this shamal permits intensive sun heating of the land surface, but the breeze has some cooling effect.
The combination of rain shortage and extreme heat makes much of Iraq a desert. Because of very high rates of evaporation, soil and plants rapidly lose the little moisture obtained from the rain, and vegetation could not survive without extensive irrigation. Some areas, however, although arid, do have natural vegetation in contrast to the desert. For example, in the Zagros Mountains in northeastern Iraq there is permanent vegetation, such as oak trees, and date palms are found in the south.
In 1922 British officials concluded the Treaty of Mohammara with Abd al Aziz ibn Abd ar Rahman Al Saud, who in 1932 formed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The treaty provided the basic agreement for the boundary between the eventually independent nations. Also in 1922 the two parties agreed to the creation of the diamond-shaped Neutral Zone of approximately 7,500 km (2,900 sq mi) adjacent to the western tip of Kuwait in which neither Iraq nor Saudi Arabia would build dwellings or installations. Bedouins from either country could utilize the limited water and seasonal grazing resources of the zone. In April 1975, an agreement signed in Baghdad fixed the borders of the countries.
Through Algerian mediation, Iran and Iraq agreed in March 1975 to normalize their relations, and three months later they signed a treaty known as the Algiers Accord. The document defined the common border all along the Khawr Abd Allah (Shatt) River estuary as the thalweg. To compensate Iraq for the loss of what formerly had been regarded as its territory, pockets of territory along the mountain border in the central sector of its common boundary with Iran were assigned to it. Nonetheless, in September 1980 Iraq went to war with Iran, citing among other complaints the fact that Iran had not turned over to it the land specified in the Algiers Accord. This problem has subsequently proved to be a stumbling block to a negotiated settlement of the ongoing conflict.
In 1988 the boundary with Kuwait was another outstanding problem. It was fixed in a 1913 treaty between the Ottoman Empire and British officials acting on behalf of Kuwait's ruling family, which in 1899 had ceded control over foreign affairs to Britain. The boundary was accepted by Iraq when it became independent in 1932, but in the 1960s and again in the mid-1970s, the Iraqi government advanced a claim to parts of Kuwait. Kuwait made several representations to the Iraqis during the war to fix the border once and for all but Baghdad repeatedly demurred, claiming that the issue is a potentially divisive one that could inflame nationalist sentiment inside Iraq. Hence in 1988 it was likely that a solution would have to wait until the war ended.
Area: total: 438,317 km (169,235 sq mi) land: 437,367 km (168,868 sq mi) water: 950 km (370 sq mi)
Land boundaries: total: 3,809 km (2,367 mi) border countries: Iran 1,599 km (994 mi), Saudi Arabia 811 km (504 mi), Syria 599 km (372 mi), Turkey 367 km (228 mi), Kuwait 254 km (158 mi), Jordan 179 km (111 mi)
Coastline: 58 km (36 mi)
Maritime claims: territorial sea: 12 nmi (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) continental shelf: not specified
Terrain: mostly broad plains; reedy marshes along Iranian border in south with large flooded areas; mountains along borders with Iran and Turkey
Elevation extremes: lowest point: Persian Gulf 0 m highest point: Cheekah Dar 3,611 m (11,847 ft)
Natural resources: petroleum, natural gas, phosphates, sulfur
Land use: arable land: 7.89% permanent crops: 0.53% other: 91.58% (2012)
Irrigated land: 35,250 km or 13,610 sq mi (2003)
Total renewable water resources: 89.86 km or 21.56 cu mi (2011)
Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural): total: 66 km/yr (7%/15%/79%) per capita: 2,616 m/yr (2000)
While its proven oil reserves of 112 billion barrels (17.8×10^ m) ranks Iraq fifth in the world behind Iran, the United States Department of Energy estimates that up to 90 percent of the country remains unexplored. Unexplored regions of Iraq could yield an additional 100 billion barrels (16×10^ m). Iraq's oil production costs are among the lowest in the world. However, only about 2,000 oil wells have been drilled in Iraq, compared to about 1 million wells in Texas alone.
Natural hazards: dust storms, sandstorms, floods
Environment - current issues: government water control projects have drained most of the inhabited marsh areas east of An Kshatriya by drying up or diverting the feeder streams and rivers; a once sizable population of Shi'a Muslims, who have inhabited these areas for thousands of years, has been displaced; furthermore, the destruction of the natural habitat poses serious threats to the area's wildlife populations; inadequate supplies of potable water; development of Tigris-Euphrates Rivers system contingent upon agreements with upstream riparian Turkey; air and water pollution; soil degradation (desalination) and erosion; and desertification.
Environment - international agreements: party to: Biodiversity, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection signed, but not ratified: Environmental Modification
33°00′N 44°00′E / 33.000°N 44.000°E / 33.000; 44.000 | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The geography of Iraq is diverse and falls into five main regions: the desert (west of the Euphrates), Upper Mesopotamia (between the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers), the northern highlands of Iraq, Lower Mesopotamia, and the alluvial plain extending from around Tikrit to the Persian Gulf.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The mountains in the northeast are an extension of the alpine system that runs eastward from the Balkans through southern Turkey, northern Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, eventually reaching the Himalayas in Pakistan. The desert lies in the southwest provinces along the borders with Saudi Arabia and Jordan and geographically belongs in the Arabian Peninsula.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Most geographers, including those of the Iraqi government, discuss the country's geography in terms of four main zones or regions: the desert in the west and southwest; the rolling upland between the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers (in Arabic the Dijla and Furat, respectively); the highlands in the north and northeast; and the alluvial plain through which the Tigris and Euphrates flow. Iraq's official statistical reports give the total land area as 438,446 km (169,285 sq mi), whereas a United States Department of State publication gives the area as 434,934 km (167,929 sq mi).",
"title": "Major geographical features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The uplands region, between the Tigris north of Hamrin Mountains and the Euphrates north of Hit, is known as Al Jazira (the island) and is part of a larger area that extends westward into Syria between the two rivers and into Turkey. Water in the area flows in deeply cut valleys, and irrigation is much more difficult than it is in the lower plain. The southwest areas of this zone are classified as desert or semi-desert. The northern parts, which include such places like the Nineveh Plains, Duhok, Zakho and Amedi, mainly consist of Mediterranean vegetation. The vegetation cyclically dries out and appear brown in the virtually arid summer and flourish in the wet winter.",
"title": "Major geographical features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "An alluvial plain begins north of Baghdad and extends to the Persian Gulf. Here the Tigris and Euphrates rivers lie above the level of the plain in many places, and the whole area is a river delta interlaced by the channels of the two rivers and by irrigation canals. Intermittent lakes, fed by the rivers in flood, also characterize southeastern Iraq. A fairly large area (15,000 km or 5,800 sq mi) just above the confluence of the two rivers at Al Qurnah and extending east of the Tigris beyond the Iranian border is marshland, known as Hawr al Hammar, the result of centuries of flooding and inadequate drainage. Much of it is permanent marsh, but some parts dry out in early winter, and other parts become marshland only in years of great flood.",
"title": "Major geographical features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Because the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates above their confluence are heavily silt- laden, irrigation and fairly frequent flooding deposit large quantities of silty loam in much of the delta area. Windborne silt contributes to the total deposit of sediments. It has been estimated that the delta plains are built up at the rate of nearly twenty centimeters in a century. In some areas, major floods lead to the deposit in temporary lakes of as much as thirty centimeters of mud.",
"title": "Major geographical features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Tigris and Euphrates also carry large quantities of salts. These, too, are spread on the land by sometimes excessive irrigation and flooding. A high water table and poor surface and subsurface drainage tend to concentrate the salts near the surface of the soil. In general, the salinity of the soil increases from Baghdad south to the Persian Gulf and severely limits productivity in the region south of Al Amarah. The salinity is reflected in the large lake in central Iraq, southwest of Baghdad, known as Bahr al Milh (Sea of Salt). There are two other major lakes in the country to the north of Bahr al Milh: Buhayrat ath Tharthar and Buhayrat al Habbaniyah.",
"title": "Major geographical features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Between Upper and Lower Mesopotamia is the urban area surrounding Baghdad. These \"Baghdad Belts\" can be described as the provinces adjacent to the Iraqi capital and can be divided into four quadrants: northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest. Beginning in the north, the belts include the province of Saladin, clockwise to Baghdad province, Diyala in the northeast, Babil and Wasit in the southeast and around to Al Anbar in the west.",
"title": "Major geographical features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The northeastern highlands begin just south of a line drawn from Mosul to Kirkuk and extend to the borders with Turkey and Iran. High ground, separated by broad, undulating steppes, gives way to mountains ranging from 1,000 to 3,611 meters (3,281 to 11,847 ft) near the Iranian and Turkish borders. Except for a few valleys, the mountain area proper is suitable only for grazing in the foothills and steppes; adequate soil and rainfall, however, make cultivation possible. Here, too, are the great oil fields near Mosul and Kirkuk. The northeast is the homeland of most Iraqi Kurds.",
"title": "Major geographical features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The desert zone, an area lying west and southwest of the Euphrates River, is a part of the Syrian Desert and Arabian Desert, which covers sections of Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia and most of the Arabian Peninsula. The region, sparsely inhabited by pastoral Bedouins, consists of a wide stony plain interspersed with rare sandy stretches. A widely ramified pattern of wadis–watercourses that are dry most of the year–runs from the border to the Euphrates. Some wadis are over 400 km (250 mi) long and carry brief but torrential floods during the winter rains.",
"title": "Major geographical features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Western and southern Iraq is a vast desert region covering some 64,900 square miles (168,000 square kilometres), almost two-fifths of the country. The western desert, an extension of the Syrian Desert, rises to elevations above 1,600 feet (490 metres). The southern desert is known as Al-Hajarah in the western part and as Al-Dibdibah in the east. Both deserts are part of the Arabian Desert. Al Hajarah has a complex topography of rocky desert, wadis, ridges, and depressions. Al-Dibdibah is a more sandy region with a covering of scrub vegetation. Elevation in the southern desert averages between 1,000 and 2,700 feet (300 and 820 metres). A height of 3,119 feet (951 metres) is reached at Mount 'Unayzah at the intersection of the borders of Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The deep Wadi Al-Batin runs 45 miles (72 km) in a northeast–southwest direction through Al-Dibdibah. It has been recognized since 1913 as the boundary between western Kuwait and Iraq.",
"title": "Major geographical features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Euphrates originates in Turkey, is augmented by the Balikh and Khabur rivers in Syria, and enters Iraq in the northwest. Here it is fed only by the wadis of the western desert during the winter rains. It then winds through a gorge, which varies from two to 16 kilometers in width, until it flows out on the plain at Ar Ramadi. Beyond there the Euphrates continues to the Hindiya Barrage, which was constructed in 1914 to divert the river into the Hindiyah Channel; the present day Shatt al Hillah had been the main channel of the Euphrates before 1914. Below Al Kifl, the river follows two channels to As-Samawah, where it reappears as a single channel to join the Tigris at Al Qurnah. The Tigris also rises in Turkey but is significantly augmented by several rivers in Iraq, the most important of which are the Khabur, the Great Zab, the Little Zab, and the Adhaim, all of which join the Tigris above Baghdad, and the Diyala, which joins it about thirty-six kilometers below the city. At the Kut Barrage much of the water is diverted into the Shatt al-Hayy, which was once the main channel of the Tigris. Water from the Tigris thus enters the Euphrates through the Shatt al-Hayy well above the confluence of the two main channels at Al Qurnah.",
"title": "Tigris–Euphrates river system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Both the Tigris and the Euphrates break into a number of channels in the marshland area, and the flow of the rivers is substantially reduced by the time they come together at Al Qurnah. Moreover. the swamps act as silt traps, and the Shatt al Arab is relatively silt free as it flows south. Below Basra, however, the Karun River enters the Shatt al Arab from Iran, carrying large quantities of silt that present a continuous dredging problem in maintaining a channel for ocean-going vessels to reach the port at Basra. This problem has been superseded by a greater obstacle to river traffic, however, namely the presence of several sunken hulls that have been rusting in the Shatt al Arab since early in the Iran-Iraq war.",
"title": "Tigris–Euphrates river system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The waters of the Tigris and Euphrates are essential to the life of the country, but they sometimes threaten it. The rivers are at their lowest level in September and October and at flood in March, April, and May when they may carry forty times as much water as at low mark. Moreover, one season's flood may be ten or more times as great as that in another year. In 1954, for example, Baghdad was seriously threatened, and dikes protecting it were nearly topped by the flooding Tigris. Since Syria built a dam on the Euphrates, the flow of water has been considerably diminished and flooding was no longer a problem in the mid-1980s. In 1988 Turkey was also constructing a dam on the Euphrates that would further restrict the water flow.",
"title": "Tigris–Euphrates river system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Until the mid-twentieth century, most efforts to control the waters were primarily concerned with irrigation. Some attention was given to problems of flood control and drainage before the revolution of July 14, 1958, but development plans in the 1960s and 1970s were increasingly devoted to these matters, as well as to irrigation projects on the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates and the tributaries of the Tigris in the northeast. During the war, government officials stressed to foreign visitors that, with the conclusion of a peace settlement, problems of irrigation and flooding would receive top priority from the government.",
"title": "Tigris–Euphrates river system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Iraqi coastal waters boast a living coral reef, covering an area of 28 km in the Persian Gulf, at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab river (29°37′00″N 48°48′00″E / 29.61667°N 48.80000°E / 29.61667; 48.80000). The coral reef was discovered by joint Iraqi–German expeditions of scientific scuba divers carried out in September 2012 and in May 2013. Prior to its discovery, it was believed that Iraq lacks coral reefs as the local turbid waters prevented the detection of the potential presence of local coral reefs. Iraqi corals were found to be adapted to one of the most extreme coral-bearing environments in the world, as the seawater temperature in this area ranges between 14 and 34 °C. The reef harbors several living stone corals, octocorals, ophiuroids and bivalves. There are also silica-containing demo-sponges.",
"title": "Tigris–Euphrates river system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the rural areas of the alluvial plain and in the lower Diyala region, settlement almost invariably clusters near the rivers, streams, and irrigation canals. The bases of the relationship between watercourse and settlement have been summarized by Robert McCormick Adams, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. He notes that the levees laid down by streams and canals provide advantages for both settlement and agriculture. Surface water drains more easily on the levees' back-slope, and the coarse soils of the levees are easier to cultivate and permit better subsurface drainage. The height of the levees gives some protection against floods and the frost that often affect low-lying areas and may kill and/or damage winter crops. Above all, those living or cultivating on the crest of a levee have easy access to water for irrigation and household use in a dry, hot country.",
"title": "Settlement patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Although there are some isolated homesteads, most rural communities are nucleated settlements rather than dispersed farmsteads; that is, the farmer leaves his village to cultivate the fields outside it. The pattern holds for farming communities in the Kurdish highlands of the northeast as well as for those in the alluvial plain. The size of the settlement varies, generally with the volume of water available for household use and with the amount of land accessible to village dwellers. Sometimes, particularly in the lower Tigris and Euphrates valleys, soil salinity restricts the area of arable land and limits the size of the community dependent on it, and it also usually results in large unsettled and uncultivated stretches between the villages.",
"title": "Settlement patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Fragmentary information suggests that most farmers in the alluvial plain tend to live in villages of over 100 persons. For example, in the mid-1970s a substantial number of the residents of Baqubah, the administrative center and major city of Diyala Governorate, were employed in agriculture.",
"title": "Settlement patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Marsh Arabs of the south usually live in small clusters of two or three houses kept above water by rushes that are constantly being replenished. Such clusters often are close together, but access from one to another is possible only by small boat. Here and there a few natural islands permit slightly larger clusters. Some of these people are primarily water buffalo herders and lead a semi-nomadic life. In the winter, when the waters are at a low point, they build fairly large temporary villages. In the summer they move their herds out of the marshes to the river banks.",
"title": "Settlement patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The war has had its effect on the lives of these denizens of the marshes. With much of the fighting concentrated in their areas, they have either migrated to settled communities away from the marshes or have been forced by government decree to relocate within the marshes. Also, in early 1988, the marshes had become the refuge of deserters from the Iraqi army who attempted to maintain life in the fastness of the overgrown, desolate areas while hiding out from the authorities. These deserters in many instances have formed into large gangs that raid the marsh communities; this also has induced many of the marsh dwellers to abandon their villages.",
"title": "Settlement patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The war has also affected settlement patterns in the northern Kurdish areas. There, the struggle for a Kurdish state by guerrillas was rejected by the government as it steadily escalated violence against the local communities. Starting in 1984, the government launched a scorched-earth campaign to drive a wedge between the villagers and the guerrillas in the remote areas of two provinces of Kurdistan in which Kurdish guerrillas were active. In the process whole villages were torched and subsequently bulldozed, which resulted in the Kurds flocking into the regional centers of Irbil and As Sulaymaniyah. Also as a \"military precaution\", the government has cleared a broad strip of territory in the Kurdish region along the Iranian border of all its inhabitants, hoping in this way to interdict the movement of Kurdish guerrillas back and forth between Iran and Iraq. The majority of Kurdish villages, however, remained intact in early 1988.",
"title": "Settlement patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the arid areas of Iraq to the west and south, cities and large towns are almost invariably situated on watercourses, usually on the major rivers or their larger tributaries. In the south this dependence has had its disadvantages. Until the recent development of flood control, Baghdad and other cities were subject to the threat of inundation. Moreover, the dikes needed for protection have effectively prevented the expansion of the urban areas in some directions. The growth of Baghdad, for example, was restricted by dikes on its eastern edge. The diversion of water to the Milhat ath Tharthar and the construction of a canal transferring water from the Tigris north of Baghdad to the Diyala River have permitted the irrigation of land outside the limits of the dikes and the expansion of settlement.",
"title": "Settlement patterns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The climate of Iraq is mainly a hot desert climate or a hot semi-arid climate to the northernmost part. Averages high temperatures are generally above 40 °C (104 °F) at low elevations during summer months (June, July and August) while averages low temperatures can drop to below 0 °C (32 °F) during the coldest month of the year during winter The all-time record high temperature in Iraq of 52 °C (126 °F) was recorded near An Nasiriyah on 2 August 2011. Most of the rainfall occurs from December through April and averages between 100 and 180 millimeters (3.9 and 7.1 in) annually. The mountainous region of northern Iraq receives appreciably more precipitation than the central or southern desert region, where they tend to have a Mediterranean climate.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Roughly 90% of the annual rainfall occurs between November and April, most of it in the winter months from December through March. The remaining six months, particularly the hottest ones of June, July, and August, are extremely dry.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Except in the north and northeast, mean annual rainfall ranges between 100 and 190 millimeters (3.9 and 7.5 in). Data available from stations in the foothills and steppes south and southwest of the mountains suggest mean annual rainfall between 320 and 570 millimeters (12.6 and 22.4 in) for that area. Rainfall in the mountains is more abundant and may reach 1,000 millimeters (39.4 in) a year in some places, but the terrain precludes extensive cultivation. Cultivation on nonirrigated land is limited essentially to the mountain valleys, foothills, and steppes, which have 300 millimeters (11.8 in) or more of rainfall annually. Even in this zone, however, only one crop a year can be grown, and shortages of rain have often led to crop failures.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Mean minimum temperatures in the winter range from near freezing (just before dawn) in the northern and northeastern foothills and the western desert to 2 and 4 to 5 °C (35.6 and 39.2 to 41.0 °F) in the alluvial plains of southern Iraq. They rise to a mean maximum of about 16 °C (60.8 °F) in the western desert and the northeast, and 17 °C (62.6 °F) in the south. In the summer mean minimum temperatures range from about 27 to 31 °C (80.6 to 87.8 °F) and rise to maxima between roughly 41 and 45 °C (105.8 and 113.0 °F). Temperatures sometimes fall below freezing and have fallen as low as −14 °C (6.8 °F) at Ar Rutbah in the western desert. Such summer heat, even in a hot desert, is high and this can be easily explained by the very low elevations of deserts regions which experience these exceptionally searing high temperatures. In fact, the elevations of cities such as Baghdad or Basra are near the sea level (0 m) because deserts are located predominantly along the Persian Gulf. That's why some Gulf's countries like Iraq, Iran and Kuwait experience extreme heat during summer, even more extreme than the normal level. The searing summer heat only exists in low elevations in these countries while mountains and higher elevations know much more moderated summer temperatures.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The summer months are marked by two kinds of wind phenomena. The southern and southeasterly sharqi, a dry, dusty wind with occasional gusts of 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph), occurs from April to early June and again from late September through November. It may last for a day at the beginning and end of the season but for several days at other times. This wind is often accompanied by violent duststorms that may rise to heights of several thousand meters and close airports for brief periods. From mid-June to mid-September the prevailing wind, called the shamal, is from the north and northwest. It is a steady wind, absent only occasionally during this period. The very dry air brought by this shamal permits intensive sun heating of the land surface, but the breeze has some cooling effect.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The combination of rain shortage and extreme heat makes much of Iraq a desert. Because of very high rates of evaporation, soil and plants rapidly lose the little moisture obtained from the rain, and vegetation could not survive without extensive irrigation. Some areas, however, although arid, do have natural vegetation in contrast to the desert. For example, in the Zagros Mountains in northeastern Iraq there is permanent vegetation, such as oak trees, and date palms are found in the south.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1922 British officials concluded the Treaty of Mohammara with Abd al Aziz ibn Abd ar Rahman Al Saud, who in 1932 formed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The treaty provided the basic agreement for the boundary between the eventually independent nations. Also in 1922 the two parties agreed to the creation of the diamond-shaped Neutral Zone of approximately 7,500 km (2,900 sq mi) adjacent to the western tip of Kuwait in which neither Iraq nor Saudi Arabia would build dwellings or installations. Bedouins from either country could utilize the limited water and seasonal grazing resources of the zone. In April 1975, an agreement signed in Baghdad fixed the borders of the countries.",
"title": "Area and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Through Algerian mediation, Iran and Iraq agreed in March 1975 to normalize their relations, and three months later they signed a treaty known as the Algiers Accord. The document defined the common border all along the Khawr Abd Allah (Shatt) River estuary as the thalweg. To compensate Iraq for the loss of what formerly had been regarded as its territory, pockets of territory along the mountain border in the central sector of its common boundary with Iran were assigned to it. Nonetheless, in September 1980 Iraq went to war with Iran, citing among other complaints the fact that Iran had not turned over to it the land specified in the Algiers Accord. This problem has subsequently proved to be a stumbling block to a negotiated settlement of the ongoing conflict.",
"title": "Area and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 1988 the boundary with Kuwait was another outstanding problem. It was fixed in a 1913 treaty between the Ottoman Empire and British officials acting on behalf of Kuwait's ruling family, which in 1899 had ceded control over foreign affairs to Britain. The boundary was accepted by Iraq when it became independent in 1932, but in the 1960s and again in the mid-1970s, the Iraqi government advanced a claim to parts of Kuwait. Kuwait made several representations to the Iraqis during the war to fix the border once and for all but Baghdad repeatedly demurred, claiming that the issue is a potentially divisive one that could inflame nationalist sentiment inside Iraq. Hence in 1988 it was likely that a solution would have to wait until the war ended.",
"title": "Area and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Area: total: 438,317 km (169,235 sq mi) land: 437,367 km (168,868 sq mi) water: 950 km (370 sq mi)",
"title": "Area and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Land boundaries: total: 3,809 km (2,367 mi) border countries: Iran 1,599 km (994 mi), Saudi Arabia 811 km (504 mi), Syria 599 km (372 mi), Turkey 367 km (228 mi), Kuwait 254 km (158 mi), Jordan 179 km (111 mi)",
"title": "Area and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Coastline: 58 km (36 mi)",
"title": "Area and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Maritime claims: territorial sea: 12 nmi (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) continental shelf: not specified",
"title": "Area and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Terrain: mostly broad plains; reedy marshes along Iranian border in south with large flooded areas; mountains along borders with Iran and Turkey",
"title": "Area and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Elevation extremes: lowest point: Persian Gulf 0 m highest point: Cheekah Dar 3,611 m (11,847 ft)",
"title": "Area and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Natural resources: petroleum, natural gas, phosphates, sulfur",
"title": "Resources and land use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Land use: arable land: 7.89% permanent crops: 0.53% other: 91.58% (2012)",
"title": "Resources and land use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Irrigated land: 35,250 km or 13,610 sq mi (2003)",
"title": "Resources and land use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Total renewable water resources: 89.86 km or 21.56 cu mi (2011)",
"title": "Resources and land use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Freshwater withdrawal (domestic/industrial/agricultural): total: 66 km/yr (7%/15%/79%) per capita: 2,616 m/yr (2000)",
"title": "Resources and land use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "While its proven oil reserves of 112 billion barrels (17.8×10^ m) ranks Iraq fifth in the world behind Iran, the United States Department of Energy estimates that up to 90 percent of the country remains unexplored. Unexplored regions of Iraq could yield an additional 100 billion barrels (16×10^ m). Iraq's oil production costs are among the lowest in the world. However, only about 2,000 oil wells have been drilled in Iraq, compared to about 1 million wells in Texas alone.",
"title": "Resources and land use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Natural hazards: dust storms, sandstorms, floods",
"title": "Environmental concerns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Environment - current issues: government water control projects have drained most of the inhabited marsh areas east of An Kshatriya by drying up or diverting the feeder streams and rivers; a once sizable population of Shi'a Muslims, who have inhabited these areas for thousands of years, has been displaced; furthermore, the destruction of the natural habitat poses serious threats to the area's wildlife populations; inadequate supplies of potable water; development of Tigris-Euphrates Rivers system contingent upon agreements with upstream riparian Turkey; air and water pollution; soil degradation (desalination) and erosion; and desertification.",
"title": "Environmental concerns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Environment - international agreements: party to: Biodiversity, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection signed, but not ratified: Environmental Modification",
"title": "Environmental concerns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "33°00′N 44°00′E / 33.000°N 44.000°E / 33.000; 44.000",
"title": "References"
}
]
| The geography of Iraq is diverse and falls into five main regions: the desert, Upper Mesopotamia, the northern highlands of Iraq, Lower Mesopotamia, and the alluvial plain extending from around Tikrit to the Persian Gulf. The mountains in the northeast are an extension of the alpine system that runs eastward from the Balkans through southern Turkey, northern Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, eventually reaching the Himalayas in Pakistan. The desert lies in the southwest provinces along the borders with Saudi Arabia and Jordan and geographically belongs in the Arabian Peninsula. | 2001-05-05T02:46:27Z | 2023-11-26T23:35:19Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Iraq |
14,666 | Demographics of Iraq | The Iraqi people (Arabic: العراقيون; Kurdish: گهلی عیراق; Syriac: ܥܡܐ ܥܝܪܩܝܐ; Turkish: Iraklılar) are people originating from the country of Iraq.
Iraqi Arabs are the largest ethnic group in Iraq, followed by Iraqi Kurds, then Iraqi Turkmen as the third largest ethnic group in the country. Studies indicate that Mesopotamian Arabs, who make up the considerable population of Iraq, are genetically distinct from other Arab populations in the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula.
The population was estimated to be 43,533,592 in 2021 Turkmen (4.5-6 million), Assyrians (0.5 million), Yazidis (500,000), Armenians, Marsh Arabs, and Shabaks (250,000). Other minorities include Mandaeans (3,000), Roma (50,000) and Circassians (2,000). The most spoken languages are Mesopotamian Arabic, Kurdish, Assyrian Syriac and Iraqi Turkmen dialects. The percentages of different ethno-religious groups residing in Iraq vary from source to source due to the last Iraqi census having taken place over 30 years ago. A new census of Iraq was planned to take place in 2020, but this was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was rescheduled to November 2022 but was postponed again with an "electronic national population census" planned in the last quarter of 2023.
39,650,145 (2021 estimate), 43,533,592 (2021 estimate), up from 31,234,000 (April 2009 IMF estimate)
Average life expectancy at age 0 of the total population.
Structure of the population (1 July 2013) (Estimates):
Population Estimates by Sex and Age Group (01.VII.2020):
Iraq's dominant ethnic group are Arabs, who account for more than three-quarters of the population.
According to the CIA World Factbook, citing a 1987 Iraqi government estimate, the population of Iraq is formed of 70-80% Arabs followed by 15-20% Kurds. and also Marsh Arabs.
in addition, the estimate claims that other minorities form 5% of the country's population, including the Turkmen, Kaka'i, Bedouins, Roma, Assyrians/Chaldeans/Syriacs, Circassians, Mandaeans, and Persians. However, the International Crisis Group points out that figures from the 1987 census, as well as the 1967, 1977, and 1997 censuses, "are all considered highly problematic, due to suspicions of regime manipulation" because Iraqi citizens were only allowed to indicate belonging to either the Arab or Kurdish ethnic groups; consequently, this skewed the number of other ethnic minorities, such as Iraq's third largest ethnic group – the Turkmen.
Arabic and Kurdish are the two official languages of Iraq. Arabic is taught across all schools in Iraq, however in the north the Kurdish language is the most spoken. Eastern Aramaic languages, such as Syriac and Mandaic are spoken, as well as the Iraqi Turkmen language, and various other indigenous languages.
Kurdish, including several dialects, is the second largest language and has regional language status in the north of the country. Aramaic, in antiquity spoken throughout the whole country, is now only spoken by the Assyrian Chaldean minority. The Iraqi Turkmen dialect is spoken in parts of northern iraq, numerous languages of the Caucasus are also spoken by minorities, notably the Chechen community.
Religion in Iraq (2017)
According to the CIA World Factbook, 98-99% of Iraqis follow Islam: 61–64% Shia and 29–34% Sunni. Christianity accounts for 1–2%, and the rest practice Yazidis, Mandaeism, and other religions.
While there has been voluntary relocation of many Christian families to northern Iraq, recent reporting indicates that the overall Christian population may have dropped by as much as 50 percent since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, with many fleeing to Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon (2010 estimate). The percentage of Christians has fallen from 6% in 1991 or 1.5 million to about one third of this. Estimates say there are 500,000 Christians in Iraq.
Nearly all Iraqi Kurds identify as Sunni Muslims. A survey in Iraq concluded that "98% of Kurds in Iraq identified themselves as Sunnis and only 2% identified as Shias". The religious differences between Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds are small. While 98 percent of Shia Arabs believe that visiting the shrines of saints is acceptable, 71 percent of Sunni Arabs did and 59 percent of Sunni Kurds support this practice. About 94 percent of the population in Iraqi Kurdistan is Muslim.
The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Iraqi people (Arabic: العراقيون; Kurdish: گهلی عیراق; Syriac: ܥܡܐ ܥܝܪܩܝܐ; Turkish: Iraklılar) are people originating from the country of Iraq.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Iraqi Arabs are the largest ethnic group in Iraq, followed by Iraqi Kurds, then Iraqi Turkmen as the third largest ethnic group in the country. Studies indicate that Mesopotamian Arabs, who make up the considerable population of Iraq, are genetically distinct from other Arab populations in the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The population was estimated to be 43,533,592 in 2021 Turkmen (4.5-6 million), Assyrians (0.5 million), Yazidis (500,000), Armenians, Marsh Arabs, and Shabaks (250,000). Other minorities include Mandaeans (3,000), Roma (50,000) and Circassians (2,000). The most spoken languages are Mesopotamian Arabic, Kurdish, Assyrian Syriac and Iraqi Turkmen dialects. The percentages of different ethno-religious groups residing in Iraq vary from source to source due to the last Iraqi census having taken place over 30 years ago. A new census of Iraq was planned to take place in 2020, but this was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was rescheduled to November 2022 but was postponed again with an \"electronic national population census\" planned in the last quarter of 2023.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "39,650,145 (2021 estimate), 43,533,592 (2021 estimate), up from 31,234,000 (April 2009 IMF estimate)",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Average life expectancy at age 0 of the total population.",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Structure of the population (1 July 2013) (Estimates):",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Population Estimates by Sex and Age Group (01.VII.2020):",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Iraq's dominant ethnic group are Arabs, who account for more than three-quarters of the population.",
"title": "Ethnicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "According to the CIA World Factbook, citing a 1987 Iraqi government estimate, the population of Iraq is formed of 70-80% Arabs followed by 15-20% Kurds. and also Marsh Arabs.",
"title": "Ethnicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "in addition, the estimate claims that other minorities form 5% of the country's population, including the Turkmen, Kaka'i, Bedouins, Roma, Assyrians/Chaldeans/Syriacs, Circassians, Mandaeans, and Persians. However, the International Crisis Group points out that figures from the 1987 census, as well as the 1967, 1977, and 1997 censuses, \"are all considered highly problematic, due to suspicions of regime manipulation\" because Iraqi citizens were only allowed to indicate belonging to either the Arab or Kurdish ethnic groups; consequently, this skewed the number of other ethnic minorities, such as Iraq's third largest ethnic group – the Turkmen.",
"title": "Ethnicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Arabic and Kurdish are the two official languages of Iraq. Arabic is taught across all schools in Iraq, however in the north the Kurdish language is the most spoken. Eastern Aramaic languages, such as Syriac and Mandaic are spoken, as well as the Iraqi Turkmen language, and various other indigenous languages.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Kurdish, including several dialects, is the second largest language and has regional language status in the north of the country. Aramaic, in antiquity spoken throughout the whole country, is now only spoken by the Assyrian Chaldean minority. The Iraqi Turkmen dialect is spoken in parts of northern iraq, numerous languages of the Caucasus are also spoken by minorities, notably the Chechen community.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Religion in Iraq (2017)",
"title": "Religions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "According to the CIA World Factbook, 98-99% of Iraqis follow Islam: 61–64% Shia and 29–34% Sunni. Christianity accounts for 1–2%, and the rest practice Yazidis, Mandaeism, and other religions.",
"title": "Religions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "While there has been voluntary relocation of many Christian families to northern Iraq, recent reporting indicates that the overall Christian population may have dropped by as much as 50 percent since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, with many fleeing to Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon (2010 estimate). The percentage of Christians has fallen from 6% in 1991 or 1.5 million to about one third of this. Estimates say there are 500,000 Christians in Iraq.",
"title": "Religions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Nearly all Iraqi Kurds identify as Sunni Muslims. A survey in Iraq concluded that \"98% of Kurds in Iraq identified themselves as Sunnis and only 2% identified as Shias\". The religious differences between Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds are small. While 98 percent of Shia Arabs believe that visiting the shrines of saints is acceptable, 71 percent of Sunni Arabs did and 59 percent of Sunni Kurds support this practice. About 94 percent of the population in Iraqi Kurdistan is Muslim.",
"title": "Religions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The following demographic statistics are from the CIA World Factbook, unless otherwise indicated.",
"title": "Demographic statistics"
}
]
| The Iraqi people are people originating from the country of Iraq. Iraqi Arabs are the largest ethnic group in Iraq, followed by Iraqi Kurds, then Iraqi Turkmen as the third largest ethnic group in the country. Studies indicate that Mesopotamian Arabs, who make up the considerable population of Iraq, are genetically distinct from other Arab populations in the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula. The population was estimated to be 43,533,592 in 2021 Turkmen, Assyrians, Yazidis (500,000), Armenians, Marsh Arabs, and Shabaks (250,000). Other minorities include Mandaeans (3,000), Roma (50,000) and Circassians (2,000). The most spoken languages are Mesopotamian Arabic, Kurdish, Assyrian Syriac and Iraqi Turkmen dialects. The percentages of different ethno-religious groups residing in Iraq vary from source to source due to the last Iraqi census having taken place over 30 years ago. A new census of Iraq was planned to take place in 2020, but this was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was rescheduled to November 2022 but was postponed again with an "electronic national population census" planned in the last quarter of 2023. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-12-30T19:07:40Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iraq |
14,667 | Politics of Iraq | Iraq is a federal parliamentary representative democratic republic. It is a multi-party system whereby the executive power is exercised by the Prime Minister of the Council of Ministers as the head of government, the President of Iraq as the head of state, and legislative power is vested in the Council of Representatives.
The current Prime Minister of Iraq is Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, who holds most of the executive authority and appointed the Council of Ministers, which acts as a cabinet and/or government.
The northern autonomous provinces, Kurdistan Region emerged in 1992 as an autonomous entity inside Iraq with its own local government and parliament.
The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Iraq an "authoritarian regime" in 2022.
The federal government of Iraq is defined under the current constitution as an Islamic, democratic, federal parliamentary republic. The federal government is composed of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as well as numerous independent commissions.
The legislative branch is composed of the Council of Representatives and a Federation Council. The executive branch is composed of the president, the prime minister, and the Council of Ministers. The federal judiciary is composed of the Higher Judicial Council, the Supreme Court, the Court of Cassation, the Public Prosecution Department, the Judiciary Oversight Commission, and other federal courts that are regulated by law. One such court is the Central Criminal Court.
The Independent High Commission for Human Rights, the Independent High Electoral Commission, and the Commission on Integrity are independent commissions subject to monitoring by the Council of Representatives. The Central Bank of Iraq, the Board of Supreme Audit, the Communications and Media Commission, and the Endowment Commission are financially and administratively independent institutions. The Foundation of Martyrs is attached to the Council of Ministers. The Federal Public Service Council regulates the affairs of the federal public service, including appointment and promotion.
The basic subdivisions of the country are the regions and the governorates. Both regions and governorates are given broad autonomy with regions given additional powers such as control of internal security forces for the region such as police, security forces, and guards. The last local elections for the governorates were held in the 2009 Iraqi governorate elections on 31 January 2009.
The constitution requires that the Council of Representatives enact a law which provides the procedures for forming a new region 6 months from the start of its first session. A law was passed 11 October 2006 by a unanimous vote with only 138 of 275 representatives present, with the remaining representatives boycotting the vote. Legislators from the Iraqi Accord Front, Sadrist Movement and Islamic Virtue Party all opposed the bill.
Under the law, a region can be created out of one or more existing governorates or two or more existing regions, and a governorate can also join an existing region to create a new region. A new region can be proposed by one third or more of the council members in each affected governorate plus 500 voters or by one tenth or more voters in each affected governorate. A referendum must then be held within three months, which requires a simple majority in favour to pass. In the event of competing proposals, the multiple proposals are put to a ballot and the proposal with the most supporters is put to the referendum. In the event of an affirmative referendum a Transitional Legislative Assembly is elected for one year, which has the task of writing a constitution for the Region, which is then put to a referendum requiring a simple majority to pass. The President, Prime Minister and Ministers of the region are elected by simple majority, in contrast to the Iraqi Council of Representatives which requires two thirds support.
Iraq is divided into 18 governorates, which are further divided into districts:
Elections for the National Assembly of Iraq were held on January 30, 2005, in Iraq. The 275-member National Assembly was a parliament created under the Transitional Law during the Occupation of Iraq. The newly elected transitional Assembly was given a mandate to write the new and permanent Constitution of Iraq and exercised legislative functions until the new Constitution came into effect, and resulted in the formation of the Iraqi Transitional Government.
The United Iraqi Alliance, tacitly backed by Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, led with some 48% of the vote. The Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan was in second place with some 26% of the vote. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's party, the Iraqi List, came third with some 14%. In total, twelve parties received enough votes to win a seat in the assembly.
Low Arab Sunni turnout threatened the legitimacy of the election, which was as low as 2% in Anbar province. More than 100 armed attacks on polling places took place, killing at least 44 people (including nine suicide bombers) across Iraq, including at least 20 in Baghdad.
Following the ratification of the Constitution of Iraq on 15 October 2005, a general election was held on 15 December to elect the permanent 275-member Iraqi Council of Representatives.
The elections took place under a list system, whereby voters chose from a list of parties and coalitions. 230 seats were apportioned among Iraq's 18 governorates based on the number of registered voters in each as of the January 2005 elections, including 59 seats for Baghdad Governorate. The seats within each governorate were allocated to lists through a system of Proportional Representation. An additional 45 "compensatory" seats were allocated to those parties whose percentage of the national vote total (including out of country votes) exceeds the percentage of the 275 total seats that they have been allocated. Women were required to occupy 25% of the 275 seats. The change in the voting system gave more weight to Arab Sunni voters, who make up most of the voters in several provinces. It was expected that these provinces would thus return mostly Sunni Arab representatives, after most Sunnis boycotted the last election.
Turnout was high (79.6%). The White House was encouraged by the relatively low levels of violence during polling, with one insurgent group making good on a promised election day moratorium on attacks, even going so far as to guard the voters from attack. President Bush frequently pointed to the election as a sign of progress in rebuilding Iraq. However, post-election violence threatened to plunge the nation into civil war, before the situation began to calm in 2007. The election results themselves produced a shaky coalition government headed by Nouri al-Maliki.
A parliamentary election was held in Iraq on 7 March 2010. The election decided the 325 members of the Council of Representatives of Iraq who will elect the Iraqi Prime Minister and President. The election resulted in a partial victory for the Iraqi National Movement, led by former Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, which won a total of 91 seats, making it the largest alliance in the council. The State of Law Coalition, led by incumbent Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, was the second largest grouping with 89 seats.
The election was rife with controversy. Prior to the election, the Supreme Court in Iraq ruled that the existing electoral law/rule was unconstitutional, and a new elections law made changes in the electoral system. On 15 January 2010, the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) banned 499 candidates from the election due to alleged links with the Ba'ath Party. Before the start of the campaign on 12 February 2010, IHEC confirmed that most of the appeals by banned candidates had been rejected and 456 of the initially banned candidates would not be allowed to run for the election. There were numerous allegations of fraud, and a recount of the votes in Baghdad was ordered on 19 April 2010. On May 14, IHEC announced that after 11,298 ballot boxes had been recounted, there was no sign of fraud or violations.
The new parliament opened on 14 June 2010. After months of fraught negotiations, an agreement was reached on the formation of a new government on November 11. Talabani would continue as president, Al-Maliki would stay on as prime minister and Allawi would head a new security council.
Parliamentary elections were held in Iraq on 30 April 2014. The elections decided the 328 members of the Council of Representatives who will in turn elect the Iraqi President and Prime Minister.
On 30 November 2021, the political bloc led by Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr was confirmed the winner of the October parliamentary election. His Sadrist Movement, won a total of 73 out of the 329 seats in the parliament. The Taqadum, or Progress Party-led by Parliament Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi, a Sunni – secured 37 seats. Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law party got 33 seats in parliament. Al-Fatah alliance, whose main components are militia groups affiliated with the Iran-backed Popular Mobilisation Forces, sustained its crushing loss and snatched 17 seats. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) received 31 seats, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) gained 18.
In June 2022, 73 members of parliament from the Sadrist movement, resigned. On 27 October 2022, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, close ally of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, took the office to succeed Mustafa al-Kadhimi as new Prime Minister of Iraq.
According to Transparency International, Iraq's is the most corrupt government in the Middle East, and is described as a "hybrid regime" (between a "flawed democracy" and an "authoritarian regime"). The 2011 report "Costs of War" from Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies concluded that U.S. military presence in Iraq has not been able to prevent this corruption, noting that as early as 2006, "there were clear signs that post-Saddam Iraq was not going to be the linchpin for a new democratic Middle East."
During the regime of Saddam Hussein (1979–2003), several Iraqi opposition groups created a quota system by which Sunni Islamic, Shia Islamic, Kurdish and other religious or ethnic groups would be proportionally represented in a future new government. The U.S. in July 2003 selected the members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the forerunner of the first post–Hussein sovereign Iraqi (interim) government, according to that ethno-sectarian quota system.
Also in 2003, a "pact" (muhasasa ta’ifa) was struck by "the elite", holding that after a national election, the winning parties divide the ministerial positions in direct relationship to their success at the ballot box. After 2003, a second agreement (muhasasa) was made, holding that ministries and their budgets and other political positions must be proportionally placed under the "control" of "religious [or sectarian or ethnic] groups", "depending mostly on a group’s size", presuming such "groups" to be fully represented by one or several parties or lists taking part in the elections, or that national governments should "represent the different ethnic, religious and sectarian identities that make up the Iraqi society", presuming that such "identities" are expressed or represented by existing political parties. Such agreements between members of the elite to collude in order to avoid competition, improve their own profits, and dominate the market (of voters in a democracy), have been labeled "elite cartel". The political parties themselves, once they won any ministry through the muhasasa system, benefit financially from state contracts awarded by them to companies run by their party members (see below, section Clientelism, patronage) what makes it even harder for them to step out of the muhasasa arrangements. Or, as a researcher phrased it in 2020: "Such elite pacts are notoriously resistant to reform, particularly if any proposed change is perceived to undermine elite interests (…)".
This muhasasa elite cartel (and connected problems) led to massive protests in Iraq in 2011, 2012–2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019–2021. Analysts have seen this muhasasa system to exist until at least late 2020. The Abdul Mahdi Government of 2018 broke with elements of muhasasa. Although his anti-muhasasa Sadrist Movement retained plurality in the 2021 election, inability to form a government eventually lead to the party's withdrawal from Parliament, allowing the rival parties to form another muhasasa-based government.
Those two muhasasa agreements in and after 2003 (see above) had the effect that, starting with the first post–2003 Iraqi government after elections in 2006, if a party "controlled" a ministry, it appointed also the top positions in their civil services to their party followers and faction members; also the positions for senior public service were distributed on the basis of "ethnic, religious and/or party affiliation" rather than merit, professional competence or experience. This incompetence caused mismanagement in the successive Iraqi governments of Al-Maliki (2006–2014), Al-Abadi (2014–2018), and also Abdul-Mahdi (2018–2020), leading to hundreds of billions of dollars being wasted on failed projects and the neglect of electricity networks, the transportation sector, economic legislation, and other infrastructure, as well as citizen demands not being responded to. Such incompetence – next to other forms of political turmoil like corruption (see next subsection) and instability – is considered by many analysts to have also fostered the rise of ISIL, in 2014. (During the formation of the Abdul Mahdi Government in 2018, this new prime minister attempted to break through the traditional muhasasa procedures, but there's no clear information as to how far he succeeded in that, or whether the Iraqi governments since 2018 worked more competently or less corruptly.)
Civil services being staffed – under these muhasasa agreements (see above) – according to party loyalty had the effect that state contracts would only be awarded by them to "party-affiliated companies and businesspeople", who would be paid handsomely for their contracted services; even if they hardly, or not at all, actually delivered those services. Such manner of spending state finances has been labeled governmental contracting fraud and structural political corruption: not the general public but privileged companies were being served by the government. This culture of clientelism and "systemic political patronage" produced a new class of entrepreneurs, getting rich through close relations with government officials and their lush government contracts. Meanwhile, politicians themselves lived in wealth, self-enrichment and massive personal protection.
The infrastructure not being maintained or modernized due to that governmental incompetence and mismanagement (see above) severely hampered the development of private economic activity, therefore meaning the private sector could not absorb the half million of young people entering the job market every year. This muhasasa-style 'cartel' government, due to its lack of accountability – politicians being "recycled … irrespective of their performance" – provided too little incentives for those politicians to build a diversified and competitive economy or "deliver benefits to the population". | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Iraq is a federal parliamentary representative democratic republic. It is a multi-party system whereby the executive power is exercised by the Prime Minister of the Council of Ministers as the head of government, the President of Iraq as the head of state, and legislative power is vested in the Council of Representatives.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The current Prime Minister of Iraq is Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, who holds most of the executive authority and appointed the Council of Ministers, which acts as a cabinet and/or government.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The northern autonomous provinces, Kurdistan Region emerged in 1992 as an autonomous entity inside Iraq with its own local government and parliament.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Iraq an \"authoritarian regime\" in 2022.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The federal government of Iraq is defined under the current constitution as an Islamic, democratic, federal parliamentary republic. The federal government is composed of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as well as numerous independent commissions.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The legislative branch is composed of the Council of Representatives and a Federation Council. The executive branch is composed of the president, the prime minister, and the Council of Ministers. The federal judiciary is composed of the Higher Judicial Council, the Supreme Court, the Court of Cassation, the Public Prosecution Department, the Judiciary Oversight Commission, and other federal courts that are regulated by law. One such court is the Central Criminal Court.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Independent High Commission for Human Rights, the Independent High Electoral Commission, and the Commission on Integrity are independent commissions subject to monitoring by the Council of Representatives. The Central Bank of Iraq, the Board of Supreme Audit, the Communications and Media Commission, and the Endowment Commission are financially and administratively independent institutions. The Foundation of Martyrs is attached to the Council of Ministers. The Federal Public Service Council regulates the affairs of the federal public service, including appointment and promotion.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The basic subdivisions of the country are the regions and the governorates. Both regions and governorates are given broad autonomy with regions given additional powers such as control of internal security forces for the region such as police, security forces, and guards. The last local elections for the governorates were held in the 2009 Iraqi governorate elections on 31 January 2009.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The constitution requires that the Council of Representatives enact a law which provides the procedures for forming a new region 6 months from the start of its first session. A law was passed 11 October 2006 by a unanimous vote with only 138 of 275 representatives present, with the remaining representatives boycotting the vote. Legislators from the Iraqi Accord Front, Sadrist Movement and Islamic Virtue Party all opposed the bill.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Under the law, a region can be created out of one or more existing governorates or two or more existing regions, and a governorate can also join an existing region to create a new region. A new region can be proposed by one third or more of the council members in each affected governorate plus 500 voters or by one tenth or more voters in each affected governorate. A referendum must then be held within three months, which requires a simple majority in favour to pass. In the event of competing proposals, the multiple proposals are put to a ballot and the proposal with the most supporters is put to the referendum. In the event of an affirmative referendum a Transitional Legislative Assembly is elected for one year, which has the task of writing a constitution for the Region, which is then put to a referendum requiring a simple majority to pass. The President, Prime Minister and Ministers of the region are elected by simple majority, in contrast to the Iraqi Council of Representatives which requires two thirds support.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Iraq is divided into 18 governorates, which are further divided into districts:",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Elections for the National Assembly of Iraq were held on January 30, 2005, in Iraq. The 275-member National Assembly was a parliament created under the Transitional Law during the Occupation of Iraq. The newly elected transitional Assembly was given a mandate to write the new and permanent Constitution of Iraq and exercised legislative functions until the new Constitution came into effect, and resulted in the formation of the Iraqi Transitional Government.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The United Iraqi Alliance, tacitly backed by Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, led with some 48% of the vote. The Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan was in second place with some 26% of the vote. Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's party, the Iraqi List, came third with some 14%. In total, twelve parties received enough votes to win a seat in the assembly.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Low Arab Sunni turnout threatened the legitimacy of the election, which was as low as 2% in Anbar province. More than 100 armed attacks on polling places took place, killing at least 44 people (including nine suicide bombers) across Iraq, including at least 20 in Baghdad.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Following the ratification of the Constitution of Iraq on 15 October 2005, a general election was held on 15 December to elect the permanent 275-member Iraqi Council of Representatives.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The elections took place under a list system, whereby voters chose from a list of parties and coalitions. 230 seats were apportioned among Iraq's 18 governorates based on the number of registered voters in each as of the January 2005 elections, including 59 seats for Baghdad Governorate. The seats within each governorate were allocated to lists through a system of Proportional Representation. An additional 45 \"compensatory\" seats were allocated to those parties whose percentage of the national vote total (including out of country votes) exceeds the percentage of the 275 total seats that they have been allocated. Women were required to occupy 25% of the 275 seats. The change in the voting system gave more weight to Arab Sunni voters, who make up most of the voters in several provinces. It was expected that these provinces would thus return mostly Sunni Arab representatives, after most Sunnis boycotted the last election.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Turnout was high (79.6%). The White House was encouraged by the relatively low levels of violence during polling, with one insurgent group making good on a promised election day moratorium on attacks, even going so far as to guard the voters from attack. President Bush frequently pointed to the election as a sign of progress in rebuilding Iraq. However, post-election violence threatened to plunge the nation into civil war, before the situation began to calm in 2007. The election results themselves produced a shaky coalition government headed by Nouri al-Maliki.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "A parliamentary election was held in Iraq on 7 March 2010. The election decided the 325 members of the Council of Representatives of Iraq who will elect the Iraqi Prime Minister and President. The election resulted in a partial victory for the Iraqi National Movement, led by former Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, which won a total of 91 seats, making it the largest alliance in the council. The State of Law Coalition, led by incumbent Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, was the second largest grouping with 89 seats.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The election was rife with controversy. Prior to the election, the Supreme Court in Iraq ruled that the existing electoral law/rule was unconstitutional, and a new elections law made changes in the electoral system. On 15 January 2010, the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) banned 499 candidates from the election due to alleged links with the Ba'ath Party. Before the start of the campaign on 12 February 2010, IHEC confirmed that most of the appeals by banned candidates had been rejected and 456 of the initially banned candidates would not be allowed to run for the election. There were numerous allegations of fraud, and a recount of the votes in Baghdad was ordered on 19 April 2010. On May 14, IHEC announced that after 11,298 ballot boxes had been recounted, there was no sign of fraud or violations.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The new parliament opened on 14 June 2010. After months of fraught negotiations, an agreement was reached on the formation of a new government on November 11. Talabani would continue as president, Al-Maliki would stay on as prime minister and Allawi would head a new security council.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Parliamentary elections were held in Iraq on 30 April 2014. The elections decided the 328 members of the Council of Representatives who will in turn elect the Iraqi President and Prime Minister.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On 30 November 2021, the political bloc led by Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr was confirmed the winner of the October parliamentary election. His Sadrist Movement, won a total of 73 out of the 329 seats in the parliament. The Taqadum, or Progress Party-led by Parliament Speaker Mohammed al-Halbousi, a Sunni – secured 37 seats. Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law party got 33 seats in parliament. Al-Fatah alliance, whose main components are militia groups affiliated with the Iran-backed Popular Mobilisation Forces, sustained its crushing loss and snatched 17 seats. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) received 31 seats, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) gained 18.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In June 2022, 73 members of parliament from the Sadrist movement, resigned. On 27 October 2022, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, close ally of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, took the office to succeed Mustafa al-Kadhimi as new Prime Minister of Iraq.",
"title": "Elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "According to Transparency International, Iraq's is the most corrupt government in the Middle East, and is described as a \"hybrid regime\" (between a \"flawed democracy\" and an \"authoritarian regime\"). The 2011 report \"Costs of War\" from Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies concluded that U.S. military presence in Iraq has not been able to prevent this corruption, noting that as early as 2006, \"there were clear signs that post-Saddam Iraq was not going to be the linchpin for a new democratic Middle East.\"",
"title": "Issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "During the regime of Saddam Hussein (1979–2003), several Iraqi opposition groups created a quota system by which Sunni Islamic, Shia Islamic, Kurdish and other religious or ethnic groups would be proportionally represented in a future new government. The U.S. in July 2003 selected the members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the forerunner of the first post–Hussein sovereign Iraqi (interim) government, according to that ethno-sectarian quota system.",
"title": "Issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Also in 2003, a \"pact\" (muhasasa ta’ifa) was struck by \"the elite\", holding that after a national election, the winning parties divide the ministerial positions in direct relationship to their success at the ballot box. After 2003, a second agreement (muhasasa) was made, holding that ministries and their budgets and other political positions must be proportionally placed under the \"control\" of \"religious [or sectarian or ethnic] groups\", \"depending mostly on a group’s size\", presuming such \"groups\" to be fully represented by one or several parties or lists taking part in the elections, or that national governments should \"represent the different ethnic, religious and sectarian identities that make up the Iraqi society\", presuming that such \"identities\" are expressed or represented by existing political parties. Such agreements between members of the elite to collude in order to avoid competition, improve their own profits, and dominate the market (of voters in a democracy), have been labeled \"elite cartel\". The political parties themselves, once they won any ministry through the muhasasa system, benefit financially from state contracts awarded by them to companies run by their party members (see below, section Clientelism, patronage) what makes it even harder for them to step out of the muhasasa arrangements. Or, as a researcher phrased it in 2020: \"Such elite pacts are notoriously resistant to reform, particularly if any proposed change is perceived to undermine elite interests (…)\".",
"title": "Issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "This muhasasa elite cartel (and connected problems) led to massive protests in Iraq in 2011, 2012–2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019–2021. Analysts have seen this muhasasa system to exist until at least late 2020. The Abdul Mahdi Government of 2018 broke with elements of muhasasa. Although his anti-muhasasa Sadrist Movement retained plurality in the 2021 election, inability to form a government eventually lead to the party's withdrawal from Parliament, allowing the rival parties to form another muhasasa-based government.",
"title": "Issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Those two muhasasa agreements in and after 2003 (see above) had the effect that, starting with the first post–2003 Iraqi government after elections in 2006, if a party \"controlled\" a ministry, it appointed also the top positions in their civil services to their party followers and faction members; also the positions for senior public service were distributed on the basis of \"ethnic, religious and/or party affiliation\" rather than merit, professional competence or experience. This incompetence caused mismanagement in the successive Iraqi governments of Al-Maliki (2006–2014), Al-Abadi (2014–2018), and also Abdul-Mahdi (2018–2020), leading to hundreds of billions of dollars being wasted on failed projects and the neglect of electricity networks, the transportation sector, economic legislation, and other infrastructure, as well as citizen demands not being responded to. Such incompetence – next to other forms of political turmoil like corruption (see next subsection) and instability – is considered by many analysts to have also fostered the rise of ISIL, in 2014. (During the formation of the Abdul Mahdi Government in 2018, this new prime minister attempted to break through the traditional muhasasa procedures, but there's no clear information as to how far he succeeded in that, or whether the Iraqi governments since 2018 worked more competently or less corruptly.)",
"title": "Issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Civil services being staffed – under these muhasasa agreements (see above) – according to party loyalty had the effect that state contracts would only be awarded by them to \"party-affiliated companies and businesspeople\", who would be paid handsomely for their contracted services; even if they hardly, or not at all, actually delivered those services. Such manner of spending state finances has been labeled governmental contracting fraud and structural political corruption: not the general public but privileged companies were being served by the government. This culture of clientelism and \"systemic political patronage\" produced a new class of entrepreneurs, getting rich through close relations with government officials and their lush government contracts. Meanwhile, politicians themselves lived in wealth, self-enrichment and massive personal protection.",
"title": "Issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The infrastructure not being maintained or modernized due to that governmental incompetence and mismanagement (see above) severely hampered the development of private economic activity, therefore meaning the private sector could not absorb the half million of young people entering the job market every year. This muhasasa-style 'cartel' government, due to its lack of accountability – politicians being \"recycled … irrespective of their performance\" – provided too little incentives for those politicians to build a diversified and competitive economy or \"deliver benefits to the population\".",
"title": "Issues"
}
]
| Iraq is a federal parliamentary representative democratic republic. It is a multi-party system whereby the executive power is exercised by the Prime Minister of the Council of Ministers as the head of government, the President of Iraq as the head of state, and legislative power is vested in the Council of Representatives. The current Prime Minister of Iraq is Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, who holds most of the executive authority and appointed the Council of Ministers, which acts as a cabinet and/or government. The northern autonomous provinces, Kurdistan Region emerged in 1992 as an autonomous entity inside Iraq with its own local government and parliament. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Iraq an "authoritarian regime" in 2022. | 2002-02-25T15:43:11Z | 2023-12-22T00:42:58Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Iraq |
14,668 | Economy of Iraq | The economy of Iraq is dominated by the oil sector, which has provided about 99.7% of foreign exchange earnings during its modern history. As of 2021, the oil sector provides about 92% of foreign exchange earnings. Iraq's hitherto agrarian economy underwent rapid development following the 14 July Revolution (1958) which overthrew the Hashemite Iraqi monarchy. It had become the third-largest economy in the Middle East by 1980. This occurred in part because of the Iraqi government's successful industrialization and infrastructure development initiatives in the 1970s, which included irrigation projects, railway and highway construction, and rural electrification.
In the 1980s, financial problems caused by massive expenditures in the Iran-Iraq War and damage to oil export facilities by Iran led the Ba'athist government to implement austerity measures, to borrow heavily, and to later reschedule foreign debt payments. Iraq suffered economic losses of at least $80 billion from the war. In 1988, the hostilities ended. Oil exports gradually increased with the construction of new pipelines and restoration of damaged facilities, but again underwent a sharp decline after the Persian Gulf War. GDP dropped to one-fourth of the country's 1980 gross domestic product and continued to decline under postwar international sanctions, until receiving aid from the U.N. Oil-for-Food Programme in 1997.
The Coalition Provisional Authority made efforts to modernize Iraq's economy after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, through privatization and reducing the country's foreign debt. As a result Iraq's economy expanded rapidly during this time, though growth was stunted by the insurgency, economic mismanagement, and oil shortages caused by outdated technology. Since mid-2009, oil export earnings have returned to levels seen before Operation New Dawn. Government revenues have rebounded, along with global oil prices. In 2011, Baghdad would increase oil exports above their then-current level of 1,900,000 bbl (300,000 m) per day as a result of new contracts with international oil companies. It was thought likely to fall short of the 2,400,000 barrels (380,000 m) per day it was forecasting in its budget. Iraq's recent contracts with major oil companies have the potential to greatly expand oil revenues, but Iraq will need to upgrade its oil processing, pipeline, and export infrastructure to enable these deals to reach their potential.
An improved security environment and an initial wave of foreign investment are helping to spur economic activity, particularly in the energy, construction, and retail sectors. Broader economic improvement, long-term fiscal health, and sustained increases in the standard of living still depend on the government passing major policy reforms and on the continued development of Iraq's massive oil reserves. Although foreign investors viewed Iraq with increasing interest in 2010, most are still hampered by difficulties acquiring land for projects and other regulatory impediments.
Nominal GDP grew by 213% in the 1960s, 1325% in the 1970s, 2% in the 1980s, −47% in the 1990s, and 317% in 2000s.
Real GDP per capita (measured in $1990 ) increased significantly during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which can be explained by both higher oil production levels as well as oil prices, which famously peaked in the 1970s due to the OPEC's oil embargo, causing the 1973 oil crisis. In the following two decades, however, GDP per capita in Iraq dropped substantially because of multiple wars, namely the 1980-88 war with Iran, the 1990-1991 Gulf War.
Before the outbreak of the war with Iran in September 1980, Iraq's economic prospects were bright. Oil production had reached a level of 560,000 m³ (3.5 million barrels) per day in 1979, and oil revenues were 21 billion dollars in 1979 and $27 billion in 1980 due to record oil prices. At the outbreak of the war, Iraq had amassed an estimated $35 billion in foreign exchange reserves. It had the best education and health care systems in the Middle East, and thousands of migrant workers from Egypt, Somalia, and the Indian subcontinent came to the country to work in construction projects.
The Iran–Iraq War and the 1980s oil glut depleted Iraq's foreign exchange reserves, devastated its economy and left the country saddled with a foreign debt of more than $40 billion. After the initial destruction of the war, oil exports gradually increased with the construction of new pipelines and the restoration of damaged facilities.
Iraq's seizure of Kuwait in August 1990, subsequent international economic sanctions on Iraq, and damage from military action by an international coalition beginning in January 1991, drastically reduced economic activity. The regime exacerbated shortages by supporting large military and internal security forces and by allocating resources to key supporters of the Ba'ath Party. The implementation of the UN's Oil for Food program in December 1996 helped improve economic conditions. For the first six six-month phases of the program, Iraq was allowed to export increasing amounts of oil in exchange for food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods. In December 1999, the UN Security Council authorized Iraq to export as much oil as required to meet humanitarian needs. Per capita, food imports increased substantially, while medical supplies and health care services steadily improved, though per capita economic production and living standards were still well below their prewar level.
Iraq changed its oil reserve currency from the U.S. dollar to the euro in 2000. However, 28% of Iraq's export revenues under the program were deducted to meet UN Compensation Fund and UN administrative expenses. The drop in GDP in 2001 was largely the result of the global economic slowdown and lower oil prices.
The removal of sanctions on 24 May 2003 and rising oil prices in the mid-to-late 2000s led to a doubling in oil production from a low of 1.3 mbpd during the turbulence of 2003 to a high of 2.6 mbpd in 2011. Furthermore, reduced inflation and violence since 2007 have translated to real increases in living standards for Iraqis.
One of the key economic challenges was Iraq's immense foreign debt, estimated at $130 billion. Although some of this debt was derived from normal export contracts that Iraq had failed to pay for, some was a result of military and financial support during Iraq's war with Iran.
The Jubilee Iraq campaign argued that much of these debts were odious (illegitimate). However, as the concept of odious debt is not accepted, trying to deal with the debt on those terms would have embroiled Iraq in legal disputes for years. Iraq decided to deal with its debt more pragmatically and approached the Paris Club of official creditors.
In a December 2006 Newsweek International article, a study by Global Insight in London was reported to show "that Civil war or not, Iraq has an economy, and—mother of all surprises—it's doing remarkably well. Real estate is booming. Construction, retail and wholesale trade sectors are healthy, too, according to [the report]. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports 34,000 registered companies in Iraq, up from 8,000 three years ago. Sales of secondhand cars, televisions and mobile phones have all risen sharply. Estimates vary, but one from Global Insight puts GDP growth at 17 per cent last year and projects 13 per cent for 2006. The World Bank has it lower: at 4 per cent this year. But, given all the attention paid to deteriorating security, the startling fact is that Iraq is growing at all."
Since 1974, after the Iraqi Government took direct control of Iraq’s largest private oil production operations, Mosul Oil and Basra Oil, most of Iraq's manufacturing activity has been closely connected to the oil industry. The major industries in that category have been petroleum refining and the manufacture of chemicals and fertilizers. Before 2003, diversification was hindered by limitations on privatization and the effects of the international sanctions of the 1990s. Since 2003, security problems have blocked efforts to establish new enterprises. The construction industry is an exception; in 2000 cement was the only major industrial product not based on hydrocarbons. The construction industry has profited from the need to rebuild after Iraq's several wars. In the 1990s, the industry benefited from government funding of extensive infrastructure and housing projects and elaborate palace complexes.
Agriculture contributes just 3.3% to the gross national product but employs a fifth of the labor force.
Historically, 50 to 60 per cent of Iraq's arable land has been under cultivation. Because of ethnic politics, valuable farmland in Kurdish territory has not contributed to the national economy, and inconsistent agricultural policies under Saddam Hussein discouraged domestic market production. Despite adequate land and water resources, Iraq remains a net food importer. Under the UN Oil for Food program, Iraq imported large quantities of grains, meat, poultry, and dairy products. The government abolished its farm collectivization program in 1981, allowing a greater role for private enterprise in agriculture.
Iraqi agriculture suffered substantial physical disruption from the Gulf War, and economic disruption from sanctions imposed by the United Nations (August 1990). Sanctions curtailed imports by cutting off Iraq's petroleum exports and embargoing those agricultural production inputs deemed to have potential military applications. The Iraqi government responded by monopolizing grain and oilseed marketing, imposing production quotas, and instituting a Public Distribution System for basic foodstuffs. By mid-1991, the government supplied a "basket" of foodstuffs that provided about one-third of the caloric daily requirement and cost consumers about five percent of its market value. With subsidies for agricultural inputs diminished, the government's prices failed to cover their costs. The implicit tax on agricultural production was estimated to reach 20 to 35 percent by the mid-1990s. In October 1991 the Baghdad regime had withdrawn personnel from the northern region controlled by two Kurdish parties. Kurdistan Region was described as "... a market economy essentially left alone by a fragile governing structure, but heavily influenced by substantial international humanitarian aid flows."
Under an "Oil for Food Program" negotiated with the United Nations, in December 1996 Iraq started exporting petroleum and used the proceeds to import foodstuffs three months later. Grain imports averaged $828 million from 1997 to 2001, an increase of over 180 percent from the previous five-year period. Due to foreign competition, Iraqi production declined (29 percent for wheat, 31 percent for barley, and 52 percent for maize). Because the government had generally neglected the production of forage crops, fruits, vegetables, and livestock other than poultry, those sectors had remained more traditional, market-based, and less buffeted by international affairs. Nevertheless, severe drought, an outbreak of screwworm, and an epizootic of foot-and-mouth disease devastated production during this period. As the Oil for Food Program expanded to cover more agricultural inputs and machinery, the productivity of Iraqi agriculture stabilized around 2002.
Following the invasion led by the United States in March 2003, with the incomes of many Iraqis devastated, the market for foodstuffs shrunk. Seeking to re-orient Iraq's economy toward private ownership and international competitiveness, the United States saw the dismantling of the Public Distribution System as essential for market-driven agriculture. Because of the great reliance of most Iraqis on government-subsidized food, this goal was never realized. Increased productivity became the focus of much of the US-funded agricultural reconstruction program. Many of these projects were undertaken by the Agricultural Reconstruction and Development Iraq (ARDI) program run by Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI) of Bethesda, Maryland, under a contract with USAID signed on 15 October 2003. While ARDI participated in limited ways, the restoration of Iraq's irrigation systems was mostly funded under USAID's contract with Bechtel International.
ARDI conducted demonstration trials of improved practices and varieties of many crops: winter cereals (wheat and barley), summer cereals (rice, maize, and sorghum), potatoes, and tomatoes. Feed supplements and veterinary treatments were demonstrated to increase ovulation, conception, and birth weights of livestock. Surveys were conducted of poultry growers and apple farmers. Nurseries were established for date palms and grapes. College buildings and farm tractors were rebuilt. ARDI had projects promoting trade associations and producers' co-ops and supported extension as an appropriate governmental function. The contract eventually cost over $100 million and lasted through December 2006. Under its Community Action Program, USAID also funded an analysis of markets for sheep and wool. It awarded a contract to the University of Hawaii to revitalize higher education in agriculture. It awarded a contract for $120 million to the Louis Berger Group to promote Iraq's private sector, including agriculture.
Starting in 2006, agricultural reconstruction was also conducted by Provincial Reconstruction Teams within the occupying Multi-National Force – Iraq. Intended to promote goodwill and sap the insurgency, "PRTs" allowed military commanders to identify local needs and, with few bureaucratic hurdles, to dispense up to $500,000. Civilians from many agencies within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as well as USAID, served tours on PRTs. Some participants criticized the absence of a national agricultural strategy, or clear direction on the design of projects. Others complained that projects emphasized "American-style, 21st-century agricultural technologies and methodologies..." that were inappropriate for Iraq.
Agricultural production has not rebounded noticeably from the reconstruction program. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), between 2002 and 2013, the production of wheat increased 11 percent and milled rice 8 percent, but barley had decreased 13 percent and maize 40 percent. Scaled in "international dollars" (2004-2006 base equaling 100) Iraq's per capita food production was 135 in 2002, 96 in 2007, and 94 in 2012. The agricultural sector shed workers. In those same years, production per worker was 117, 106, and 130, respectively.
The international Oil-for-Food program (1997–2003) further reduced farm production by supplying artificially priced foreign foodstuffs. The military action of 2003 did little damage to Iraqi agriculture; because of favorable weather conditions, grain production was 22 percent higher than in 2002. Although growth continued in 2004, experts predicted that Iraq would be an importer of agricultural products for the foreseeable future. Long-term plans call for investment in agricultural machinery and materials and more prolific crop varieties—improvements that did not reach Iraq's farmers under the Hussein regime. In 2004, the main crops were wheat, barley, corn, rice, vegetables, dates, and cotton, and the main livestock outputs were cattle and sheep.
The Agricultural Cooperative Bank, capitalized at nearly 1 G$ - by 1984, targets its low-interest, low-collateral loans to private farmers for mechanization, poultry projects, and orchard development. Large modern cattle, dairy, and poultry farms are under construction. Obstacles to agricultural development include labor shortages, inadequate management and maintenance, salinization, urban migration, and dislocations resulting from previous land reform and collectivization programs.
In 2011, an agricultural adviser to the Iraqi government, Layth Mahdi, summarized the forced United States agricultural reconstruction:
Before 2003, Iraq had imported about 30 per cent of its food needs annually. The decline in agricultural production after this period, created the need for importing 90 per cent of the food at a cost estimated at more than $12 billion annually. Due to the sudden shift in the agricultural policy from subsidized assistance to an immediate shift to a free market policy, the outcomes led to a decline in production. The observed outcome resulted in many farmers abandoning the land and agriculture. The impact on natural resources results in an exploited and degraded environment leaving the land destitute and the people impoverished, unemployed [and] experiencing a sense of losing their human dignity.
Importation of foreign workers and increased entry of women into traditionally male labour roles have helped compensate for agricultural and industrial labour shortages exacerbated by the war. A disastrous attempt to drain the southern marshes and introduce irrigated farming to this region merely destroyed a natural food producing area, while concentration of salts and minerals in the soil due to the draining left the land unsuitable for agriculture.
In the Mada'in Qada region east of Baghdad, hundreds of small farmers united to form the Green Mada'in Association for Agricultural Development, an agricultural cooperative that provides its members with drip irrigation and greenhouses as well as access to credit.
As a result of climate change farmers have been confronted with reduced rainfall and high temperatures. Particularly affected are small scale farmers who, unable to withstand lower water levels, are forced to leave their lands in search of different ways to fulfill their livelihoods.
Throughout the twentieth century, human exploration, shifting agriculture, forest fires, and uncontrolled grazing denuded large areas of Iraq's natural forests, which in 2005 were almost exclusively confined to the northeastern highlands. Most of the trees found in that region are not suitable for lumbering. In 2002, a total of 112,000 cubic meters of wood were harvested, nearly half of which was used as fuel.
Despite its notable large rivers, Iraq's fishing industry has remained relatively small and based largely on marine species in the Persian Gulf. In 2001, the catch was 22,800 tons.
Aside from hydrocarbons, Iraq's mining industry has been confined to extraction of relatively small amounts of phosphates (at Akashat), salt, and sulfur (near Mosul). Since a productive period in the 1970s, the mining industry has been hampered by the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), the sanctions of the 1990s, and the economic collapse of 2003.
Iraq is one of the most oil-rich countries in the world. The country holding the fifth largest proven crude oil reserves, totalling 147.22 billion barrels at the end of 2017. Most of this oil—4 million barrels per day out of 4.3 million barrels produced daily—is exported, making Iraq the third-largest exporter of oil. Despite its ongoing civil war, Iraq was able to increase oil production during 2015 and 2016, with production dipping by 3.5 per cent in 2017 due to conflict with the Kurdistan Regional Government and OPEC production limits. By world standards, production costs for Iraqi oil are relatively low. However, four wars—the 1980–1988 Iraq-Iran War, 1991 Gulf War, the 2003–2011 War in Iraq, and the civil war—and the 1991–2003 UN sanctions have left the industry's infrastructure in poor condition, and the de facto independence of oil-rich Kurdistan Region have limited production.
In the 1970s, Iraq produced over 3.5 million barrels of oil per day. Production began to fall during the Iran-Iraq War, before plummeting 85 per cent after the 1991 invasion of Kuwait. UN sanctions prevented the export of oil until 1996, and then allowed exports only in exchange for humanitarian aid in the Oil-for-Food Programme. The 2003 lifting of sanctions enabled production—and exports—to restart. Production has since recovered to pre-Gulf War levels, and most of Iraq's oil infrastructure has been repaired, despite persistent sabotage by the Islamic State (ISIL) and others. In 2004, Iraq had eight oil refineries, the largest of which were at Baiji, Basra, and Daura.
Despite its oil wealth, sabotage and technical problems at refineries have forced Iraq to import petroleum, other refined oil products, and electricity from neighbouring countries, especially Iran. In 2004, for example, Iraq spent $60 million per month for imported gasoline. Sabotage In late 2004 and early 2005, regular sabotage of plants and pipelines reduced export and domestic distribution of oil, particularly to Baghdad. Nationwide fuel shortages and power outages resulted. Persistent ISIL sabotage of pipelines, power plants and power lines, and theft of oil and electricity have also contributed to the July 2018 protests in southern Iraq.
In 2004, plans called for increased domestic utilization of natural gas to replace oil and for use in the petrochemical industry. However, because most of Iraq's gas output is associated with oil, output growth depends on developments in the oil industry.
Half of Iraq's power plants were destroyed in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and full recovery never occurred. In mid-2004, Iraq had an estimated 5,000 megawatts of power-generating capacity, compared with 7,500 megawatts of demand. At that time, the transmission system included 17,700 kilometres of line. In 2004, plans called for construction of two new power plants and restoration of existing plants and transmission lines to ease the blackouts and economic hardship caused by this shortfall, but sabotage and looting kept capacity below 6,000 megawatts. The ongoing civil war, sabotage of transmission lines, and government corruption caused the electricity shortage to worsen: by 2010 demand outstripped supply by 6000 megawatts.
Oil continues to dominate Iraq's economy. As of 2018, oil is responsible for over 65 per cent of GDP, 90 per cent of government revenue. Petroleum constitutes 94% of Iraq's exports with a value of $59.73 billion in 2017. The central government hopes to diversify the economy away from oil, and has had some success: non-oil GDP growth, which was below the regional average from 2014 to 2016, pushed above the average in 2017. Despite this, the per cent of government spending going to non-oil investment has continued to decline since 2013 and now stands at only 34 per cent.
Between June 2009 and February 2010 the Iraqi Oil Ministry tendered for the award of Service Contracts to develop Iraq's existing oil fields. The results of the tender, which were broadcast live on Iraqi television, are as follows for all major fields awarded but excluding the Kurdistan Region where Production Sharing Contracts have been awarded that are currently being disputed by the Baghdad government. All contracts are awaiting final ratification of the awards by the Iraqi government. Company shares are subject to change as a result of commercial negotiations between parties.
Notes: 1. Field shares are as a % of the total. The Iraq state retains a 25% share in all fields for which Service Contracts have been awarded. 2. Production Increase Share is the millions bbls per day that will attract the Service Fee for the company. 3. Gross revenue at plateau is the total payment each company will receive upon reaching their declared target plateau production rate (in between 5 and 8 years depending on field), before deduction of any operating costs but in addition to recovery of all development costs as billions of US$ per annum. The total gross revenue for all companies, after recovery of capital costs, is at plateau production of an additional 9.4 mb/d, 4.34 bn US per annum at a $70 bbl oil price. The 2010 Iraq govt budget is $60 billion. $300 billion is approximately $10,000 per annum for each Iraqi citizen.
In summary the shares by region in the increased production are:
Iraq's financial services have been the subject of post-Hussein reforms. The 17 private banks established during the 1990s were limited to domestic transactions and attracted few private depositors. Those banks and two main state banks were badly damaged by the international embargo of the 1990s. To further privatize and expand the system, in 2003 the Coalition Provisional Authority removed restrictions on international bank transactions and freed the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) from government control. In its first year of independent operation, the CBI received credit for limiting Iraq's inflation. In 2004, three foreign banks received licenses to do business in Iraq.
Because of the danger posed by Iraq's ongoing insurgency, the security industry has been a uniquely prosperous part of the services sector. Often run by former US military personnel, in 2005 at least 26 companies offered personal and institutional protection, surveillance, and other forms of security.
In the early post-Hussein period, a freewheeling retail trade in all types of commodities straddled the line between legitimate and illegitimate commerce, taking advantage of the lack of income tax and import controls.
The Iraq tourism industry, which in peaceful times has profited from Iraq's many places of cultural interest (earning US$14 million in 2001), has been dormant since 2003. Despite conditions, in 2005 the Iraqi Tourism Board maintained a staff of 2,500 and 14 regional offices. Between 2009 and 2010, 165 tourists from 16 countries entered Iraq to visit historic sites; as of January 2011, a U.S. State Department grant provided $2 million to help preserve Babylon, supporting the re-opening of one of the site's two museums.
From 2003 to 2008, mobile phone subscriptions had expanded over hundred-fold to ten million nationwide, according to the Brookings Institution.
In 2002, Iraq's labour force was estimated at 6.8 million people.
In 1996, some 66.4 per cent of the labour force worked in services, 17.5 per cent in industry, and 16.1 per cent in agriculture. 2004 estimates of Iraq's unemployment ranged from 30 per cent to 60 per cent.
The CPA has referred to a 25% unemployment rate, the Iraqi Ministry of Planning mentioned a 30% unemployment rate, whereas the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs claims it to be 48%. Other sources are claiming a 20% unemployment rate and a probably 60% under-employment rate. The actual figure is problematic because of high participation in black-market activities and poor security conditions in many populous areas. In central Iraq, security concerns discouraged the hiring of new workers and the resumption of regular work schedules. At the same time, the return of Iraqis from other countries increased the number of job seekers. In late 2004, most legitimate jobs were in the government, the army, the oil industry, and security-related enterprises. Under Saddam Hussein Hussein, many of the highest-paid workers were employed by the greatly overstaffed government, whose overthrow disrupted the input of these people to the economy. In 2004, the U.S. Agency for International Development committed US$1 billion for a worker-training program. In early 2004, the minimum wage was US$72 per month.
Iraq is a founding member of OPEC. Petroleum constitutes 99,7% of Iraq's exports with a value of $43,8 billion in 2016.
From the 1990s until 2003, the international trade embargo restricted Iraq's export activity almost exclusively to oil. In 2003, oil accounted for about US$7.4 billion of Iraq's total US$7.6 billion of export value, and statistics for earlier years showed similar proportions. After the end of the trade embargo in 2003 expanded the range of exports, oil continued to occupy the dominant position: in 2004 Iraq's export income doubled (to US$16.5 billion), but oil accounted for all but US$340 million (2 per cent) of the total. In late 2004, sabotage significantly reduced oil output, and experts forecast that output, hence exports, would be below capacity in 2005 as well. In 2004, the chief export markets were the United States (which accounted for nearly half), Italy, France, Jordan, Canada, and the Netherlands. In 2004, the value of Iraq's imports was US$21.7 billion, incurring a trade deficit of about US$5.2 billion. In 2003, the main sources of Iraq's imports were Turkey, Jordan, Vietnam, the United States, Germany, and Britain. Because of Iraq's inactive manufacturing sector, the range of imports was quite large, including food, fuels, medicines, and manufactured goods. By 2010, exports rose to US$50.8 billion and imports rose to US$45.2 billion. Chief 2009 export partners were: U.S., India, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Netherlands, and Japan. Chief 2009 import partners were: Turkey, Syria, U.S., China, Jordan, Italy, and Germany.
In March 2022, Iran-Iraq trade reached a volume of 10 billion USD, as joint ventures increased significantly but were still limited due to sanctions against Iran. Especially goods originating from Iran were subject to a trade embargo imposed by the US and the European Union. Iran and Iraq signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on economic cooperation back in January 2021. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The economy of Iraq is dominated by the oil sector, which has provided about 99.7% of foreign exchange earnings during its modern history. As of 2021, the oil sector provides about 92% of foreign exchange earnings. Iraq's hitherto agrarian economy underwent rapid development following the 14 July Revolution (1958) which overthrew the Hashemite Iraqi monarchy. It had become the third-largest economy in the Middle East by 1980. This occurred in part because of the Iraqi government's successful industrialization and infrastructure development initiatives in the 1970s, which included irrigation projects, railway and highway construction, and rural electrification.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the 1980s, financial problems caused by massive expenditures in the Iran-Iraq War and damage to oil export facilities by Iran led the Ba'athist government to implement austerity measures, to borrow heavily, and to later reschedule foreign debt payments. Iraq suffered economic losses of at least $80 billion from the war. In 1988, the hostilities ended. Oil exports gradually increased with the construction of new pipelines and restoration of damaged facilities, but again underwent a sharp decline after the Persian Gulf War. GDP dropped to one-fourth of the country's 1980 gross domestic product and continued to decline under postwar international sanctions, until receiving aid from the U.N. Oil-for-Food Programme in 1997.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Coalition Provisional Authority made efforts to modernize Iraq's economy after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, through privatization and reducing the country's foreign debt. As a result Iraq's economy expanded rapidly during this time, though growth was stunted by the insurgency, economic mismanagement, and oil shortages caused by outdated technology. Since mid-2009, oil export earnings have returned to levels seen before Operation New Dawn. Government revenues have rebounded, along with global oil prices. In 2011, Baghdad would increase oil exports above their then-current level of 1,900,000 bbl (300,000 m) per day as a result of new contracts with international oil companies. It was thought likely to fall short of the 2,400,000 barrels (380,000 m) per day it was forecasting in its budget. Iraq's recent contracts with major oil companies have the potential to greatly expand oil revenues, but Iraq will need to upgrade its oil processing, pipeline, and export infrastructure to enable these deals to reach their potential.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "An improved security environment and an initial wave of foreign investment are helping to spur economic activity, particularly in the energy, construction, and retail sectors. Broader economic improvement, long-term fiscal health, and sustained increases in the standard of living still depend on the government passing major policy reforms and on the continued development of Iraq's massive oil reserves. Although foreign investors viewed Iraq with increasing interest in 2010, most are still hampered by difficulties acquiring land for projects and other regulatory impediments.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Nominal GDP grew by 213% in the 1960s, 1325% in the 1970s, 2% in the 1980s, −47% in the 1990s, and 317% in 2000s.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Real GDP per capita (measured in $1990 ) increased significantly during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which can be explained by both higher oil production levels as well as oil prices, which famously peaked in the 1970s due to the OPEC's oil embargo, causing the 1973 oil crisis. In the following two decades, however, GDP per capita in Iraq dropped substantially because of multiple wars, namely the 1980-88 war with Iran, the 1990-1991 Gulf War.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Before the outbreak of the war with Iran in September 1980, Iraq's economic prospects were bright. Oil production had reached a level of 560,000 m³ (3.5 million barrels) per day in 1979, and oil revenues were 21 billion dollars in 1979 and $27 billion in 1980 due to record oil prices. At the outbreak of the war, Iraq had amassed an estimated $35 billion in foreign exchange reserves. It had the best education and health care systems in the Middle East, and thousands of migrant workers from Egypt, Somalia, and the Indian subcontinent came to the country to work in construction projects.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Iran–Iraq War and the 1980s oil glut depleted Iraq's foreign exchange reserves, devastated its economy and left the country saddled with a foreign debt of more than $40 billion. After the initial destruction of the war, oil exports gradually increased with the construction of new pipelines and the restoration of damaged facilities.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Iraq's seizure of Kuwait in August 1990, subsequent international economic sanctions on Iraq, and damage from military action by an international coalition beginning in January 1991, drastically reduced economic activity. The regime exacerbated shortages by supporting large military and internal security forces and by allocating resources to key supporters of the Ba'ath Party. The implementation of the UN's Oil for Food program in December 1996 helped improve economic conditions. For the first six six-month phases of the program, Iraq was allowed to export increasing amounts of oil in exchange for food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods. In December 1999, the UN Security Council authorized Iraq to export as much oil as required to meet humanitarian needs. Per capita, food imports increased substantially, while medical supplies and health care services steadily improved, though per capita economic production and living standards were still well below their prewar level.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Iraq changed its oil reserve currency from the U.S. dollar to the euro in 2000. However, 28% of Iraq's export revenues under the program were deducted to meet UN Compensation Fund and UN administrative expenses. The drop in GDP in 2001 was largely the result of the global economic slowdown and lower oil prices.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The removal of sanctions on 24 May 2003 and rising oil prices in the mid-to-late 2000s led to a doubling in oil production from a low of 1.3 mbpd during the turbulence of 2003 to a high of 2.6 mbpd in 2011. Furthermore, reduced inflation and violence since 2007 have translated to real increases in living standards for Iraqis.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "One of the key economic challenges was Iraq's immense foreign debt, estimated at $130 billion. Although some of this debt was derived from normal export contracts that Iraq had failed to pay for, some was a result of military and financial support during Iraq's war with Iran.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Jubilee Iraq campaign argued that much of these debts were odious (illegitimate). However, as the concept of odious debt is not accepted, trying to deal with the debt on those terms would have embroiled Iraq in legal disputes for years. Iraq decided to deal with its debt more pragmatically and approached the Paris Club of official creditors.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In a December 2006 Newsweek International article, a study by Global Insight in London was reported to show \"that Civil war or not, Iraq has an economy, and—mother of all surprises—it's doing remarkably well. Real estate is booming. Construction, retail and wholesale trade sectors are healthy, too, according to [the report]. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports 34,000 registered companies in Iraq, up from 8,000 three years ago. Sales of secondhand cars, televisions and mobile phones have all risen sharply. Estimates vary, but one from Global Insight puts GDP growth at 17 per cent last year and projects 13 per cent for 2006. The World Bank has it lower: at 4 per cent this year. But, given all the attention paid to deteriorating security, the startling fact is that Iraq is growing at all.\"",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Since 1974, after the Iraqi Government took direct control of Iraq’s largest private oil production operations, Mosul Oil and Basra Oil, most of Iraq's manufacturing activity has been closely connected to the oil industry. The major industries in that category have been petroleum refining and the manufacture of chemicals and fertilizers. Before 2003, diversification was hindered by limitations on privatization and the effects of the international sanctions of the 1990s. Since 2003, security problems have blocked efforts to establish new enterprises. The construction industry is an exception; in 2000 cement was the only major industrial product not based on hydrocarbons. The construction industry has profited from the need to rebuild after Iraq's several wars. In the 1990s, the industry benefited from government funding of extensive infrastructure and housing projects and elaborate palace complexes.",
"title": "Industry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Agriculture contributes just 3.3% to the gross national product but employs a fifth of the labor force.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Historically, 50 to 60 per cent of Iraq's arable land has been under cultivation. Because of ethnic politics, valuable farmland in Kurdish territory has not contributed to the national economy, and inconsistent agricultural policies under Saddam Hussein discouraged domestic market production. Despite adequate land and water resources, Iraq remains a net food importer. Under the UN Oil for Food program, Iraq imported large quantities of grains, meat, poultry, and dairy products. The government abolished its farm collectivization program in 1981, allowing a greater role for private enterprise in agriculture.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Iraqi agriculture suffered substantial physical disruption from the Gulf War, and economic disruption from sanctions imposed by the United Nations (August 1990). Sanctions curtailed imports by cutting off Iraq's petroleum exports and embargoing those agricultural production inputs deemed to have potential military applications. The Iraqi government responded by monopolizing grain and oilseed marketing, imposing production quotas, and instituting a Public Distribution System for basic foodstuffs. By mid-1991, the government supplied a \"basket\" of foodstuffs that provided about one-third of the caloric daily requirement and cost consumers about five percent of its market value. With subsidies for agricultural inputs diminished, the government's prices failed to cover their costs. The implicit tax on agricultural production was estimated to reach 20 to 35 percent by the mid-1990s. In October 1991 the Baghdad regime had withdrawn personnel from the northern region controlled by two Kurdish parties. Kurdistan Region was described as \"... a market economy essentially left alone by a fragile governing structure, but heavily influenced by substantial international humanitarian aid flows.\"",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Under an \"Oil for Food Program\" negotiated with the United Nations, in December 1996 Iraq started exporting petroleum and used the proceeds to import foodstuffs three months later. Grain imports averaged $828 million from 1997 to 2001, an increase of over 180 percent from the previous five-year period. Due to foreign competition, Iraqi production declined (29 percent for wheat, 31 percent for barley, and 52 percent for maize). Because the government had generally neglected the production of forage crops, fruits, vegetables, and livestock other than poultry, those sectors had remained more traditional, market-based, and less buffeted by international affairs. Nevertheless, severe drought, an outbreak of screwworm, and an epizootic of foot-and-mouth disease devastated production during this period. As the Oil for Food Program expanded to cover more agricultural inputs and machinery, the productivity of Iraqi agriculture stabilized around 2002.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Following the invasion led by the United States in March 2003, with the incomes of many Iraqis devastated, the market for foodstuffs shrunk. Seeking to re-orient Iraq's economy toward private ownership and international competitiveness, the United States saw the dismantling of the Public Distribution System as essential for market-driven agriculture. Because of the great reliance of most Iraqis on government-subsidized food, this goal was never realized. Increased productivity became the focus of much of the US-funded agricultural reconstruction program. Many of these projects were undertaken by the Agricultural Reconstruction and Development Iraq (ARDI) program run by Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI) of Bethesda, Maryland, under a contract with USAID signed on 15 October 2003. While ARDI participated in limited ways, the restoration of Iraq's irrigation systems was mostly funded under USAID's contract with Bechtel International.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "ARDI conducted demonstration trials of improved practices and varieties of many crops: winter cereals (wheat and barley), summer cereals (rice, maize, and sorghum), potatoes, and tomatoes. Feed supplements and veterinary treatments were demonstrated to increase ovulation, conception, and birth weights of livestock. Surveys were conducted of poultry growers and apple farmers. Nurseries were established for date palms and grapes. College buildings and farm tractors were rebuilt. ARDI had projects promoting trade associations and producers' co-ops and supported extension as an appropriate governmental function. The contract eventually cost over $100 million and lasted through December 2006. Under its Community Action Program, USAID also funded an analysis of markets for sheep and wool. It awarded a contract to the University of Hawaii to revitalize higher education in agriculture. It awarded a contract for $120 million to the Louis Berger Group to promote Iraq's private sector, including agriculture.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Starting in 2006, agricultural reconstruction was also conducted by Provincial Reconstruction Teams within the occupying Multi-National Force – Iraq. Intended to promote goodwill and sap the insurgency, \"PRTs\" allowed military commanders to identify local needs and, with few bureaucratic hurdles, to dispense up to $500,000. Civilians from many agencies within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as well as USAID, served tours on PRTs. Some participants criticized the absence of a national agricultural strategy, or clear direction on the design of projects. Others complained that projects emphasized \"American-style, 21st-century agricultural technologies and methodologies...\" that were inappropriate for Iraq.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Agricultural production has not rebounded noticeably from the reconstruction program. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), between 2002 and 2013, the production of wheat increased 11 percent and milled rice 8 percent, but barley had decreased 13 percent and maize 40 percent. Scaled in \"international dollars\" (2004-2006 base equaling 100) Iraq's per capita food production was 135 in 2002, 96 in 2007, and 94 in 2012. The agricultural sector shed workers. In those same years, production per worker was 117, 106, and 130, respectively.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The international Oil-for-Food program (1997–2003) further reduced farm production by supplying artificially priced foreign foodstuffs. The military action of 2003 did little damage to Iraqi agriculture; because of favorable weather conditions, grain production was 22 percent higher than in 2002. Although growth continued in 2004, experts predicted that Iraq would be an importer of agricultural products for the foreseeable future. Long-term plans call for investment in agricultural machinery and materials and more prolific crop varieties—improvements that did not reach Iraq's farmers under the Hussein regime. In 2004, the main crops were wheat, barley, corn, rice, vegetables, dates, and cotton, and the main livestock outputs were cattle and sheep.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Agricultural Cooperative Bank, capitalized at nearly 1 G$ - by 1984, targets its low-interest, low-collateral loans to private farmers for mechanization, poultry projects, and orchard development. Large modern cattle, dairy, and poultry farms are under construction. Obstacles to agricultural development include labor shortages, inadequate management and maintenance, salinization, urban migration, and dislocations resulting from previous land reform and collectivization programs.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 2011, an agricultural adviser to the Iraqi government, Layth Mahdi, summarized the forced United States agricultural reconstruction:",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Before 2003, Iraq had imported about 30 per cent of its food needs annually. The decline in agricultural production after this period, created the need for importing 90 per cent of the food at a cost estimated at more than $12 billion annually. Due to the sudden shift in the agricultural policy from subsidized assistance to an immediate shift to a free market policy, the outcomes led to a decline in production. The observed outcome resulted in many farmers abandoning the land and agriculture. The impact on natural resources results in an exploited and degraded environment leaving the land destitute and the people impoverished, unemployed [and] experiencing a sense of losing their human dignity.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Importation of foreign workers and increased entry of women into traditionally male labour roles have helped compensate for agricultural and industrial labour shortages exacerbated by the war. A disastrous attempt to drain the southern marshes and introduce irrigated farming to this region merely destroyed a natural food producing area, while concentration of salts and minerals in the soil due to the draining left the land unsuitable for agriculture.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In the Mada'in Qada region east of Baghdad, hundreds of small farmers united to form the Green Mada'in Association for Agricultural Development, an agricultural cooperative that provides its members with drip irrigation and greenhouses as well as access to credit.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "As a result of climate change farmers have been confronted with reduced rainfall and high temperatures. Particularly affected are small scale farmers who, unable to withstand lower water levels, are forced to leave their lands in search of different ways to fulfill their livelihoods.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Throughout the twentieth century, human exploration, shifting agriculture, forest fires, and uncontrolled grazing denuded large areas of Iraq's natural forests, which in 2005 were almost exclusively confined to the northeastern highlands. Most of the trees found in that region are not suitable for lumbering. In 2002, a total of 112,000 cubic meters of wood were harvested, nearly half of which was used as fuel.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Despite its notable large rivers, Iraq's fishing industry has remained relatively small and based largely on marine species in the Persian Gulf. In 2001, the catch was 22,800 tons.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Aside from hydrocarbons, Iraq's mining industry has been confined to extraction of relatively small amounts of phosphates (at Akashat), salt, and sulfur (near Mosul). Since a productive period in the 1970s, the mining industry has been hampered by the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), the sanctions of the 1990s, and the economic collapse of 2003.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Iraq is one of the most oil-rich countries in the world. The country holding the fifth largest proven crude oil reserves, totalling 147.22 billion barrels at the end of 2017. Most of this oil—4 million barrels per day out of 4.3 million barrels produced daily—is exported, making Iraq the third-largest exporter of oil. Despite its ongoing civil war, Iraq was able to increase oil production during 2015 and 2016, with production dipping by 3.5 per cent in 2017 due to conflict with the Kurdistan Regional Government and OPEC production limits. By world standards, production costs for Iraqi oil are relatively low. However, four wars—the 1980–1988 Iraq-Iran War, 1991 Gulf War, the 2003–2011 War in Iraq, and the civil war—and the 1991–2003 UN sanctions have left the industry's infrastructure in poor condition, and the de facto independence of oil-rich Kurdistan Region have limited production.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In the 1970s, Iraq produced over 3.5 million barrels of oil per day. Production began to fall during the Iran-Iraq War, before plummeting 85 per cent after the 1991 invasion of Kuwait. UN sanctions prevented the export of oil until 1996, and then allowed exports only in exchange for humanitarian aid in the Oil-for-Food Programme. The 2003 lifting of sanctions enabled production—and exports—to restart. Production has since recovered to pre-Gulf War levels, and most of Iraq's oil infrastructure has been repaired, despite persistent sabotage by the Islamic State (ISIL) and others. In 2004, Iraq had eight oil refineries, the largest of which were at Baiji, Basra, and Daura.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Despite its oil wealth, sabotage and technical problems at refineries have forced Iraq to import petroleum, other refined oil products, and electricity from neighbouring countries, especially Iran. In 2004, for example, Iraq spent $60 million per month for imported gasoline. Sabotage In late 2004 and early 2005, regular sabotage of plants and pipelines reduced export and domestic distribution of oil, particularly to Baghdad. Nationwide fuel shortages and power outages resulted. Persistent ISIL sabotage of pipelines, power plants and power lines, and theft of oil and electricity have also contributed to the July 2018 protests in southern Iraq.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 2004, plans called for increased domestic utilization of natural gas to replace oil and for use in the petrochemical industry. However, because most of Iraq's gas output is associated with oil, output growth depends on developments in the oil industry.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Half of Iraq's power plants were destroyed in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and full recovery never occurred. In mid-2004, Iraq had an estimated 5,000 megawatts of power-generating capacity, compared with 7,500 megawatts of demand. At that time, the transmission system included 17,700 kilometres of line. In 2004, plans called for construction of two new power plants and restoration of existing plants and transmission lines to ease the blackouts and economic hardship caused by this shortfall, but sabotage and looting kept capacity below 6,000 megawatts. The ongoing civil war, sabotage of transmission lines, and government corruption caused the electricity shortage to worsen: by 2010 demand outstripped supply by 6000 megawatts.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Oil continues to dominate Iraq's economy. As of 2018, oil is responsible for over 65 per cent of GDP, 90 per cent of government revenue. Petroleum constitutes 94% of Iraq's exports with a value of $59.73 billion in 2017. The central government hopes to diversify the economy away from oil, and has had some success: non-oil GDP growth, which was below the regional average from 2014 to 2016, pushed above the average in 2017. Despite this, the per cent of government spending going to non-oil investment has continued to decline since 2013 and now stands at only 34 per cent.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Between June 2009 and February 2010 the Iraqi Oil Ministry tendered for the award of Service Contracts to develop Iraq's existing oil fields. The results of the tender, which were broadcast live on Iraqi television, are as follows for all major fields awarded but excluding the Kurdistan Region where Production Sharing Contracts have been awarded that are currently being disputed by the Baghdad government. All contracts are awaiting final ratification of the awards by the Iraqi government. Company shares are subject to change as a result of commercial negotiations between parties.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Notes: 1. Field shares are as a % of the total. The Iraq state retains a 25% share in all fields for which Service Contracts have been awarded. 2. Production Increase Share is the millions bbls per day that will attract the Service Fee for the company. 3. Gross revenue at plateau is the total payment each company will receive upon reaching their declared target plateau production rate (in between 5 and 8 years depending on field), before deduction of any operating costs but in addition to recovery of all development costs as billions of US$ per annum. The total gross revenue for all companies, after recovery of capital costs, is at plateau production of an additional 9.4 mb/d, 4.34 bn US per annum at a $70 bbl oil price. The 2010 Iraq govt budget is $60 billion. $300 billion is approximately $10,000 per annum for each Iraqi citizen.",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In summary the shares by region in the increased production are:",
"title": "Primary sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Iraq's financial services have been the subject of post-Hussein reforms. The 17 private banks established during the 1990s were limited to domestic transactions and attracted few private depositors. Those banks and two main state banks were badly damaged by the international embargo of the 1990s. To further privatize and expand the system, in 2003 the Coalition Provisional Authority removed restrictions on international bank transactions and freed the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) from government control. In its first year of independent operation, the CBI received credit for limiting Iraq's inflation. In 2004, three foreign banks received licenses to do business in Iraq.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Because of the danger posed by Iraq's ongoing insurgency, the security industry has been a uniquely prosperous part of the services sector. Often run by former US military personnel, in 2005 at least 26 companies offered personal and institutional protection, surveillance, and other forms of security.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In the early post-Hussein period, a freewheeling retail trade in all types of commodities straddled the line between legitimate and illegitimate commerce, taking advantage of the lack of income tax and import controls.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Iraq tourism industry, which in peaceful times has profited from Iraq's many places of cultural interest (earning US$14 million in 2001), has been dormant since 2003. Despite conditions, in 2005 the Iraqi Tourism Board maintained a staff of 2,500 and 14 regional offices. Between 2009 and 2010, 165 tourists from 16 countries entered Iraq to visit historic sites; as of January 2011, a U.S. State Department grant provided $2 million to help preserve Babylon, supporting the re-opening of one of the site's two museums.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "From 2003 to 2008, mobile phone subscriptions had expanded over hundred-fold to ten million nationwide, according to the Brookings Institution.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 2002, Iraq's labour force was estimated at 6.8 million people.",
"title": "Labor force"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In 1996, some 66.4 per cent of the labour force worked in services, 17.5 per cent in industry, and 16.1 per cent in agriculture. 2004 estimates of Iraq's unemployment ranged from 30 per cent to 60 per cent.",
"title": "Labor force"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The CPA has referred to a 25% unemployment rate, the Iraqi Ministry of Planning mentioned a 30% unemployment rate, whereas the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs claims it to be 48%. Other sources are claiming a 20% unemployment rate and a probably 60% under-employment rate. The actual figure is problematic because of high participation in black-market activities and poor security conditions in many populous areas. In central Iraq, security concerns discouraged the hiring of new workers and the resumption of regular work schedules. At the same time, the return of Iraqis from other countries increased the number of job seekers. In late 2004, most legitimate jobs were in the government, the army, the oil industry, and security-related enterprises. Under Saddam Hussein Hussein, many of the highest-paid workers were employed by the greatly overstaffed government, whose overthrow disrupted the input of these people to the economy. In 2004, the U.S. Agency for International Development committed US$1 billion for a worker-training program. In early 2004, the minimum wage was US$72 per month.",
"title": "Labor force"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Iraq is a founding member of OPEC. Petroleum constitutes 99,7% of Iraq's exports with a value of $43,8 billion in 2016.",
"title": "External trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "From the 1990s until 2003, the international trade embargo restricted Iraq's export activity almost exclusively to oil. In 2003, oil accounted for about US$7.4 billion of Iraq's total US$7.6 billion of export value, and statistics for earlier years showed similar proportions. After the end of the trade embargo in 2003 expanded the range of exports, oil continued to occupy the dominant position: in 2004 Iraq's export income doubled (to US$16.5 billion), but oil accounted for all but US$340 million (2 per cent) of the total. In late 2004, sabotage significantly reduced oil output, and experts forecast that output, hence exports, would be below capacity in 2005 as well. In 2004, the chief export markets were the United States (which accounted for nearly half), Italy, France, Jordan, Canada, and the Netherlands. In 2004, the value of Iraq's imports was US$21.7 billion, incurring a trade deficit of about US$5.2 billion. In 2003, the main sources of Iraq's imports were Turkey, Jordan, Vietnam, the United States, Germany, and Britain. Because of Iraq's inactive manufacturing sector, the range of imports was quite large, including food, fuels, medicines, and manufactured goods. By 2010, exports rose to US$50.8 billion and imports rose to US$45.2 billion. Chief 2009 export partners were: U.S., India, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Netherlands, and Japan. Chief 2009 import partners were: Turkey, Syria, U.S., China, Jordan, Italy, and Germany.",
"title": "External trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In March 2022, Iran-Iraq trade reached a volume of 10 billion USD, as joint ventures increased significantly but were still limited due to sanctions against Iran. Especially goods originating from Iran were subject to a trade embargo imposed by the US and the European Union. Iran and Iraq signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on economic cooperation back in January 2021.",
"title": "External trade"
}
]
| The economy of Iraq is dominated by the oil sector, which has provided about 99.7% of foreign exchange earnings during its modern history. As of 2021, the oil sector provides about 92% of foreign exchange earnings. Iraq's hitherto agrarian economy underwent rapid development following the 14 July Revolution (1958) which overthrew the Hashemite Iraqi monarchy. It had become the third-largest economy in the Middle East by 1980. This occurred in part because of the Iraqi government's successful industrialization and infrastructure development initiatives in the 1970s, which included irrigation projects, railway and highway construction, and rural electrification. In the 1980s, financial problems caused by massive expenditures in the Iran-Iraq War and damage to oil export facilities by Iran led the Ba'athist government to implement austerity measures, to borrow heavily, and to later reschedule foreign debt payments. Iraq suffered economic losses of at least $80 billion from the war. In 1988, the hostilities ended. Oil exports gradually increased with the construction of new pipelines and restoration of damaged facilities, but again underwent a sharp decline after the Persian Gulf War. GDP dropped to one-fourth of the country's 1980 gross domestic product and continued to decline under postwar international sanctions, until receiving aid from the U.N. Oil-for-Food Programme in 1997. The Coalition Provisional Authority made efforts to modernize Iraq's economy after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, through privatization and reducing the country's foreign debt. As a result Iraq's economy expanded rapidly during this time, though growth was stunted by the insurgency, economic mismanagement, and oil shortages caused by outdated technology. Since mid-2009, oil export earnings have returned to levels seen before Operation New Dawn. Government revenues have rebounded, along with global oil prices. In 2011, Baghdad would increase oil exports above their then-current level of 1,900,000 bbl (300,000 m3) per day as a result of new contracts with international oil companies. It was thought likely to fall short of the 2,400,000 barrels (380,000 m3) per day it was forecasting in its budget. Iraq's recent contracts with major oil companies have the potential to greatly expand oil revenues, but Iraq will need to upgrade its oil processing, pipeline, and export infrastructure to enable these deals to reach their potential. An improved security environment and an initial wave of foreign investment are helping to spur economic activity, particularly in the energy, construction, and retail sectors. Broader economic improvement, long-term fiscal health, and sustained increases in the standard of living still depend on the government passing major policy reforms and on the continued development of Iraq's massive oil reserves. Although foreign investors viewed Iraq with increasing interest in 2010, most are still hampered by difficulties acquiring land for projects and other regulatory impediments. | 2001-05-05T02:47:19Z | 2023-12-14T06:15:54Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iraq |
14,670 | Transport in Iraq | Transport in Iraq consists of railways, highways, waterways, pipelines, ports and harbors, marines and airports.
total: 2,272 km standard gauge: 2,272 km 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge
For more than two decades there have been plans for building a metro system in Baghdad. It is possible that part of the tunnels have been built, but that they are now used for military, shelter, hiding, and escaping purposes. U.N. inspectors have heard of the tunnels for years, but have not found their entrances. map In November, 2008, an overground service dubbed the Baghdad Metro began service. Local government in Baghdad is arranging feasibility studies for the construction of two new underground lines
A 37 km monorail is planned in Najaf, which would link three Shi'ite holy sites.
The first Iraqi Republic Railways train to Basra since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime arrived on 26 April 2003. British troops hope to use the 68 km long railway to transport much-needed aid supplies from the port town of Umm Qasr to Basra.
In June 2011, it was announced that planning had begun for a new high-speed rail line between Baghdad and Basra, with a memorandum of understanding with Alstom having been signed.
All adjacent countries generally use 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge, but may vary in couplings. Neighbours with electrified railways – Turkey and Iran – both use the world standard 25 kVAC
An overland trans-desert bus service between Beirut, Haifa, Damascus and Baghdad was established by the Nairn Transport Company of Damascus in 1923.
total: 44,900 km paved: 37,851 km, unpaved: 7,049 km (2002)
5,729 km (Euphrates River (2,815 km), Tigris River 1,899 km, Third River (565 km)); Shatt al Arab is usually navigable by maritime traffic for about 130 km. The channel has been dredged to 3 m and is in use. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers have navigable sections for shallow-draft watercraft; the Shatt al Basrah canal was navigable by shallow-draft craft before closing in 1991 because of the Gulf War.
crude oil 5,432 km; natural gas 2,455 km; refined products 1,637 km; liquid petroleum gas 913 km
total: 32 ships (with a volume of 1,000 gross tonnage (GT) or over) totaling 606,227 GT/1,067,770 tonnes deadweight (DWT) ships by type: cargo ship 14, passenger ship 1, passenger/cargo 1, petroleum tanker 13, refrigerated cargo 1, roll-on/roll-off ship 2 (1999 est.)
Iraq has about 104 airports as of 2012. Major airports include:
20 (2012) | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Transport in Iraq consists of railways, highways, waterways, pipelines, ports and harbors, marines and airports.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "total: 2,272 km standard gauge: 2,272 km 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "For more than two decades there have been plans for building a metro system in Baghdad. It is possible that part of the tunnels have been built, but that they are now used for military, shelter, hiding, and escaping purposes. U.N. inspectors have heard of the tunnels for years, but have not found their entrances. map In November, 2008, an overground service dubbed the Baghdad Metro began service. Local government in Baghdad is arranging feasibility studies for the construction of two new underground lines",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A 37 km monorail is planned in Najaf, which would link three Shi'ite holy sites.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The first Iraqi Republic Railways train to Basra since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime arrived on 26 April 2003. British troops hope to use the 68 km long railway to transport much-needed aid supplies from the port town of Umm Qasr to Basra.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In June 2011, it was announced that planning had begun for a new high-speed rail line between Baghdad and Basra, with a memorandum of understanding with Alstom having been signed.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "All adjacent countries generally use 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge, but may vary in couplings. Neighbours with electrified railways – Turkey and Iran – both use the world standard 25 kVAC",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "An overland trans-desert bus service between Beirut, Haifa, Damascus and Baghdad was established by the Nairn Transport Company of Damascus in 1923.",
"title": "Road Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "total: 44,900 km paved: 37,851 km, unpaved: 7,049 km (2002)",
"title": "Road Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "5,729 km (Euphrates River (2,815 km), Tigris River 1,899 km, Third River (565 km)); Shatt al Arab is usually navigable by maritime traffic for about 130 km. The channel has been dredged to 3 m and is in use. The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers have navigable sections for shallow-draft watercraft; the Shatt al Basrah canal was navigable by shallow-draft craft before closing in 1991 because of the Gulf War.",
"title": "Waterways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "crude oil 5,432 km; natural gas 2,455 km; refined products 1,637 km; liquid petroleum gas 913 km",
"title": "Pipelines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "total: 32 ships (with a volume of 1,000 gross tonnage (GT) or over) totaling 606,227 GT/1,067,770 tonnes deadweight (DWT) ships by type: cargo ship 14, passenger ship 1, passenger/cargo 1, petroleum tanker 13, refrigerated cargo 1, roll-on/roll-off ship 2 (1999 est.)",
"title": "Merchant marine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Iraq has about 104 airports as of 2012. Major airports include:",
"title": "Airports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "20 (2012)",
"title": "Airports"
}
]
| Transport in Iraq consists of railways, highways, waterways, pipelines, ports and harbors, marines and airports. | 2022-04-22T08:14:48Z | [
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|
14,672 | Foreign relations of Iraq | Since 1980, the foreign relations of Iraq have been influenced by a number of controversial decisions by the Saddam Hussein administration. Hussein had good relations with the Soviet Union and a number of western countries such as France and Germany, who provided him with advanced weapons systems. He also developed a tenuous relation with the United States, who supported him during the Iran–Iraq War. However, the Invasion of Kuwait that triggered the Gulf War brutally changed Iraq's relations with the Arab World and the West. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and others were among the countries that supported Kuwait in the UN coalition. After the Hussein administration was toppled by the 2003 U.S. invasion, the governments that succeeded it have now tried to establish relations with various nations.
In September 2005, a joint political declaration between the European Union and Iraq was signed which forms the basis of regular political dialogue. A Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the EU and Iraq is in the process of being negotiated and will probably be concluded during 2008.
July 2005 saw the introduction of EUJUST LEX, the European Union's rule of law operation intended to train Iraqi police and legal officials in human rights along with other issues. Over 1,400 Iraqis have already taken part in training courses.
Iraq belongs to the following international organizations: Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, Arab League, Arab Monetary Fund, Council of Arab Economic Unity, Customs Cooperation Council, Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, G-77, International Atomic Energy Agency, International Monetary Fund, International Maritime Organization, Interpol, International Organization for Standardization, International Telecommunication Union, Non-Aligned Movement, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, United Nations, Universal Postal Union, World Health Organization and World Bank, MENAFATF.
Iraq's relations with other countries and with international organizations are supervised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1988 the minister of foreign affairs was Tariq Aziz, who was an influential leader of the Ba'ath Party and had served in that post since 1983. Aziz, Saddam Hussein, and the other members of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) formulated Iraq's foreign policy, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs bureaucracy implemented RCC directives. The Baath maintained control over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and over all Iraqi diplomatic missions abroad.
Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Hoshyar Zebari was first appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad on 3 September 2003. On 28 June 2004, he was reappointed as Minister of Foreign Affairs by the Iraqi Interim Government, under Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. On 3 May 2005 he was sworn in as Minister of Foreign Affairs by the Iraqi Transitional Government, under Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. On 20 May 2006, he was delegated in for the fourth consecutive time as Foreign Minister in the government of Nouri Al-Maliki.
Iran and Iraq restored diplomatic relations in 1990 but are still trying to work out written agreements settling outstanding disputes from their eight-year war concerning border demarcation, prisoners-of-war, and freedom of navigation and sovereignty over the Shatt al-Arab waterway; in November 1994, Iraq formally accepted the United Nations-demarcated border with Kuwait which had been spelled out in Security Council Resolutions 687 (1991), 773 (1992), and 883 (1993); this formally ends earlier claims to Kuwait and to Bubiyan and Warbah islands although the government continues periodic rhetorical challenges; dispute over water development plans by Turkey for the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Since 1980, the foreign relations of Iraq have been influenced by a number of controversial decisions by the Saddam Hussein administration. Hussein had good relations with the Soviet Union and a number of western countries such as France and Germany, who provided him with advanced weapons systems. He also developed a tenuous relation with the United States, who supported him during the Iran–Iraq War. However, the Invasion of Kuwait that triggered the Gulf War brutally changed Iraq's relations with the Arab World and the West. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and others were among the countries that supported Kuwait in the UN coalition. After the Hussein administration was toppled by the 2003 U.S. invasion, the governments that succeeded it have now tried to establish relations with various nations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In September 2005, a joint political declaration between the European Union and Iraq was signed which forms the basis of regular political dialogue. A Trade and Cooperation Agreement between the EU and Iraq is in the process of being negotiated and will probably be concluded during 2008.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "July 2005 saw the introduction of EUJUST LEX, the European Union's rule of law operation intended to train Iraqi police and legal officials in human rights along with other issues. Over 1,400 Iraqis have already taken part in training courses.",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Iraq belongs to the following international organizations: Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, Arab League, Arab Monetary Fund, Council of Arab Economic Unity, Customs Cooperation Council, Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, G-77, International Atomic Energy Agency, International Monetary Fund, International Maritime Organization, Interpol, International Organization for Standardization, International Telecommunication Union, Non-Aligned Movement, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, United Nations, Universal Postal Union, World Health Organization and World Bank, MENAFATF.",
"title": "Member of international organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Iraq's relations with other countries and with international organizations are supervised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1988 the minister of foreign affairs was Tariq Aziz, who was an influential leader of the Ba'ath Party and had served in that post since 1983. Aziz, Saddam Hussein, and the other members of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) formulated Iraq's foreign policy, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs bureaucracy implemented RCC directives. The Baath maintained control over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and over all Iraqi diplomatic missions abroad.",
"title": "Ministry of Foreign Affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Hoshyar Zebari was first appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad on 3 September 2003. On 28 June 2004, he was reappointed as Minister of Foreign Affairs by the Iraqi Interim Government, under Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. On 3 May 2005 he was sworn in as Minister of Foreign Affairs by the Iraqi Transitional Government, under Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. On 20 May 2006, he was delegated in for the fourth consecutive time as Foreign Minister in the government of Nouri Al-Maliki.",
"title": "Ministry of Foreign Affairs"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Iran and Iraq restored diplomatic relations in 1990 but are still trying to work out written agreements settling outstanding disputes from their eight-year war concerning border demarcation, prisoners-of-war, and freedom of navigation and sovereignty over the Shatt al-Arab waterway; in November 1994, Iraq formally accepted the United Nations-demarcated border with Kuwait which had been spelled out in Security Council Resolutions 687 (1991), 773 (1992), and 883 (1993); this formally ends earlier claims to Kuwait and to Bubiyan and Warbah islands although the government continues periodic rhetorical challenges; dispute over water development plans by Turkey for the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.",
"title": "International disputes"
}
]
| Since 1980, the foreign relations of Iraq have been influenced by a number of controversial decisions by the Saddam Hussein administration. Hussein had good relations with the Soviet Union and a number of western countries such as France and Germany, who provided him with advanced weapons systems. He also developed a tenuous relation with the United States, who supported him during the Iran–Iraq War. However, the Invasion of Kuwait that triggered the Gulf War brutally changed Iraq's relations with the Arab World and the West. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and others were among the countries that supported Kuwait in the UN coalition. After the Hussein administration was toppled by the 2003 U.S. invasion, the governments that succeeded it have now tried to establish relations with various nations. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-30T18:35:23Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_Iraq |
14,676 | Demographics of the Republic of Ireland | The Republic of Ireland had an estimated population of 5,281,600 as of 1 April 2023.
The island of Ireland's population has fluctuated over history. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Ireland experienced a major population boom as a result of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. In the 50-year period 1790–1840, the population of the island doubled from 4 million to 8 million. At its peak, Ireland's population density was similar to that of England and continental Europe.
This changed dramatically with the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, which led to mass starvation and consequent mass emigration. In the area covering the present day Republic of Ireland, the population reached about 6.5 million in the mid-1840s. Ten years later it was down to 5 million. The population continued a slow decline well into the 20th century, with the Republic recording a low of 2.8 million in the 1961 census.
During the 1960s, the population started to grow once more, although slowly as emigration was still common. In the 1990s the country entered a period of rapid economic growth as a result of the Celtic Tiger Irish economic boom, and the Republic started to receive immigration. Many former Irish emigrants returned home, and Ireland became an attractive destination for immigrants, from other member states EU such as Central Europe, but also from outside the EU such as Africa, Asia and elsewhere. With the 2008 onset of the Irish economic and banking crisis, the state's economy suffered, and Ireland has once again been experiencing net emigration of its citizens, but immigration remains high.
In November 2013, Eurostat reported that the Republic had the largest net emigration rate of any member state, at 7.6 emigrants per 1,000 population. However, it has the youngest population of any European Union member state and its population size is predicted to grow for many decades, in contrast with the declining population predicted for most European countries. A report published in 2008 predicted that the population would reach 6.7 million by 2060. The Republic has also been experiencing a baby boom, with increasing birth rates and overall fertility rates. Despite this, the total fertility rate is still below replacement depending on when the measurement is taken. The Irish fertility rate is still the highest of any European country. This increase is significantly fuelled by non-Irish immigration – in 2009, one-quarter of all babies born in the Republic of Ireland were born to foreign-born mothers.
The population of the Republic of Ireland was 5,123,536 people in 2022. Demographic statistics as of 2019.
Urban population (areas with >1,500 people): 62.0% (2011)
Rural population: 38.0% (2011)
The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman.
Birth rate; 13.8 births/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 137th
Total fertility rate; 1.96 children born/woman (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 125th
Mother's mean age at first birth; 30.7 years (2015 est.)
Death rate; 6.6 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 140th
Source: UN World Population Prospects
Age structure
Median age; total: 37.1 years
c = Census results.
Ireland's immigration history (and of one of a multi-ethnic society) is most of that of a country of emigration, remaining exclusively homogeneous for the vast majority of 20th century history, rather than one of net migration and increased ethnic and racial diversity. However, from the 1990s, with the rise of the 'Celtic Tiger', the nation shifted to one of a net receiver of immigration at a rapid pace, changing from one of the most 'homogeneous countries in the EU, to a country with a rate of change almost unparalleled in speed and scale'. The Celtic Tiger economic boom saw a large expansion of the labour market, which contributed to the large increase of immigration towards the country, with the additional enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and the further 2007 enlargement contributing to increased levels of immigration. Additionally, asylum seekers rose dramatically as well: from 364 in 1994 to 11,634 in 2002, before falling off towards the end of the decade.
Net migration rate; 4 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2017 est.) Country comparison to the world: 28th
Ireland contains several immigrant communities, especially in Dublin and other cities across the country. The largest immigrant groups, with over 10,000 people, being Poles, British, Indians, Romanians, Lithuanians, Brazilians, Italians, Latvians, Spaniards, French, Croats, Americans, Chinese, Germans and Ukrainians.
Of the 57,540 births in 2022, there were 43,651 babies (76%) born to mothers of Irish nationality compared to 45,381 (78%) in 2021. There were 8.3% of births to mothers of EU15 to EU27 nationality, 1.9% of mothers were of UK nationality, and 2.3% were of EU14 nationality (excluding Ireland). Mothers of nationalities other than Ireland, UK and the EU accounted for 12% of total births registered. There were 0.01% of mothers where the nationality was not stated.
In 2022, 20% of the usually resident population in Ireland were born elsewhere, an increase of 3% since 2016. This represented 1,017,437 people, an increase of 207,031 from six years previously.
Migrants are supported/represented by the Immigrant Council of Ireland, Irish Refugee Council, Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland, Nasc and the state's Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service. They are managed by the International Protection Accommodation Service under the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY) as well being policed by the Garda National Immigration Bureau. Some minor parties have voiced opposition to immigration in the country and its capability to continue to let refugees in (including making claims that Ireland is "full") including the National Party and the Irish Freedom Party. The DCEDIY projected a shortfall of 15,000 beds for refugees in December 2022 and admitted that there was mounting pressure to house 65,000 people.
Approximately 7,400 refugee adults and children were projected to be living in 38 "direct provision" centres across 17 counties in the Republic of Ireland by the end of April 2020. The government of Ireland have said that they project to end direct provision by 2024 and are looking towards alternative forms of accommodation.
Religions in Ireland (2022)
Ireland is a predominantly Christian country. The majority are Catholic; however, the number of people who declare themselves Catholic has been declining in recent years. Irreligion has increased since 2016 with 14% declaring 'No Religion' in 2022, meaning this is the second largest religious affiliation in Ireland. Immigration has also brought other faiths, with Islam at 1.7%, or over 83,000 people. As well as Hinduism, with 33,043 Hindus in the state, an increase of over 250% from 2016.
English is the most commonly used language, with 84% of the population calling it their mother tongue. Irish is the first official language of the state, with 11% calling it their mother tongue. Irish is the main language of the Gaeltacht regions, where 96,628 people live. The main sign language used is Irish Sign Language.
Literacy rate; definition: age 15 and over who can read and write
School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education); total: 19 years
For November 2022 the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was:
Unchanged at 4.3% for males from October 2022, and down from 5.3% in November 2021.
Unchanged at 4.6% for females from October 2022, and down from 5.2% in November 2021.
Unchanged at 12.1% for persons aged 15–24 years (youth unemployment rate) from a revised rate of 12.1% in October 2022.
Down to 3.3% for persons aged 25–74 years from 3.4% in October 2022.
The median household disposable income in 2020 was €46,471, an increase of €2,556 (+5.8%) from the previous year. Disposable household income is gross household income less total tax, social insurance contributions, pension contributions and inter-household transfers paid.
Groups: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Republic of Ireland had an estimated population of 5,281,600 as of 1 April 2023.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The island of Ireland's population has fluctuated over history. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Ireland experienced a major population boom as a result of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. In the 50-year period 1790–1840, the population of the island doubled from 4 million to 8 million. At its peak, Ireland's population density was similar to that of England and continental Europe.",
"title": "Demographic history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "This changed dramatically with the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, which led to mass starvation and consequent mass emigration. In the area covering the present day Republic of Ireland, the population reached about 6.5 million in the mid-1840s. Ten years later it was down to 5 million. The population continued a slow decline well into the 20th century, with the Republic recording a low of 2.8 million in the 1961 census.",
"title": "Demographic history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "During the 1960s, the population started to grow once more, although slowly as emigration was still common. In the 1990s the country entered a period of rapid economic growth as a result of the Celtic Tiger Irish economic boom, and the Republic started to receive immigration. Many former Irish emigrants returned home, and Ireland became an attractive destination for immigrants, from other member states EU such as Central Europe, but also from outside the EU such as Africa, Asia and elsewhere. With the 2008 onset of the Irish economic and banking crisis, the state's economy suffered, and Ireland has once again been experiencing net emigration of its citizens, but immigration remains high.",
"title": "Demographic history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In November 2013, Eurostat reported that the Republic had the largest net emigration rate of any member state, at 7.6 emigrants per 1,000 population. However, it has the youngest population of any European Union member state and its population size is predicted to grow for many decades, in contrast with the declining population predicted for most European countries. A report published in 2008 predicted that the population would reach 6.7 million by 2060. The Republic has also been experiencing a baby boom, with increasing birth rates and overall fertility rates. Despite this, the total fertility rate is still below replacement depending on when the measurement is taken. The Irish fertility rate is still the highest of any European country. This increase is significantly fuelled by non-Irish immigration – in 2009, one-quarter of all babies born in the Republic of Ireland were born to foreign-born mothers.",
"title": "Demographic history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The population of the Republic of Ireland was 5,123,536 people in 2022. Demographic statistics as of 2019.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Urban population (areas with >1,500 people): 62.0% (2011)",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Rural population: 38.0% (2011)",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Birth rate; 13.8 births/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 137th",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Total fertility rate; 1.96 children born/woman (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 125th",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Mother's mean age at first birth; 30.7 years (2015 est.)",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Death rate; 6.6 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.) Country comparison to the world: 140th",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Source: UN World Population Prospects",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Age structure",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Median age; total: 37.1 years",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "c = Census results.",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Ireland's immigration history (and of one of a multi-ethnic society) is most of that of a country of emigration, remaining exclusively homogeneous for the vast majority of 20th century history, rather than one of net migration and increased ethnic and racial diversity. However, from the 1990s, with the rise of the 'Celtic Tiger', the nation shifted to one of a net receiver of immigration at a rapid pace, changing from one of the most 'homogeneous countries in the EU, to a country with a rate of change almost unparalleled in speed and scale'. The Celtic Tiger economic boom saw a large expansion of the labour market, which contributed to the large increase of immigration towards the country, with the additional enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and the further 2007 enlargement contributing to increased levels of immigration. Additionally, asylum seekers rose dramatically as well: from 364 in 1994 to 11,634 in 2002, before falling off towards the end of the decade.",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Net migration rate; 4 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2017 est.) Country comparison to the world: 28th",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Ireland contains several immigrant communities, especially in Dublin and other cities across the country. The largest immigrant groups, with over 10,000 people, being Poles, British, Indians, Romanians, Lithuanians, Brazilians, Italians, Latvians, Spaniards, French, Croats, Americans, Chinese, Germans and Ukrainians.",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Of the 57,540 births in 2022, there were 43,651 babies (76%) born to mothers of Irish nationality compared to 45,381 (78%) in 2021. There were 8.3% of births to mothers of EU15 to EU27 nationality, 1.9% of mothers were of UK nationality, and 2.3% were of EU14 nationality (excluding Ireland). Mothers of nationalities other than Ireland, UK and the EU accounted for 12% of total births registered. There were 0.01% of mothers where the nationality was not stated.",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 2022, 20% of the usually resident population in Ireland were born elsewhere, an increase of 3% since 2016. This represented 1,017,437 people, an increase of 207,031 from six years previously.",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Migrants are supported/represented by the Immigrant Council of Ireland, Irish Refugee Council, Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland, Nasc and the state's Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service. They are managed by the International Protection Accommodation Service under the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth (DCEDIY) as well being policed by the Garda National Immigration Bureau. Some minor parties have voiced opposition to immigration in the country and its capability to continue to let refugees in (including making claims that Ireland is \"full\") including the National Party and the Irish Freedom Party. The DCEDIY projected a shortfall of 15,000 beds for refugees in December 2022 and admitted that there was mounting pressure to house 65,000 people.",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Approximately 7,400 refugee adults and children were projected to be living in 38 \"direct provision\" centres across 17 counties in the Republic of Ireland by the end of April 2020. The government of Ireland have said that they project to end direct provision by 2024 and are looking towards alternative forms of accommodation.",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Religions in Ireland (2022)",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Ireland is a predominantly Christian country. The majority are Catholic; however, the number of people who declare themselves Catholic has been declining in recent years. Irreligion has increased since 2016 with 14% declaring 'No Religion' in 2022, meaning this is the second largest religious affiliation in Ireland. Immigration has also brought other faiths, with Islam at 1.7%, or over 83,000 people. As well as Hinduism, with 33,043 Hindus in the state, an increase of over 250% from 2016.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "English is the most commonly used language, with 84% of the population calling it their mother tongue. Irish is the first official language of the state, with 11% calling it their mother tongue. Irish is the main language of the Gaeltacht regions, where 96,628 people live. The main sign language used is Irish Sign Language.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Literacy rate; definition: age 15 and over who can read and write",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education); total: 19 years",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "For November 2022 the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was:",
"title": "Employment and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Unchanged at 4.3% for males from October 2022, and down from 5.3% in November 2021.",
"title": "Employment and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Unchanged at 4.6% for females from October 2022, and down from 5.2% in November 2021.",
"title": "Employment and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Unchanged at 12.1% for persons aged 15–24 years (youth unemployment rate) from a revised rate of 12.1% in October 2022.",
"title": "Employment and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Down to 3.3% for persons aged 25–74 years from 3.4% in October 2022.",
"title": "Employment and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The median household disposable income in 2020 was €46,471, an increase of €2,556 (+5.8%) from the previous year. Disposable household income is gross household income less total tax, social insurance contributions, pension contributions and inter-household transfers paid.",
"title": "Employment and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Groups:",
"title": "See also"
}
]
| The Republic of Ireland had an estimated population of 5,281,600 as of 1 April 2023. | 2001-05-05T02:52:58Z | 2023-12-19T15:11:06Z | [
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14,677 | Politics of the Republic of Ireland | Ireland is a parliamentary, representative democratic republic and a member state of the European Union. While the head of state is the popularly elected President of Ireland, it is a largely ceremonial position, with real political power being vested in the Taoiseach, who is nominated by the Dáil and is the head of the government.
Executive power is exercised by the government, which consists of no more than 15 cabinet ministers, inclusive of the Taoiseach and Tánaiste (the deputy head of government). Legislative power is vested in the Oireachtas, the bicameral national parliament, which consists of Dáil Éireann, Seanad Éireann and the President of Ireland. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. The head of the judiciary is the Chief Justice, who presides over the Supreme Court.
Ireland has a multi-party system. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, historically opposed and competing entities, which both occupy the traditional centre ground, trace their roots to the opposing sides of the Irish Civil War. All governments since 1932 have been led by one or the other party, with Fianna Fáil having had sufficient support at many elections to govern alone. Fluctuations in seat levels allowed changes in governments through different coalitions. From 1932 to 2011, the parties were stable in their support, with Fianna Fáil the largest at each election, Fine Gael the second largest, and on all but two occasions, the Labour Party the third party. The last three elections, however, have each had more volatile results. At the 2011 election, the largest parties in order were Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil; at the 2016 election, the largest parties in order were Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin; and at the 2020 election, the largest parties were Fianna Fáil first in seats (second in votes), Sinn Féin second in seats (first in votes), and then Fine Gael. The result was historically good for Sinn Féin.
In June 2020, leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin, became the new Taoiseach (head of government). He formed a historic three-party coalition consisting of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party. It was the first time in history that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were in the same government. The previous Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael, Leo Varadkar, became the Tánaiste (deputy head of government). Martin led the country as Taoiseach until 17 December 2022, when he changed posts with Varadkar.
The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Ireland a "full democracy" in 2022.
The state operates under the Constitution of Ireland (Irish: Bunreacht na hÉireann) which was adopted in 1937 by means of a plebiscite. The constitution falls within the liberal democratic tradition. It defines the organs of government and guarantees certain fundamental rights. The Constitution can only be amended by means of a referendum. Important constitutional referendums have concerned issues such as abortion, the status of the Catholic Church, divorce, the European Union and same-sex marriage.
The head of state is the President of Ireland. In keeping with the state's parliamentary system of government, the President exercises a mainly ceremonial role but does possess certain specific powers. The presidency is open to all Irish citizens who are at least 35. They are directly elected by secret ballot under the alternative vote. A candidate may be nominated for election as president by no fewer than 20 members of the Oireachtas or by four or more of Ireland's 31 County and City Councils. A retiring President may nominate themselves as a candidate for re-election. If only one valid candidate is nominated for election, for example if there is consensus among the political parties to nominate a single candidate, it is unnecessary to proceed to a ballot and that candidate is deemed elected. The President is elected to a seven-year term of office and no person may serve more than two terms.
In carrying out certain of their constitutional functions, the President is aided by the Council of State. There is no vice-president in Ireland. If for any reason the President is unable to carry out their functions, or if the Office of President is vacant, the duties of the President are carried out by the Presidential Commission.
The President may not veto bills passed by the Oireachtas but may, after consultation with the Council of State, refer them to the Supreme Court of Ireland for a ruling on whether they comply with the constitution. The President may refuse a request of the Taoiseach for a dissolution of Dáil Éireann, although no request for a dissolution has ever been refused.
Article 15 of the Constitution of Ireland established the Oireachtas as the national parliament of Ireland. The Oireachtas consists of the President of Ireland and two elected houses: Dáil Éireann (the House of Representatives) and Seanad Éireann (the Senate). As the Oireachtas also consists of the President, the title of the two law-making houses is the Houses of the Oireachtas. The Dáil is by far the dominant house of the legislature.
Members of the Dáil are directly elected at least once in every five years under the single transferable vote form of proportional representation from multi-seat constituencies. Membership of the house is open to all Irish citizens who are at least 21 and permanently resident in the State. The electorate consists of all Irish and British citizens resident in Ireland over the age of 18. Members of the Dáil are known as Teachta Dála or TDs. As of 2021, there are 160 TDs, of which one, the Ceann Comhairle (Presiding Officer), is automatically returned at an election. The Taoiseach, Tánaiste and the Minister for Finance must be members of the Dáil. The Dáil is the only House which can introduce and amend money bills (i.e. financial and tax legislation). Since the early 1980s, no single party has had a majority in Dáil Éireann, so that coalition governments have been the norm.
The Seanad is a largely advisory body. It consists of sixty members called Senators. An election for the Seanad must take place no later than 90 days after a general election for the members of the Dáil. Eleven Senators are nominated by the Taoiseach while a further six are elected by certain national universities. The remaining 43 are elected from special vocational panels of candidates, the electorate for which consists of the 60 members of the outgoing Senate, the 160 TDs of the incoming Dáil and the 883 elected members of 31 local authorities. The Seanad has the power to delay legislative proposals and is allowed 90 days to consider and amend bills sent to it by the Dáil (excluding money bills). The Seanad is only allowed 21 days to consider money bills sent to it by the Dáil. The Seanad cannot amend money bills but can make recommendations to the Dáil on such bills. No more than two members of a government may be members of the Seanad, and only twice since 1937 have members of the Seanad been appointed to government.
Executive authority is exercised by a cabinet known simply as the Government. Article 28 of the Constitution states that the Government may consist of no less than seven and no more than fifteen members, namely the Taoiseach (prime minister), the Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and up to thirteen other ministers. The Minister for Finance is the only other position named in the Constitution. The Taoiseach is appointed by the President, after being nominated by Dáil Éireann. The remaining ministers are nominated by the Taoiseach and appointed by the President following their approval by the Dáil. The Government must enjoy the confidence of Dáil Éireann and, in the event that they cease to enjoy the support of the lower house, the Taoiseach must either resign or request the President to dissolve the Dáil, in which case a general election follows.
Ireland is a common law jurisdiction. The judiciary consists of the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal and the High Court established by the Constitution and other lower courts established by statute law. Judges are appointed by the President after being nominated by the Government and can be removed from office only for misbehaviour or incapacity, and then only by resolution of both houses of the Oireachtas. The final court of appeal is the Supreme Court, which consists of the Chief Justice, nine ordinary judges and, ex officio the Presidents of the Court of Appeal and the High Court. The Supreme Court rarely sits as a full bench and normally hears cases in chambers of three, five or seven judges.
The courts established by the constitution have the power of judicial review and may declare to be invalid both laws and acts of the state which are repugnant to the constitution.
The Government, through the civil and public services and state-sponsored bodies, is a significant employer in the state; these three sectors are often called the public sector. Management of these various bodies vary, for instance in the civil service there will be clearly defined routes and patterns whilst among public services a sponsoring minister or the Minister for Finance may appoint a board or commission. Commercial activities, where the state involves itself, are typically through the state-sponsored bodies which are usually organised in a similar fashion to private companies.
A 2005 report on public sector employment, showed that in June 2005 the numbers employed in the public sector stood at 350,100; of these by sector they were 38,700 (civil service), 254,100 (public service) and 57,300 (state-sponsored). The total workforce of the state was 1,857,400 that year, thus the public sector represents approximately 20% of the total workforce.
The civil service of Ireland consists of two broad components, the Civil Service of the Government and the Civil Service of the State. Whilst these two components are largely theoretical, they do have some fundamental operational differences. The civil service is expected to maintain the political impartiality in its work, and some sections of it are entirely independent of Government decision making.
The public service is a relatively broad term and is not clearly defined and sometimes is taken to include the civil service. The public service proper consists of Government agencies and bodies which provide services on behalf of the Government but are not the core civil service. For instance local authorities, Education and Training Boards and Garda Síochána are considered to be public services.
Article 28A of the constitution of Ireland provides a constitutional basis for local government. The Oireachtas is empowered to establish the number, size and powers of local authorities by law. Under Article 28A, members of local authorities must be directly elected by voters at least once every five years.
Local government in Ireland is governed by a series of Local Government Acts, beginning with the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898. The most significant of these is the Local Government Act 2001, which established a two-tier structure of local government. The Local Government Reform Act 2014 abolished the bottom tier, the town councils, leaving 31 local authorities. There are 26 County Councils (County Dublin having been divided into three council areas), 3 City Councils (Dublin, Cork and Galway), and 2 City and County Councils (Limerick and Waterford).
A number of political parties are represented in the Dáil and coalition governments are common. The Irish electoral system has been historically characterised as a two-and-a-half party system, with two large catch-all parties, this being the centre-right Fine Gael and the centrist Fianna Fáil, dominating, and the "half-party", being Labour. This changed after the 2011 general election, following the large drop in support for Fianna Fáil and the rise in support for other parties. Ireland's political landscape changed dramatically after the 2020 general election, when Sinn Féin made gains to become the joint-largest party in the Dáil, making Ireland a three party system.
Fianna Fáil, a traditionally Irish republican party founded in 1927 by Éamon de Valera, is the joint-largest party in the Dáil and considered centrist in Irish politics. It first formed a government on the basis of a populist programme of land redistribution and national preference in trade and republican populism remains a key part of its appeal. It has formed government seven times since Ireland gained independence: 1932–1948, 1951–1954, 1957–1973, 1977–1981, 1982, 1987–1994, and 1997–2011. Fianna Fáil was the largest party in the Dáil from 1932 to 2011. It lost a huge amount of support in the 2011 general election, going from 71 to 20 seats, its lowest ever. Its loss in support was mainly due to its handling of the 2008 economic recession. It has since regained some support, but is yet to recover to its pre-2011 levels.
The other joint-largest party is Sinn Féin, established in its current form in 1970 as a breakaway faction from the original political party of the same name (the remaining part has had several changes of name since, and is now known as the Workers' Party). The original Sinn Féin party played a major role in the Irish War of Independence and the First Dáil, and both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil trace their origins to this party, having split from it in 1922 and 1926, respectively. The current-day party split from this older Sinn Féin in a dispute over political ideology and a perceived lack of support for the so-called “armed struggle” against British rule in Northern Ireland, and as a result the newer party has been historically linked to the Provisional IRA. The party is a Republican party which takes a strongly left wing stance on economics and social policy, placing it to the left of the Labour party. Sinn Féin received the highest share of first-preference votes in the 2020 general election, but finished level with Fianna Fáil in overall seats once vote transfers had been counted.
The third-largest party in the Dáil is Fine Gael, which has its origins in the pro-Treaty faction of Michael Collins in the Irish Civil War. Traditionally regarded as the party of law and order, it is associated with strong belief in pro-enterprise and reward. Despite expressions of Social Democracy by previous leader Garret FitzGerald, today, it remains a Christian democratic, economically liberal party along European lines, with a strongly pro-European outlook. Fine Gael was formed in 1933 out of a merger of Cumann na nGaedheal (which had split from the original Sinn Féin in 1922), the National Centre Party and the paramilitary Blueshirts organisation. In more recent years it has generally been associated with a liberal, progressive, outlook. Fine Gael has formed governments in the periods 1922–1932 (as Cumann na nGaedheal), 1948–1951, 1954–1957, 1973–1977, 1981–1982, 1982–1987, 1994–1997, and from 2011 to present. In the 2011 general election, Fine Gael won 78 seats, its highest ever total, and a massive increase from the previous election.
The fourth-largest party in the Dáil is the Green Party, which made significant gains at the 2020 general election.
The fifth largest party in the Dáil is the centre-left Labour Party which was founded by James Connolly and Jim Larkin in 1912. Labour has formal links with the trade union movement and has governed in seven coalition governments – six led by Fine Gael and one by Fianna Fáil. This recurring role as a junior coalition partner has led to Labour being classed as the "half" party in Ireland's "two-and-a-half party system". Labour won a record number of seats, 37, at the 2011 general election, becoming the second-largest party for the first time in its history, following the collapse in support for Fianna Fáil. In 2011, Labour went into coalition with Fine Gael, who had also won a record number of seats. Labour retained its place as one of Ireland's three largest parties up until the 2016 general election, when it suffered the worst general election defeat in its history, gaining just 7 seats. Much of this was due to being part of a government that had introduced unpopular austerity measures to deal with the economic crisis.
The sixth-largest Dáil party is the centre-left Social Democrats. The Social Democrats were founded in 2015 and made gains at the 2020 general election.
The Solidarity–People Before Profit electoral alliance, consisting of the Solidarity and People Before Profit are the 7th-largest party grouping within Dáil Éireann. Formed in 2015, the group represents a left-wing, socialist viewpoint.
Aontú, a party formed in 2019 by politicians who left the current Sinn Féin, has one TD, as does Right to Change, a left-wing, socialist political party formed after the 2020 election.
Nineteen of the 160 members of the 33rd Dáil are Independent.
Ireland's foreign relations are substantially influenced by its membership of the European Union, although bilateral relations with the United States and United Kingdom are also important to the country. It is one of the group of smaller nations in the EU, and has traditionally followed a non-aligned foreign policy.
Ireland tends towards independence in foreign policy, thus it is not a member of NATO and has a longstanding policy of military neutrality.
This policy has helped the Irish Defence Forces to be successful in their contributions to UN peace-keeping missions since 1960 (in the Congo Crisis ONUC) and subsequently in Cyprus (UNFICYP), Lebanon (UNIFIL), Iran/Iraq Border (UNIIMOG), Bosnia and Herzegovina (SFOR & EUFOR Althea), Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), Liberia (UNMIL), East Timor (INTERFET), Darfur and Chad (EUFOR Tchad/RCA).
Northern Ireland has been a major factor in Irish politics since the island of Ireland was divided between Northern Ireland and what is now the Republic in 1920. The creation of Northern Ireland led to conflict between northern nationalists (mostly Roman Catholic) who seek unification with the Republic and Unionists (mostly Protestant) who opposed British plans for Irish Home Rule and wished for Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. After the formation of Northern Ireland in 1921 following its opt out from the newly formed Irish Free State, many Roman Catholics and Republicans were discriminated against. The abolition of Proportional Representation and the gerrymandering of constituency boundaries led to Unionists being over-represented at Stormont and at Westminster. Even James Craig who was prime minister of Northern Ireland boasted of his Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People. In the 1960s NICRA was set up to end discrimination between Catholics and Protestants. There was a massive backlash to this from sections of the Unionist community. This conflict exploded into violence in the late sixties with the beginning of the Troubles, involving groups such as the Provisional IRA, loyalist paramilitaries, the police and the British army, the latter originally drafted in to protect Catholic communities from loyalist violence. These clashes were to result in the suspension of the Stormont Parliament and unsuccessful efforts by the British Government to encourage a power-sharing Executive in Northern Ireland which were only realised following the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The Troubles caused thousands of deaths in Northern Ireland but also spilled over into bombings and acts of violence in England and the Republic.
Since its foundation it has been the stated long-term policy of governments of what is now the Republic to bring an end to the conflict in Northern Ireland and to bring about a united Ireland. Northern Ireland has also, in the past, often been a source of tension between the Irish Government and the government of the United Kingdom. To find a solution to the Troubles the Irish Government became a partner in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
While Sinn Féin have long organised in both Northern Ireland and the Republic, Fianna Fáil have recently opened a cumann (branch) in Derry and begun recruiting members at Queen's University, Belfast although both are extremely small.
Under the Good Friday Agreement and Article 3 of the Constitution a North-South Ministerial Council and six North-South Implementation Bodies co-ordinate activities and exercise a limited governmental role within certain policy areas across the whole island of Ireland. The Implementation Bodies have limited executive authority in six policy areas. Meetings of the Council take the form of meetings between ministers from both the Republic's Government and the Northern Ireland Executive. The council was suspended from 2002 to 2007. However, with the resumption of devolved government in Northern Ireland in May 2007, the council has now re-assumed its duties. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Ireland is a parliamentary, representative democratic republic and a member state of the European Union. While the head of state is the popularly elected President of Ireland, it is a largely ceremonial position, with real political power being vested in the Taoiseach, who is nominated by the Dáil and is the head of the government.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Executive power is exercised by the government, which consists of no more than 15 cabinet ministers, inclusive of the Taoiseach and Tánaiste (the deputy head of government). Legislative power is vested in the Oireachtas, the bicameral national parliament, which consists of Dáil Éireann, Seanad Éireann and the President of Ireland. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. The head of the judiciary is the Chief Justice, who presides over the Supreme Court.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Ireland has a multi-party system. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, historically opposed and competing entities, which both occupy the traditional centre ground, trace their roots to the opposing sides of the Irish Civil War. All governments since 1932 have been led by one or the other party, with Fianna Fáil having had sufficient support at many elections to govern alone. Fluctuations in seat levels allowed changes in governments through different coalitions. From 1932 to 2011, the parties were stable in their support, with Fianna Fáil the largest at each election, Fine Gael the second largest, and on all but two occasions, the Labour Party the third party. The last three elections, however, have each had more volatile results. At the 2011 election, the largest parties in order were Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil; at the 2016 election, the largest parties in order were Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin; and at the 2020 election, the largest parties were Fianna Fáil first in seats (second in votes), Sinn Féin second in seats (first in votes), and then Fine Gael. The result was historically good for Sinn Féin.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In June 2020, leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin, became the new Taoiseach (head of government). He formed a historic three-party coalition consisting of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party. It was the first time in history that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were in the same government. The previous Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael, Leo Varadkar, became the Tánaiste (deputy head of government). Martin led the country as Taoiseach until 17 December 2022, when he changed posts with Varadkar.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Ireland a \"full democracy\" in 2022.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The state operates under the Constitution of Ireland (Irish: Bunreacht na hÉireann) which was adopted in 1937 by means of a plebiscite. The constitution falls within the liberal democratic tradition. It defines the organs of government and guarantees certain fundamental rights. The Constitution can only be amended by means of a referendum. Important constitutional referendums have concerned issues such as abortion, the status of the Catholic Church, divorce, the European Union and same-sex marriage.",
"title": "Constitution"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The head of state is the President of Ireland. In keeping with the state's parliamentary system of government, the President exercises a mainly ceremonial role but does possess certain specific powers. The presidency is open to all Irish citizens who are at least 35. They are directly elected by secret ballot under the alternative vote. A candidate may be nominated for election as president by no fewer than 20 members of the Oireachtas or by four or more of Ireland's 31 County and City Councils. A retiring President may nominate themselves as a candidate for re-election. If only one valid candidate is nominated for election, for example if there is consensus among the political parties to nominate a single candidate, it is unnecessary to proceed to a ballot and that candidate is deemed elected. The President is elected to a seven-year term of office and no person may serve more than two terms.",
"title": "President"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In carrying out certain of their constitutional functions, the President is aided by the Council of State. There is no vice-president in Ireland. If for any reason the President is unable to carry out their functions, or if the Office of President is vacant, the duties of the President are carried out by the Presidential Commission.",
"title": "President"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The President may not veto bills passed by the Oireachtas but may, after consultation with the Council of State, refer them to the Supreme Court of Ireland for a ruling on whether they comply with the constitution. The President may refuse a request of the Taoiseach for a dissolution of Dáil Éireann, although no request for a dissolution has ever been refused.",
"title": "President"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Article 15 of the Constitution of Ireland established the Oireachtas as the national parliament of Ireland. The Oireachtas consists of the President of Ireland and two elected houses: Dáil Éireann (the House of Representatives) and Seanad Éireann (the Senate). As the Oireachtas also consists of the President, the title of the two law-making houses is the Houses of the Oireachtas. The Dáil is by far the dominant house of the legislature.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Members of the Dáil are directly elected at least once in every five years under the single transferable vote form of proportional representation from multi-seat constituencies. Membership of the house is open to all Irish citizens who are at least 21 and permanently resident in the State. The electorate consists of all Irish and British citizens resident in Ireland over the age of 18. Members of the Dáil are known as Teachta Dála or TDs. As of 2021, there are 160 TDs, of which one, the Ceann Comhairle (Presiding Officer), is automatically returned at an election. The Taoiseach, Tánaiste and the Minister for Finance must be members of the Dáil. The Dáil is the only House which can introduce and amend money bills (i.e. financial and tax legislation). Since the early 1980s, no single party has had a majority in Dáil Éireann, so that coalition governments have been the norm.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Seanad is a largely advisory body. It consists of sixty members called Senators. An election for the Seanad must take place no later than 90 days after a general election for the members of the Dáil. Eleven Senators are nominated by the Taoiseach while a further six are elected by certain national universities. The remaining 43 are elected from special vocational panels of candidates, the electorate for which consists of the 60 members of the outgoing Senate, the 160 TDs of the incoming Dáil and the 883 elected members of 31 local authorities. The Seanad has the power to delay legislative proposals and is allowed 90 days to consider and amend bills sent to it by the Dáil (excluding money bills). The Seanad is only allowed 21 days to consider money bills sent to it by the Dáil. The Seanad cannot amend money bills but can make recommendations to the Dáil on such bills. No more than two members of a government may be members of the Seanad, and only twice since 1937 have members of the Seanad been appointed to government.",
"title": "Legislative branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Executive authority is exercised by a cabinet known simply as the Government. Article 28 of the Constitution states that the Government may consist of no less than seven and no more than fifteen members, namely the Taoiseach (prime minister), the Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and up to thirteen other ministers. The Minister for Finance is the only other position named in the Constitution. The Taoiseach is appointed by the President, after being nominated by Dáil Éireann. The remaining ministers are nominated by the Taoiseach and appointed by the President following their approval by the Dáil. The Government must enjoy the confidence of Dáil Éireann and, in the event that they cease to enjoy the support of the lower house, the Taoiseach must either resign or request the President to dissolve the Dáil, in which case a general election follows.",
"title": "Executive branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Ireland is a common law jurisdiction. The judiciary consists of the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal and the High Court established by the Constitution and other lower courts established by statute law. Judges are appointed by the President after being nominated by the Government and can be removed from office only for misbehaviour or incapacity, and then only by resolution of both houses of the Oireachtas. The final court of appeal is the Supreme Court, which consists of the Chief Justice, nine ordinary judges and, ex officio the Presidents of the Court of Appeal and the High Court. The Supreme Court rarely sits as a full bench and normally hears cases in chambers of three, five or seven judges.",
"title": "Judicial branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The courts established by the constitution have the power of judicial review and may declare to be invalid both laws and acts of the state which are repugnant to the constitution.",
"title": "Judicial branch"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Government, through the civil and public services and state-sponsored bodies, is a significant employer in the state; these three sectors are often called the public sector. Management of these various bodies vary, for instance in the civil service there will be clearly defined routes and patterns whilst among public services a sponsoring minister or the Minister for Finance may appoint a board or commission. Commercial activities, where the state involves itself, are typically through the state-sponsored bodies which are usually organised in a similar fashion to private companies.",
"title": "Public sector"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "A 2005 report on public sector employment, showed that in June 2005 the numbers employed in the public sector stood at 350,100; of these by sector they were 38,700 (civil service), 254,100 (public service) and 57,300 (state-sponsored). The total workforce of the state was 1,857,400 that year, thus the public sector represents approximately 20% of the total workforce.",
"title": "Public sector"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The civil service of Ireland consists of two broad components, the Civil Service of the Government and the Civil Service of the State. Whilst these two components are largely theoretical, they do have some fundamental operational differences. The civil service is expected to maintain the political impartiality in its work, and some sections of it are entirely independent of Government decision making.",
"title": "Public sector"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The public service is a relatively broad term and is not clearly defined and sometimes is taken to include the civil service. The public service proper consists of Government agencies and bodies which provide services on behalf of the Government but are not the core civil service. For instance local authorities, Education and Training Boards and Garda Síochána are considered to be public services.",
"title": "Public sector"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Article 28A of the constitution of Ireland provides a constitutional basis for local government. The Oireachtas is empowered to establish the number, size and powers of local authorities by law. Under Article 28A, members of local authorities must be directly elected by voters at least once every five years.",
"title": "Local government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Local government in Ireland is governed by a series of Local Government Acts, beginning with the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898. The most significant of these is the Local Government Act 2001, which established a two-tier structure of local government. The Local Government Reform Act 2014 abolished the bottom tier, the town councils, leaving 31 local authorities. There are 26 County Councils (County Dublin having been divided into three council areas), 3 City Councils (Dublin, Cork and Galway), and 2 City and County Councils (Limerick and Waterford).",
"title": "Local government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A number of political parties are represented in the Dáil and coalition governments are common. The Irish electoral system has been historically characterised as a two-and-a-half party system, with two large catch-all parties, this being the centre-right Fine Gael and the centrist Fianna Fáil, dominating, and the \"half-party\", being Labour. This changed after the 2011 general election, following the large drop in support for Fianna Fáil and the rise in support for other parties. Ireland's political landscape changed dramatically after the 2020 general election, when Sinn Féin made gains to become the joint-largest party in the Dáil, making Ireland a three party system.",
"title": "Political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Fianna Fáil, a traditionally Irish republican party founded in 1927 by Éamon de Valera, is the joint-largest party in the Dáil and considered centrist in Irish politics. It first formed a government on the basis of a populist programme of land redistribution and national preference in trade and republican populism remains a key part of its appeal. It has formed government seven times since Ireland gained independence: 1932–1948, 1951–1954, 1957–1973, 1977–1981, 1982, 1987–1994, and 1997–2011. Fianna Fáil was the largest party in the Dáil from 1932 to 2011. It lost a huge amount of support in the 2011 general election, going from 71 to 20 seats, its lowest ever. Its loss in support was mainly due to its handling of the 2008 economic recession. It has since regained some support, but is yet to recover to its pre-2011 levels.",
"title": "Political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The other joint-largest party is Sinn Féin, established in its current form in 1970 as a breakaway faction from the original political party of the same name (the remaining part has had several changes of name since, and is now known as the Workers' Party). The original Sinn Féin party played a major role in the Irish War of Independence and the First Dáil, and both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil trace their origins to this party, having split from it in 1922 and 1926, respectively. The current-day party split from this older Sinn Féin in a dispute over political ideology and a perceived lack of support for the so-called “armed struggle” against British rule in Northern Ireland, and as a result the newer party has been historically linked to the Provisional IRA. The party is a Republican party which takes a strongly left wing stance on economics and social policy, placing it to the left of the Labour party. Sinn Féin received the highest share of first-preference votes in the 2020 general election, but finished level with Fianna Fáil in overall seats once vote transfers had been counted.",
"title": "Political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The third-largest party in the Dáil is Fine Gael, which has its origins in the pro-Treaty faction of Michael Collins in the Irish Civil War. Traditionally regarded as the party of law and order, it is associated with strong belief in pro-enterprise and reward. Despite expressions of Social Democracy by previous leader Garret FitzGerald, today, it remains a Christian democratic, economically liberal party along European lines, with a strongly pro-European outlook. Fine Gael was formed in 1933 out of a merger of Cumann na nGaedheal (which had split from the original Sinn Féin in 1922), the National Centre Party and the paramilitary Blueshirts organisation. In more recent years it has generally been associated with a liberal, progressive, outlook. Fine Gael has formed governments in the periods 1922–1932 (as Cumann na nGaedheal), 1948–1951, 1954–1957, 1973–1977, 1981–1982, 1982–1987, 1994–1997, and from 2011 to present. In the 2011 general election, Fine Gael won 78 seats, its highest ever total, and a massive increase from the previous election.",
"title": "Political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The fourth-largest party in the Dáil is the Green Party, which made significant gains at the 2020 general election.",
"title": "Political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The fifth largest party in the Dáil is the centre-left Labour Party which was founded by James Connolly and Jim Larkin in 1912. Labour has formal links with the trade union movement and has governed in seven coalition governments – six led by Fine Gael and one by Fianna Fáil. This recurring role as a junior coalition partner has led to Labour being classed as the \"half\" party in Ireland's \"two-and-a-half party system\". Labour won a record number of seats, 37, at the 2011 general election, becoming the second-largest party for the first time in its history, following the collapse in support for Fianna Fáil. In 2011, Labour went into coalition with Fine Gael, who had also won a record number of seats. Labour retained its place as one of Ireland's three largest parties up until the 2016 general election, when it suffered the worst general election defeat in its history, gaining just 7 seats. Much of this was due to being part of a government that had introduced unpopular austerity measures to deal with the economic crisis.",
"title": "Political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The sixth-largest Dáil party is the centre-left Social Democrats. The Social Democrats were founded in 2015 and made gains at the 2020 general election.",
"title": "Political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Solidarity–People Before Profit electoral alliance, consisting of the Solidarity and People Before Profit are the 7th-largest party grouping within Dáil Éireann. Formed in 2015, the group represents a left-wing, socialist viewpoint.",
"title": "Political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Aontú, a party formed in 2019 by politicians who left the current Sinn Féin, has one TD, as does Right to Change, a left-wing, socialist political party formed after the 2020 election.",
"title": "Political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Nineteen of the 160 members of the 33rd Dáil are Independent.",
"title": "Political parties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Ireland's foreign relations are substantially influenced by its membership of the European Union, although bilateral relations with the United States and United Kingdom are also important to the country. It is one of the group of smaller nations in the EU, and has traditionally followed a non-aligned foreign policy.",
"title": "Foreign relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Ireland tends towards independence in foreign policy, thus it is not a member of NATO and has a longstanding policy of military neutrality.",
"title": "Foreign relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "This policy has helped the Irish Defence Forces to be successful in their contributions to UN peace-keeping missions since 1960 (in the Congo Crisis ONUC) and subsequently in Cyprus (UNFICYP), Lebanon (UNIFIL), Iran/Iraq Border (UNIIMOG), Bosnia and Herzegovina (SFOR & EUFOR Althea), Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE), Liberia (UNMIL), East Timor (INTERFET), Darfur and Chad (EUFOR Tchad/RCA).",
"title": "Foreign relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Northern Ireland has been a major factor in Irish politics since the island of Ireland was divided between Northern Ireland and what is now the Republic in 1920. The creation of Northern Ireland led to conflict between northern nationalists (mostly Roman Catholic) who seek unification with the Republic and Unionists (mostly Protestant) who opposed British plans for Irish Home Rule and wished for Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. After the formation of Northern Ireland in 1921 following its opt out from the newly formed Irish Free State, many Roman Catholics and Republicans were discriminated against. The abolition of Proportional Representation and the gerrymandering of constituency boundaries led to Unionists being over-represented at Stormont and at Westminster. Even James Craig who was prime minister of Northern Ireland boasted of his Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People. In the 1960s NICRA was set up to end discrimination between Catholics and Protestants. There was a massive backlash to this from sections of the Unionist community. This conflict exploded into violence in the late sixties with the beginning of the Troubles, involving groups such as the Provisional IRA, loyalist paramilitaries, the police and the British army, the latter originally drafted in to protect Catholic communities from loyalist violence. These clashes were to result in the suspension of the Stormont Parliament and unsuccessful efforts by the British Government to encourage a power-sharing Executive in Northern Ireland which were only realised following the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The Troubles caused thousands of deaths in Northern Ireland but also spilled over into bombings and acts of violence in England and the Republic.",
"title": "Northern Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Since its foundation it has been the stated long-term policy of governments of what is now the Republic to bring an end to the conflict in Northern Ireland and to bring about a united Ireland. Northern Ireland has also, in the past, often been a source of tension between the Irish Government and the government of the United Kingdom. To find a solution to the Troubles the Irish Government became a partner in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.",
"title": "Northern Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "While Sinn Féin have long organised in both Northern Ireland and the Republic, Fianna Fáil have recently opened a cumann (branch) in Derry and begun recruiting members at Queen's University, Belfast although both are extremely small.",
"title": "Northern Ireland"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Under the Good Friday Agreement and Article 3 of the Constitution a North-South Ministerial Council and six North-South Implementation Bodies co-ordinate activities and exercise a limited governmental role within certain policy areas across the whole island of Ireland. The Implementation Bodies have limited executive authority in six policy areas. Meetings of the Council take the form of meetings between ministers from both the Republic's Government and the Northern Ireland Executive. The council was suspended from 2002 to 2007. However, with the resumption of devolved government in Northern Ireland in May 2007, the council has now re-assumed its duties.",
"title": "Northern Ireland"
}
]
| Ireland is a parliamentary, representative democratic republic and a member state of the European Union. While the head of state is the popularly elected President of Ireland, it is a largely ceremonial position, with real political power being vested in the Taoiseach, who is nominated by the Dáil and is the head of the government. Executive power is exercised by the government, which consists of no more than 15 cabinet ministers, inclusive of the Taoiseach and Tánaiste. Legislative power is vested in the Oireachtas, the bicameral national parliament, which consists of Dáil Éireann, Seanad Éireann and the President of Ireland. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislature. The head of the judiciary is the Chief Justice, who presides over the Supreme Court. Ireland has a multi-party system. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, historically opposed and competing entities, which both occupy the traditional centre ground, trace their roots to the opposing sides of the Irish Civil War. All governments since 1932 have been led by one or the other party, with Fianna Fáil having had sufficient support at many elections to govern alone. Fluctuations in seat levels allowed changes in governments through different coalitions. From 1932 to 2011, the parties were stable in their support, with Fianna Fáil the largest at each election, Fine Gael the second largest, and on all but two occasions, the Labour Party the third party. The last three elections, however, have each had more volatile results. At the 2011 election, the largest parties in order were Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil; at the 2016 election, the largest parties in order were Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin; and at the 2020 election, the largest parties were Fianna Fáil first in seats, Sinn Féin second in seats, and then Fine Gael. The result was historically good for Sinn Féin. In June 2020, leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin, became the new Taoiseach. He formed a historic three-party coalition consisting of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party. It was the first time in history that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were in the same government. The previous Taoiseach and leader of Fine Gael, Leo Varadkar, became the Tánaiste. Martin led the country as Taoiseach until 17 December 2022, when he changed posts with Varadkar. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Ireland a "full democracy" in 2022. | 2023-04-30T11:21:17Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_Republic_of_Ireland |
|
14,679 | Telecommunications in the Republic of Ireland | Telecommunications in Ireland operate in a regulated competitive market that provides customers with a wide array of advanced digital services. This article explores Ireland's telecommunications infrastructure including: fixed and mobile networks, The voice, data and Internet services, cable television, developments in next generation networks and broadcast networks for radio and television.
Telecommunications, including radio frequency spectrum licensing and the postal sector, are regulated by the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg). ComReg was established on 1 December 2002. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) (Irish: Údarás Craolacháin na hÉireann) is the regulator of both public and commercial broadcasting sector in Ireland. It was established on 1 October 2009, replacing the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) (Irish: Coimisiún Craolacháin na hÉireann).
The Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment has overall responsibility for national policy and regulation of both telecommunications and broadcasting.
The telecommunications market in Ireland was opened to competition in 1998.
Eir's dominance has reduced and by Q3 2019 operators other than eir accounted for 61% of the Irish fixed voice market retail revenue and 54.7% market share by fixed-line retail and wholesale revenue and 80.9% of the mobile market (excluding mobile broadband and machine-to-machine subscriptions) or 84.4% of total subscriptions. Other operators accounted for 68.6% of retail fixed broadband subscriptions (comprising cable, FTTH, FTTC/VDSL and ADSL) and 57.3% of retail FTTP subscriptions
Eir remains the largest telecommunications company in Ireland, offering fixed, mobile, and broadband services. As Bord Telecom Éireann, the company was state owned until 1999, when it was floated on the Irish and New York Stock Exchanges.
Ireland's telecommunications network is a modern digital system connected by an extensive national fibre optic network with multiple high capacity fibre optic links to the UK, Continental Europe, North America and with dedicated capacity on routes to Asia and other parts of the globe. There is an open and competitive telecommunications market regulated by ComReg. However, the fixed-line market is still dominated by the incumbent operator Eir.
Several companies operate national fibre optic networks including Eir, BT Ireland, ESB Group and Virgin Media Ireland. Eir's fibre network is the most extensive covering most parts of the country with 12,000 km of fibre routes (>40,000 km of fibres) Eir's Next Generation Network upgrade rolled out Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) which is capable of delivering up to 320 Gbit/s along a single fibre route. This upgrade also sees Eir's core infrastructure moving to an all-IP network. It has major aggregation nodes at 140 locations around Ireland and onward fibre connections to another 470 central office sites.
Ireland also has major connections to multiple international fibre optic networks.
94 Irish towns and cities also have access to publicly owned, carrier-neutral metropolitan fibre networks managed by Enet.
These networks can be used by any licensed Irish telecommunications operator to provide commercial or residential end users with products.
For residential and small business providers, most major urban areas have access to Virgin Media Ireland's HFC network which provides speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s using EuroDOCSIS 3.1 cable modem technology.
Open Eir is also in the process of rolling out FTTH which provides speeds of up to 1000Mbit/s down and 100Mbit/s up. They also provide an extensive vectored VDSL2 based FTTC access network, using the legacy copper network. This offers speeds of up to 100Mbit/s down and 20Mbit/s up.
Retail services using this next generation access infrastructure are provided by approximately 15 operators.
SIRO, a joint venture between ESB Group and Vodafone Ireland, provides another open access fibre to home network, used by multiple ISPs to deliver service. Fibre is run alongside ESB Networks 230V/400V LV electricity distribution system, sharing underground ducts and poles, with fibre typically entering premises next to the electricity meter. This, similar to Eir's FTTH network, delivers speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s and is capable of delivery of 10 Gbit/s in the future.
Ireland has three mobile networks that own and operate their own network infrastructure and a number of MVNO operators that operate mobile phone services using one of these infrastructure providers' radio networks. The three infrastructure owning networks are Eir Mobile, Three, and Vodafone.
Meteor and Eir Mobile were the first to launch 4G LTE services in Ireland on 26 September 2013, followed by Vodafone on 14 October 2013, and Three on 27 January 2014. O2 was due to launch its 4G services later in 2014, but plans were put on hold when its acquisition by Three was approved in May, and from the time of the merger in 2015, previous O2 customers gained 4G coverage through Three's network, albeit with initial service problems.
In 2016, 41.9% of Ireland's mobile subscriptions were using 4G technology. 3G remained the dominant technology with 44.6% share, however, it is likely to be overtaken by 4G in 2017.
As mobile phone services become more price competitive, more Irish customers are opting to drop landline services. This is reflected by a sharp fall in the number of fixed line channels in use and an equivalent increase in mobile subscriptions. Details are tracked on ComReg's ComStat website
There are three mobile telecommunications providers: Three Ireland, Eir Mobile and Vodafone Ireland.
There are also some MNVOs (Mobile Network Virtual Operators), such as: 48, GoMo, Lycamobile, An Post Mobile, Tesco Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Clear Mobile.
The original network was taken over by the Irish Department of Posts and Telegraphs (P&T) from the British Post Office in 1921 and used a mixture of manual and step-by-step automatic exchanges. Development of the network was relatively stagnant with slow rollout of automatic switching using step-by-step exchanges until after WWII. From 1957 onwards, P&T began to roll out more modern crossbar switches primarily using equipment supplied by Ericsson built at their Athlone facility. ITT Pentaconta crossbar switches, built by CGCT (Compagnie générale de constructions téléphoniques) were also used in some areas. This saw significant improvements to many services, but the network was still quite underdeveloped in rural areas. Digital switching was introduced in 1980 using Ericsson AXE and Alcatel E10 switches both of which were manufactured at facilities in Ireland. This saw a total transformation of the telephone network with modern automatic and digital services reaching even the most rural parts of Ireland by the mid-1980s. The fixed-line network is now made up of multiple operators using a diverse range of digital technologies including VoIP.
Ireland's first mobile telephone network, Eircell, went live in 1986 using the analogue TACS system. 2G GSM services from Eircell launched on 1 July 1993. Digifone followed in 1997, then Meteor in 2001 (having been licensed in 1998) and 3 Ireland launched its UMTS 3G-only service in 2005.
3G services launched in 2004 (Vodafone Ireland) and other networks quickly followed suit, and 4G launched in 2013 (Meteor) and is now available on most networks. Meteor was bought out by Eir in 2005 and eventually rebranded as Eir in 2017.
Broadband Internet access is available in Ireland via DSL, cable, wireless, and satellite. By the end of 2011 Eircom announced that 75% of its working lines would be connected to Next Generation Broadband (NGB) enabled exchanges.
Currently available services (Q3 2014)
A typical monthly broadband Internet subscription cost $26.02 in 2011, 14% less than the average of $30.16 for the 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries surveyed.
In August 2012 Pat Rabbitte, the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, outlined a national broadband plan with goals of:
Founded in 1996, the Internet Neutral Exchange (INEX) is an industry-owned association that provides IP peering and traffic exchange for its members in Ireland. The INEX switching centres are located in five secure data centres in Dublin and one in Cork: TeleCity Group in Kilcarbery Park, Dublin 22 & TeleCity Group in Citywest Business Campus, Dublin 24 and Interxion DUB1, and Interxion DUB2 in Park West, and Vodafone Clonshaugh as well as at CIX, Hollyhill, Cork T23 R68N. The switches are connected by dedicated resilient fibre links. In June 2015 it listed 74 full and 21 associate members.
Established in 1998, the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland (ISPAI) listed 24 Internet access and hosting providers as members in 2012.
Television in Ireland is broadcast using DVB-T using the common platform specifications defined by NorDig which apply in the Nordic countries and Ireland. Video is encoded using the MPEG4 system. The analogue PAL-I broadcasting system is no longer on air.
Cable systems operate using the DVB-C standard and Satellite is broadcast using DVB-S/S2. Some areas still carry a range of cable channels in analogue PAL-I format. Although, this is normally just a legacy service provided by default. It is not possible to subscribe to analogue cable as a new customer.
Radio is broadcast primarily using FM 88-108 MHz. Digital DAB Radio is also available in some areas. RTÉ Radio 1 is also broadcast on Longwave 252 kHz (AM) Mediumwave services have been discontinued.
2RN operates a national FM network and DAB services. However, most independent FM stations own their own broadcasting infrastructure.
Raidió Teilifís Éireann (Radio [and] Television of Ireland; abbreviated as RTÉ) is a statutory semi-state company and the public service broadcaster that dominates the radio and TV sectors in Ireland. The first commercial radio stations began broadcasting in 1989. Prior to 1989 hundreds of pirate radio stations were a mainstay of radio listener-ship, particularly in Dublin, and a handful of pirate stations continue to operate illegally today. In 1998 TV3 became the first privately owned commercial TV station and it remains the main free-to-air service after RTÉ. Competition also comes from British public and private terrestrial TV. Satellite and cable TV are widely available. There are also non-commercial community and special interest radio stations.
RTÉ both produces programmes and broadcasts them on television, radio and the Internet in English and Irish. The radio service began on 1 January 1926, while regular television broadcasts began on 31 December 1961, making RTÉ one of the oldest continuously operating public service broadcasters in the world. Some RTÉ services are only funded by advertising, while other RTÉ services are only funded by the television licence fee.
Saorview (/ˈsɛərvjuː/ SAIR-vyoo) is Ireland's national free-to-air digital terrestrial television (DTT) service operated by 2RN. Trial service began on 29 October 2010 with full service to the public from May 2011. Analogue television transmissions ended on 24 October 2012.
SAORSAT is Ireland's national free-to-air digital satellite television service, also operated by 2RN. SAORSAT delivers Irish television services to the 1% to 2% of homes that are not covered by the SAORVIEW Digital Terrestrial Television service.
A television licence is required for any address at which there is a television set or device that is not exempt. The annual licence fee is €160. The licence is free to senior citizens (to anyone over the age of 70, some over 66), some social welfare recipients, and individuals who are blind. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Telecommunications in Ireland operate in a regulated competitive market that provides customers with a wide array of advanced digital services. This article explores Ireland's telecommunications infrastructure including: fixed and mobile networks, The voice, data and Internet services, cable television, developments in next generation networks and broadcast networks for radio and television.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Telecommunications, including radio frequency spectrum licensing and the postal sector, are regulated by the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg). ComReg was established on 1 December 2002. The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) (Irish: Údarás Craolacháin na hÉireann) is the regulator of both public and commercial broadcasting sector in Ireland. It was established on 1 October 2009, replacing the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) (Irish: Coimisiún Craolacháin na hÉireann).",
"title": "Regulation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment has overall responsibility for national policy and regulation of both telecommunications and broadcasting.",
"title": "Regulation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The telecommunications market in Ireland was opened to competition in 1998.",
"title": "Regulation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Eir's dominance has reduced and by Q3 2019 operators other than eir accounted for 61% of the Irish fixed voice market retail revenue and 54.7% market share by fixed-line retail and wholesale revenue and 80.9% of the mobile market (excluding mobile broadband and machine-to-machine subscriptions) or 84.4% of total subscriptions. Other operators accounted for 68.6% of retail fixed broadband subscriptions (comprising cable, FTTH, FTTC/VDSL and ADSL) and 57.3% of retail FTTP subscriptions",
"title": "Regulation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Eir remains the largest telecommunications company in Ireland, offering fixed, mobile, and broadband services. As Bord Telecom Éireann, the company was state owned until 1999, when it was floated on the Irish and New York Stock Exchanges.",
"title": "Regulation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Ireland's telecommunications network is a modern digital system connected by an extensive national fibre optic network with multiple high capacity fibre optic links to the UK, Continental Europe, North America and with dedicated capacity on routes to Asia and other parts of the globe. There is an open and competitive telecommunications market regulated by ComReg. However, the fixed-line market is still dominated by the incumbent operator Eir.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Several companies operate national fibre optic networks including Eir, BT Ireland, ESB Group and Virgin Media Ireland. Eir's fibre network is the most extensive covering most parts of the country with 12,000 km of fibre routes (>40,000 km of fibres) Eir's Next Generation Network upgrade rolled out Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) which is capable of delivering up to 320 Gbit/s along a single fibre route. This upgrade also sees Eir's core infrastructure moving to an all-IP network. It has major aggregation nodes at 140 locations around Ireland and onward fibre connections to another 470 central office sites.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Ireland also has major connections to multiple international fibre optic networks.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "94 Irish towns and cities also have access to publicly owned, carrier-neutral metropolitan fibre networks managed by Enet.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "These networks can be used by any licensed Irish telecommunications operator to provide commercial or residential end users with products.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "For residential and small business providers, most major urban areas have access to Virgin Media Ireland's HFC network which provides speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s using EuroDOCSIS 3.1 cable modem technology.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Open Eir is also in the process of rolling out FTTH which provides speeds of up to 1000Mbit/s down and 100Mbit/s up. They also provide an extensive vectored VDSL2 based FTTC access network, using the legacy copper network. This offers speeds of up to 100Mbit/s down and 20Mbit/s up.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Retail services using this next generation access infrastructure are provided by approximately 15 operators.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "SIRO, a joint venture between ESB Group and Vodafone Ireland, provides another open access fibre to home network, used by multiple ISPs to deliver service. Fibre is run alongside ESB Networks 230V/400V LV electricity distribution system, sharing underground ducts and poles, with fibre typically entering premises next to the electricity meter. This, similar to Eir's FTTH network, delivers speeds of up to 1 Gbit/s and is capable of delivery of 10 Gbit/s in the future.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Ireland has three mobile networks that own and operate their own network infrastructure and a number of MVNO operators that operate mobile phone services using one of these infrastructure providers' radio networks. The three infrastructure owning networks are Eir Mobile, Three, and Vodafone.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Meteor and Eir Mobile were the first to launch 4G LTE services in Ireland on 26 September 2013, followed by Vodafone on 14 October 2013, and Three on 27 January 2014. O2 was due to launch its 4G services later in 2014, but plans were put on hold when its acquisition by Three was approved in May, and from the time of the merger in 2015, previous O2 customers gained 4G coverage through Three's network, albeit with initial service problems.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 2016, 41.9% of Ireland's mobile subscriptions were using 4G technology. 3G remained the dominant technology with 44.6% share, however, it is likely to be overtaken by 4G in 2017.",
"title": "Infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "As mobile phone services become more price competitive, more Irish customers are opting to drop landline services. This is reflected by a sharp fall in the number of fixed line channels in use and an equivalent increase in mobile subscriptions. Details are tracked on ComReg's ComStat website",
"title": "Telephone system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "There are three mobile telecommunications providers: Three Ireland, Eir Mobile and Vodafone Ireland.",
"title": "Telephone system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "There are also some MNVOs (Mobile Network Virtual Operators), such as: 48, GoMo, Lycamobile, An Post Mobile, Tesco Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Clear Mobile.",
"title": "Telephone system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The original network was taken over by the Irish Department of Posts and Telegraphs (P&T) from the British Post Office in 1921 and used a mixture of manual and step-by-step automatic exchanges. Development of the network was relatively stagnant with slow rollout of automatic switching using step-by-step exchanges until after WWII. From 1957 onwards, P&T began to roll out more modern crossbar switches primarily using equipment supplied by Ericsson built at their Athlone facility. ITT Pentaconta crossbar switches, built by CGCT (Compagnie générale de constructions téléphoniques) were also used in some areas. This saw significant improvements to many services, but the network was still quite underdeveloped in rural areas. Digital switching was introduced in 1980 using Ericsson AXE and Alcatel E10 switches both of which were manufactured at facilities in Ireland. This saw a total transformation of the telephone network with modern automatic and digital services reaching even the most rural parts of Ireland by the mid-1980s. The fixed-line network is now made up of multiple operators using a diverse range of digital technologies including VoIP.",
"title": "Telephone system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Ireland's first mobile telephone network, Eircell, went live in 1986 using the analogue TACS system. 2G GSM services from Eircell launched on 1 July 1993. Digifone followed in 1997, then Meteor in 2001 (having been licensed in 1998) and 3 Ireland launched its UMTS 3G-only service in 2005.",
"title": "Telephone system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "3G services launched in 2004 (Vodafone Ireland) and other networks quickly followed suit, and 4G launched in 2013 (Meteor) and is now available on most networks. Meteor was bought out by Eir in 2005 and eventually rebranded as Eir in 2017.",
"title": "Telephone system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Broadband Internet access is available in Ireland via DSL, cable, wireless, and satellite. By the end of 2011 Eircom announced that 75% of its working lines would be connected to Next Generation Broadband (NGB) enabled exchanges.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Currently available services (Q3 2014)",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "A typical monthly broadband Internet subscription cost $26.02 in 2011, 14% less than the average of $30.16 for the 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries surveyed.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In August 2012 Pat Rabbitte, the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, outlined a national broadband plan with goals of:",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Founded in 1996, the Internet Neutral Exchange (INEX) is an industry-owned association that provides IP peering and traffic exchange for its members in Ireland. The INEX switching centres are located in five secure data centres in Dublin and one in Cork: TeleCity Group in Kilcarbery Park, Dublin 22 & TeleCity Group in Citywest Business Campus, Dublin 24 and Interxion DUB1, and Interxion DUB2 in Park West, and Vodafone Clonshaugh as well as at CIX, Hollyhill, Cork T23 R68N. The switches are connected by dedicated resilient fibre links. In June 2015 it listed 74 full and 21 associate members.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Established in 1998, the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland (ISPAI) listed 24 Internet access and hosting providers as members in 2012.",
"title": "Internet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Television in Ireland is broadcast using DVB-T using the common platform specifications defined by NorDig which apply in the Nordic countries and Ireland. Video is encoded using the MPEG4 system. The analogue PAL-I broadcasting system is no longer on air.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Cable systems operate using the DVB-C standard and Satellite is broadcast using DVB-S/S2. Some areas still carry a range of cable channels in analogue PAL-I format. Although, this is normally just a legacy service provided by default. It is not possible to subscribe to analogue cable as a new customer.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Radio is broadcast primarily using FM 88-108 MHz. Digital DAB Radio is also available in some areas. RTÉ Radio 1 is also broadcast on Longwave 252 kHz (AM) Mediumwave services have been discontinued.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "2RN operates a national FM network and DAB services. However, most independent FM stations own their own broadcasting infrastructure.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Raidió Teilifís Éireann (Radio [and] Television of Ireland; abbreviated as RTÉ) is a statutory semi-state company and the public service broadcaster that dominates the radio and TV sectors in Ireland. The first commercial radio stations began broadcasting in 1989. Prior to 1989 hundreds of pirate radio stations were a mainstay of radio listener-ship, particularly in Dublin, and a handful of pirate stations continue to operate illegally today. In 1998 TV3 became the first privately owned commercial TV station and it remains the main free-to-air service after RTÉ. Competition also comes from British public and private terrestrial TV. Satellite and cable TV are widely available. There are also non-commercial community and special interest radio stations.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "RTÉ both produces programmes and broadcasts them on television, radio and the Internet in English and Irish. The radio service began on 1 January 1926, while regular television broadcasts began on 31 December 1961, making RTÉ one of the oldest continuously operating public service broadcasters in the world. Some RTÉ services are only funded by advertising, while other RTÉ services are only funded by the television licence fee.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Saorview (/ˈsɛərvjuː/ SAIR-vyoo) is Ireland's national free-to-air digital terrestrial television (DTT) service operated by 2RN. Trial service began on 29 October 2010 with full service to the public from May 2011. Analogue television transmissions ended on 24 October 2012.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "SAORSAT is Ireland's national free-to-air digital satellite television service, also operated by 2RN. SAORSAT delivers Irish television services to the 1% to 2% of homes that are not covered by the SAORVIEW Digital Terrestrial Television service.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "A television licence is required for any address at which there is a television set or device that is not exempt. The annual licence fee is €160. The licence is free to senior citizens (to anyone over the age of 70, some over 66), some social welfare recipients, and individuals who are blind.",
"title": "Radio and television"
}
]
| Telecommunications in Ireland operate in a regulated competitive market that provides customers with a wide array of advanced digital services. This article explores Ireland's telecommunications infrastructure including: fixed and mobile networks, The voice, data and Internet services, cable television, developments in next generation networks and broadcast networks for radio and television. | 2001-05-05T02:54:04Z | 2023-10-21T14:58:37Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland |
14,680 | Transport in Ireland | Most of the transport system in Ireland is in public hands, either side of the Irish border. The Irish road network has evolved separately in the two jurisdictions into which Ireland is divided, while the Irish rail network was mostly created prior to the partition of Ireland.
In the Republic of Ireland, the Minister for Transport, acting through the Department of Transport, is responsible for the state's road network, rail network, public transport, airports and several other areas. Although some sections of road have been built using private or public-private funds, and are operated as toll roads, they are owned by the Government of Ireland. The rail network is also state-owned and operated, while the government currently still owns the main airports. Public transport is mainly in the hands of a statutory corporation, Córas Iompair Éireann (CIÉ), and its subsidiaries, Bus Átha Cliath (Dublin Bus), Bus Éireann (Irish Bus), and Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail).
On 1 November 2005, the Irish government published the Transport 21 plan which includes €18bn for improved roads and €16bn for improved rail, including the Western Railway Corridor and the Dublin Metro.
The Republic of Ireland's transport sector is responsible for 21% of the state's greenhouse gas emissions.
In Northern Ireland, the road network and railways are in state ownership. The Department for Infrastructure is responsible for these and other areas (such as water services). Two of the three main airports in Northern Ireland are privately operated and owned. The exception is City of Derry Airport, which is owned and funded by Derry City Council. A statutory corporation, the Northern Ireland Transport Holding Company (which trades as Translink) operates public transport services through its three subsidiaries – NI Railways Company Limited, Ulsterbus Limited, and Citybus Limited (now branded as Metro).
Ireland's railways are in State ownership, with Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) operating services in the Republic and NI Railways operating services in Northern Ireland. The two companies co-operate in providing the joint Enterprise service between Dublin and Belfast. InterCity services are provided between Dublin and the major towns and cities of the Republic, and in Ulster along the Belfast–Derry railway line. Suburban railway networks operate in Dublin, Dublin Suburban Rail, and Belfast, Belfast Suburban Rail, with limited local services being offered in, or planned for, Cork, Limerick, and Galway.
The rail network in Ireland was developed by various private companies during the 19th century, with some receiving government funding. The network reached its greatest extent by 1920. A broad gauge of 1600mm (5 ft 3in) was agreed as the standard for the island, although there were also hundreds of kilometres of 914mm (3 ft) narrow gauge railways.
Many lines in the west were decommissioned in the 1930s under Éamon de Valera, with a further large cull in services by both CIÉ and the Ulster Transport Authority (UTA) during the 1960s, leaving few working lines in the northern third of the island. There is a campaign to bring some closed lines back into service, in particular the Limerick-Sligo line (the Western Railway Corridor), to facilitate economic regeneration in the west, which has lagged behind the rest of the country. There is also a move to restore service on the Dublin to Navan line, and smaller campaigns to re-establish the rail links between Sligo and Enniskillen/Omagh/Derry and Mullingar and Athlone/Galway. Under the Irish government's Transport 21 plan, the Cork to Midleton rail link was reopened in 2009. The re-opening of the Navan-Clonsilla rail link and the Western Rail Corridor are amongst future projects as part of the same plan.
Public transport services in Northern Ireland are sparse in comparison with those of the rest of Ireland or Great Britain. A large railway network was severely curtailed in the 1950s and 1960s. Current services includes suburban routes to Larne, Newry and Bangor, as well as services to Derry. There is also a branch from Coleraine to Portrush.
Since 1984 an electrified train service run by Iarnród Éireann has linked Dublin with its coastal suburbs. Running initially between Bray and Howth, the Dublin Area Rapid Transit (DART) system was extended from Bray to Greystones in 2000 and further extended from Howth Junction to Malahide. In 2004 a light rail system, Luas, was opened in Dublin serving the central and western suburbs, run by Veolia under franchise from the Railway Procurement Agency. The construction of the Luas system caused much disruption in Dublin. Plans to construct a Dublin Metro service including underground lines were mooted in 2001, but stalled in the financial crisis at the end of that decade.
Ireland has one of the largest dedicated freight railways in Europe, operated by Bord na Móna totalling nearly 1,400 kilometres (870 mi).
Ireland's roads link Dublin with all the major cities (Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Derry, Galway, and Waterford). Driving is on the left. Signposts in the Republic of Ireland are shown in kilometres and speed limits in kilometres per hour. Distance and speed limit signs in Northern Ireland use imperial units in common with the rest of the United Kingdom.
Historically, land owners developed most roads and later turnpike trusts collected tolls so that as early as 1800 Ireland had a 16,100 kilometres (10,000 mi) road network. In 2005 the Irish Government launched Transport 21, a plan envisaging the investment of €34 billion in transport infrastructure from 2006 until 2015. Several road projects were progressed but the economic crisis that began in 2008–09 has prevented its full implementation.
Between 2011 and 2015, diesel cars constituted 70% of new cars. In 2015, 27 new cars per 1,000 inhabitants were registered in Ireland, the same as the EU average.
Ireland's first mail coach services were contracted with the government by John Anderson with William Bourne in 1791 who also paid to improve the condition of the roads. The system of mail coaches, carriages and "bians" was further developed by Charles Bianconi, based in Clonmel, from 1815 as a fore-runner of the modern Irish public transportation system.
State-owned Bus Éireann (Irish Bus) currently provides most bus services in the Republic of Ireland, outside Dublin, including an express coach network connecting most cities in Ireland, along with local bus services in the provincial cities. Bus Átha Cliath (Dublin Bus), a sister company of Bus Éireann, provides most of the bus services in Dublin, with some other operators providing a number of routes. These include Aircoach, a subsidiary of FirstGroup which provides services to Dublin Airport from Dublin city centre, South Dublin City, Greystones and Bray. They also operate two intercity express non-stop services service between Dublin Airport, Dublin City Centre, and Cork and also a non-stop route between Belfast City Centre, Dublin Airport and Dublin City. Other operators such as Irish Citylink and GoBus.ie compete on the Dublin-Galway route. Matthews Coaches run a direct service from Bettystown, Laytown and Julianstown to Dublin whilst Dublin Coach operate services to Portlaoise and Limerick. JJ Kavanagh and Sons also operates regular services on the Portlaoise/Limerick route as well as offering services to Waterford, Carlow, Kilkenny, Clonmel and a selection of regional towns and villages in the south.
TFI Local Link is a set of not-for-profit operators, funded via the National Transport Authority, that provide bus services in rural Ireland. Other private rural operators exist, such as Halpenny's in Blackrock, County Louth, which was the first private bus operator to run a public service in Ireland, Bus Feda (Feda O'Donnell Coaches), which operates twice daily routes from Ranafast, County Donegal to Galway and back.
In Northern Ireland Ulsterbus provides the bus network, with its sister company Metro providing services in Belfast. Both are part of state-owned Translink. Tiger Coaches operates a very late night bus service on Friday and Saturday nights between Belfast and Lisburn.
Private hire companies offer groups travelling throughout Ireland with options ranging from cars to 56 passenger coaches. Private Coach Hire Companies can be found at CTTC.ie.
Cross-border services (e.g. Dublin city centre to Belfast) are run primarily by a partnership of Ulsterbus and Bus Éireann with some services run across the border exclusively by one of the two companies (e.g. Derry–Sligo run by Bus Éireann). Aircoach, a private operator, does however operate a competing Dublin to Belfast Express service via Dublin Airport.
According to an Irish Times article in September 2022, 14.3% of national journeys in the Republic of Ireland were undertaken by bus, compared to the European average of 8.8%. However, this may be partly due to the lack of widespread train coverage in the country, as Ireland’s figure of 3.1% usage of trains for journeys is well behind the European average of 7.9%.
Natural gas transmission network 1,795 km (1,115 mi) (2003). There is a much more extensive distribution network.
Ireland has major ports in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Rosslare, Derry and Waterford. Smaller ports exist in Arklow, Ballina, Drogheda, Dundalk, Dún Laoghaire, Foynes, Galway, Larne, Limerick, New Ross, Sligo, Warrenpoint and Wicklow.
Ports in the Republic of Ireland handled 2.8 million travellers crossing the sea between Ireland and Great Britain in 2014, a decrease of 1 million passengers movements since 2003. This has been steadily dropping for a number of years (20% since 1999), probably as a result of low cost airlines.
Ferry connections between Britain and Ireland via the Irish Sea include the routes from Fishguard and Pembroke to Rosslare, and Cairnryan to Larne. The Stranraer to Belfast and Larne routes and the Swansea to Cork route have closed. There is also a connection between Liverpool and Belfast via the Isle of Man. The world's largest car ferry, Ulysses, is operated by Irish Ferries on the Dublin–Holyhead route.
In addition, there are ferries from Rosslare and Dublin to Cherbourg and Roscoff in France.
The vast majority of heavy goods trade is done by sea. Northern Irish ports handle 10 megatonnes (Mt) of goods trade with Britain annually, while ports in the south handle 7.6 Mt, representing 50% and 40% respectively of total trade by weight.
Ireland has five main international airports: Dublin Airport, Belfast International Airport (Aldergrove), Cork Airport, Shannon Airport and Ireland West Airport (Knock). Dublin Airport is the busiest of these carrying almost 28 million passengers per year; a second terminal (T2) was opened in November 2010. All provide services to Great Britain and continental Europe, while Cork, Dublin and Shannon also offer transatlantic services. The London to Dublin air route is the ninth busiest international air route in the world, and also the busiest international air route in Europe, with 14,500 flights between the two in 2017. In 2015, 4.5 million people took the route, at that time, the world's second-busiest. Aer Lingus is the flag carrier of Ireland, although Ryanair is the country's largest airline. Ryanair is Europe's largest low-cost carrier, the second largest in terms of passenger numbers, and the world's largest in terms of international passenger numbers. For several decades until 2007 Shannon was a mandatory stopover for transatlantic routes to the United States. In recent years it has opened a pre-screening service allowing passengers to pass through US immigration services before departing from Ireland.
There are also several smaller regional airports: George Best Belfast City Airport, City of Derry Airport, Galway Airport, Kerry Airport (Farranfore), Sligo Airport (Strandhill), Waterford Airport and Donegal Airport (Carrickfinn). Scheduled services from these regional points are in the main limited to flights travelling to other parts of Ireland and to Great Britain. Airlines based in Ireland include Aer Lingus (the former national airline of the Republic of Ireland), Ryanair, Aer Arann and CityJet. Services to the Aran Islands are operated from Aerfort na Minna (Connemara Regional Airport).
Ireland's national airline, Aer Lingus, provides services from Belfast City, Cork, Dublin and Shannon to Europe, North Africa and North America. Dublin and Cork airports are run by a State body, DAA (Dublin Airport Authority). Other Irish airlines are Ryanair, one of the largest in the world, CityJet, ASL Airlines Ireland and the Aer Lingus subsidiary Aer Lingus Regional. A number of other operators specialise in general aviation.
For 2018 the passenger numbers were as follows: | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Most of the transport system in Ireland is in public hands, either side of the Irish border. The Irish road network has evolved separately in the two jurisdictions into which Ireland is divided, while the Irish rail network was mostly created prior to the partition of Ireland.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the Republic of Ireland, the Minister for Transport, acting through the Department of Transport, is responsible for the state's road network, rail network, public transport, airports and several other areas. Although some sections of road have been built using private or public-private funds, and are operated as toll roads, they are owned by the Government of Ireland. The rail network is also state-owned and operated, while the government currently still owns the main airports. Public transport is mainly in the hands of a statutory corporation, Córas Iompair Éireann (CIÉ), and its subsidiaries, Bus Átha Cliath (Dublin Bus), Bus Éireann (Irish Bus), and Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "On 1 November 2005, the Irish government published the Transport 21 plan which includes €18bn for improved roads and €16bn for improved rail, including the Western Railway Corridor and the Dublin Metro.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Republic of Ireland's transport sector is responsible for 21% of the state's greenhouse gas emissions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In Northern Ireland, the road network and railways are in state ownership. The Department for Infrastructure is responsible for these and other areas (such as water services). Two of the three main airports in Northern Ireland are privately operated and owned. The exception is City of Derry Airport, which is owned and funded by Derry City Council. A statutory corporation, the Northern Ireland Transport Holding Company (which trades as Translink) operates public transport services through its three subsidiaries – NI Railways Company Limited, Ulsterbus Limited, and Citybus Limited (now branded as Metro).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Ireland's railways are in State ownership, with Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) operating services in the Republic and NI Railways operating services in Northern Ireland. The two companies co-operate in providing the joint Enterprise service between Dublin and Belfast. InterCity services are provided between Dublin and the major towns and cities of the Republic, and in Ulster along the Belfast–Derry railway line. Suburban railway networks operate in Dublin, Dublin Suburban Rail, and Belfast, Belfast Suburban Rail, with limited local services being offered in, or planned for, Cork, Limerick, and Galway.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The rail network in Ireland was developed by various private companies during the 19th century, with some receiving government funding. The network reached its greatest extent by 1920. A broad gauge of 1600mm (5 ft 3in) was agreed as the standard for the island, although there were also hundreds of kilometres of 914mm (3 ft) narrow gauge railways.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Many lines in the west were decommissioned in the 1930s under Éamon de Valera, with a further large cull in services by both CIÉ and the Ulster Transport Authority (UTA) during the 1960s, leaving few working lines in the northern third of the island. There is a campaign to bring some closed lines back into service, in particular the Limerick-Sligo line (the Western Railway Corridor), to facilitate economic regeneration in the west, which has lagged behind the rest of the country. There is also a move to restore service on the Dublin to Navan line, and smaller campaigns to re-establish the rail links between Sligo and Enniskillen/Omagh/Derry and Mullingar and Athlone/Galway. Under the Irish government's Transport 21 plan, the Cork to Midleton rail link was reopened in 2009. The re-opening of the Navan-Clonsilla rail link and the Western Rail Corridor are amongst future projects as part of the same plan.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Public transport services in Northern Ireland are sparse in comparison with those of the rest of Ireland or Great Britain. A large railway network was severely curtailed in the 1950s and 1960s. Current services includes suburban routes to Larne, Newry and Bangor, as well as services to Derry. There is also a branch from Coleraine to Portrush.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Since 1984 an electrified train service run by Iarnród Éireann has linked Dublin with its coastal suburbs. Running initially between Bray and Howth, the Dublin Area Rapid Transit (DART) system was extended from Bray to Greystones in 2000 and further extended from Howth Junction to Malahide. In 2004 a light rail system, Luas, was opened in Dublin serving the central and western suburbs, run by Veolia under franchise from the Railway Procurement Agency. The construction of the Luas system caused much disruption in Dublin. Plans to construct a Dublin Metro service including underground lines were mooted in 2001, but stalled in the financial crisis at the end of that decade.",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Ireland has one of the largest dedicated freight railways in Europe, operated by Bord na Móna totalling nearly 1,400 kilometres (870 mi).",
"title": "Railways"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Ireland's roads link Dublin with all the major cities (Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Derry, Galway, and Waterford). Driving is on the left. Signposts in the Republic of Ireland are shown in kilometres and speed limits in kilometres per hour. Distance and speed limit signs in Northern Ireland use imperial units in common with the rest of the United Kingdom.",
"title": "Road transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Historically, land owners developed most roads and later turnpike trusts collected tolls so that as early as 1800 Ireland had a 16,100 kilometres (10,000 mi) road network. In 2005 the Irish Government launched Transport 21, a plan envisaging the investment of €34 billion in transport infrastructure from 2006 until 2015. Several road projects were progressed but the economic crisis that began in 2008–09 has prevented its full implementation.",
"title": "Road transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Between 2011 and 2015, diesel cars constituted 70% of new cars. In 2015, 27 new cars per 1,000 inhabitants were registered in Ireland, the same as the EU average.",
"title": "Road transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Ireland's first mail coach services were contracted with the government by John Anderson with William Bourne in 1791 who also paid to improve the condition of the roads. The system of mail coaches, carriages and \"bians\" was further developed by Charles Bianconi, based in Clonmel, from 1815 as a fore-runner of the modern Irish public transportation system.",
"title": "Road transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "State-owned Bus Éireann (Irish Bus) currently provides most bus services in the Republic of Ireland, outside Dublin, including an express coach network connecting most cities in Ireland, along with local bus services in the provincial cities. Bus Átha Cliath (Dublin Bus), a sister company of Bus Éireann, provides most of the bus services in Dublin, with some other operators providing a number of routes. These include Aircoach, a subsidiary of FirstGroup which provides services to Dublin Airport from Dublin city centre, South Dublin City, Greystones and Bray. They also operate two intercity express non-stop services service between Dublin Airport, Dublin City Centre, and Cork and also a non-stop route between Belfast City Centre, Dublin Airport and Dublin City. Other operators such as Irish Citylink and GoBus.ie compete on the Dublin-Galway route. Matthews Coaches run a direct service from Bettystown, Laytown and Julianstown to Dublin whilst Dublin Coach operate services to Portlaoise and Limerick. JJ Kavanagh and Sons also operates regular services on the Portlaoise/Limerick route as well as offering services to Waterford, Carlow, Kilkenny, Clonmel and a selection of regional towns and villages in the south.",
"title": "Road transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "TFI Local Link is a set of not-for-profit operators, funded via the National Transport Authority, that provide bus services in rural Ireland. Other private rural operators exist, such as Halpenny's in Blackrock, County Louth, which was the first private bus operator to run a public service in Ireland, Bus Feda (Feda O'Donnell Coaches), which operates twice daily routes from Ranafast, County Donegal to Galway and back.",
"title": "Road transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In Northern Ireland Ulsterbus provides the bus network, with its sister company Metro providing services in Belfast. Both are part of state-owned Translink. Tiger Coaches operates a very late night bus service on Friday and Saturday nights between Belfast and Lisburn.",
"title": "Road transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Private hire companies offer groups travelling throughout Ireland with options ranging from cars to 56 passenger coaches. Private Coach Hire Companies can be found at CTTC.ie.",
"title": "Road transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Cross-border services (e.g. Dublin city centre to Belfast) are run primarily by a partnership of Ulsterbus and Bus Éireann with some services run across the border exclusively by one of the two companies (e.g. Derry–Sligo run by Bus Éireann). Aircoach, a private operator, does however operate a competing Dublin to Belfast Express service via Dublin Airport.",
"title": "Road transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "According to an Irish Times article in September 2022, 14.3% of national journeys in the Republic of Ireland were undertaken by bus, compared to the European average of 8.8%. However, this may be partly due to the lack of widespread train coverage in the country, as Ireland’s figure of 3.1% usage of trains for journeys is well behind the European average of 7.9%.",
"title": "Road transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Natural gas transmission network 1,795 km (1,115 mi) (2003). There is a much more extensive distribution network.",
"title": "Pipelines"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Ireland has major ports in Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Rosslare, Derry and Waterford. Smaller ports exist in Arklow, Ballina, Drogheda, Dundalk, Dún Laoghaire, Foynes, Galway, Larne, Limerick, New Ross, Sligo, Warrenpoint and Wicklow.",
"title": "Ports and harbours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Ports in the Republic of Ireland handled 2.8 million travellers crossing the sea between Ireland and Great Britain in 2014, a decrease of 1 million passengers movements since 2003. This has been steadily dropping for a number of years (20% since 1999), probably as a result of low cost airlines.",
"title": "Ports and harbours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Ferry connections between Britain and Ireland via the Irish Sea include the routes from Fishguard and Pembroke to Rosslare, and Cairnryan to Larne. The Stranraer to Belfast and Larne routes and the Swansea to Cork route have closed. There is also a connection between Liverpool and Belfast via the Isle of Man. The world's largest car ferry, Ulysses, is operated by Irish Ferries on the Dublin–Holyhead route.",
"title": "Ports and harbours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In addition, there are ferries from Rosslare and Dublin to Cherbourg and Roscoff in France.",
"title": "Ports and harbours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The vast majority of heavy goods trade is done by sea. Northern Irish ports handle 10 megatonnes (Mt) of goods trade with Britain annually, while ports in the south handle 7.6 Mt, representing 50% and 40% respectively of total trade by weight.",
"title": "Ports and harbours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Ireland has five main international airports: Dublin Airport, Belfast International Airport (Aldergrove), Cork Airport, Shannon Airport and Ireland West Airport (Knock). Dublin Airport is the busiest of these carrying almost 28 million passengers per year; a second terminal (T2) was opened in November 2010. All provide services to Great Britain and continental Europe, while Cork, Dublin and Shannon also offer transatlantic services. The London to Dublin air route is the ninth busiest international air route in the world, and also the busiest international air route in Europe, with 14,500 flights between the two in 2017. In 2015, 4.5 million people took the route, at that time, the world's second-busiest. Aer Lingus is the flag carrier of Ireland, although Ryanair is the country's largest airline. Ryanair is Europe's largest low-cost carrier, the second largest in terms of passenger numbers, and the world's largest in terms of international passenger numbers. For several decades until 2007 Shannon was a mandatory stopover for transatlantic routes to the United States. In recent years it has opened a pre-screening service allowing passengers to pass through US immigration services before departing from Ireland.",
"title": "Aviation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "There are also several smaller regional airports: George Best Belfast City Airport, City of Derry Airport, Galway Airport, Kerry Airport (Farranfore), Sligo Airport (Strandhill), Waterford Airport and Donegal Airport (Carrickfinn). Scheduled services from these regional points are in the main limited to flights travelling to other parts of Ireland and to Great Britain. Airlines based in Ireland include Aer Lingus (the former national airline of the Republic of Ireland), Ryanair, Aer Arann and CityJet. Services to the Aran Islands are operated from Aerfort na Minna (Connemara Regional Airport).",
"title": "Aviation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Ireland's national airline, Aer Lingus, provides services from Belfast City, Cork, Dublin and Shannon to Europe, North Africa and North America. Dublin and Cork airports are run by a State body, DAA (Dublin Airport Authority). Other Irish airlines are Ryanair, one of the largest in the world, CityJet, ASL Airlines Ireland and the Aer Lingus subsidiary Aer Lingus Regional. A number of other operators specialise in general aviation.",
"title": "Aviation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "For 2018 the passenger numbers were as follows:",
"title": "Aviation"
}
]
| Most of the transport system in Ireland is in public hands, either side of the Irish border. The Irish road network has evolved separately in the two jurisdictions into which Ireland is divided, while the Irish rail network was mostly created prior to the partition of Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, the Minister for Transport, acting through the Department of Transport, is responsible for the state's road network, rail network, public transport, airports and several other areas. Although some sections of road have been built using private or public-private funds, and are operated as toll roads, they are owned by the Government of Ireland. The rail network is also state-owned and operated, while the government currently still owns the main airports. Public transport is mainly in the hands of a statutory corporation, Córas Iompair Éireann (CIÉ), and its subsidiaries, Bus Átha Cliath, Bus Éireann, and Iarnród Éireann. On 1 November 2005, the Irish government published the Transport 21 plan which includes €18bn for improved roads and €16bn for improved rail, including the Western Railway Corridor and the Dublin Metro. The Republic of Ireland's transport sector is responsible for 21% of the state's greenhouse gas emissions. In Northern Ireland, the road network and railways are in state ownership. The Department for Infrastructure is responsible for these and other areas. Two of the three main airports in Northern Ireland are privately operated and owned. The exception is City of Derry Airport, which is owned and funded by Derry City Council. A statutory corporation, the Northern Ireland Transport Holding Company operates public transport services through its three subsidiaries – NI Railways Company Limited, Ulsterbus Limited, and Citybus Limited. | 2001-05-05T02:54:28Z | 2023-12-24T15:57:36Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Ireland |
14,682 | Foreign relations of Ireland | The foreign relations of Ireland are substantially influenced by its membership of the European Union, although bilateral relations with the United States and United Kingdom are also important to the state. It is one of the group of smaller nations in the EU and has traditionally followed a non-aligned foreign policy. Ireland has historically tended towards independence in foreign military policy, thus it is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and has a longstanding policy of military neutrality. According to the Irish Defence Forces, the neutrality policy has helped them to be successful in their contributions to United Nations peace-keeping missions since 1960 (in the Congo Crisis) and subsequently in Cyprus, Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Ireland was not invited to join the United Nations when it was formed in 1945. Both Washington and London were opposed because of Ireland's neutrality during the war. Ireland applied in 1946 and the US and UK voted approval, but the Soviet Union vetoed it. Ireland was finally admitted to the UN in 1955. It joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973; it is now known as the European Union (EU). In 1974 it began the Irish Aid programme to provide assistance to developing countries. In 1991 it established the Irish Institute of International and European Affairs to conduct research and analysis on international and European affairs. In 1992 the Irish Refugee Council began as a humanitarian advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland.
Since at least the 1100s Ireland, as a result of military conquest, has had political connections with the United Kingdom and its predecessor states, with the whole island becoming a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1922. From the time Ireland became independent from the United Kingdom in 1922, the two countries have been involved in a dispute over the status of Northern Ireland. Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland formerly claimed Northern Ireland as a part of the "national territory", though in practice the Irish government did recognise the UK's jurisdiction over the region. From the onset of the Troubles in 1969, the two governments sought to bring the violence to an end. The Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 were important steps in this process. In 1998, both states signed the Good Friday Agreement and now co-operate closely to find a solution to the region's problems. Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland were amended as part of this agreement, the territorial claim being replaced with a statement of aspiration to unite the people of the island of Ireland. As part of the Good Friday Agreement, the states also ended their dispute over their respective names: Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Each agreed to accept and use the others' correct name.
When the Troubles were raging in Northern Ireland, the Irish Government sought, with mixed success, to prevent the import of weapons and ammunition through its territory by illegal paramilitary organisations for use in their conflict with the security forces in Northern Ireland. In 1973 three ships of the Irish Naval Service intercepted a ship carrying weapons from Libya which were probably destined for Irish Republican paramilitaries. Law enforcement acts such as these additionally improved relations with the government of the United Kingdom. However, the independent judiciary blocked a number of attempts to extradite suspects between 1970 and 1998 on the basis that their crime might have been 'political' and thus contrary to international law at the time.
Ireland is one of the parties to the Rockall continental shelf dispute that also involves Denmark, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. Ireland and the United Kingdom have signed a boundary agreement in the Rockall area. However, neither has concluded similar agreements with Iceland or Denmark (on behalf of the Faroe Islands) and the matter remains under negotiation. Iceland now claims a substantial area of the continental shelf to the west of Ireland, to a point 49°48'N 19°00'W, which is further south than Ireland.
The controversial Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in north-western England has also been a contentious issue between the two governments. The Irish government has sought the closure of the plant, taking a case against the UK government under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. However, the European Court of Justice found that the case should have been dealt with under EU law. In 2006, however, both countries came to a friendly agreement which enabled both the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland and the Garda Síochána (Irish Police Force) access to the site to conduct investigations.
The United States recognised the Irish Free State on 28 June 1924 with diplomatic relations being established on 7 October 1924. In 1927, the United States opened an American Legation in Dublin. Due to the ancestral ties between the two countries, Ireland and the US have a strong relationship, both politically and economically, with the US being Ireland's biggest trading partner since 2000. Ireland also receives more foreign direct investment from the US than many larger nations, with investments in Ireland equal to France and Germany combined and, in 2012, more than all of developing Asia put together.
The use of Shannon Airport as a stop-over point for US forces en route to Iraq has caused domestic controversy in Ireland. Opponents of this policy brought an unsuccessful High Court case against the government in 2003, arguing that this use of Irish airspace violated Irish neutrality. Restrictions such as carrying no arms, ammunition, or explosives, and that the flights in question did not form part of military exercises or operations were put in place to defend Irish neutrality, however, allegations have been made against the Central Intelligence Agency that the airport has been used between 30 and 50 times for illegal extraordinary rendition flights to the U.S without the knowledge of the Irish Government, despite diplomatic assurances by the US that Irish airspace would not be used for transport of detainees.
In July 2006, the former Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern voiced concern over the 2006 Lebanon War. A shipment of bombs being sent to Israel by the United States was banned using Irish airspace or airfields.
In 1995 a decision was made by the U.S. government to appoint a Special Envoy to Northern Ireland to help with the Northern Ireland peace process. During the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States, however, Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama was reported as having questioned the necessity to keep a US Special Envoy for Northern Ireland. His remarks caused an uproar within the Republican Party, with Senator John McCain questioning his leadership abilities and his commitment to the ongoing peace process in Northern Ireland.
As of 2023, Geraldine Byrne Nason is the Irish ambassador to the United States while the position of U.S. ambassador to Ireland is held by Claire D. Cronin.
Ireland's official relationship with the People's Republic of China began on 22 June 1979. Following his visit to China in 1999, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern authorised the establishment of an Asia Strategy. this Strategy aimed to ensure that the Irish Government and Irish enterprise work coherently to enhance the important relationships between Ireland and Asia. In recent years due to the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy, China is becoming a key trade partner of Ireland, with over $6bn worth of bilateral trade between the two countries in 2010. In July 2013, the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade were invited to China by the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi on a trade mission to boost both investment and political ties between the two countries.
Ireland has raised its concerns in the area of human rights with China on several occasions. On 12 May 2007, during a visit to Beijing, former Taoiseach Brian Cowen (then Minister for Finance) discussed human rights issues with Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing. Former Tánaiste Mary Coughlan also raised human rights issues and concerns with visiting Chinese Vice-Premier Zeng Peiyan. Ireland also participates in the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue.
Concerning the Taiwan issue, Ireland follows a One-China policy and emphasizes the Taiwan issue being best settled through dialogue "between the parties concerned". Ireland does not maintain official diplomatic ties with Taiwan although there is a Taipei Representative Office that has a representative function about economic and cultural promotion.
In July 2019, the UN ambassadors from 22 nations, including Ireland, signed a joint letter to the UNHRC condemning China's mistreatment of the Uyghurs as well as its mistreatment of other minority groups, urging the Chinese government to close the Xinjiang re-education camps.
Ireland is consistently the most pro-European of EU member states, with 88% of the population approving of EU membership according to a poll in 2022. Ireland was a founding member of the euro single currency. In May 2004, Ireland was one of only three countries to open its borders to workers from the 10 new member states. EU issues important to Ireland include the Common Agricultural Policy, corporation tax harmonisation and the EU Constitution. The Irish electorate declined to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008. A second referendum in October 2009 passed the bill, allowing the treaty to be ratified. Before it was ratified Ireland required legal guarantees on issues such as the right of Ireland to remain militarily neutral (and not engage in any kind of "European army"), the right of the state to maintain its low levels of corporation tax and that the treaty would not change the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland making abortion illegal (since deleted). Ireland has held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union on seven occasions (in 1975, 1979, 1984, 1990, 1996, 2004 and 2013).
The United Nations was founded in 1945, but Ireland's membership was blocked by the Soviet Union until 1955, "partly because of Dublin's neutrality" during the Second World War. Since 2017, the Irish ambassador to the UN Office at Geneva has been Michael Gaffey. Ireland has been elected to the UN Security Council as a non-permanent member on four occasions — in 1962, in 1981–1982, in 2001–2002 and most recently in 2021–2022.
Ireland is a member state of the International Criminal Court, having signed the Rome Statute in 1998 and ratified it in 2002.
Irish Aid, the Government of Ireland's programme of assistance to developing countries financed the redesign of the UNV Online Volunteering service website in 2008 and supported its operations from 2007 to 2010, which led to a significant growth in the number of online volunteers and the tasks they completed.
In 2017, Ireland signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Ireland has a long history of participation in UN peacekeeping efforts starting in 1958, just three years after joining the UN. As of August 2018, 90 members of the Irish Defence Forces had been killed on peacekeeping missions.
List of major peacekeeping operations:
As well as these missions, Irish personnel have served as observers in Central America, Russia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Namibia, Western Sahara, Kuwait and South Africa.
Ireland was a member state of the British Commonwealth from 1922 until 1949, initially as a Dominion called the Irish Free State from 1922 until 1937, when Ireland adopted a new constitution and changed the name of the state to "Ireland". Although the king was removed from the Constitution in 1936, a republic was only formally declared from 18 April 1949. Under the rules for membership at the time, a republic could not be a member state of the Commonwealth. This was changed a week later with the adoption of the London Declaration.
Since 1998, some people in Ireland have advocated joining the Commonwealth of Nations, most notably Éamon Ó Cuív, Frank Feighan, and Mary Kenny.
Ireland is a member of or otherwise participates in the following international organisations:
Ireland's aid programme was founded in 1974, and in 2017 its budget amounted to €651 million. The government had previously set a target of reaching the Millennium Development Goal of 0.7% of Gross National Product in aid by 2012, which was not met as aid was reduced as a result of the Irish financial crisis. Irish development aid is concentrated on eight priority countries: Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zambia, Uganda, Vietnam and East Timor. In 2006, Malawi was announced as the ninth priority country, with a tenth country to follow.
There have been no serious civil, human or social rights abuses/problems in the State, according to Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department. The country consistently comes among the top nations in terms of freedom and rights ratings. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The foreign relations of Ireland are substantially influenced by its membership of the European Union, although bilateral relations with the United States and United Kingdom are also important to the state. It is one of the group of smaller nations in the EU and has traditionally followed a non-aligned foreign policy. Ireland has historically tended towards independence in foreign military policy, thus it is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and has a longstanding policy of military neutrality. According to the Irish Defence Forces, the neutrality policy has helped them to be successful in their contributions to United Nations peace-keeping missions since 1960 (in the Congo Crisis) and subsequently in Cyprus, Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Ireland was not invited to join the United Nations when it was formed in 1945. Both Washington and London were opposed because of Ireland's neutrality during the war. Ireland applied in 1946 and the US and UK voted approval, but the Soviet Union vetoed it. Ireland was finally admitted to the UN in 1955. It joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973; it is now known as the European Union (EU). In 1974 it began the Irish Aid programme to provide assistance to developing countries. In 1991 it established the Irish Institute of International and European Affairs to conduct research and analysis on international and European affairs. In 1992 the Irish Refugee Council began as a humanitarian advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Since at least the 1100s Ireland, as a result of military conquest, has had political connections with the United Kingdom and its predecessor states, with the whole island becoming a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1922. From the time Ireland became independent from the United Kingdom in 1922, the two countries have been involved in a dispute over the status of Northern Ireland. Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland formerly claimed Northern Ireland as a part of the \"national territory\", though in practice the Irish government did recognise the UK's jurisdiction over the region. From the onset of the Troubles in 1969, the two governments sought to bring the violence to an end. The Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 were important steps in this process. In 1998, both states signed the Good Friday Agreement and now co-operate closely to find a solution to the region's problems. Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland were amended as part of this agreement, the territorial claim being replaced with a statement of aspiration to unite the people of the island of Ireland. As part of the Good Friday Agreement, the states also ended their dispute over their respective names: Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Each agreed to accept and use the others' correct name.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "When the Troubles were raging in Northern Ireland, the Irish Government sought, with mixed success, to prevent the import of weapons and ammunition through its territory by illegal paramilitary organisations for use in their conflict with the security forces in Northern Ireland. In 1973 three ships of the Irish Naval Service intercepted a ship carrying weapons from Libya which were probably destined for Irish Republican paramilitaries. Law enforcement acts such as these additionally improved relations with the government of the United Kingdom. However, the independent judiciary blocked a number of attempts to extradite suspects between 1970 and 1998 on the basis that their crime might have been 'political' and thus contrary to international law at the time.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Ireland is one of the parties to the Rockall continental shelf dispute that also involves Denmark, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. Ireland and the United Kingdom have signed a boundary agreement in the Rockall area. However, neither has concluded similar agreements with Iceland or Denmark (on behalf of the Faroe Islands) and the matter remains under negotiation. Iceland now claims a substantial area of the continental shelf to the west of Ireland, to a point 49°48'N 19°00'W, which is further south than Ireland.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The controversial Sellafield nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in north-western England has also been a contentious issue between the two governments. The Irish government has sought the closure of the plant, taking a case against the UK government under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. However, the European Court of Justice found that the case should have been dealt with under EU law. In 2006, however, both countries came to a friendly agreement which enabled both the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland and the Garda Síochána (Irish Police Force) access to the site to conduct investigations.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The United States recognised the Irish Free State on 28 June 1924 with diplomatic relations being established on 7 October 1924. In 1927, the United States opened an American Legation in Dublin. Due to the ancestral ties between the two countries, Ireland and the US have a strong relationship, both politically and economically, with the US being Ireland's biggest trading partner since 2000. Ireland also receives more foreign direct investment from the US than many larger nations, with investments in Ireland equal to France and Germany combined and, in 2012, more than all of developing Asia put together.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The use of Shannon Airport as a stop-over point for US forces en route to Iraq has caused domestic controversy in Ireland. Opponents of this policy brought an unsuccessful High Court case against the government in 2003, arguing that this use of Irish airspace violated Irish neutrality. Restrictions such as carrying no arms, ammunition, or explosives, and that the flights in question did not form part of military exercises or operations were put in place to defend Irish neutrality, however, allegations have been made against the Central Intelligence Agency that the airport has been used between 30 and 50 times for illegal extraordinary rendition flights to the U.S without the knowledge of the Irish Government, despite diplomatic assurances by the US that Irish airspace would not be used for transport of detainees.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In July 2006, the former Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern voiced concern over the 2006 Lebanon War. A shipment of bombs being sent to Israel by the United States was banned using Irish airspace or airfields.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1995 a decision was made by the U.S. government to appoint a Special Envoy to Northern Ireland to help with the Northern Ireland peace process. During the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States, however, Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama was reported as having questioned the necessity to keep a US Special Envoy for Northern Ireland. His remarks caused an uproar within the Republican Party, with Senator John McCain questioning his leadership abilities and his commitment to the ongoing peace process in Northern Ireland.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "As of 2023, Geraldine Byrne Nason is the Irish ambassador to the United States while the position of U.S. ambassador to Ireland is held by Claire D. Cronin.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Ireland's official relationship with the People's Republic of China began on 22 June 1979. Following his visit to China in 1999, former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern authorised the establishment of an Asia Strategy. this Strategy aimed to ensure that the Irish Government and Irish enterprise work coherently to enhance the important relationships between Ireland and Asia. In recent years due to the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy, China is becoming a key trade partner of Ireland, with over $6bn worth of bilateral trade between the two countries in 2010. In July 2013, the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade were invited to China by the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi on a trade mission to boost both investment and political ties between the two countries.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Ireland has raised its concerns in the area of human rights with China on several occasions. On 12 May 2007, during a visit to Beijing, former Taoiseach Brian Cowen (then Minister for Finance) discussed human rights issues with Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing. Former Tánaiste Mary Coughlan also raised human rights issues and concerns with visiting Chinese Vice-Premier Zeng Peiyan. Ireland also participates in the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Concerning the Taiwan issue, Ireland follows a One-China policy and emphasizes the Taiwan issue being best settled through dialogue \"between the parties concerned\". Ireland does not maintain official diplomatic ties with Taiwan although there is a Taipei Representative Office that has a representative function about economic and cultural promotion.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In July 2019, the UN ambassadors from 22 nations, including Ireland, signed a joint letter to the UNHRC condemning China's mistreatment of the Uyghurs as well as its mistreatment of other minority groups, urging the Chinese government to close the Xinjiang re-education camps.",
"title": "Main relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "",
"title": "Africa"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Ireland is consistently the most pro-European of EU member states, with 88% of the population approving of EU membership according to a poll in 2022. Ireland was a founding member of the euro single currency. In May 2004, Ireland was one of only three countries to open its borders to workers from the 10 new member states. EU issues important to Ireland include the Common Agricultural Policy, corporation tax harmonisation and the EU Constitution. The Irish electorate declined to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon in 2008. A second referendum in October 2009 passed the bill, allowing the treaty to be ratified. Before it was ratified Ireland required legal guarantees on issues such as the right of Ireland to remain militarily neutral (and not engage in any kind of \"European army\"), the right of the state to maintain its low levels of corporation tax and that the treaty would not change the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland making abortion illegal (since deleted). Ireland has held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union on seven occasions (in 1975, 1979, 1984, 1990, 1996, 2004 and 2013).",
"title": "Europe"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The United Nations was founded in 1945, but Ireland's membership was blocked by the Soviet Union until 1955, \"partly because of Dublin's neutrality\" during the Second World War. Since 2017, the Irish ambassador to the UN Office at Geneva has been Michael Gaffey. Ireland has been elected to the UN Security Council as a non-permanent member on four occasions — in 1962, in 1981–1982, in 2001–2002 and most recently in 2021–2022.",
"title": "United Nations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Ireland is a member state of the International Criminal Court, having signed the Rome Statute in 1998 and ratified it in 2002.",
"title": "United Nations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Irish Aid, the Government of Ireland's programme of assistance to developing countries financed the redesign of the UNV Online Volunteering service website in 2008 and supported its operations from 2007 to 2010, which led to a significant growth in the number of online volunteers and the tasks they completed.",
"title": "United Nations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2017, Ireland signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.",
"title": "United Nations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Ireland has a long history of participation in UN peacekeeping efforts starting in 1958, just three years after joining the UN. As of August 2018, 90 members of the Irish Defence Forces had been killed on peacekeeping missions.",
"title": "United Nations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "List of major peacekeeping operations:",
"title": "United Nations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "As well as these missions, Irish personnel have served as observers in Central America, Russia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Namibia, Western Sahara, Kuwait and South Africa.",
"title": "United Nations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Ireland was a member state of the British Commonwealth from 1922 until 1949, initially as a Dominion called the Irish Free State from 1922 until 1937, when Ireland adopted a new constitution and changed the name of the state to \"Ireland\". Although the king was removed from the Constitution in 1936, a republic was only formally declared from 18 April 1949. Under the rules for membership at the time, a republic could not be a member state of the Commonwealth. This was changed a week later with the adoption of the London Declaration.",
"title": "Ireland and the Commonwealth of Nations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Since 1998, some people in Ireland have advocated joining the Commonwealth of Nations, most notably Éamon Ó Cuív, Frank Feighan, and Mary Kenny.",
"title": "Ireland and the Commonwealth of Nations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Ireland is a member of or otherwise participates in the following international organisations:",
"title": "International organisations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Ireland's aid programme was founded in 1974, and in 2017 its budget amounted to €651 million. The government had previously set a target of reaching the Millennium Development Goal of 0.7% of Gross National Product in aid by 2012, which was not met as aid was reduced as a result of the Irish financial crisis. Irish development aid is concentrated on eight priority countries: Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zambia, Uganda, Vietnam and East Timor. In 2006, Malawi was announced as the ninth priority country, with a tenth country to follow.",
"title": "Foreign aid"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "There have been no serious civil, human or social rights abuses/problems in the State, according to Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department. The country consistently comes among the top nations in terms of freedom and rights ratings.",
"title": "Human rights"
}
]
| The foreign relations of Ireland are substantially influenced by its membership of the European Union, although bilateral relations with the United States and United Kingdom are also important to the state. It is one of the group of smaller nations in the EU and has traditionally followed a non-aligned foreign policy. Ireland has historically tended towards independence in foreign military policy, thus it is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and has a longstanding policy of military neutrality. According to the Irish Defence Forces, the neutrality policy has helped them to be successful in their contributions to United Nations peace-keeping missions since 1960 and subsequently in Cyprus, Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina. | 2001-05-05T02:54:57Z | 2023-12-31T07:16:57Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_Ireland |
14,687 | Geography of Israel | The geography of Israel is very diverse, with desert conditions in the south, and snow-capped mountains in the north. Israel is located at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea in West Asia. It is bounded to the north by Lebanon, the northeast by Syria, the east by Jordan and the West Bank, and to the southwest by Egypt. To the west of Israel is the Mediterranean Sea, which makes up the majority of Israel's 273 km (170 mi) coastline, and the Gaza Strip. Israel has a small coastline on the Red Sea in the south.
Israel's area is approximately 20,770 km (8,019 sq mi), which includes 445 km (172 sq mi) of inland water. Israel stretches 424 km (263 mi) from north to south, and its width ranges from 114 km (71 mi) at its widest point to 10 km (6.2 mi) at its narrowest point. It has an Exclusive Economic Zone of 26,352 km (10,175 sq mi).
The Israeli-occupied territories include the West Bank, 5,879 km (2,270 sq mi), East Jerusalem, 70 km (27 sq mi) and the Golan Heights, 1,150 km (444 sq mi). Geographical features in these territories will be noted as such. Of these areas, Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, an act not recognized by the international community.
Southern Israel is dominated by the Negev desert, covering some 16,000 square kilometres (6,178 sq mi), more than half of the country's total land area. The north of the Negev contains the Judean Desert, which, at its border with Jordan, contains the Dead Sea which, at −417 m (−1,368 ft) is the lowest point on Earth. The inland area of central Israel is dominated by the Judean Hills of the West Bank, whilst the central and northern coastline consists of the flat and fertile Israeli coastal plain. Inland, the northern region contains the Mount Carmel mountain range, which is followed inland by the fertile Jezreel Valley, and then the hilly Galilee region. The Sea of Galilee is located beyond this region and is bordered to the east by the Golan Heights, a plateau bordered to the north by the Israeli-occupied part of the Mount Hermon massif, which includes the highest point under Israel's control, a peak of 2,224 meters (7,297 ft). The highest point in territory internationally recognized as Israeli is Mount Meron at 1,208 meters (3,963 ft).
Israel lies to the north of the equator around 31°30' north latitude and 34°45' east longitude. It measures 424 km (263 mi) from north to south and, at its widest point 114 km (71 mi), from east to west. At its narrowest point, however, this is reduced to just 15 km (9 mi). It has a land frontier of 1,017 km (632 mi) and a coastline of 273 km (170 mi). It is ranked 153 on the List of countries and outlying territories by total area.
Prior to the establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine, there was no clear-cut definition of the geographical and territorial limits of the area known as "Palestine." On the eve of World War I it was described by Encyclopædia Britannica as a "nebulous geographical concept." The Sykes-Picot Treaty in 1916 divided the region that later became Palestine into four political units. Under the British Mandate for Palestine, the first geo-political framework was created that distinguished the area from the larger countries that surrounded it. The boundary demarcation at this time did not introduce geographical changes near the frontiers and both sides of the border were controlled by the British administration.
Modern Israel is bounded to the north by Lebanon, the northeast by Syria, the east by Jordan and the West Bank, and to the southwest by Egypt. To the west of Israel is the Mediterranean Sea, which makes up the majority of Israel's 273 km (170 mi) coastline and the Gaza Strip. Israel has a small coastline on the Red Sea in the south. The southernmost settlement in Israel is the city of Eilat whilst the northernmost is the town of Metula. The territorial waters of Israel extend into the sea to a distance of twelve nautical miles measured from the appropriate baseline.
The statistics provided by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics include the annexed East Jerusalem and Golan Heights, but exclude the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The population of Israel includes Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The route of the Israeli West Bank barrier incorporates some parts of the West Bank.
Israel is divided into four physiographic regions: the Mediterranean coastal plain, the Central Hills, the Jordan Rift Valley and the Negev Desert.
The Israeli Coastal Plain stretches from the Lebanese border in the north to Gaza in the south, interrupted only by Cape Carmel at Haifa Bay. It is about 40 kilometers (25 mi) wide at Gaza and narrows toward the north to about 5 kilometers (3.1 mi) at the Lebanese border. The region is fertile and humid (historically malarial) and is known for its citrus orchards and viticulture. The plain is traversed by several short streams. From north to south these are: Kishon, Hadera, Alexander, Poleg, and Yarkon. All of these streams were badly polluted, but in the last ten years much work has been done to clean them up. Today the Kishon, Alexander and Yarkon again flow year round, and also have parks along their banks.
Geographically, the region is divided into five sub-regions. The northernmost section lays between the Lebanese border, the Western Galilee to the east, and the sea. It stretches from Rosh HaNikra in the north and down to Haifa, Israel's third-largest city. It is a fertile region, and off the coast there are many small islands. Along the Mount Carmel range is Hof HaCarmel, or the Carmel Coastal Plain. It stretches from the point where Mount Carmel almost touches the sea, at Haifa, and down to Nahal Taninim, a stream that marks the southern limit of the Carmel range. The Sharon Plain is the next section, running from Nahal Taninim (south of Zikhron Ya'akov) to Tel Aviv's Yarkon River. This area is Israel's most densely populated. South of this, running to Nahal Shikma, is the Central Coastal Plain, also known as the Western Negev. The last segment is the Southern Coastal Plain, which extends south around the Gaza Strip. It is divided into two – in the north, the Besor region, a savanna-type area with a relatively large number of communities, and south of it the Agur-Halutza region, which is very sparsely populated.
Inland (east) of the coastal plain lies the central highland region. In the north of this region lie the mountains and hills of Upper Galilee and Lower Galilee, which are generally 500 meters (1,640 ft) to 700 meters (2,297 ft) in height, although they reach a maximum height of 1,208 meters (3,963 ft) at Mount Meron. South of the Galilee, in the West Bank, are the Samarian Hills with numerous small, fertile valleys rarely reaching the height of 800 meters (2,625 ft). South of Jerusalem, also mainly within the West Bank, are the Judean Hills, including Mount Hebron. The central highlands average 610 meters (2,001 ft) in height and reach their highest elevation at Har Meron, at 1,208 meters (3,963 ft), in Galilee near Safed. Several valleys cut across the highlands roughly from east to west; the largest is the Jezreel Valley (also known as the Plain of Esdraelon), which stretches 48 kilometers (30 mi) from Haifa southeast to the valley of the Jordan River, and is 19 kilometers (12 mi) across at its widest point.
East of the central highlands lies the Jordan Rift Valley, which is a small part of the 6,500 kilometers (4,039 mi)-long Syrian-East African Rift. In Israel the Rift Valley is dominated by the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee (an important freshwater source also known as Lake Tiberias and Lake Kinneret), and the Dead Sea. The Jordan, Israel's largest river (322 kilometers (200 mi)), originates in the Dan, Baniyas, and Hasbani rivers near Mount Hermon in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains and flows south through the drained Hula Basin into the freshwater Lake Tiberias. Lake Tiberias is 165 square kilometers (64 sq mi) in size and, depending on the season and rainfall, is at about 213 meters (699 ft) below sea level. With a water capacity estimated at 3 cubic kilometers (0.72 cu mi), it serves as the principal reservoir of the National Water Carrier (also known as the Kinneret-Negev Conduit). The Jordan River continues its course from the southern end of Lake Tiberias (forming the boundary between the West Bank and Jordan) to its terminus in the highly saline Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is 1,020 square kilometers (394 sq mi) in size and, at 420 meters (1,378 ft) below sea level, is the lowest surface point on the earth. South of the Dead Sea, the Rift Valley continues in the Arabah (Hebrew "Arava", Arabic "Wadi 'Arabah"), which has no permanent water flow, for 170 kilometers (106 mi) to the Gulf of Eilat.
The Negev Desert comprises approximately 12,000 square kilometers (4,633 sq mi), more than half of Israel's total land area. Geographically it is an extension of the Sinai Desert, forming a rough triangle with its base in the north near Beersheba, the Dead Sea, and the southern Judean Mountains, and it has its apex in the southern tip of the country at Eilat. Topographically, it parallels the other regions of the country, with lowlands in the west, hills in the central portion, and the Arava valley as its eastern border.
Unique to the Negev region are the craterlike makhteshim cirques; Makhtesh Ramon, Makhtesh Gadol and Makhtesh Katan. The Negev is also sub-divided into five different ecological regions: northern, western and central Negev, the high plateau and the Arabah Valley. The northern Negev receives 300 millimeters (11.8 in) of rain annually and has fairly fertile soils. The western Negev receives 250 millimeters (9.8 in) of rain per year, with light and partially sandy soils. The central Negev has an annual precipitation of 200 millimeters (7.9 in) and is characterized by impervious soil, allowing minimum penetration of water with greater soil erosion and water runoff. This can result in rare flash floods during heavy rains as water runs across the surface of the impervious desert soil. The high plateau area of Ramat HaNegev stands between 370 meters (1,214 ft) and 520 meters (1,706 ft) above sea level with extreme temperatures in summer and winter. The area gets 100 millimeters (3.9 in) of rain each year, with inferior and partially salty soils. The Arabah Valley along the Jordanian border stretches 180 kilometers (112 mi) from Eilat in the south to the tip of the Dead Sea in the north and is very arid with barely 50 millimeters (1.97 in) of rain annually.
Israel is divided east–west by a mountain range running north to south along the coast. Jerusalem sits on the top of this ridge, east of which lies the Dead Sea graben which is a pull-apart basin on the Dead Sea Transform fault.
The numerous limestone and sandstone layers of the Israeli mountains serve as aquifers through which water flows from the west flank to the east. Several springs have formed along the Dead Sea, each an oasis, most notably the oases at Ein Gedi and Ein Bokek (Neve Zohar) where settlements have developed. Israel also has a number of areas of karst topography. Caves in the region have been used for thousands of years as shelter, storage rooms, barns and as places of public gatherings.
The far northern coastline of the country has some chalk landscapes best seen at Rosh HaNikra, a chalk cliff into which a series of grottoes have been eroded.
The Jordan Rift Valley is the result of tectonic movements within the Dead Sea Transform (DSF) fault system. The DSF forms the transform boundary between the African Plate to the west and the Arabian Plate to the east. The Golan Heights and all of Jordan are part of the Arabian Plate, while the Galilee, West Bank, Coastal Plain, and Negev along with the Sinai Peninsula are on the African Plate. This tectonic disposition leads to a relatively high seismic activity in the region.
The entire Jordan Valley segment is thought to have ruptured repeatedly, for instance during the last two major earthquakes along this structure in 749 and 1033. The deficit in slip that has built up since the 1033 event is sufficient to cause an earthquake of Mw ~7.4.
The most catastrophic earthquakes occurred in 31 BCE, 363, 749, and 1033 CE, that is every ca. 400 years on average. Destructive earthquakes leading to serious loss of life strike about every 80 years. While stringent construction regulations are currently in place and recently built structures are earthquake-safe, as of 2007 the majority of the buildings in Israel were older than these regulations and many public buildings as well as 50,000 residential buildings did not meet the new standards and were "expected to collapse" if exposed to a strong quake. Given the fragile political situation of the Middle East region and the presence there of major holy sites, a quake reaching magnitude 7 on the Richter scale could have dire consequences for world peace.
Israel's longest and most famous river is the 320-kilometre (199 mi) long River Jordan, which rises on the southern slopes of Mount Hermon in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. The river flows south through the freshwater Sea of Galilee, and from there forms the boundary with the Kingdom of Jordan for much of its route, eventually emptying into the Dead Sea. The northern tributaries to the Jordan are the Dan, Banias, and Hasbani. Only the Dan is within undisputed Israel; the Hasbani flows from Lebanon and the Banias from territory captured from Syria in the Six-Day War.
The Sea of Galilee (also called the Kinneret) is Israel's largest and most important freshwater lake, located in the northeast of the country. The pear-shaped lake is 23 kilometres (14 mi) long from north to south, with a maximum width of 13 kilometres (8 mi) in the north, covering 166 square kilometers (64 sq mi). The Kinneret lies 207 meters (679 ft) below sea level and reaches depths of 46 meters (151 ft). In a previous geological epoch the lake was part of a large inland sea which extended from the Hula marshes in northern Israel to 64 kilometers (40 mi) south of the Dead Sea. The bed of the lake forms part of the Jordan Rift Valley.
South of the Kinneret lies the saltwater Dead Sea which forms the border between Israel and Jordan and is 418 meters (1,371 ft) below sea level, making it the lowest water surface on Earth. The Dead Sea is 67 kilometers (42 mi) long with a maximum width of 16 kilometers (10 mi) and also makes up part of the Rift Valley. A peninsula juts out into the lake from the eastern shore, south of which the lake is shallow, less than 6 meters (19.7 ft) deep. To the north is the lake's greatest depth.
There are no navigable, artificial waterways in Israel, although the National Water Carrier, a conduit for drinking water, might be classified as such. The idea of a channel connecting the Mediterranean and Dead Seas or the Red and Dead Seas has been discussed.
The following are selected elevations of notable locations, from highest to lowest:
Israel has a Mediterranean climate with long, hot, rainless summers and relatively short, cool, rainy winters (Köppen climate classification Csa). The climate is as such due to Israel's location between the subtropical aridity of the Sahara and the Arabian deserts, and the subtropical humidity of the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean. The climate conditions are highly variable within the state and modified locally by altitude, latitude, and the proximity to the Mediterranean.
On average, January is the coldest month with average temperatures ranging from 6 to 15 °C (42.8 to 59.0 °F), and July and August are the hottest months at 22 to 33 °C (71.6 to 91.4 °F), on average across the country. Summers are very humid along the Mediterranean coast but dry in the central highlands, the Rift Valley, and the Negev Desert. In Eilat, a desert city, summer daytime-temperatures are often the highest in the state, at times reaching 44 to 46 °C (111.2 to 114.8 °F). More than 70% of the average rainfall in Israel falls between November and March; June through September are usually rainless. Rainfall is unevenly distributed, significantly lower in the south of the country. In the extreme south, rainfall averages near 30 millimeters (1.18 in) annually; in the north, average annual rainfall exceeds 900 millimeters (35.4 in). Rainfall varies from season to season and from year to year, particularly in the Negev Desert. Precipitation is often concentrated in violent storms, causing erosion and flash floods. In winter, precipitation often takes the form of snow at the higher elevations of the central highlands, including Jerusalem. Mount Hermon has seasonal snow which covers all three of its peaks in winter and spring. In rare occasions, snow gets to the northern mountain peaks and only in extremely rare occasions even to the coast. The areas of the country most cultivated are those receiving more than 300 millimeters (11.8 in) of rainfall annually, making approximately one-third of the country cultivable.
Thunderstorms and hail are common throughout the rainy season and waterspouts occasionally hit the Mediterranean coast, capable of causing only minor damage. However, supercell thunderstorms and a true F2 tornado hit the Western Galilee in April 2006, causing significant damage and 75 injuries.
Heat waves are frequent. 2010 was the hottest year in the history of Israel with absolute record high in several places in August. The heat became stronger from August when temperatures were considerably above the average. October and November were also dry, and November was almost rainless when it was supposed to be rainy.
Unlike much of the Middle East which is rich in lucrative crude oil, Israel has limited natural resources. These include copper, phosphates, bromide, potash, clay, sand, sulfur, asphalt, and manganese. Small amounts of natural gas and crude oil are present, often too little to merit commercial extraction. In 2009, significant reserves of natural gas were discovered at the Tamar 1 offshore drilling site, 90 kilometers west of Haifa. It is the largest natural gas reserve ever discovered in Israel.
Israel has a large number of environmental concerns ranging from natural hazards to man-made issues both resulting from ancient times to modern development. Natural hazards facing the country include sandstorms which sometimes occur during spring in the desert south, droughts which are usually concentrated in summer months, flash floods which create great danger in the deserts due to their lack of notice, and regular earthquakes, most of which are small, although there is a constant risk due to Israel's location along the Jordan Rift Valley. Current environmental concerns include the lack of arable land and natural fresh water resources. Whilst measures have been taken to irrigate and grow in the desert, the amount of water needed here poses issues. Desertification is also a risk possible on the desert fringe, whilst air pollution from industrial and vehicle emissions and groundwater pollution from industrial and domestic waste are also issues facing the country. Furthermore, the effects of the use of chemical fertilizers, and pesticides are issues facing the country. Israel has signed many international environmental agreements and is party to:
Signed but not ratified:
Israel's rural space includes several unique kinds of settlements, notably the moshav and the kibbutz. Originally these were collective and cooperative settlements respectively. Over time, the degree of cooperation in these settlements has decreased and in several of them the cooperative structure has been dismantled altogether. All rural settlements and many small towns (some of which are dubbed "rurban settlements") are incorporated in regional councils. Land use in Israel is 17% arable land, 4% permanent crops, and 79% other uses. As of 2003 1,940 square kilometers (749 sq mi) were irrigated.
There are 242 Israeli settlements and civilian land use sites in the West Bank, 42 in the Golan Heights, and 29 in East Jerusalem.
Israel has the Rosh Hanikra Islands and the Achziv Islands within its territorial waters. The Israeli government plans to build artificial islands off the coast to house an airport, a seaport, a desalination plant, a power plant, and a military testing base, as an answer to Israel's lack of space.
^a This number includes East Jerusalem and West Bank areas, which had a total population of 573,330 inhabitants in 2019. Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem is internationally unrecognized.
As of 2013, the population of Israel is 8 million, 6,015,000 of them Jewish.
For statistical purposes, the country has three metropolitan areas; Gush Dan-Tel Aviv (population 3,150,000), Haifa (population 996,000), and Beersheba (population 531,600). Some argue that Jerusalem, Israel's largest city with a population of 763,600, and Nazareth, should also be classified as metropolitan areas. In total, Israel has 74 cities, 14 of which have populations of over 100,000. Other forms of local government in Israel are local councils of which there are 144 governing small municipalities generally over 2,000 in population, and regional councils of which there are 53, governing a group of small communities over a relatively large geographical area.
Israel's population is diverse demographically; 76% Jewish, 20% Arab, and 4% unaffiliated. In terms of religion, 76% are Jewish, 16% Muslim, 2% Christian, 2% Druze, and 4% are unclassified by choice. 8% of Israeli Jews are haredi; 9% are "religious", 12% "religious-traditionalists", 27% are "non-religious traditionalists", and 43% are "secular". Other small, but notable groups in Israel, include Circassians of whom there are approximately 3,000 living mostly in two northern villages, 2,500 Lebanese, and 5,000 Armenians predominantly in Jerusalem.
Israel is ranked 34th in the world in terms of population density with, as noted, a climate of long, hot, rainless summers and relatively short, cool, rainy winters. The Population Matters 2011 overshoot index ranked Israel as the third most dependent region in the World after Singapore and Kuwait. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The geography of Israel is very diverse, with desert conditions in the south, and snow-capped mountains in the north. Israel is located at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea in West Asia. It is bounded to the north by Lebanon, the northeast by Syria, the east by Jordan and the West Bank, and to the southwest by Egypt. To the west of Israel is the Mediterranean Sea, which makes up the majority of Israel's 273 km (170 mi) coastline, and the Gaza Strip. Israel has a small coastline on the Red Sea in the south.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Israel's area is approximately 20,770 km (8,019 sq mi), which includes 445 km (172 sq mi) of inland water. Israel stretches 424 km (263 mi) from north to south, and its width ranges from 114 km (71 mi) at its widest point to 10 km (6.2 mi) at its narrowest point. It has an Exclusive Economic Zone of 26,352 km (10,175 sq mi).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Israeli-occupied territories include the West Bank, 5,879 km (2,270 sq mi), East Jerusalem, 70 km (27 sq mi) and the Golan Heights, 1,150 km (444 sq mi). Geographical features in these territories will be noted as such. Of these areas, Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, an act not recognized by the international community.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Southern Israel is dominated by the Negev desert, covering some 16,000 square kilometres (6,178 sq mi), more than half of the country's total land area. The north of the Negev contains the Judean Desert, which, at its border with Jordan, contains the Dead Sea which, at −417 m (−1,368 ft) is the lowest point on Earth. The inland area of central Israel is dominated by the Judean Hills of the West Bank, whilst the central and northern coastline consists of the flat and fertile Israeli coastal plain. Inland, the northern region contains the Mount Carmel mountain range, which is followed inland by the fertile Jezreel Valley, and then the hilly Galilee region. The Sea of Galilee is located beyond this region and is bordered to the east by the Golan Heights, a plateau bordered to the north by the Israeli-occupied part of the Mount Hermon massif, which includes the highest point under Israel's control, a peak of 2,224 meters (7,297 ft). The highest point in territory internationally recognized as Israeli is Mount Meron at 1,208 meters (3,963 ft).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Israel lies to the north of the equator around 31°30' north latitude and 34°45' east longitude. It measures 424 km (263 mi) from north to south and, at its widest point 114 km (71 mi), from east to west. At its narrowest point, however, this is reduced to just 15 km (9 mi). It has a land frontier of 1,017 km (632 mi) and a coastline of 273 km (170 mi). It is ranked 153 on the List of countries and outlying territories by total area.",
"title": "Location and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Prior to the establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine, there was no clear-cut definition of the geographical and territorial limits of the area known as \"Palestine.\" On the eve of World War I it was described by Encyclopædia Britannica as a \"nebulous geographical concept.\" The Sykes-Picot Treaty in 1916 divided the region that later became Palestine into four political units. Under the British Mandate for Palestine, the first geo-political framework was created that distinguished the area from the larger countries that surrounded it. The boundary demarcation at this time did not introduce geographical changes near the frontiers and both sides of the border were controlled by the British administration.",
"title": "Location and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Modern Israel is bounded to the north by Lebanon, the northeast by Syria, the east by Jordan and the West Bank, and to the southwest by Egypt. To the west of Israel is the Mediterranean Sea, which makes up the majority of Israel's 273 km (170 mi) coastline and the Gaza Strip. Israel has a small coastline on the Red Sea in the south. The southernmost settlement in Israel is the city of Eilat whilst the northernmost is the town of Metula. The territorial waters of Israel extend into the sea to a distance of twelve nautical miles measured from the appropriate baseline.",
"title": "Location and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The statistics provided by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics include the annexed East Jerusalem and Golan Heights, but exclude the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The population of Israel includes Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The route of the Israeli West Bank barrier incorporates some parts of the West Bank.",
"title": "Location and boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Israel is divided into four physiographic regions: the Mediterranean coastal plain, the Central Hills, the Jordan Rift Valley and the Negev Desert.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Israeli Coastal Plain stretches from the Lebanese border in the north to Gaza in the south, interrupted only by Cape Carmel at Haifa Bay. It is about 40 kilometers (25 mi) wide at Gaza and narrows toward the north to about 5 kilometers (3.1 mi) at the Lebanese border. The region is fertile and humid (historically malarial) and is known for its citrus orchards and viticulture. The plain is traversed by several short streams. From north to south these are: Kishon, Hadera, Alexander, Poleg, and Yarkon. All of these streams were badly polluted, but in the last ten years much work has been done to clean them up. Today the Kishon, Alexander and Yarkon again flow year round, and also have parks along their banks.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Geographically, the region is divided into five sub-regions. The northernmost section lays between the Lebanese border, the Western Galilee to the east, and the sea. It stretches from Rosh HaNikra in the north and down to Haifa, Israel's third-largest city. It is a fertile region, and off the coast there are many small islands. Along the Mount Carmel range is Hof HaCarmel, or the Carmel Coastal Plain. It stretches from the point where Mount Carmel almost touches the sea, at Haifa, and down to Nahal Taninim, a stream that marks the southern limit of the Carmel range. The Sharon Plain is the next section, running from Nahal Taninim (south of Zikhron Ya'akov) to Tel Aviv's Yarkon River. This area is Israel's most densely populated. South of this, running to Nahal Shikma, is the Central Coastal Plain, also known as the Western Negev. The last segment is the Southern Coastal Plain, which extends south around the Gaza Strip. It is divided into two – in the north, the Besor region, a savanna-type area with a relatively large number of communities, and south of it the Agur-Halutza region, which is very sparsely populated.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Inland (east) of the coastal plain lies the central highland region. In the north of this region lie the mountains and hills of Upper Galilee and Lower Galilee, which are generally 500 meters (1,640 ft) to 700 meters (2,297 ft) in height, although they reach a maximum height of 1,208 meters (3,963 ft) at Mount Meron. South of the Galilee, in the West Bank, are the Samarian Hills with numerous small, fertile valleys rarely reaching the height of 800 meters (2,625 ft). South of Jerusalem, also mainly within the West Bank, are the Judean Hills, including Mount Hebron. The central highlands average 610 meters (2,001 ft) in height and reach their highest elevation at Har Meron, at 1,208 meters (3,963 ft), in Galilee near Safed. Several valleys cut across the highlands roughly from east to west; the largest is the Jezreel Valley (also known as the Plain of Esdraelon), which stretches 48 kilometers (30 mi) from Haifa southeast to the valley of the Jordan River, and is 19 kilometers (12 mi) across at its widest point.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "East of the central highlands lies the Jordan Rift Valley, which is a small part of the 6,500 kilometers (4,039 mi)-long Syrian-East African Rift. In Israel the Rift Valley is dominated by the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee (an important freshwater source also known as Lake Tiberias and Lake Kinneret), and the Dead Sea. The Jordan, Israel's largest river (322 kilometers (200 mi)), originates in the Dan, Baniyas, and Hasbani rivers near Mount Hermon in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains and flows south through the drained Hula Basin into the freshwater Lake Tiberias. Lake Tiberias is 165 square kilometers (64 sq mi) in size and, depending on the season and rainfall, is at about 213 meters (699 ft) below sea level. With a water capacity estimated at 3 cubic kilometers (0.72 cu mi), it serves as the principal reservoir of the National Water Carrier (also known as the Kinneret-Negev Conduit). The Jordan River continues its course from the southern end of Lake Tiberias (forming the boundary between the West Bank and Jordan) to its terminus in the highly saline Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is 1,020 square kilometers (394 sq mi) in size and, at 420 meters (1,378 ft) below sea level, is the lowest surface point on the earth. South of the Dead Sea, the Rift Valley continues in the Arabah (Hebrew \"Arava\", Arabic \"Wadi 'Arabah\"), which has no permanent water flow, for 170 kilometers (106 mi) to the Gulf of Eilat.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Negev Desert comprises approximately 12,000 square kilometers (4,633 sq mi), more than half of Israel's total land area. Geographically it is an extension of the Sinai Desert, forming a rough triangle with its base in the north near Beersheba, the Dead Sea, and the southern Judean Mountains, and it has its apex in the southern tip of the country at Eilat. Topographically, it parallels the other regions of the country, with lowlands in the west, hills in the central portion, and the Arava valley as its eastern border.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Unique to the Negev region are the craterlike makhteshim cirques; Makhtesh Ramon, Makhtesh Gadol and Makhtesh Katan. The Negev is also sub-divided into five different ecological regions: northern, western and central Negev, the high plateau and the Arabah Valley. The northern Negev receives 300 millimeters (11.8 in) of rain annually and has fairly fertile soils. The western Negev receives 250 millimeters (9.8 in) of rain per year, with light and partially sandy soils. The central Negev has an annual precipitation of 200 millimeters (7.9 in) and is characterized by impervious soil, allowing minimum penetration of water with greater soil erosion and water runoff. This can result in rare flash floods during heavy rains as water runs across the surface of the impervious desert soil. The high plateau area of Ramat HaNegev stands between 370 meters (1,214 ft) and 520 meters (1,706 ft) above sea level with extreme temperatures in summer and winter. The area gets 100 millimeters (3.9 in) of rain each year, with inferior and partially salty soils. The Arabah Valley along the Jordanian border stretches 180 kilometers (112 mi) from Eilat in the south to the tip of the Dead Sea in the north and is very arid with barely 50 millimeters (1.97 in) of rain annually.",
"title": "Physiographic regions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Israel is divided east–west by a mountain range running north to south along the coast. Jerusalem sits on the top of this ridge, east of which lies the Dead Sea graben which is a pull-apart basin on the Dead Sea Transform fault.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The numerous limestone and sandstone layers of the Israeli mountains serve as aquifers through which water flows from the west flank to the east. Several springs have formed along the Dead Sea, each an oasis, most notably the oases at Ein Gedi and Ein Bokek (Neve Zohar) where settlements have developed. Israel also has a number of areas of karst topography. Caves in the region have been used for thousands of years as shelter, storage rooms, barns and as places of public gatherings.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The far northern coastline of the country has some chalk landscapes best seen at Rosh HaNikra, a chalk cliff into which a series of grottoes have been eroded.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Jordan Rift Valley is the result of tectonic movements within the Dead Sea Transform (DSF) fault system. The DSF forms the transform boundary between the African Plate to the west and the Arabian Plate to the east. The Golan Heights and all of Jordan are part of the Arabian Plate, while the Galilee, West Bank, Coastal Plain, and Negev along with the Sinai Peninsula are on the African Plate. This tectonic disposition leads to a relatively high seismic activity in the region.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The entire Jordan Valley segment is thought to have ruptured repeatedly, for instance during the last two major earthquakes along this structure in 749 and 1033. The deficit in slip that has built up since the 1033 event is sufficient to cause an earthquake of Mw ~7.4.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The most catastrophic earthquakes occurred in 31 BCE, 363, 749, and 1033 CE, that is every ca. 400 years on average. Destructive earthquakes leading to serious loss of life strike about every 80 years. While stringent construction regulations are currently in place and recently built structures are earthquake-safe, as of 2007 the majority of the buildings in Israel were older than these regulations and many public buildings as well as 50,000 residential buildings did not meet the new standards and were \"expected to collapse\" if exposed to a strong quake. Given the fragile political situation of the Middle East region and the presence there of major holy sites, a quake reaching magnitude 7 on the Richter scale could have dire consequences for world peace.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Israel's longest and most famous river is the 320-kilometre (199 mi) long River Jordan, which rises on the southern slopes of Mount Hermon in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. The river flows south through the freshwater Sea of Galilee, and from there forms the boundary with the Kingdom of Jordan for much of its route, eventually emptying into the Dead Sea. The northern tributaries to the Jordan are the Dan, Banias, and Hasbani. Only the Dan is within undisputed Israel; the Hasbani flows from Lebanon and the Banias from territory captured from Syria in the Six-Day War.",
"title": "Rivers and lakes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Sea of Galilee (also called the Kinneret) is Israel's largest and most important freshwater lake, located in the northeast of the country. The pear-shaped lake is 23 kilometres (14 mi) long from north to south, with a maximum width of 13 kilometres (8 mi) in the north, covering 166 square kilometers (64 sq mi). The Kinneret lies 207 meters (679 ft) below sea level and reaches depths of 46 meters (151 ft). In a previous geological epoch the lake was part of a large inland sea which extended from the Hula marshes in northern Israel to 64 kilometers (40 mi) south of the Dead Sea. The bed of the lake forms part of the Jordan Rift Valley.",
"title": "Rivers and lakes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "South of the Kinneret lies the saltwater Dead Sea which forms the border between Israel and Jordan and is 418 meters (1,371 ft) below sea level, making it the lowest water surface on Earth. The Dead Sea is 67 kilometers (42 mi) long with a maximum width of 16 kilometers (10 mi) and also makes up part of the Rift Valley. A peninsula juts out into the lake from the eastern shore, south of which the lake is shallow, less than 6 meters (19.7 ft) deep. To the north is the lake's greatest depth.",
"title": "Rivers and lakes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "There are no navigable, artificial waterways in Israel, although the National Water Carrier, a conduit for drinking water, might be classified as such. The idea of a channel connecting the Mediterranean and Dead Seas or the Red and Dead Seas has been discussed.",
"title": "Rivers and lakes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The following are selected elevations of notable locations, from highest to lowest:",
"title": "Selected elevations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Israel has a Mediterranean climate with long, hot, rainless summers and relatively short, cool, rainy winters (Köppen climate classification Csa). The climate is as such due to Israel's location between the subtropical aridity of the Sahara and the Arabian deserts, and the subtropical humidity of the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean. The climate conditions are highly variable within the state and modified locally by altitude, latitude, and the proximity to the Mediterranean.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "On average, January is the coldest month with average temperatures ranging from 6 to 15 °C (42.8 to 59.0 °F), and July and August are the hottest months at 22 to 33 °C (71.6 to 91.4 °F), on average across the country. Summers are very humid along the Mediterranean coast but dry in the central highlands, the Rift Valley, and the Negev Desert. In Eilat, a desert city, summer daytime-temperatures are often the highest in the state, at times reaching 44 to 46 °C (111.2 to 114.8 °F). More than 70% of the average rainfall in Israel falls between November and March; June through September are usually rainless. Rainfall is unevenly distributed, significantly lower in the south of the country. In the extreme south, rainfall averages near 30 millimeters (1.18 in) annually; in the north, average annual rainfall exceeds 900 millimeters (35.4 in). Rainfall varies from season to season and from year to year, particularly in the Negev Desert. Precipitation is often concentrated in violent storms, causing erosion and flash floods. In winter, precipitation often takes the form of snow at the higher elevations of the central highlands, including Jerusalem. Mount Hermon has seasonal snow which covers all three of its peaks in winter and spring. In rare occasions, snow gets to the northern mountain peaks and only in extremely rare occasions even to the coast. The areas of the country most cultivated are those receiving more than 300 millimeters (11.8 in) of rainfall annually, making approximately one-third of the country cultivable.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Thunderstorms and hail are common throughout the rainy season and waterspouts occasionally hit the Mediterranean coast, capable of causing only minor damage. However, supercell thunderstorms and a true F2 tornado hit the Western Galilee in April 2006, causing significant damage and 75 injuries.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Heat waves are frequent. 2010 was the hottest year in the history of Israel with absolute record high in several places in August. The heat became stronger from August when temperatures were considerably above the average. October and November were also dry, and November was almost rainless when it was supposed to be rainy.",
"title": "Climate"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Unlike much of the Middle East which is rich in lucrative crude oil, Israel has limited natural resources. These include copper, phosphates, bromide, potash, clay, sand, sulfur, asphalt, and manganese. Small amounts of natural gas and crude oil are present, often too little to merit commercial extraction. In 2009, significant reserves of natural gas were discovered at the Tamar 1 offshore drilling site, 90 kilometers west of Haifa. It is the largest natural gas reserve ever discovered in Israel.",
"title": "Natural resources"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Israel has a large number of environmental concerns ranging from natural hazards to man-made issues both resulting from ancient times to modern development. Natural hazards facing the country include sandstorms which sometimes occur during spring in the desert south, droughts which are usually concentrated in summer months, flash floods which create great danger in the deserts due to their lack of notice, and regular earthquakes, most of which are small, although there is a constant risk due to Israel's location along the Jordan Rift Valley. Current environmental concerns include the lack of arable land and natural fresh water resources. Whilst measures have been taken to irrigate and grow in the desert, the amount of water needed here poses issues. Desertification is also a risk possible on the desert fringe, whilst air pollution from industrial and vehicle emissions and groundwater pollution from industrial and domestic waste are also issues facing the country. Furthermore, the effects of the use of chemical fertilizers, and pesticides are issues facing the country. Israel has signed many international environmental agreements and is party to:",
"title": "Environmental concerns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Signed but not ratified:",
"title": "Environmental concerns"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Israel's rural space includes several unique kinds of settlements, notably the moshav and the kibbutz. Originally these were collective and cooperative settlements respectively. Over time, the degree of cooperation in these settlements has decreased and in several of them the cooperative structure has been dismantled altogether. All rural settlements and many small towns (some of which are dubbed \"rurban settlements\") are incorporated in regional councils. Land use in Israel is 17% arable land, 4% permanent crops, and 79% other uses. As of 2003 1,940 square kilometers (749 sq mi) were irrigated.",
"title": "Rural settlements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "There are 242 Israeli settlements and civilian land use sites in the West Bank, 42 in the Golan Heights, and 29 in East Jerusalem.",
"title": "Rural settlements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Israel has the Rosh Hanikra Islands and the Achziv Islands within its territorial waters. The Israeli government plans to build artificial islands off the coast to house an airport, a seaport, a desalination plant, a power plant, and a military testing base, as an answer to Israel's lack of space.",
"title": "Islands"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "^a This number includes East Jerusalem and West Bank areas, which had a total population of 573,330 inhabitants in 2019. Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem is internationally unrecognized.",
"title": "Human geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "As of 2013, the population of Israel is 8 million, 6,015,000 of them Jewish.",
"title": "Human geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "For statistical purposes, the country has three metropolitan areas; Gush Dan-Tel Aviv (population 3,150,000), Haifa (population 996,000), and Beersheba (population 531,600). Some argue that Jerusalem, Israel's largest city with a population of 763,600, and Nazareth, should also be classified as metropolitan areas. In total, Israel has 74 cities, 14 of which have populations of over 100,000. Other forms of local government in Israel are local councils of which there are 144 governing small municipalities generally over 2,000 in population, and regional councils of which there are 53, governing a group of small communities over a relatively large geographical area.",
"title": "Human geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Israel's population is diverse demographically; 76% Jewish, 20% Arab, and 4% unaffiliated. In terms of religion, 76% are Jewish, 16% Muslim, 2% Christian, 2% Druze, and 4% are unclassified by choice. 8% of Israeli Jews are haredi; 9% are \"religious\", 12% \"religious-traditionalists\", 27% are \"non-religious traditionalists\", and 43% are \"secular\". Other small, but notable groups in Israel, include Circassians of whom there are approximately 3,000 living mostly in two northern villages, 2,500 Lebanese, and 5,000 Armenians predominantly in Jerusalem.",
"title": "Human geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Israel is ranked 34th in the world in terms of population density with, as noted, a climate of long, hot, rainless summers and relatively short, cool, rainy winters. The Population Matters 2011 overshoot index ranked Israel as the third most dependent region in the World after Singapore and Kuwait.",
"title": "Overshoot index"
}
]
| The geography of Israel is very diverse, with desert conditions in the south, and snow-capped mountains in the north. Israel is located at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea in West Asia. It is bounded to the north by Lebanon, the northeast by Syria, the east by Jordan and the West Bank, and to the southwest by Egypt. To the west of Israel is the Mediterranean Sea, which makes up the majority of Israel's 273 km (170 mi) coastline, and the Gaza Strip. Israel has a small coastline on the Red Sea in the south. Israel's area is approximately 20,770 km2 (8,019 sq mi), which includes 445 km2 (172 sq mi) of inland water. Israel stretches 424 km (263 mi) from north to south, and its width ranges from 114 km (71 mi) at its widest point to 10 km (6.2 mi) at its narrowest point. It has an Exclusive Economic Zone of 26,352 km2 (10,175 sq mi). The Israeli-occupied territories include the West Bank, 5,879 km2 (2,270 sq mi), East Jerusalem, 70 km2 (27 sq mi) and the Golan Heights, 1,150 km2 (444 sq mi). Geographical features in these territories will be noted as such. Of these areas, Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, an act not recognized by the international community. Southern Israel is dominated by the Negev desert, covering some 16,000 square kilometres (6,178 sq mi), more than half of the country's total land area. The north of the Negev contains the Judean Desert, which, at its border with Jordan, contains the Dead Sea which, at −417 m (−1,368 ft) is the lowest point on Earth. The inland area of central Israel is dominated by the Judean Hills of the West Bank, whilst the central and northern coastline consists of the flat and fertile Israeli coastal plain. Inland, the northern region contains the Mount Carmel mountain range, which is followed inland by the fertile Jezreel Valley, and then the hilly Galilee region. The Sea of Galilee is located beyond this region and is bordered to the east by the Golan Heights, a plateau bordered to the north by the Israeli-occupied part of the Mount Hermon massif, which includes the highest point under Israel's control, a peak of 2,224 meters (7,297 ft). The highest point in territory internationally recognized as Israeli is Mount Meron at 1,208 meters (3,963 ft). | 2001-09-26T04:59:02Z | 2023-11-25T12:42:32Z | [
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14,688 | Demographics of Israel | The demographics of Israel, monitored by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, encompass various attributes that define the nation's populace. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has witnessed significant changes in its demographics. Initially formed as a homeland for the Jewish people following the Holocaust in World War II, Israel has attracted Jewish immigrants from around the globe. Consequently, the Jewish population in Israel is incredibly diverse, with roots spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
As of March 2023, Israel's population stands at approximately 9.73 million. Jews make up the majority at 73.5% (about 7.145 million individuals). The Arab community, spanning various religions excluding Judaism, accounts for 21% (around 2.048 million). An additional 5.5% (roughly 534,000 individuals) are classified as "others". This diverse group comprises those with Jewish ancestry but not recognized as Jewish by religious law, non-Jewish family members of Jewish immigrants, Christian non-Arabs, Muslim non-Arabs, and residents without a distinct ethnic or religious categorization.
Beyond the predominant Jewish and Arab communities, there are also smaller ethnic groups, such as the Circassians, Armenians, and Druze.
Israel's annual population growth rate stood at 2.0% in 2015, more than three times faster than the OECD average of around 0.6%. With an average of three children per woman, Israel also has the highest fertility rate in the OECD by a considerable margin and much higher than the OECD average of 1.7.
The definition of the "population of Israel" varies according to which territories are counted and which nationalities and which religious-ethnic groups are counted in each territory. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics ("CBS") defines:
*Jan. 2023 estimate: Israeli population in Seam Area and West Bank Area C combined had more than doubled since 2005 to 502,991.
9,830,720 (most current update from the Israeli Central Bureau for Statistics, via live feed)
Note: includes over 200,000 Israelis and 250,000 Arabs in East Jerusalem, about 421,400 Jewish settlers on the West Bank, and about 42,000 in the Golan Heights (July 2007 estimate). Does not include Arab populations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Does not include 222,000 foreigners living in the country.
Geographic deployment, as of 2018:
During the 1990s, the Jewish population growth rate was about 3% per year, as a result of massive immigration to Israel, primarily from the republics of the former Soviet Union. There is also a very high population growth rate among certain Jewish groups, especially adherents of Orthodox Judaism. The growth rate of the Arab population in Israel is 2.2%, while the growth rate of the Jewish population in Israel is 1.8%. The growth rate of the Arab population has slowed from 3.8% in 1999 to 2.2% in 2013, and for the Jewish population, the growth rate declined from 2.7% to its lowest rate of 1.4% in 2005. Due to a rise in fertility of the Jewish population since 1995 and immigration, the growth rate has since risen to 1.8%.
The total fertility rate (TFR) of a population is the average number of children that an average woman would have, in her lifetime.
Jewish total fertility rate increased by 10.2% during 1998–2009, and was recorded at 2.90 during 2009. During the same time period, Arab TFR decreased by 20.5%. Muslim TFR was measured at 3.73 for 2009. During 2000, the Arab TFR in Jerusalem (4.43) was higher than that of the Jews residing there (3.79). But as of 2009, Jewish TFR in Jerusalem was measured higher than the Arab TFR (2010: 4.26 vs 3.85, 2009: 4.16 vs 3.87). TFR for Arab residents in the West Bank was measured at 2.91 in 2013, while that for the Jewish residents was reported at 5.10 children per woman.
The ethnic group with highest recorded TFR is the Bedouin of Negev. Their TFR was reported at 10.06 in 1998, and 5.73 in 2009. TFR is also very high among Haredi Jews. For Ashkenazi Haredim, the TFR rose from 6.91 in 1980 to 8.51 in 1996. The figure for 2008 is estimated to be even higher. TFR for Sephardi/Mizrahi Haredim rose from 4.57 in 1980 to 6.57 in 1996. In 2020 the overall Jewish TFR in Israel (3.00) was for the first time measured higher than Arab Muslim TFR (2.99).
2021 :
Births, in absolute numbers, by mother's religion
Between the mid-1980s and 2000, the fertility rate in the Muslim sector was stable at 4.6–4.7 children per woman; after 2001, a gradual decline became evident, reaching 3.51 children per woman in 2011. By point of comparison, in 2011, there was a rising fertility rate of 2.98 children among the Jewish population.
As of 2019:
Total:
Jews:
Arab:
The Jewish median age in Jerusalem district and the West Bank are 24.9 and 19.7, respectively, and both account for 16% of the Jewish population, but 24% of 0- to 4-year-olds. The lowest median age in Israel, and one of the lowest in the world, is found in two of the West Bank's biggest Jewish cities: Modi'in Illit (11), Beitar Illit (11) followed by Bedouin towns in the Negev (15.2).
Within Israel's system of local government, an urban municipality can be granted a city council by the Israeli Interior Ministry when its population exceeds 20,000. The term "city" does not generally refer to local councils or urban agglomerations, even though a defined city often contains only a small portion of an urban area or metropolitan area's population.
^a This number includes East Jerusalem and West Bank areas, which had a total population of 573,330 inhabitants in 2019. Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem is internationally unrecognized.
The most prominent ethnic and religious groups that live in Israel at present and that are Israeli citizens or nationals are as follows:
According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2008, of Israel's 7.3 million people, 75.6 percent were Jews of any background. Among them, 70.3 percent were Sabras (born in Israel), mostly second- or third-generation Israelis, and the rest are olim (Jewish immigrants to Israel)—20.5 percent from Europe and the Americas, and 9.2 percent from Asia and Africa, including the Arab countries.
According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, in April 2023, of Israel's 9.7 million people, 73.5 percent, or 7.145 million, were Jews of any background.
There are no government statistics categorizing Israeli Jews as "Ashkenazi", "Mizrahi", etc, but studies and estimates have been conducted. In a 2019 study, in a sample meant to be representative of the Israeli Jewish population, about 44.9% percent of Israel's Jewish population were categorized as Mizrahi (defined as having grandparents born in North Africa or Asia), 31.8% were categorized as Ashkenazi (defined as having grandparents born in Europe, the Americas, Oceania and South Africa), 12.4% as "Soviet" (defined as having progenitors who came from the ex-USSR in 1989 or later), about 3% as Beta Israel (Ethiopia) and 7.9% as a mix of these, or other Jewish groups. Note that this methodology isn't exact: See, for example, Bulgarian or Greek Jews, who would be categorized as Ashkenazi according to this definition, although they are overwhelmingly Sephardic.
The paternal lineage of the Jewish population of Israel as of 2015 is as follows:
Arab citizens of Israel are those Arab residents of Mandatory Palestine that remained within Israel's borders following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the establishment of the State of Israel. It is including those born within the state borders subsequent to this time, as well as those who had left during the establishment of the state (or their descendants), who have since re-entered by means accepted as lawful residence by the Israeli state (primarily family reunifications).
In 2019, the official number of Arab residents in Israel was 1,890,000 people, representing 21% of Israel's population. This figure includes 209,000 Arabs (14% of the Israeli Arab population) in East Jerusalem, also counted in the Palestinian statistics, although 98 percent of East Jerusalem Palestinians have either Israeli residency or Israeli citizenship.
Arab Muslims
Most Arab citizens of Israel are Muslim, particularly of the Sunni branch of Islam. A small minority are Ahmadiyya sect and there are also some Alawites (affiliated with Shia Islam) in the northernmost village of Ghajar with Israeli citizenship. As of 2019, Arab citizens of Israel composed 21 percent of the country's total population. About 82 percent of the Arab population in Israel are Sunni Muslims, a very small minority are Shia Muslims, another 9 percent are Druze, and around 9 percent are Christian (mostly Eastern Orthodox and Catholic denominations).
Bedouin
The Arab Muslim citizens of Israel include also the Bedouins, who are divided into two main groups: the Bedouin in the north of Israel, who live in villages and towns for the most part, and the Bedouin in the Negev, who include half-nomadic and inhabitants of towns and Unrecognized villages. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as of 1999, 110,000 Bedouins live in the Negev, 50,000 in the Galilee and 10,000 in the central region of Israel. The vast majority of Arab Bedouins of Israel practice Sunni Islam.
Ahmadiyya
The Ahmadiyya community was first established in the region in the 1920s, in what was then Mandatory Palestine. There is a large community in Kababir, a neighborhood on Mount Carmel in Haifa. It is unknown how many Israeli Ahmadis there are, although it is estimated there are about 2,200 Ahmadis in Kababir alone.
Arab Christians
As of December 2013, about 161,000 Israeli citizens practiced Christianity, together comprising about 2% of the total population. The largest group consists of Melkites (about 60% of Israel's Christians), followed by the Greek Orthodox (about 30%), with the remaining ca. 10% spread between the Roman Catholic (Latin), Maronite, Anglican, Lutheran, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopian, Coptic and other denominations.
Druze
The Arab citizens of Israel include also the Druze, who numbered at an estimated 143,000 in April 2019. All of the Druze living in what was then British Mandate Palestine became Israeli citizens after the declaration of the State of Israel. Druze serve prominently in the Israel Defense Forces, and are represented in mainstream Israeli politics and business as well, unlike Muslim or Christian Arabs who are not required to and generally choose not to serve in the Israeli army. Though a few individuals identify themselves as "Palestinian Druze", the vast majority of Druze do not consider themselves to be 'Palestinian', and consider their Israeli identity stronger than their Arab identity. A 2017 Pew Research Center poll reported that the majority of the Israeli Druze identified as ethnically Arab.
Arameans
In 2014, Israel decided to recognize the Aramaic community within its borders as a national minority, allowing some of the Christians in Israel to be registered as "Aramean" instead of "Arab". As of October 2014, some 600 Israelis requested to be registered as Arameans, with several thousand eligible for the status – mostly members of the Maronite community.
The Maronite Christian community in Israel of around 7,000 resides mostly in the Galilee, with a presence in Haifa, Nazareth and Jerusalem. It is largely composed of families that lived in Upper Galilee in villages such as Jish long before the establishment of Israel in 1948. In the year 2000, the community was joined by a group of Lebanese SLA militia members and their families, who fled Lebanon after 2000 withdrawal of IDF from South Lebanon.
Assyrians
There are around 1,000 Assyrians living in Israel, mostly in Jerusalem and Nazareth. Assyrians are an Aramaic speaking, Eastern Rite Christian minority who are descended from the ancient Mesopotamians. The old Syriac Orthodox monastery of Saint Mark lies in Jerusalem. Other than followers of the Syriac Orthodox Church, there are also followers of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church living in Israel.
Copts
Some 1,000 Israeli citizens belong to the Coptic community, originating in Egypt.
Samaritans
The Samaritans are an ethnoreligious group of the Levant. Ancestrally, they claim descent from a group of Israelite inhabitants who have connections to ancient Samaria from the beginning of the Babylonian Exile up to the beginning of the Common Era. 2007 population estimates show that 712 Samaritans live half in Holon, Israel and half at Mount Gerizim in the West Bank. The Holon community holds Israeli citizenship, while the Gerizim community resides at an Israeli-controlled enclave, holding dual Israeli-Palestinian citizenship.
Armenians
About 4,000 Armenians reside in Israel mostly in Jerusalem (including in the Armenian Quarter), but also in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jaffa. Armenians have a Patriarchate in Jerusalem and churches in Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa. Although Armenians of Old Jerusalem have Israeli identity cards, they are officially holders of Jordanian passports.
Circassians
In Israel, there are also a few thousand Circassians, living mostly in Kfar Kama (2,000) and Reyhaniye (1,000). These two villages were a part of a greater group of Circassian villages around the Golan Heights. The Circassians in Israel enjoy, like Druzes, a status aparte. Male Circassians (at their leader's request) are mandated for military service, while females are not.
People from post-Soviet states
Ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who were eligible to emigrate due to having, or being married to somebody who has, at least one Jewish grandparent and thus qualified for Israeli citizenship under the revised Law of Return. A number of these immigrants also belong to various ethnic groups from the Former Soviet Union such as Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Uzbeks, Moldovans, Tatars, among others. Some of them, having a Jewish father or grandfather, identify as Jews, but being non-Jewish by Orthodox Halakha (religious law), they are not recognized formally as Jews by the state. Most of them are in the mainstream of Israel culture and are called "expanded Jewish population". In addition, a certain number of former Soviet citizens, primarily women of Russian and Ukrainian ethnicity, emigrated to Israel, after marrying Muslim or Christian Arab citizens of Israel, who went to study in the former Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. 1,557,698 people from the current Russia and Ukraine live in Israel.
Finns
Although most people of Finnish origin in Israel are Finnish Jews who immigrated to Israel, and their descendants, a small number of Finnish Christians moved to Israel in the 1940s before independence and gained citizenship following independence. For the most part, many of the original Finnish settlers intermarried with the other communities in the country, and therefore remain very small in number. A Moshav shitufi near Jerusalem named Yad HaShmona, meaning the "Memorial for the Eight", was established in 1971 by a group of Finnish Christian-Israelis, although today, most members are Israeli, and are predominantly Hebrew speakers, and the moshav has become a center of Messianic Jews.
Baháʼís
The population of followers of the Baháʼí Faith in Israel is almost entirely made up of volunteers serving at the Baháʼí World Centre. Bahá'u'lláh (1817–1892), the Faith's founder, was banished to Akka and died nearby where his shrine is located. During his lifetime he instructed his followers not to teach or convert those living in the area, and the Baháʼís descending from those original immigrants were later asked to leave and teach elsewhere. For nearly a century there has been a policy by Baháʼí leaders to not accept converts living in Israel. The 650 or so foreign national Baháʼís living in Israel are almost all on temporary duty serving at the shrines and administrative offices.
Vietnamese
The number of Vietnamese people in Israel and their descendants is estimated at 150 to 200. Most of them came to Israel in between 1976 and 1979, after prime minister Menachem Begin authorized their admission to Israel and granted them political asylum. The Vietnamese people living in Israel are Israeli citizens who also serve in the Israel Defense Forces. Today, the majority of the community lives in the Gush Dan area in the center of Tel Aviv, but also a few dozen Vietnamese-Israelis or Israelis of Vietnamese origin live in Haifa, Jerusalem, and Ofakim.
African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem
The African Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem is a religious sect of Black Americans, founded in 1960 by Ben Carter a metal worker in Chicago. The members of this sect believe they are descended from the tribes of Judah driven from the Holy Land by the Romans during the First Jewish War (70 AD), and who reportedly emigrated to West Africa before being taken as slaves to the United States. With a population of over 5,000, most members live in their own community in Dimona, Israel, with additional families in Arad, Mitzpe Ramon, and the Tiberias area. The group believes that the ancient Israelites are the ancestors of Black Americans and that the actual Jews are "impostors". Some scholarship does consider them to be of subsaharan African origin, rather than Levantine. Their ancestors were Black Americans who, after being expelled from Liberia, illegally immigrated to Israel in the late 1960s using tourist visas, requesting that Israel provide them legal citizenship status. Israel granted their requests. The African Hebrew Israelites, like the Haredim and most Israeli Arabs, are not required to serve in the military; however, some do.
Naturalized foreign workers
Some naturalized foreign workers and their children born in Israel, predominantly from the Philippines, Nepal, Nigeria, Senegal, Romania, China, Cyprus, Thailand, and South America (mainly Colombia).
African migrants
The number and status of African migrants in Israel is disputed and controversial, but it is estimated that at least 70,000 refugees mainly from Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Ivory Coast reside and work in Israel. A count in late 2011 published in Ynet pointed out the number only in Tel Aviv is 40,000, which represents 10 percent of the city's population. The vast majority live in the southern parts of the city. There is a significant population in the southern Israeli cities of Eilat, Arad, and Beersheba.
Foreign workers
There are around 300,000 foreign workers, residing in Israel under temporary work visas, including Palestinians. Most of those foreign workers engage in agriculture and construction. The main groups of those foreign workers include the Chinese, Thai, Filipinos, Nigerians, Romanians, and Latin Americans.
Other refugees
Approximately 100–200 refugees from Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraqi Kurdistan, and North Korea were absorbed in Israel as refugees. Most of them were also given Israeli resident status, and currently reside in Israel. As of 2006, some 200 ethnic Kurdish refugees from Turkey resided in Israel as illegal immigrants, fleeing the Kurdish–Turkish conflict.
Due to its immigrant nature, Israel is one of the most multicultural and multilingual societies in the world. Hebrew is the official language of the country, and Arabic is given special status, while English and Russian are the two most widely spoken non-official languages. A certain degree of English is spoken widely, and is the language of choice for many Israeli businesses. Hebrew and English language are mandatory subjects in the Israeli school system, and most schools offer either Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Italian, or Russian.
According to a 2010 Israel Central Bureau of Statistics study of Israelis aged over 18:
While the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim, represented only 5% of Israel's population in 1990, they are expected to represent more than one-fifth of Israel's Jewish population by 2028. By 2022, Haredim were 13.3% of the population and enumerated 1,280,000.
Education between ages 5 and 15 is compulsory. It is not free, but it is subsidized by the government, individual organizations (such as the Beit Yaakov System), or a combination. Parents are expected to participate in courses as well. The school system is organized into kindergartens, 6-year primary schools, and either 6-year secondary schools or 3-year junior secondary schools + 3-year senior secondary schools (depending on region), after which a comprehensive examination is offered for university admissions.
Age 15 and over can read and write (2011 estimate):
Israel is the thirtieth-most-densely-crowded country in the world. In an academic article, Jewish National Fund Board member Daniel Orenstein, argues that, as elsewhere, overpopulation is a stressor on the environment in Israel; he shows that environmentalists have conspicuously failed to consider the impact of population on the environment, and argues that overpopulation in Israel has not been appropriately addressed for ideological reasons.
The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order) 5763 was first passed on 31 July 2003, and has since been extended until 31 July 2008. The law places age restrictions for the automatic granting of Israeli citizenship and residency permits to spouses of Israeli citizens, such that spouses who are inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are ineligible. On 8 May 2005, the Israeli ministerial committee for issues of legislation once again amended the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, to restrict citizenship and residence in Israel only to Palestinian men over the age of 35, and Palestinian women over the age of 25. Those in favor of the law say the law not only limits the possibility of the entrance of terrorists into Israel, but, as Ze'ev Boim asserts, allows Israel "to maintain the state's democratic nature, but also its Jewish nature" (i. e., its Jewish demographic majority). Critics, including the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, say the law disproportionately affects Arab citizens of Israel, since Arabs in Israel are far more likely to have spouses from the West Bank and Gaza Strip than other Israeli citizens.
In the constitutional challenges to the Citizenship and Entry to Israel Law, the state, represented by the Attorney General, insisted that security was the only objective behind the law. The state also added that even if the law was intended to achieve demographic objectives, it is still in conformity with Israel's Jewish and democratic definition, and thus constitutional. In a 2012 ruling by the Supreme Court on the issue, some of the judges on the panel discussed demography, and were inclined to accept that demography is a legitimate consideration in devising family reunification policies that violate the right to family life.
In 2013 Israel had an estimated net migration rate of 1.81 migrant(s) per 1,000 population.
Immigrants by last country of residence in recent years (according to CBS and the Jewish Agency):
During the 1970s about 163,000 people of Jewish descent immigrated to Israel from the USSR.
Later Ariel Sharon, in his capacity as Minister of Housing & Construction and member of the Ministerial Committee for Immigration & Absorption, launched an unprecedented large-scale construction effort to accommodate the new Russian population in Israel so as to facilitate their smooth integration and encourage further Jewish immigration as an ongoing means of increasing the Jewish population of Israel. Between 1989 and 2006, about 979,000 Jews emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel.
For many years definitive data on Israeli emigration was unavailable. In The Israeli Diaspora sociologist Stephen J. Gold maintains that calculation of Jewish emigration has been a contentious issue, explaining, "Since Zionism, the philosophy that underlies the existence of the Jewish state, calls for return home of the world's Jews, the opposite movement—Israelis leaving the Jewish state to reside elsewhere—clearly presents an ideological and demographic problem."
In the past several decades, emigration (yerida) has seen a considerable increase. From 1990 to 2005, 230,000 Israelis left the country; a large proportion of these departures included people who initially immigrated to Israel and then reversed their course (48% of all post-1990 departures and even 60% of 2003 and 2004 departures were former immigrants to Israel). 8% of Jewish immigrants in the post-1990 period left Israel, while 15% of non-Jewish immigrants did. In 2005 alone, 21,500 Israelis left the country and had not yet returned at the end of 2006; among them 73% were Jews, 5% Arabs, and 22% "Others" (mostly non-Jewish immigrants, with Jewish ancestry, from USSR). At the same time, 10,500 Israelis came back to Israel after over one year abroad; 84% were Jews, 9% Others, and 7% Arabs.
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, as of 2005, 650,000 Israelis had left the country for over one year and not returned. Of them, 530,000 are still alive today. This number does not include the children born overseas. It should also be noted that Israeli law grants citizenship only to the first generation of children born to Israeli emigrants.
In June 2013, the Central Bureau of Statistics released a demographic report, projecting that Israel's population would grow to 11.4 million by 2035, with the Jewish population numbering 8.3 million, or 73% of the population, and the Arab population at 2.6 million, or 23%. This includes some 2.3 million Muslims (20% of the population), 185,000 Druze, and 152,000 Christians. The report predicts that the Israeli population growth rate will decline to 1.4% annually, with growth in the Muslim population remaining higher than the Jewish population until 2035, at which point the Jewish population will begin growing the fastest.
In 2017, the Central Bureau of Statistics projected that Israel's population would rise to about 18 million by 2059, including 14.4 million Jews and 3.6 million Arabs. Of the Jewish population, about 5.25 million would be Haredi. Overall, the forecast projected that 49% of the population would be either Haredi Jews (29%) or Arabs (20%). It also projected a population of 20 million in 2065. Jews and other non-Arabs are expected to compose 81% of the population in 2065, and Arabs 19%. About 32% of the population is expected to be Haredi.
Other forecasts project that Israel could have a population as high as 23 million, or even 36 million, by 2050. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The demographics of Israel, monitored by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, encompass various attributes that define the nation's populace. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has witnessed significant changes in its demographics. Initially formed as a homeland for the Jewish people following the Holocaust in World War II, Israel has attracted Jewish immigrants from around the globe. Consequently, the Jewish population in Israel is incredibly diverse, with roots spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "As of March 2023, Israel's population stands at approximately 9.73 million. Jews make up the majority at 73.5% (about 7.145 million individuals). The Arab community, spanning various religions excluding Judaism, accounts for 21% (around 2.048 million). An additional 5.5% (roughly 534,000 individuals) are classified as \"others\". This diverse group comprises those with Jewish ancestry but not recognized as Jewish by religious law, non-Jewish family members of Jewish immigrants, Christian non-Arabs, Muslim non-Arabs, and residents without a distinct ethnic or religious categorization.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Beyond the predominant Jewish and Arab communities, there are also smaller ethnic groups, such as the Circassians, Armenians, and Druze.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Israel's annual population growth rate stood at 2.0% in 2015, more than three times faster than the OECD average of around 0.6%. With an average of three children per woman, Israel also has the highest fertility rate in the OECD by a considerable margin and much higher than the OECD average of 1.7.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The definition of the \"population of Israel\" varies according to which territories are counted and which nationalities and which religious-ethnic groups are counted in each territory. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (\"CBS\") defines:",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "*Jan. 2023 estimate: Israeli population in Seam Area and West Bank Area C combined had more than doubled since 2005 to 502,991.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "9,830,720 (most current update from the Israeli Central Bureau for Statistics, via live feed)",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Note: includes over 200,000 Israelis and 250,000 Arabs in East Jerusalem, about 421,400 Jewish settlers on the West Bank, and about 42,000 in the Golan Heights (July 2007 estimate). Does not include Arab populations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Does not include 222,000 foreigners living in the country.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Geographic deployment, as of 2018:",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "During the 1990s, the Jewish population growth rate was about 3% per year, as a result of massive immigration to Israel, primarily from the republics of the former Soviet Union. There is also a very high population growth rate among certain Jewish groups, especially adherents of Orthodox Judaism. The growth rate of the Arab population in Israel is 2.2%, while the growth rate of the Jewish population in Israel is 1.8%. The growth rate of the Arab population has slowed from 3.8% in 1999 to 2.2% in 2013, and for the Jewish population, the growth rate declined from 2.7% to its lowest rate of 1.4% in 2005. Due to a rise in fertility of the Jewish population since 1995 and immigration, the growth rate has since risen to 1.8%.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The total fertility rate (TFR) of a population is the average number of children that an average woman would have, in her lifetime.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Jewish total fertility rate increased by 10.2% during 1998–2009, and was recorded at 2.90 during 2009. During the same time period, Arab TFR decreased by 20.5%. Muslim TFR was measured at 3.73 for 2009. During 2000, the Arab TFR in Jerusalem (4.43) was higher than that of the Jews residing there (3.79). But as of 2009, Jewish TFR in Jerusalem was measured higher than the Arab TFR (2010: 4.26 vs 3.85, 2009: 4.16 vs 3.87). TFR for Arab residents in the West Bank was measured at 2.91 in 2013, while that for the Jewish residents was reported at 5.10 children per woman.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The ethnic group with highest recorded TFR is the Bedouin of Negev. Their TFR was reported at 10.06 in 1998, and 5.73 in 2009. TFR is also very high among Haredi Jews. For Ashkenazi Haredim, the TFR rose from 6.91 in 1980 to 8.51 in 1996. The figure for 2008 is estimated to be even higher. TFR for Sephardi/Mizrahi Haredim rose from 4.57 in 1980 to 6.57 in 1996. In 2020 the overall Jewish TFR in Israel (3.00) was for the first time measured higher than Arab Muslim TFR (2.99).",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "2021 :",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Births, in absolute numbers, by mother's religion",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Between the mid-1980s and 2000, the fertility rate in the Muslim sector was stable at 4.6–4.7 children per woman; after 2001, a gradual decline became evident, reaching 3.51 children per woman in 2011. By point of comparison, in 2011, there was a rising fertility rate of 2.98 children among the Jewish population.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "As of 2019:",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Total:",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Jews:",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Arab:",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Jewish median age in Jerusalem district and the West Bank are 24.9 and 19.7, respectively, and both account for 16% of the Jewish population, but 24% of 0- to 4-year-olds. The lowest median age in Israel, and one of the lowest in the world, is found in two of the West Bank's biggest Jewish cities: Modi'in Illit (11), Beitar Illit (11) followed by Bedouin towns in the Negev (15.2).",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Within Israel's system of local government, an urban municipality can be granted a city council by the Israeli Interior Ministry when its population exceeds 20,000. The term \"city\" does not generally refer to local councils or urban agglomerations, even though a defined city often contains only a small portion of an urban area or metropolitan area's population.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "^a This number includes East Jerusalem and West Bank areas, which had a total population of 573,330 inhabitants in 2019. Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem is internationally unrecognized.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The most prominent ethnic and religious groups that live in Israel at present and that are Israeli citizens or nationals are as follows:",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2008, of Israel's 7.3 million people, 75.6 percent were Jews of any background. Among them, 70.3 percent were Sabras (born in Israel), mostly second- or third-generation Israelis, and the rest are olim (Jewish immigrants to Israel)—20.5 percent from Europe and the Americas, and 9.2 percent from Asia and Africa, including the Arab countries.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, in April 2023, of Israel's 9.7 million people, 73.5 percent, or 7.145 million, were Jews of any background.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "There are no government statistics categorizing Israeli Jews as \"Ashkenazi\", \"Mizrahi\", etc, but studies and estimates have been conducted. In a 2019 study, in a sample meant to be representative of the Israeli Jewish population, about 44.9% percent of Israel's Jewish population were categorized as Mizrahi (defined as having grandparents born in North Africa or Asia), 31.8% were categorized as Ashkenazi (defined as having grandparents born in Europe, the Americas, Oceania and South Africa), 12.4% as \"Soviet\" (defined as having progenitors who came from the ex-USSR in 1989 or later), about 3% as Beta Israel (Ethiopia) and 7.9% as a mix of these, or other Jewish groups. Note that this methodology isn't exact: See, for example, Bulgarian or Greek Jews, who would be categorized as Ashkenazi according to this definition, although they are overwhelmingly Sephardic.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The paternal lineage of the Jewish population of Israel as of 2015 is as follows:",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Arab citizens of Israel are those Arab residents of Mandatory Palestine that remained within Israel's borders following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the establishment of the State of Israel. It is including those born within the state borders subsequent to this time, as well as those who had left during the establishment of the state (or their descendants), who have since re-entered by means accepted as lawful residence by the Israeli state (primarily family reunifications).",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 2019, the official number of Arab residents in Israel was 1,890,000 people, representing 21% of Israel's population. This figure includes 209,000 Arabs (14% of the Israeli Arab population) in East Jerusalem, also counted in the Palestinian statistics, although 98 percent of East Jerusalem Palestinians have either Israeli residency or Israeli citizenship.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Arab Muslims",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Most Arab citizens of Israel are Muslim, particularly of the Sunni branch of Islam. A small minority are Ahmadiyya sect and there are also some Alawites (affiliated with Shia Islam) in the northernmost village of Ghajar with Israeli citizenship. As of 2019, Arab citizens of Israel composed 21 percent of the country's total population. About 82 percent of the Arab population in Israel are Sunni Muslims, a very small minority are Shia Muslims, another 9 percent are Druze, and around 9 percent are Christian (mostly Eastern Orthodox and Catholic denominations).",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Bedouin",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Arab Muslim citizens of Israel include also the Bedouins, who are divided into two main groups: the Bedouin in the north of Israel, who live in villages and towns for the most part, and the Bedouin in the Negev, who include half-nomadic and inhabitants of towns and Unrecognized villages. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as of 1999, 110,000 Bedouins live in the Negev, 50,000 in the Galilee and 10,000 in the central region of Israel. The vast majority of Arab Bedouins of Israel practice Sunni Islam.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Ahmadiyya",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Ahmadiyya community was first established in the region in the 1920s, in what was then Mandatory Palestine. There is a large community in Kababir, a neighborhood on Mount Carmel in Haifa. It is unknown how many Israeli Ahmadis there are, although it is estimated there are about 2,200 Ahmadis in Kababir alone.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Arab Christians",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "As of December 2013, about 161,000 Israeli citizens practiced Christianity, together comprising about 2% of the total population. The largest group consists of Melkites (about 60% of Israel's Christians), followed by the Greek Orthodox (about 30%), with the remaining ca. 10% spread between the Roman Catholic (Latin), Maronite, Anglican, Lutheran, Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopian, Coptic and other denominations.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Druze",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The Arab citizens of Israel include also the Druze, who numbered at an estimated 143,000 in April 2019. All of the Druze living in what was then British Mandate Palestine became Israeli citizens after the declaration of the State of Israel. Druze serve prominently in the Israel Defense Forces, and are represented in mainstream Israeli politics and business as well, unlike Muslim or Christian Arabs who are not required to and generally choose not to serve in the Israeli army. Though a few individuals identify themselves as \"Palestinian Druze\", the vast majority of Druze do not consider themselves to be 'Palestinian', and consider their Israeli identity stronger than their Arab identity. A 2017 Pew Research Center poll reported that the majority of the Israeli Druze identified as ethnically Arab.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Arameans",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 2014, Israel decided to recognize the Aramaic community within its borders as a national minority, allowing some of the Christians in Israel to be registered as \"Aramean\" instead of \"Arab\". As of October 2014, some 600 Israelis requested to be registered as Arameans, with several thousand eligible for the status – mostly members of the Maronite community.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Maronite Christian community in Israel of around 7,000 resides mostly in the Galilee, with a presence in Haifa, Nazareth and Jerusalem. It is largely composed of families that lived in Upper Galilee in villages such as Jish long before the establishment of Israel in 1948. In the year 2000, the community was joined by a group of Lebanese SLA militia members and their families, who fled Lebanon after 2000 withdrawal of IDF from South Lebanon.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Assyrians",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "There are around 1,000 Assyrians living in Israel, mostly in Jerusalem and Nazareth. Assyrians are an Aramaic speaking, Eastern Rite Christian minority who are descended from the ancient Mesopotamians. The old Syriac Orthodox monastery of Saint Mark lies in Jerusalem. Other than followers of the Syriac Orthodox Church, there are also followers of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church living in Israel.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Copts",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Some 1,000 Israeli citizens belong to the Coptic community, originating in Egypt.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Samaritans",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Samaritans are an ethnoreligious group of the Levant. Ancestrally, they claim descent from a group of Israelite inhabitants who have connections to ancient Samaria from the beginning of the Babylonian Exile up to the beginning of the Common Era. 2007 population estimates show that 712 Samaritans live half in Holon, Israel and half at Mount Gerizim in the West Bank. The Holon community holds Israeli citizenship, while the Gerizim community resides at an Israeli-controlled enclave, holding dual Israeli-Palestinian citizenship.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Armenians",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "About 4,000 Armenians reside in Israel mostly in Jerusalem (including in the Armenian Quarter), but also in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jaffa. Armenians have a Patriarchate in Jerusalem and churches in Jerusalem, Haifa and Jaffa. Although Armenians of Old Jerusalem have Israeli identity cards, they are officially holders of Jordanian passports.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Circassians",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In Israel, there are also a few thousand Circassians, living mostly in Kfar Kama (2,000) and Reyhaniye (1,000). These two villages were a part of a greater group of Circassian villages around the Golan Heights. The Circassians in Israel enjoy, like Druzes, a status aparte. Male Circassians (at their leader's request) are mandated for military service, while females are not.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "People from post-Soviet states",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who were eligible to emigrate due to having, or being married to somebody who has, at least one Jewish grandparent and thus qualified for Israeli citizenship under the revised Law of Return. A number of these immigrants also belong to various ethnic groups from the Former Soviet Union such as Armenians, Georgians, Azeris, Uzbeks, Moldovans, Tatars, among others. Some of them, having a Jewish father or grandfather, identify as Jews, but being non-Jewish by Orthodox Halakha (religious law), they are not recognized formally as Jews by the state. Most of them are in the mainstream of Israel culture and are called \"expanded Jewish population\". In addition, a certain number of former Soviet citizens, primarily women of Russian and Ukrainian ethnicity, emigrated to Israel, after marrying Muslim or Christian Arab citizens of Israel, who went to study in the former Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. 1,557,698 people from the current Russia and Ukraine live in Israel.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Finns",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Although most people of Finnish origin in Israel are Finnish Jews who immigrated to Israel, and their descendants, a small number of Finnish Christians moved to Israel in the 1940s before independence and gained citizenship following independence. For the most part, many of the original Finnish settlers intermarried with the other communities in the country, and therefore remain very small in number. A Moshav shitufi near Jerusalem named Yad HaShmona, meaning the \"Memorial for the Eight\", was established in 1971 by a group of Finnish Christian-Israelis, although today, most members are Israeli, and are predominantly Hebrew speakers, and the moshav has become a center of Messianic Jews.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Baháʼís",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The population of followers of the Baháʼí Faith in Israel is almost entirely made up of volunteers serving at the Baháʼí World Centre. Bahá'u'lláh (1817–1892), the Faith's founder, was banished to Akka and died nearby where his shrine is located. During his lifetime he instructed his followers not to teach or convert those living in the area, and the Baháʼís descending from those original immigrants were later asked to leave and teach elsewhere. For nearly a century there has been a policy by Baháʼí leaders to not accept converts living in Israel. The 650 or so foreign national Baháʼís living in Israel are almost all on temporary duty serving at the shrines and administrative offices.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Vietnamese",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The number of Vietnamese people in Israel and their descendants is estimated at 150 to 200. Most of them came to Israel in between 1976 and 1979, after prime minister Menachem Begin authorized their admission to Israel and granted them political asylum. The Vietnamese people living in Israel are Israeli citizens who also serve in the Israel Defense Forces. Today, the majority of the community lives in the Gush Dan area in the center of Tel Aviv, but also a few dozen Vietnamese-Israelis or Israelis of Vietnamese origin live in Haifa, Jerusalem, and Ofakim.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The African Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem is a religious sect of Black Americans, founded in 1960 by Ben Carter a metal worker in Chicago. The members of this sect believe they are descended from the tribes of Judah driven from the Holy Land by the Romans during the First Jewish War (70 AD), and who reportedly emigrated to West Africa before being taken as slaves to the United States. With a population of over 5,000, most members live in their own community in Dimona, Israel, with additional families in Arad, Mitzpe Ramon, and the Tiberias area. The group believes that the ancient Israelites are the ancestors of Black Americans and that the actual Jews are \"impostors\". Some scholarship does consider them to be of subsaharan African origin, rather than Levantine. Their ancestors were Black Americans who, after being expelled from Liberia, illegally immigrated to Israel in the late 1960s using tourist visas, requesting that Israel provide them legal citizenship status. Israel granted their requests. The African Hebrew Israelites, like the Haredim and most Israeli Arabs, are not required to serve in the military; however, some do.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Naturalized foreign workers",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Some naturalized foreign workers and their children born in Israel, predominantly from the Philippines, Nepal, Nigeria, Senegal, Romania, China, Cyprus, Thailand, and South America (mainly Colombia).",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "African migrants",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The number and status of African migrants in Israel is disputed and controversial, but it is estimated that at least 70,000 refugees mainly from Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Ivory Coast reside and work in Israel. A count in late 2011 published in Ynet pointed out the number only in Tel Aviv is 40,000, which represents 10 percent of the city's population. The vast majority live in the southern parts of the city. There is a significant population in the southern Israeli cities of Eilat, Arad, and Beersheba.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Foreign workers",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "There are around 300,000 foreign workers, residing in Israel under temporary work visas, including Palestinians. Most of those foreign workers engage in agriculture and construction. The main groups of those foreign workers include the Chinese, Thai, Filipinos, Nigerians, Romanians, and Latin Americans.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Other refugees",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Approximately 100–200 refugees from Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraqi Kurdistan, and North Korea were absorbed in Israel as refugees. Most of them were also given Israeli resident status, and currently reside in Israel. As of 2006, some 200 ethnic Kurdish refugees from Turkey resided in Israel as illegal immigrants, fleeing the Kurdish–Turkish conflict.",
"title": "Ethnic and religious groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Due to its immigrant nature, Israel is one of the most multicultural and multilingual societies in the world. Hebrew is the official language of the country, and Arabic is given special status, while English and Russian are the two most widely spoken non-official languages. A certain degree of English is spoken widely, and is the language of choice for many Israeli businesses. Hebrew and English language are mandatory subjects in the Israeli school system, and most schools offer either Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Italian, or Russian.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "According to a 2010 Israel Central Bureau of Statistics study of Israelis aged over 18:",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "While the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim, represented only 5% of Israel's population in 1990, they are expected to represent more than one-fifth of Israel's Jewish population by 2028. By 2022, Haredim were 13.3% of the population and enumerated 1,280,000.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Education between ages 5 and 15 is compulsory. It is not free, but it is subsidized by the government, individual organizations (such as the Beit Yaakov System), or a combination. Parents are expected to participate in courses as well. The school system is organized into kindergartens, 6-year primary schools, and either 6-year secondary schools or 3-year junior secondary schools + 3-year senior secondary schools (depending on region), after which a comprehensive examination is offered for university admissions.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Age 15 and over can read and write (2011 estimate):",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Israel is the thirtieth-most-densely-crowded country in the world. In an academic article, Jewish National Fund Board member Daniel Orenstein, argues that, as elsewhere, overpopulation is a stressor on the environment in Israel; he shows that environmentalists have conspicuously failed to consider the impact of population on the environment, and argues that overpopulation in Israel has not been appropriately addressed for ideological reasons.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order) 5763 was first passed on 31 July 2003, and has since been extended until 31 July 2008. The law places age restrictions for the automatic granting of Israeli citizenship and residency permits to spouses of Israeli citizens, such that spouses who are inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are ineligible. On 8 May 2005, the Israeli ministerial committee for issues of legislation once again amended the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law, to restrict citizenship and residence in Israel only to Palestinian men over the age of 35, and Palestinian women over the age of 25. Those in favor of the law say the law not only limits the possibility of the entrance of terrorists into Israel, but, as Ze'ev Boim asserts, allows Israel \"to maintain the state's democratic nature, but also its Jewish nature\" (i. e., its Jewish demographic majority). Critics, including the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, say the law disproportionately affects Arab citizens of Israel, since Arabs in Israel are far more likely to have spouses from the West Bank and Gaza Strip than other Israeli citizens.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In the constitutional challenges to the Citizenship and Entry to Israel Law, the state, represented by the Attorney General, insisted that security was the only objective behind the law. The state also added that even if the law was intended to achieve demographic objectives, it is still in conformity with Israel's Jewish and democratic definition, and thus constitutional. In a 2012 ruling by the Supreme Court on the issue, some of the judges on the panel discussed demography, and were inclined to accept that demography is a legitimate consideration in devising family reunification policies that violate the right to family life.",
"title": "Policy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In 2013 Israel had an estimated net migration rate of 1.81 migrant(s) per 1,000 population.",
"title": "Migration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Immigrants by last country of residence in recent years (according to CBS and the Jewish Agency):",
"title": "Migration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "During the 1970s about 163,000 people of Jewish descent immigrated to Israel from the USSR.",
"title": "Migration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Later Ariel Sharon, in his capacity as Minister of Housing & Construction and member of the Ministerial Committee for Immigration & Absorption, launched an unprecedented large-scale construction effort to accommodate the new Russian population in Israel so as to facilitate their smooth integration and encourage further Jewish immigration as an ongoing means of increasing the Jewish population of Israel. Between 1989 and 2006, about 979,000 Jews emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel.",
"title": "Migration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "For many years definitive data on Israeli emigration was unavailable. In The Israeli Diaspora sociologist Stephen J. Gold maintains that calculation of Jewish emigration has been a contentious issue, explaining, \"Since Zionism, the philosophy that underlies the existence of the Jewish state, calls for return home of the world's Jews, the opposite movement—Israelis leaving the Jewish state to reside elsewhere—clearly presents an ideological and demographic problem.\"",
"title": "Migration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "In the past several decades, emigration (yerida) has seen a considerable increase. From 1990 to 2005, 230,000 Israelis left the country; a large proportion of these departures included people who initially immigrated to Israel and then reversed their course (48% of all post-1990 departures and even 60% of 2003 and 2004 departures were former immigrants to Israel). 8% of Jewish immigrants in the post-1990 period left Israel, while 15% of non-Jewish immigrants did. In 2005 alone, 21,500 Israelis left the country and had not yet returned at the end of 2006; among them 73% were Jews, 5% Arabs, and 22% \"Others\" (mostly non-Jewish immigrants, with Jewish ancestry, from USSR). At the same time, 10,500 Israelis came back to Israel after over one year abroad; 84% were Jews, 9% Others, and 7% Arabs.",
"title": "Migration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, as of 2005, 650,000 Israelis had left the country for over one year and not returned. Of them, 530,000 are still alive today. This number does not include the children born overseas. It should also be noted that Israeli law grants citizenship only to the first generation of children born to Israeli emigrants.",
"title": "Migration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In June 2013, the Central Bureau of Statistics released a demographic report, projecting that Israel's population would grow to 11.4 million by 2035, with the Jewish population numbering 8.3 million, or 73% of the population, and the Arab population at 2.6 million, or 23%. This includes some 2.3 million Muslims (20% of the population), 185,000 Druze, and 152,000 Christians. The report predicts that the Israeli population growth rate will decline to 1.4% annually, with growth in the Muslim population remaining higher than the Jewish population until 2035, at which point the Jewish population will begin growing the fastest.",
"title": "Future projections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "In 2017, the Central Bureau of Statistics projected that Israel's population would rise to about 18 million by 2059, including 14.4 million Jews and 3.6 million Arabs. Of the Jewish population, about 5.25 million would be Haredi. Overall, the forecast projected that 49% of the population would be either Haredi Jews (29%) or Arabs (20%). It also projected a population of 20 million in 2065. Jews and other non-Arabs are expected to compose 81% of the population in 2065, and Arabs 19%. About 32% of the population is expected to be Haredi.",
"title": "Future projections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Other forecasts project that Israel could have a population as high as 23 million, or even 36 million, by 2050.",
"title": "Future projections"
}
]
| The demographics of Israel, monitored by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, encompass various attributes that define the nation's populace. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has witnessed significant changes in its demographics. Initially formed as a homeland for the Jewish people following the Holocaust in World War II, Israel has attracted Jewish immigrants from around the globe. Consequently, the Jewish population in Israel is incredibly diverse, with roots spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. As of March 2023, Israel's population stands at approximately 9.73 million. Jews make up the majority at 73.5%. The Arab community, spanning various religions excluding Judaism, accounts for 21%. An additional 5.5% are classified as "others". This diverse group comprises those with Jewish ancestry but not recognized as Jewish by religious law, non-Jewish family members of Jewish immigrants, Christian non-Arabs, Muslim non-Arabs, and residents without a distinct ethnic or religious categorization. Beyond the predominant Jewish and Arab communities, there are also smaller ethnic groups, such as the Circassians, Armenians, and Druze. Israel's annual population growth rate stood at 2.0% in 2015, more than three times faster than the OECD average of around 0.6%. With an average of three children per woman, Israel also has the highest fertility rate in the OECD by a considerable margin and much higher than the OECD average of 1.7. | 2001-09-15T16:15:01Z | 2023-12-31T18:00:55Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel |
14,690 | Economy of Israel | The economy of Israel is a highly developed free-market economy. The prosperity of Israel's advanced economy allows the country to have a sophisticated welfare state, a powerful modern military said to possess a nuclear-weapons capability with a full nuclear triad, modern infrastructure rivaling many Western countries, and a high-technology sector competitively on par with Silicon Valley. It has the second-largest number of startup companies in the world after the United States, and the third-largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies after the U.S. and China. American companies, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple, built their first overseas research and development facilities in Israel. More than 400 high-tech multi-national corporations, such as IBM, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Facebook and Motorola have opened R&D centers throughout the country.
The country's major economic sectors are high-technology and industrial manufacturing. The Israeli diamond industry is one of the world's centers for diamond cutting and polishing, amounting to 23.2% of all exports. As the country is relatively poor in natural resources, it consequently depends on imports of petroleum, raw materials, wheat, motor vehicles, uncut diamonds and production inputs. Nonetheless, the country's nearly total reliance on energy imports may change in the future as recent discoveries of natural gas reserves off its coast and the Israeli solar energy industry have taken a leading role in Israel's energy sector.
Israel's quality higher education and the establishment of a highly motivated and educated populace is largely responsible for ushering in the country's high technology boom and rapid economic development by regional standards. The country has developed a strong educational infrastructure and a high-quality business startup incubation system for promoting cutting edge new ideas to create value-driven goods and services. These developments have allowed the country to create a high concentration of high-tech companies across the country's regions. These companies are financially backed by a strong venture capital industry. Its central high technology hub, the "Silicon Wadi", is considered second in importance only to its Californian counterpart. Numerous Israeli companies have been acquired by global multinational corporations for their profit-driven technologies in addition to their reliable and quality corporate personnel.
In its early decades, the Israeli economy was largely state-controlled and shaped by social democratic ideas. In the 1970s and 1980s, the economy underwent a series of free-market reforms and was gradually liberalized. In the past three decades, the economy has grown considerably, though GDP per capita has increased faster than wages. Israel is the most developed and advanced country in West Asia, possessing the 17th largest foreign-exchange reserves in the world and the highest average wealth per adult in the Middle East (10th worldwide by financial assets per capita). Israel is the 9th largest arm exporter in the world and has the highest number of billionaires in the Middle East, ranked 18th in the world. In recent years, Israel has had among the highest GDP growth rates within the developed world along with Ireland. The Economist ranked Israel as the 4th most successful economy among developed countries for 2022. The IMF estimated Israel's GDP at US$564 billion and its GDP per capita at US$58,270 in 2023 (13th highest in the world), a figure comparable to other highly developed countries. Israel was invited to join the OECD in 2010. Israel has also signed free trade agreements with the European Union, the United States, the European Free Trade Association, Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Ukraine, Jordan, and Egypt. In 2007, Israel became the first non-Latin-American country to sign a free trade agreement with the Mercosur trade bloc.
The British Mandate for Palestine that came into effect in 1920 aimed at restricting land purchases by Jewish immigrants. For this reason, the Jewish population was initially more urban and had a higher share in industrial occupations. This particular development resulted economically in one of the few growth miracles of the region whereby the structure of firms was determined mainly by private businessmen rather than by the government. The first survey of the Dead Sea in 1911, by the Russian Jewish businessman and engineer Moshe Novomeysky, led to the establishment of Palestine Potash Ltd. in 1930, later renamed the Dead Sea Works. In 1923, the businessman and hydraulic engineer Pinhas Rutenberg was granted an exclusive concession for the production and distribution of electric power. He founded the Palestine Electric Company, later the Israel Electric Corporation. Between 1920 and 1924, some of the country's largest factories were established, including the Shemen Oil Company, the Societe des Grand Moulins, the Palestine Silicate Company and the Palestine Salt Company.
In 1937, there were 86 spinning and weaving factories in the country, employing a workforce of 1,500. Capital and technical expertise were supplied by Jewish professionals from Europe. The Ata textile plant in Kiryat Ata, which went on to become an icon of the Israeli textile industry, was established in 1934. In 1939, the cornerstone was laid for one of the kibbutz industry's first factories: the Naaman brick factory, which supplied the growing need for construction materials.
The textile underwent rapid development during World War II, when supplies from Europe were cut off while local manufacturers were commissioned for army needs. By 1943, the number of factories had grown to 250, with a workforce of 5,630, and output increased tenfold.
From 1924, trade fairs were held in Tel Aviv. The Levant Fair was inaugurated in 1932.
After statehood, Israel faced a deep economic crisis. As well as having to recover from the devastating effects of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, it also had to absorb hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe and almost a million from the Arab world. Israel was financially overwhelmed and faced a deep economic crisis, which led to a policy of austerity from 1949 to 1959. Unemployment was high, and foreign currency reserves were scarce.
In 1952, Israel and West Germany signed an agreement stipulating that West Germany was to pay Israel to compensate for Jewish property stolen by the Nazis, material claims during the Holocaust, and absorption of refugees as a result. Over the next 14 years, West Germany paid Israel 3 billion marks (around 714 million USD according to 1953-1955 conversion rates or equivalent to approximately US$7 billion in modern currency). The reparations became a decisive part of Israel's income, comprising as high as 87.5% of Israel's income in 1956. Israel never had any formal diplomatic relations with East Germany. In 1950, the Israeli government launched Israel Bonds for American and Canadian Jews to buy. In 1951, the final results of the bonds program exceeded $52 million. Additionally, many American Jews made private donations to Israel, which in 1956 were thought to amount to $100 million a year. In 1957, bond sales amounted to 35% of Israel's special development budget. Later in the century, Israel became significantly reliant on economic aid from the United States, a country that also became Israel's most important source of political support internationally.
The proceeds from these sources were invested in industrial and agricultural development projects, which allowed Israel to become economically self-sufficient. Among the projects made possible by the aid was the Hadera power plant, the Dead Sea Works, the National Water Carrier, port development in Haifa, Ashdod, and Eilat, desalination plants, and national infrastructure projects.
After statehood, priority was given to establishing industries in areas slated for development, among them, Lachish, Ashkelon, the Negev and Galilee. The expansion of Israel's textile industry was a consequence of the development of cotton growing as a profitable agricultural branch. By the late 1960s, textiles were one of the largest industrial branches in Israel, second only to the foodstuff industry. Textiles constituted about 12% of industrial exports, becoming the second-largest export branch after polished diamonds. In the 1990s, cheap East Asian labor decreased the profitability of the sector. Much of the work was subcontracted to 400 Israeli Arab sewing shops. As these closed down, Israeli firms, among them Delta, Polgat, Argeman and Kitan, began doing their sewing work in Jordan and Egypt, usually under the QIZ arrangement. In the early 2000s, Israeli companies had 30 plants in Jordan. Israeli exports reached $370 million a year, supplying such retailers and designers as Marks & Spencer, The Gap, Victoria's Secret, Walmart, Sears, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Donna Karan.
In its first two decades of existence, Israel's strong commitment to development led to economic growth rates that exceeded 10% annually. Between 1950 and 1963, the expenditure among wage-earner's families rose 97% in real terms. Between 1955 and 1966, per capita consumption rose by 221%. The years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War were a lost decade economically, as growth stalled, inflation soared and government expenditures rose significantly. Also worthy of mention is the 1983 Bank stock crisis. By 1984, the economic situation became almost catastrophic with inflation reaching an annual rate close to 450% and projected to reach over 1000% by the end of the following year. However, the successful economic stabilization plan implemented in 1985 and the subsequent introduction of market-oriented structural reforms reinvigorated the economy and paved the way for its rapid growth in the 1990s and became a model for other countries facing similar economic crises.
Two developments have helped to transform Israel's economy since the beginning of the 1990s. The first is waves of Jewish immigration, predominantly from the countries of the former USSR, that has brought over one million new citizens to Israel. These new Soviet Jewish immigrants, many of them highly educated, had a wellspring of scientific and technical expertise to help spur Israel's burgeoning technology sector, now constitute some 15% of Israel's population. The second development benefiting the Israeli economy is the peace process that begun at the Madrid conference of October 1991, which led to the signing of accords and later to a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan (1994).
During the early 2000s, the Israeli economy went into a downturn due to the crashing of the global dot-com bubble which bankrupted many startups established during the height of the bubble. The Second Intifada, which cost Israel billions of dollars in security costs, and a decline in investment and tourism, sent unemployment in Israel to the double digits; growth in one quarter of 2000 was 10%. In 2002, the Israeli economy declined about 4% in one quarter. Afterward, Israel managed to create a remarkable recovery by opening up new markets to Israeli exporters farther afield, such as in the rapidly growing countries of East Asia. This was possible thanks to a rebound in the Israeli tech sector, spurred on by the gradual bottoming out of the dotcom crash and a growing increase in demand for computer software, which in turn was due to burgeoning rates of global internet usage at this time. The explosion in demand for security and defense products following 9/11 also allowed Israel to sell even more of its technologies abroad - a situation only made possible due to Israel’s prior investments in the technology sector in an effort to curb high levels of domestic unemployment.
In the 2000s, there was an influx of foreign investment in Israel from companies that formerly shunned the Israeli market. In 2006, foreign investment in Israel totalled $13 billion, according to the Manufacturers Association of Israel. The Financial Times said that "bombs drop, yet Israel's economy grows". Moreover, while Israel's total gross external debt is US$95 billion, or approximately 41.6% of GDP, since 2001 it has become a net lender nation in terms of net external debt (the total value of assets vs. liabilities in debt instruments owed abroad), which as of June 2012 stood at a significant surplus of US$60 billion. The country also maintains a current account surplus in an amount equivalent to about 3% of its gross domestic product in 2010.
The Israeli economy weathered and withstood the late-2000s recession, registering positive GDP growth in 2009 and ending the decade with an unemployment rate lower than that of many of its Western counterparts. There are several reasons behind this economic resilience, for example, the fact that the country is a net lender rather than a borrower nation and the government and the Bank of Israel's generally conservative macro-economic policies. Two policies, in particular, can be cited, one is the refusal of the government to succumb to pressure by the banks to appropriate large sums of public money to aid them early in the crisis, thus limiting their risky behavior. The second is the implementation of the recommendations of the Bach'ar commission in the early to mid-2000s which recommended decoupling the banks' depository- and Investment banking activities, contrary to the then-opposite trend, particularly in the United States, of easing such restrictions which had the effect of encouraging more risk-taking in the financial systems of those countries.
In May 2007, Israel was invited to open accession discussions with the OECD. In May 2010, the OECD voted unanimously to invite Israel to join, despite Palestinian objections. It became a full member on 7 September 2010. The OECD praised Israel's scientific and technological progress and described it as having "produced outstanding outcomes on a world scale."
Despite economic prosperity, the Israeli economy faces many challenges, some are short term and some are long term challenges. On the short term its inability to duplicate its success in the telecommunication industry into other growing industries hampers its economic outlooks. Its inability to foster large multinational companies in the last decade also calls into question its ability to employ large numbers of people in advanced industries. On the long term, Israel is facing challenges of high dependency of the growing number of Ultra-Orthodox Jews who have a low level of official labor force participation amongst men, and this situation could lead to a materially lower employment-to-population ratio and a higher dependency ratio in the future. The governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, stated that the growing poverty amongst the Ultra-Orthodox is hurting the Israeli economy. According to the data published by Ian Fursman, 60% of the poor households in Israel are of the Haredi Jews and the Israeli Arabs. Both groups together represent 25–28% of the Israeli population. Organizations such as The Kemach Foundation, Gvahim, Jerusalem Village and The Jerusalem Business Networking Forum are addressing these challenges with job placement services and networking events.
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2021 (with IMF staff estimates in 2022–2027). Inflation under 5% is in green.
In 2017, 2.4% of the country's GDP is derived from agriculture. Of a total labor force of 2.7 million, 2.6% are employed in agricultural production while 6.3% in services for agriculture. While Israel imports substantial quantities of grain (approximately 80% of local consumption), it is largely self-sufficient in other agricultural products and foodstuffs. For centuries, farmers of the region have grown varieties of citrus fruits, such as grapefruit, oranges and lemons. Citrus fruits are still Israel's major agricultural export. In addition, Israel is one of the world's leading greenhouse-food-exporting countries. Israel also produces and exports flowers and cotton. The country exports more than $1.3 billion worth of agricultural products every year, including farm produce as well as $1.2 billion worth of agricultural inputs and technology.
Israel has over 100 active venture capital funds operating throughout the country with US$10 billion under management. In 2004, international foreign funds from various nations around the world committed over 50 percent of the total dollars invested exemplifying the country's strong and sound reputation as an internationally sought after foreign investment by many countries. Israel's venture capital sector has rapidly developed from the early 1990s, and has about 70 active venture capital funds (VC), of which 14 international VCs have Israeli offices. Israel's thriving venture capital and business-incubator industry played an important role in financing the country's flourishing high-tech sector. In 2008, venture capital investment in Israel, rose 19 percent to $1.9 billion.
"Between 1991 and 2000, Israel's annual venture-capital outlays, nearly all private, rose nearly 60-fold, from $58 million to $3.3 billion; companies launched by Israeli venture funds rose from 100 to 800; and Israel's information-technology revenues rose from $1.6 billion to $12.5 billion. By 1999, Israel ranked second only to the United States in invested private-equity capital as a share of GDP. Israel led the world in the share of its growth attributable to high-tech ventures: 70 percent."
Israel's thriving venture capital industry has played an important role in funding the country's booming high-technology sector, with hundreds of prosperous Israeli private equity and venture capital firms. The financial crisis of 2007–08 negatively affected the availability of venture capital locally. In 2009, there were 63 mergers and acquisitions in the Israeli market worth a total of $2.54 billion; 7% below 2008 levels ($2.74 billion), when 82 Israeli companies were merged or acquired, and 33% lower than 2007 proceeds ($3.79 billion) when 87 Israeli companies were merged or acquired. Numerous Israeli high tech companies have been acquired by various global multinational corporations for their ability to produce profit-driven technologies in addition to their arsenal of reliable corporate management and quality administrative personnel. In addition to venture capital funds, many of the world's leading investment banks, pension funds, and insurance companies have a strong presence in Israel committing their funds to financially back Israeli high-tech firms and benefit from its prosperous high tech sector. These institutional investors include Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse First Boston, Merrill Lynch, CalPERS, Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, and AIG.
Israel also has a small but fast growing hedge fund industry. Within five years between 2007 and 2012, the number of active hedge funds doubled to 60. Israel-based hedge funds have registered an increase of 162% from 2006 to 2012, when they managed a total of $2 billion (₪8 billion) and employed about 300 people. The ever-growing hedge fund industry in Israel is also attracting a myriad of investors from around the world, particularly from the United States.
Science and technology in Israel is one of the country's most highly developed and industrialized sectors. The modern Israeli ecosystem of high technology is highly optimized making up a significant bulk of the Israeli economy. The percentage of Israelis engaged in scientific and technological inquiry, and the amount spent on research and development (R&D) concerning gross domestic product (GDP), is among the highest in the world, with 140 scientists and technicians per 10,000 employees. In comparison, the same is 85 per 10,000 in the United States and 83 per 10,000 in Japan. Israel ranks fourth in the world in scientific activity, as measured by the number of scientific publications per million citizens. Israel's percentage of the total number of scientific articles published worldwide is almost 10 times higher than its percentage of the world's population. The country is home to over 1,400 life science companies, including about 300 pharmaceutical companies, 600 medical device companies, 450 digital health companies, and 468 biotechnology companies. Israeli scientists, engineers, and technicians have contributed to the modern advancement of the natural sciences, agricultural sciences, computer sciences, electronics, genetics, medicine, optics, solar energy and various fields of engineering. The country has one of the world's technologically most literate populations. Israel has the second largest number of startup companies globally, behind only the United States, and remains one of the largest centers in the world for technology start-up enterprises. As of 2013, around 200 start-ups were being created annually in Israel. In 2019, there were nearly 7,000 active start-ups operating throughout the country. In 2021, there were 79 Israeli-estalished tech unicorns, with 32 of them headquartered in Israel. More than one-third of cybersecurity unicorns in the world were Israeli in 2021. Israel is also home to nearly 400 research and development centers owned by various multinational companies, including prominent high-technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Intel.
Israel is also a major semiconductor design hub. The country is home to numerous chip design centers owned by major multinational corporations, and is considered as having one of the most advanced chip design industries in the world. In 2021, a total of 37 multinational corporations were operating in Israel in the semiconductor field.
In 1998, Tel Aviv was named by Newsweek as one of the ten technologically most influential cities in the world. In 2012, the city was also named one of the best places for high-tech startup companies, placed second behind its California counterpart. In 2013, The Boston Globe ranked Tel Aviv as the second-best city for business start-ups, after Silicon Valley. In 2020, StartupBlink ranked Israel as having the third best startup ecosystem in the world, behind only the United States and United Kingdom.
As a result of the country's highly prolific and dynamic start-up culture, Israel is often referred to as the "Start-Up Nation." and the "Silicon Valley of the Middle East". Programs that send people to Israel to explore the "Start-Up Nation" economy include TAVtech Ventures and TAMID Group. This success has been attributed by some to widespread service in the Israel Defense Forces and its development of talent which then fuels the high-tech industry upon discharge.
In recent years, the industry has faced a shortage of technology specialists; 15% of positions in the high technology sector of Israel were unfilled as of 2019. However, the largest number of unfilled job positions (31%) are in software engineering specialities: DevOps, back-end, data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Therefore, salaries of specialists in the Israeli market also increased significantly. To solve this problem, IT companies look for filling the gaps abroad. Consequently, they employ about 25% of their entire workforce overseas. Most companies choose to hire employees from Ukraine (45%) and the United States (with 16%) are the second most popular offshoring destination country. In 2017, the Council for Higher Education in Israel launched a five-year program to increase the number of graduates from computer science and engineering programs by 40%.
Historically, Israel relied on external imports for meeting most of its energy needs, spending an amount equivalent to over 5% of its GDP per year in 2009 on imports of energy products. The transportation sector relies mainly on gasoline and diesel fuel, while the majority of electricity production is generated using imported coal. As of 2013, Israel was importing about 100 mln barrels of oil per year. The country possesses negligible reserves of crude oil but does have domestic natural gas resources which were discovered in more significant quantities starting in 2009, after many decades of previously unsuccessful exploration.
Until the early 2000s, natural gas use in Israel was minimal. In the late 1990s, the government of Israel decided to encourage the usage of natural gas because of environmental, cost, and resource diversification reasons. At the time however, there were no domestic sources of natural gas and the expectation was that gas would be supplied from overseas in the form of LNG and by a future pipeline from Egypt (which eventually became the Arish–Ashkelon pipeline). Plans were made for the Israel Electric Corporation to construct several natural gas-driven power plants, for erecting a national gas distribution grid, and for an LNG import terminal.
In 2000, a 33-billion-cubic-metre (BCM), or 1,200-billion-cubic-foot, natural-gas field was located offshore Ashkelon, with commercial production starting in 2004. As of 2014 however, this field is nearly depleted—earlier than expected due to increased pumping to partially compensate for the loss of imported Egyptian gas in the wake of unrest associated with the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011. In 2009, a significant gas find named Tamar, with proven reserves of 223 BCM or 7.9×10^ cu ft (307 BCM total proven + probable) was located in deep water approximately 90 km (60 mi) west of Haifa, as well as a smaller 15 BCM (530×10^ cu ft) field situated nearer the coastline. Furthermore, results of 3D seismic surveys and test drilling conducted since 2010 have confirmed that an estimated 621 BCM (21.9×10^ cu ft) natural-gas deposit named Leviathan exists in a large underwater geological formation nearby the large gas field already discovered in 2009.
The Tamar field began commercial production on 30 March 2013 after four years of development. The supply of gas from Tamar was expected to aid the Israeli economy, which had suffered losses of more than ₪20 billion between 2011 and 2013 resulting from the disruption of gas supplies from neighboring Egypt (and which are not expected to resume due to Egypt's decision to indefinitely suspend its gas supply agreement to Israel). As a result, Israel, as well as its other neighbor Jordan, which also suffered from disruption of gas deliveries from Egypt, had to resort to importing significantly more expensive and polluting liquid heavy fuels as substitute sources of energy. The ensuing energy crisis in Israel was lifted once the Tamar field came online in 2013, while Jordan committed to a US$10 billion, 15-year gas supply deal totaling 45 BCM from the Israeli Leviathan field which is scheduled to come online in late 2019. The agreement is estimated to save Jordan US$600 million per year in energy costs. In 2018, the owners of the Tamar and Leviathan fields announced that they are negotiating an agreement with a consortium of Egyptian firms for the supply of up to 64 BCM of gas over 10 years valued at up to US$15 billion. In early 2012 the Israeli cabinet announced plans to set up a sovereign wealth fund (called "the Israeli Citizens' Fund").
Since the founding of the state through the mid-2010s decade, the state-owned utility, Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) had an effective monopoly on power generation in the country. In 2010 the company sold 52,037 GWh of electricity. Until the mid-2010s the country also faced a persistently low operating reserve, which is mostly the result of Israel being an "electricity island". Most countries have the capability of relying on power drawn from producers in adjacent countries in the event of a power shortage. Israel's grid however, is unconnected to those of neighboring countries. This is mostly due to political reasons but also to the considerably less-developed nature of the power systems of Jordan and Egypt, whose systems constantly struggle to meet domestic demand and whose per-capita electric generation is less than one fifth that of Israel's. Nevertheless, while operating reserves in Israel were low, the country possessed sufficient generation and transmission capacity to meet domestic electricity needs and unlike in the countries surrounding it, rolling blackouts have historically been quite rare, even at periods of extreme demand.
Facing the increasing demand for electricity and concerned about the low reserve situation, the government of Israel began taking steps to increase the supply of electricity and operating reserve, as well to reduce the monopoly position of the IEC and increase competition in the electricity market starting in the second half of the 2000s decade. It instructed the IEC to construct several new power stations and encouraged private investment in the generation sector. By 2015, the IEC's share of total nationwide installed electric generation capacity had fallen to about 75%, with the company then possessing an installed generation capacity of about 13.6 gigawatts (GW). Since 2010, Independent Power Producers have constructed three new gas-fired combined cycle power stations with a total generation capacity of about 2.2 GW, while various industrial concerns constructed on-premises cogeneration facilities with a total electricity output of about 1 GW, and which are licensed by the electric authority to sell surplus electricity to the national grid at competitive rates. Also under construction is a 300 MW pumped storage facility, with two more in planning, plus several solar-powered plants.
In addition to the above steps, Israel and Cyprus are considering implementing the proposed EuroAsia Interconnector project. This consists of laying a 2000MW HVDC undersea power cable between them and between Cyprus and Greece, thus connecting Israel to the greater European power grid. If carried out, this will allow a further increase in the country's operating reserve as well as sell surplus electricity abroad.
In 2016, total nationwide electricity production was 67.2 GWh, of which 55.2% was generated using natural gas and 43.8% using coal — the first time the share of electricity production using natural gas exceeded that generated using coal.
Solar power in Israel and the Israeli solar energy industry has a history that dates to the founding of the country. In the 1950s, Levi Yissar developed a solar water heater to help assuage an energy shortage in the new country. By 1967 around one in twenty households heated their water with the sun and 50,000 solar heaters had been sold. With the 1970s oil crisis, Harry Zvi Tabor, the father of Israel's solar industry, developed the prototype solar water heater that is now used in over 90% of Israeli homes.
Israel has a large industrial capacity. It has a well-developed chemical industry with many of its products aimed at the export market. Most of the chemical plants are located in Ramat Hovav, the Haifa Bay area and near the Dead Sea. Israel Chemicals is one of the largest fertilizer and chemical companies in Israel and its subsidiary, the Dead Sea Works in Sdom is the world's fourth-largest producer and supplier of potash products. The company also produces other products such as magnesium chloride, industrial salts, de-icers, bath salts, table salt, and raw materials for the cosmetic industry. Industrial production of metals, machinery and electrical equipment, construction materials, consumer goods, and textiles, as well as food processing also form a significant part of the manufacturing sector. Machinery and equipment manufactured in Israel includes computer equipment, medical equipment, agricultural equipment, and robots. Israel has a successful semiconductor device fabrication industry, with several semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the country.
One of the country's largest employers is Israel Aerospace Industries which produces mainly aviation, space, and defense products. In 2017 the company had an order backlog of 11.4 billion US dollars. There are numerous other aerospace companies. Israeli aerospace companies are primarily sub-suppliers, focusing on fields such as machining, electronic systems and components, and composite materials. Israel is a major manufacturer and exporter of unmanned aerial vehicles. Israel also has a significant pharmaceutical industry and is home to Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, which employed 40,000 people as of 2011. It specializes in generic and proprietary pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients. It is the largest generic drug manufacturer in the world and one of the 15 largest pharmaceutical companies worldwide. In addition, Israel also has a shipbuilding industry through the company Israel Shipyards, which has one of the largest shipbuilding and repair facilities in the Eastern Mediterranean. For the civilian market, it builds merchant ships and other civilian watercraft as well as machinery for ports and heavy industries. It also builds naval craft for the defense market.
Israel is one of the world's three major centers for polished diamonds, alongside Belgium and India. Israel's net polished diamond exports slid 22.8 percent in 2012 as polished diamond exports fell to $5.56 billion from $7.2 billion in 2011. Net exports of rough diamonds dropped 20.1 percent to $2.8 billion and net exports of polished diamonds slipped 24.9 percent to $4.3 billion, while net rough diamond imports dropped 12.9 percent to $3.8 billion. Net exports and imports have dropped due to the ongoing Global financial crisis, particularly within the Eurozone and the United States. The United States is the largest market accounting for 36% of overall export market for polished diamonds while Hong Kong remains at second with 28 percent and Belgium at 8 percent coming in third. As of 2016, cut diamonds were Israel's largest export product, comprising 23.2% of all exports.
Israel is one of the world's major exporters of military equipment, accounting for 10% of the world total in 2007. Three Israeli companies were listed on the 2010 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute index of the world's top 100 arms-producing and military service companies: Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries and RAFAEL. The Defense industry in Israel is a strategically important sector and a large employer within the country. It is also a major player in the global arms market and is the 11th largest arms exporter in the world as of 2012. Total arms transfer agreements topped 12.9 billion between 2004 and 2011. There are over 150 active defense companies based in the country with combined revenues of more than US$3.5 billion annually. Israeli defense equipment exports have reached 7 billion U.S. dollars in 2012, making it a 20 percent increase from the amount of defense-related exports in 2011. Much of the exports are sold to the United States and Europe. Other major regions that purchase Israeli defense equipment include Southeast Asia and Latin America. India is also major country for Israeli arms exports and has remained Israel's largest arms market in the world. Israel is considered to be the leading UAV exporter in the world. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israeli defense companies were behind 41% of all drones exported in 2001–2011. Israel's defense exports in 2021 reached US$11.2 billion in sales. Exports to Arab countries that joined the Abraham Accords made up 7% of all Israeli defense exports.
Israel is a major tourist destination, especially for those of Jewish ancestry, with 4.55 million foreign tourists visiting the country in 2019 (about one tourist per two Israelis), yielding a 25% growth since 2016 and contributed ₪20 billion to the economy, making it an all-time record at that time. The most popular paid visited site is Masada.
In 2016, Israeli goods exports totaled US$55.8 billion. It imported US$61.9 billion worth of goods in the same year. In 2017 total exports (goods and services) amounted to US$102.3 billion, while imports totaled $96.7 billion. Israel usually posts a modest trade deficit in goods. Its main goods imports consist of raw materials, crude oil, production inputs and finished consumer goods. Most of its exports are high-value-added items such as electronic components and other high-technology equipment, tools, and machinery, cut diamonds, refined petrochemicals, and pharmaceuticals. It normally posts a substantial trade surplus in services thanks to tourism and service industries such as software development, engineering services, and biomedical and scientific research and development. Therefore, overall external trade is positive, contributing to a significant current account surplus which as of 2017 stood at 4.7% of GDP.
The United States is Israel's largest trading partner, and Israel is the United States' 26th-largest trading partner; two-way trade totaled some $24.5 billion in 2010, up from $12.7 billion in 1997. The principal U.S. exports to Israel include computers, integrated circuits, aircraft parts and other defense equipment, wheat, and automobiles. Israel's chief exports to the U.S. include cut diamonds, jewelry, integrated circuits, printing machinery, and telecommunications equipment. The two countries signed a free trade agreement (FTA) in 1985 that progressively eliminated tariffs on most goods traded between the two countries over the following ten years. An agricultural trade accord was signed in November 1996, which addressed the remaining goods not covered in the FTA. Some non-tariff barriers and tariffs on goods remain, however. Israel also has trade and cooperation agreements in place with the European Union and Canada, and is seeking to conclude such agreements with a number of other countries, including Turkey, Jordan and several countries in Eastern Europe.
In regional terms, the European Union is the top destination for Israeli exports. In the four-month period between October 2011 and January 2012, Israel exported goods totalling $5 billion to the EU – amounting to 35% of Israel's overall exports. During the same period, Israeli exports to East Asia and the Far East totaled some $3.1 billion.
Until 1995, Israel's trade with the Arab world was minimal due to the Arab League boycott, which was begun against the Jewish community of Palestine in 1945. Arab nations not only refused to have direct trade with Israel (the primary boycott), but they also refused to do business with any corporation that operated in Israel (secondary boycott), or any corporation that did business with a corporation that did business with Israel (tertiary boycott).
In 2013, commercial trade between Israel and the Palestinian territories were valued at US$20 billion annually.
In 2012, ten companies were responsible for 47.7% of Israel's exports. These companies were Intel Israel, Elbit Systems, Oil Refineries Ltd, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Iscar, Israel Chemicals, Makhteshim Agan, Paz Oil Company, Israel Aerospace Industries and the Indigo division of Hewlett-Packard. The Bank of Israel and Israel's Export Institute have warned that the country is too dependent on a small number of exporters.
The Global Competitiveness Report of 2016 to 2017 ranked Israel as having the world's second most innovative economy. It was also ranked 19th among 189 world nations on the UN's Human Development Index. As of 2018, Israel ranks 20th out of 133 countries on the economic complexity index. The IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook of 2016 ranked Israel's economy as world 21st most competitive out of the 61 economies surveyed. The Israeli economy was ranked as the world's most durable economy in the face of crises, and was also ranked first in the rate research and development center investments. The Bank of Israel was ranked first among central banks for its efficient functioning, up from the 8th place in 2009. Israel was ranked first also in its supply of skilled manpower. Israeli companies, particularly in the high-tech area, have enjoyed considerable success raising money on Wall Street and other world financial markets: as of 2010 Israel ranked second among foreign countries in the number of its companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges.
Having moved away from the socialist economic model since the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Israel has made dramatic moves toward the free-market capitalist paradigm. As of 2020, Israel's economic freedom score is 74.0, making its economy the 26th freest in the 2020 Index of Economic Freedom. Israel ranks 35th on the World Bank's ease of doing business index. Israel's economic competitiveness is helped by strong protection of property rights, relatively low corruption levels, and high openness to global trade and investment. Income and corporate tax rates remain relatively high. As of 2020, Israel ranks 35th out of 179 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index. Bribery and other forms of corruption are illegal in Israel, which is a signatory to the OECD Bribery Convention since 2008. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The economy of Israel is a highly developed free-market economy. The prosperity of Israel's advanced economy allows the country to have a sophisticated welfare state, a powerful modern military said to possess a nuclear-weapons capability with a full nuclear triad, modern infrastructure rivaling many Western countries, and a high-technology sector competitively on par with Silicon Valley. It has the second-largest number of startup companies in the world after the United States, and the third-largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies after the U.S. and China. American companies, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple, built their first overseas research and development facilities in Israel. More than 400 high-tech multi-national corporations, such as IBM, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Facebook and Motorola have opened R&D centers throughout the country.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The country's major economic sectors are high-technology and industrial manufacturing. The Israeli diamond industry is one of the world's centers for diamond cutting and polishing, amounting to 23.2% of all exports. As the country is relatively poor in natural resources, it consequently depends on imports of petroleum, raw materials, wheat, motor vehicles, uncut diamonds and production inputs. Nonetheless, the country's nearly total reliance on energy imports may change in the future as recent discoveries of natural gas reserves off its coast and the Israeli solar energy industry have taken a leading role in Israel's energy sector.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Israel's quality higher education and the establishment of a highly motivated and educated populace is largely responsible for ushering in the country's high technology boom and rapid economic development by regional standards. The country has developed a strong educational infrastructure and a high-quality business startup incubation system for promoting cutting edge new ideas to create value-driven goods and services. These developments have allowed the country to create a high concentration of high-tech companies across the country's regions. These companies are financially backed by a strong venture capital industry. Its central high technology hub, the \"Silicon Wadi\", is considered second in importance only to its Californian counterpart. Numerous Israeli companies have been acquired by global multinational corporations for their profit-driven technologies in addition to their reliable and quality corporate personnel.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In its early decades, the Israeli economy was largely state-controlled and shaped by social democratic ideas. In the 1970s and 1980s, the economy underwent a series of free-market reforms and was gradually liberalized. In the past three decades, the economy has grown considerably, though GDP per capita has increased faster than wages. Israel is the most developed and advanced country in West Asia, possessing the 17th largest foreign-exchange reserves in the world and the highest average wealth per adult in the Middle East (10th worldwide by financial assets per capita). Israel is the 9th largest arm exporter in the world and has the highest number of billionaires in the Middle East, ranked 18th in the world. In recent years, Israel has had among the highest GDP growth rates within the developed world along with Ireland. The Economist ranked Israel as the 4th most successful economy among developed countries for 2022. The IMF estimated Israel's GDP at US$564 billion and its GDP per capita at US$58,270 in 2023 (13th highest in the world), a figure comparable to other highly developed countries. Israel was invited to join the OECD in 2010. Israel has also signed free trade agreements with the European Union, the United States, the European Free Trade Association, Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Ukraine, Jordan, and Egypt. In 2007, Israel became the first non-Latin-American country to sign a free trade agreement with the Mercosur trade bloc.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The British Mandate for Palestine that came into effect in 1920 aimed at restricting land purchases by Jewish immigrants. For this reason, the Jewish population was initially more urban and had a higher share in industrial occupations. This particular development resulted economically in one of the few growth miracles of the region whereby the structure of firms was determined mainly by private businessmen rather than by the government. The first survey of the Dead Sea in 1911, by the Russian Jewish businessman and engineer Moshe Novomeysky, led to the establishment of Palestine Potash Ltd. in 1930, later renamed the Dead Sea Works. In 1923, the businessman and hydraulic engineer Pinhas Rutenberg was granted an exclusive concession for the production and distribution of electric power. He founded the Palestine Electric Company, later the Israel Electric Corporation. Between 1920 and 1924, some of the country's largest factories were established, including the Shemen Oil Company, the Societe des Grand Moulins, the Palestine Silicate Company and the Palestine Salt Company.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 1937, there were 86 spinning and weaving factories in the country, employing a workforce of 1,500. Capital and technical expertise were supplied by Jewish professionals from Europe. The Ata textile plant in Kiryat Ata, which went on to become an icon of the Israeli textile industry, was established in 1934. In 1939, the cornerstone was laid for one of the kibbutz industry's first factories: the Naaman brick factory, which supplied the growing need for construction materials.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The textile underwent rapid development during World War II, when supplies from Europe were cut off while local manufacturers were commissioned for army needs. By 1943, the number of factories had grown to 250, with a workforce of 5,630, and output increased tenfold.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "From 1924, trade fairs were held in Tel Aviv. The Levant Fair was inaugurated in 1932.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "After statehood, Israel faced a deep economic crisis. As well as having to recover from the devastating effects of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, it also had to absorb hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe and almost a million from the Arab world. Israel was financially overwhelmed and faced a deep economic crisis, which led to a policy of austerity from 1949 to 1959. Unemployment was high, and foreign currency reserves were scarce.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1952, Israel and West Germany signed an agreement stipulating that West Germany was to pay Israel to compensate for Jewish property stolen by the Nazis, material claims during the Holocaust, and absorption of refugees as a result. Over the next 14 years, West Germany paid Israel 3 billion marks (around 714 million USD according to 1953-1955 conversion rates or equivalent to approximately US$7 billion in modern currency). The reparations became a decisive part of Israel's income, comprising as high as 87.5% of Israel's income in 1956. Israel never had any formal diplomatic relations with East Germany. In 1950, the Israeli government launched Israel Bonds for American and Canadian Jews to buy. In 1951, the final results of the bonds program exceeded $52 million. Additionally, many American Jews made private donations to Israel, which in 1956 were thought to amount to $100 million a year. In 1957, bond sales amounted to 35% of Israel's special development budget. Later in the century, Israel became significantly reliant on economic aid from the United States, a country that also became Israel's most important source of political support internationally.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The proceeds from these sources were invested in industrial and agricultural development projects, which allowed Israel to become economically self-sufficient. Among the projects made possible by the aid was the Hadera power plant, the Dead Sea Works, the National Water Carrier, port development in Haifa, Ashdod, and Eilat, desalination plants, and national infrastructure projects.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After statehood, priority was given to establishing industries in areas slated for development, among them, Lachish, Ashkelon, the Negev and Galilee. The expansion of Israel's textile industry was a consequence of the development of cotton growing as a profitable agricultural branch. By the late 1960s, textiles were one of the largest industrial branches in Israel, second only to the foodstuff industry. Textiles constituted about 12% of industrial exports, becoming the second-largest export branch after polished diamonds. In the 1990s, cheap East Asian labor decreased the profitability of the sector. Much of the work was subcontracted to 400 Israeli Arab sewing shops. As these closed down, Israeli firms, among them Delta, Polgat, Argeman and Kitan, began doing their sewing work in Jordan and Egypt, usually under the QIZ arrangement. In the early 2000s, Israeli companies had 30 plants in Jordan. Israeli exports reached $370 million a year, supplying such retailers and designers as Marks & Spencer, The Gap, Victoria's Secret, Walmart, Sears, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Donna Karan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In its first two decades of existence, Israel's strong commitment to development led to economic growth rates that exceeded 10% annually. Between 1950 and 1963, the expenditure among wage-earner's families rose 97% in real terms. Between 1955 and 1966, per capita consumption rose by 221%. The years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War were a lost decade economically, as growth stalled, inflation soared and government expenditures rose significantly. Also worthy of mention is the 1983 Bank stock crisis. By 1984, the economic situation became almost catastrophic with inflation reaching an annual rate close to 450% and projected to reach over 1000% by the end of the following year. However, the successful economic stabilization plan implemented in 1985 and the subsequent introduction of market-oriented structural reforms reinvigorated the economy and paved the way for its rapid growth in the 1990s and became a model for other countries facing similar economic crises.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Two developments have helped to transform Israel's economy since the beginning of the 1990s. The first is waves of Jewish immigration, predominantly from the countries of the former USSR, that has brought over one million new citizens to Israel. These new Soviet Jewish immigrants, many of them highly educated, had a wellspring of scientific and technical expertise to help spur Israel's burgeoning technology sector, now constitute some 15% of Israel's population. The second development benefiting the Israeli economy is the peace process that begun at the Madrid conference of October 1991, which led to the signing of accords and later to a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan (1994).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "During the early 2000s, the Israeli economy went into a downturn due to the crashing of the global dot-com bubble which bankrupted many startups established during the height of the bubble. The Second Intifada, which cost Israel billions of dollars in security costs, and a decline in investment and tourism, sent unemployment in Israel to the double digits; growth in one quarter of 2000 was 10%. In 2002, the Israeli economy declined about 4% in one quarter. Afterward, Israel managed to create a remarkable recovery by opening up new markets to Israeli exporters farther afield, such as in the rapidly growing countries of East Asia. This was possible thanks to a rebound in the Israeli tech sector, spurred on by the gradual bottoming out of the dotcom crash and a growing increase in demand for computer software, which in turn was due to burgeoning rates of global internet usage at this time. The explosion in demand for security and defense products following 9/11 also allowed Israel to sell even more of its technologies abroad - a situation only made possible due to Israel’s prior investments in the technology sector in an effort to curb high levels of domestic unemployment.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the 2000s, there was an influx of foreign investment in Israel from companies that formerly shunned the Israeli market. In 2006, foreign investment in Israel totalled $13 billion, according to the Manufacturers Association of Israel. The Financial Times said that \"bombs drop, yet Israel's economy grows\". Moreover, while Israel's total gross external debt is US$95 billion, or approximately 41.6% of GDP, since 2001 it has become a net lender nation in terms of net external debt (the total value of assets vs. liabilities in debt instruments owed abroad), which as of June 2012 stood at a significant surplus of US$60 billion. The country also maintains a current account surplus in an amount equivalent to about 3% of its gross domestic product in 2010.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Israeli economy weathered and withstood the late-2000s recession, registering positive GDP growth in 2009 and ending the decade with an unemployment rate lower than that of many of its Western counterparts. There are several reasons behind this economic resilience, for example, the fact that the country is a net lender rather than a borrower nation and the government and the Bank of Israel's generally conservative macro-economic policies. Two policies, in particular, can be cited, one is the refusal of the government to succumb to pressure by the banks to appropriate large sums of public money to aid them early in the crisis, thus limiting their risky behavior. The second is the implementation of the recommendations of the Bach'ar commission in the early to mid-2000s which recommended decoupling the banks' depository- and Investment banking activities, contrary to the then-opposite trend, particularly in the United States, of easing such restrictions which had the effect of encouraging more risk-taking in the financial systems of those countries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In May 2007, Israel was invited to open accession discussions with the OECD. In May 2010, the OECD voted unanimously to invite Israel to join, despite Palestinian objections. It became a full member on 7 September 2010. The OECD praised Israel's scientific and technological progress and described it as having \"produced outstanding outcomes on a world scale.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Despite economic prosperity, the Israeli economy faces many challenges, some are short term and some are long term challenges. On the short term its inability to duplicate its success in the telecommunication industry into other growing industries hampers its economic outlooks. Its inability to foster large multinational companies in the last decade also calls into question its ability to employ large numbers of people in advanced industries. On the long term, Israel is facing challenges of high dependency of the growing number of Ultra-Orthodox Jews who have a low level of official labor force participation amongst men, and this situation could lead to a materially lower employment-to-population ratio and a higher dependency ratio in the future. The governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, stated that the growing poverty amongst the Ultra-Orthodox is hurting the Israeli economy. According to the data published by Ian Fursman, 60% of the poor households in Israel are of the Haredi Jews and the Israeli Arabs. Both groups together represent 25–28% of the Israeli population. Organizations such as The Kemach Foundation, Gvahim, Jerusalem Village and The Jerusalem Business Networking Forum are addressing these challenges with job placement services and networking events.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2021 (with IMF staff estimates in 2022–2027). Inflation under 5% is in green.",
"title": "Data"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2017, 2.4% of the country's GDP is derived from agriculture. Of a total labor force of 2.7 million, 2.6% are employed in agricultural production while 6.3% in services for agriculture. While Israel imports substantial quantities of grain (approximately 80% of local consumption), it is largely self-sufficient in other agricultural products and foodstuffs. For centuries, farmers of the region have grown varieties of citrus fruits, such as grapefruit, oranges and lemons. Citrus fruits are still Israel's major agricultural export. In addition, Israel is one of the world's leading greenhouse-food-exporting countries. Israel also produces and exports flowers and cotton. The country exports more than $1.3 billion worth of agricultural products every year, including farm produce as well as $1.2 billion worth of agricultural inputs and technology.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Israel has over 100 active venture capital funds operating throughout the country with US$10 billion under management. In 2004, international foreign funds from various nations around the world committed over 50 percent of the total dollars invested exemplifying the country's strong and sound reputation as an internationally sought after foreign investment by many countries. Israel's venture capital sector has rapidly developed from the early 1990s, and has about 70 active venture capital funds (VC), of which 14 international VCs have Israeli offices. Israel's thriving venture capital and business-incubator industry played an important role in financing the country's flourishing high-tech sector. In 2008, venture capital investment in Israel, rose 19 percent to $1.9 billion.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "\"Between 1991 and 2000, Israel's annual venture-capital outlays, nearly all private, rose nearly 60-fold, from $58 million to $3.3 billion; companies launched by Israeli venture funds rose from 100 to 800; and Israel's information-technology revenues rose from $1.6 billion to $12.5 billion. By 1999, Israel ranked second only to the United States in invested private-equity capital as a share of GDP. Israel led the world in the share of its growth attributable to high-tech ventures: 70 percent.\"",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Israel's thriving venture capital industry has played an important role in funding the country's booming high-technology sector, with hundreds of prosperous Israeli private equity and venture capital firms. The financial crisis of 2007–08 negatively affected the availability of venture capital locally. In 2009, there were 63 mergers and acquisitions in the Israeli market worth a total of $2.54 billion; 7% below 2008 levels ($2.74 billion), when 82 Israeli companies were merged or acquired, and 33% lower than 2007 proceeds ($3.79 billion) when 87 Israeli companies were merged or acquired. Numerous Israeli high tech companies have been acquired by various global multinational corporations for their ability to produce profit-driven technologies in addition to their arsenal of reliable corporate management and quality administrative personnel. In addition to venture capital funds, many of the world's leading investment banks, pension funds, and insurance companies have a strong presence in Israel committing their funds to financially back Israeli high-tech firms and benefit from its prosperous high tech sector. These institutional investors include Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse First Boston, Merrill Lynch, CalPERS, Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, and AIG.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Israel also has a small but fast growing hedge fund industry. Within five years between 2007 and 2012, the number of active hedge funds doubled to 60. Israel-based hedge funds have registered an increase of 162% from 2006 to 2012, when they managed a total of $2 billion (₪8 billion) and employed about 300 people. The ever-growing hedge fund industry in Israel is also attracting a myriad of investors from around the world, particularly from the United States.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Science and technology in Israel is one of the country's most highly developed and industrialized sectors. The modern Israeli ecosystem of high technology is highly optimized making up a significant bulk of the Israeli economy. The percentage of Israelis engaged in scientific and technological inquiry, and the amount spent on research and development (R&D) concerning gross domestic product (GDP), is among the highest in the world, with 140 scientists and technicians per 10,000 employees. In comparison, the same is 85 per 10,000 in the United States and 83 per 10,000 in Japan. Israel ranks fourth in the world in scientific activity, as measured by the number of scientific publications per million citizens. Israel's percentage of the total number of scientific articles published worldwide is almost 10 times higher than its percentage of the world's population. The country is home to over 1,400 life science companies, including about 300 pharmaceutical companies, 600 medical device companies, 450 digital health companies, and 468 biotechnology companies. Israeli scientists, engineers, and technicians have contributed to the modern advancement of the natural sciences, agricultural sciences, computer sciences, electronics, genetics, medicine, optics, solar energy and various fields of engineering. The country has one of the world's technologically most literate populations. Israel has the second largest number of startup companies globally, behind only the United States, and remains one of the largest centers in the world for technology start-up enterprises. As of 2013, around 200 start-ups were being created annually in Israel. In 2019, there were nearly 7,000 active start-ups operating throughout the country. In 2021, there were 79 Israeli-estalished tech unicorns, with 32 of them headquartered in Israel. More than one-third of cybersecurity unicorns in the world were Israeli in 2021. Israel is also home to nearly 400 research and development centers owned by various multinational companies, including prominent high-technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Intel.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Israel is also a major semiconductor design hub. The country is home to numerous chip design centers owned by major multinational corporations, and is considered as having one of the most advanced chip design industries in the world. In 2021, a total of 37 multinational corporations were operating in Israel in the semiconductor field.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1998, Tel Aviv was named by Newsweek as one of the ten technologically most influential cities in the world. In 2012, the city was also named one of the best places for high-tech startup companies, placed second behind its California counterpart. In 2013, The Boston Globe ranked Tel Aviv as the second-best city for business start-ups, after Silicon Valley. In 2020, StartupBlink ranked Israel as having the third best startup ecosystem in the world, behind only the United States and United Kingdom.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "As a result of the country's highly prolific and dynamic start-up culture, Israel is often referred to as the \"Start-Up Nation.\" and the \"Silicon Valley of the Middle East\". Programs that send people to Israel to explore the \"Start-Up Nation\" economy include TAVtech Ventures and TAMID Group. This success has been attributed by some to widespread service in the Israel Defense Forces and its development of talent which then fuels the high-tech industry upon discharge.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In recent years, the industry has faced a shortage of technology specialists; 15% of positions in the high technology sector of Israel were unfilled as of 2019. However, the largest number of unfilled job positions (31%) are in software engineering specialities: DevOps, back-end, data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Therefore, salaries of specialists in the Israeli market also increased significantly. To solve this problem, IT companies look for filling the gaps abroad. Consequently, they employ about 25% of their entire workforce overseas. Most companies choose to hire employees from Ukraine (45%) and the United States (with 16%) are the second most popular offshoring destination country. In 2017, the Council for Higher Education in Israel launched a five-year program to increase the number of graduates from computer science and engineering programs by 40%.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Historically, Israel relied on external imports for meeting most of its energy needs, spending an amount equivalent to over 5% of its GDP per year in 2009 on imports of energy products. The transportation sector relies mainly on gasoline and diesel fuel, while the majority of electricity production is generated using imported coal. As of 2013, Israel was importing about 100 mln barrels of oil per year. The country possesses negligible reserves of crude oil but does have domestic natural gas resources which were discovered in more significant quantities starting in 2009, after many decades of previously unsuccessful exploration.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Until the early 2000s, natural gas use in Israel was minimal. In the late 1990s, the government of Israel decided to encourage the usage of natural gas because of environmental, cost, and resource diversification reasons. At the time however, there were no domestic sources of natural gas and the expectation was that gas would be supplied from overseas in the form of LNG and by a future pipeline from Egypt (which eventually became the Arish–Ashkelon pipeline). Plans were made for the Israel Electric Corporation to construct several natural gas-driven power plants, for erecting a national gas distribution grid, and for an LNG import terminal.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 2000, a 33-billion-cubic-metre (BCM), or 1,200-billion-cubic-foot, natural-gas field was located offshore Ashkelon, with commercial production starting in 2004. As of 2014 however, this field is nearly depleted—earlier than expected due to increased pumping to partially compensate for the loss of imported Egyptian gas in the wake of unrest associated with the fall of the Mubarak regime in 2011. In 2009, a significant gas find named Tamar, with proven reserves of 223 BCM or 7.9×10^ cu ft (307 BCM total proven + probable) was located in deep water approximately 90 km (60 mi) west of Haifa, as well as a smaller 15 BCM (530×10^ cu ft) field situated nearer the coastline. Furthermore, results of 3D seismic surveys and test drilling conducted since 2010 have confirmed that an estimated 621 BCM (21.9×10^ cu ft) natural-gas deposit named Leviathan exists in a large underwater geological formation nearby the large gas field already discovered in 2009.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Tamar field began commercial production on 30 March 2013 after four years of development. The supply of gas from Tamar was expected to aid the Israeli economy, which had suffered losses of more than ₪20 billion between 2011 and 2013 resulting from the disruption of gas supplies from neighboring Egypt (and which are not expected to resume due to Egypt's decision to indefinitely suspend its gas supply agreement to Israel). As a result, Israel, as well as its other neighbor Jordan, which also suffered from disruption of gas deliveries from Egypt, had to resort to importing significantly more expensive and polluting liquid heavy fuels as substitute sources of energy. The ensuing energy crisis in Israel was lifted once the Tamar field came online in 2013, while Jordan committed to a US$10 billion, 15-year gas supply deal totaling 45 BCM from the Israeli Leviathan field which is scheduled to come online in late 2019. The agreement is estimated to save Jordan US$600 million per year in energy costs. In 2018, the owners of the Tamar and Leviathan fields announced that they are negotiating an agreement with a consortium of Egyptian firms for the supply of up to 64 BCM of gas over 10 years valued at up to US$15 billion. In early 2012 the Israeli cabinet announced plans to set up a sovereign wealth fund (called \"the Israeli Citizens' Fund\").",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Since the founding of the state through the mid-2010s decade, the state-owned utility, Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) had an effective monopoly on power generation in the country. In 2010 the company sold 52,037 GWh of electricity. Until the mid-2010s the country also faced a persistently low operating reserve, which is mostly the result of Israel being an \"electricity island\". Most countries have the capability of relying on power drawn from producers in adjacent countries in the event of a power shortage. Israel's grid however, is unconnected to those of neighboring countries. This is mostly due to political reasons but also to the considerably less-developed nature of the power systems of Jordan and Egypt, whose systems constantly struggle to meet domestic demand and whose per-capita electric generation is less than one fifth that of Israel's. Nevertheless, while operating reserves in Israel were low, the country possessed sufficient generation and transmission capacity to meet domestic electricity needs and unlike in the countries surrounding it, rolling blackouts have historically been quite rare, even at periods of extreme demand.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Facing the increasing demand for electricity and concerned about the low reserve situation, the government of Israel began taking steps to increase the supply of electricity and operating reserve, as well to reduce the monopoly position of the IEC and increase competition in the electricity market starting in the second half of the 2000s decade. It instructed the IEC to construct several new power stations and encouraged private investment in the generation sector. By 2015, the IEC's share of total nationwide installed electric generation capacity had fallen to about 75%, with the company then possessing an installed generation capacity of about 13.6 gigawatts (GW). Since 2010, Independent Power Producers have constructed three new gas-fired combined cycle power stations with a total generation capacity of about 2.2 GW, while various industrial concerns constructed on-premises cogeneration facilities with a total electricity output of about 1 GW, and which are licensed by the electric authority to sell surplus electricity to the national grid at competitive rates. Also under construction is a 300 MW pumped storage facility, with two more in planning, plus several solar-powered plants.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In addition to the above steps, Israel and Cyprus are considering implementing the proposed EuroAsia Interconnector project. This consists of laying a 2000MW HVDC undersea power cable between them and between Cyprus and Greece, thus connecting Israel to the greater European power grid. If carried out, this will allow a further increase in the country's operating reserve as well as sell surplus electricity abroad.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 2016, total nationwide electricity production was 67.2 GWh, of which 55.2% was generated using natural gas and 43.8% using coal — the first time the share of electricity production using natural gas exceeded that generated using coal.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Solar power in Israel and the Israeli solar energy industry has a history that dates to the founding of the country. In the 1950s, Levi Yissar developed a solar water heater to help assuage an energy shortage in the new country. By 1967 around one in twenty households heated their water with the sun and 50,000 solar heaters had been sold. With the 1970s oil crisis, Harry Zvi Tabor, the father of Israel's solar industry, developed the prototype solar water heater that is now used in over 90% of Israeli homes.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Israel has a large industrial capacity. It has a well-developed chemical industry with many of its products aimed at the export market. Most of the chemical plants are located in Ramat Hovav, the Haifa Bay area and near the Dead Sea. Israel Chemicals is one of the largest fertilizer and chemical companies in Israel and its subsidiary, the Dead Sea Works in Sdom is the world's fourth-largest producer and supplier of potash products. The company also produces other products such as magnesium chloride, industrial salts, de-icers, bath salts, table salt, and raw materials for the cosmetic industry. Industrial production of metals, machinery and electrical equipment, construction materials, consumer goods, and textiles, as well as food processing also form a significant part of the manufacturing sector. Machinery and equipment manufactured in Israel includes computer equipment, medical equipment, agricultural equipment, and robots. Israel has a successful semiconductor device fabrication industry, with several semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the country.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "One of the country's largest employers is Israel Aerospace Industries which produces mainly aviation, space, and defense products. In 2017 the company had an order backlog of 11.4 billion US dollars. There are numerous other aerospace companies. Israeli aerospace companies are primarily sub-suppliers, focusing on fields such as machining, electronic systems and components, and composite materials. Israel is a major manufacturer and exporter of unmanned aerial vehicles. Israel also has a significant pharmaceutical industry and is home to Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, which employed 40,000 people as of 2011. It specializes in generic and proprietary pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients. It is the largest generic drug manufacturer in the world and one of the 15 largest pharmaceutical companies worldwide. In addition, Israel also has a shipbuilding industry through the company Israel Shipyards, which has one of the largest shipbuilding and repair facilities in the Eastern Mediterranean. For the civilian market, it builds merchant ships and other civilian watercraft as well as machinery for ports and heavy industries. It also builds naval craft for the defense market.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Israel is one of the world's three major centers for polished diamonds, alongside Belgium and India. Israel's net polished diamond exports slid 22.8 percent in 2012 as polished diamond exports fell to $5.56 billion from $7.2 billion in 2011. Net exports of rough diamonds dropped 20.1 percent to $2.8 billion and net exports of polished diamonds slipped 24.9 percent to $4.3 billion, while net rough diamond imports dropped 12.9 percent to $3.8 billion. Net exports and imports have dropped due to the ongoing Global financial crisis, particularly within the Eurozone and the United States. The United States is the largest market accounting for 36% of overall export market for polished diamonds while Hong Kong remains at second with 28 percent and Belgium at 8 percent coming in third. As of 2016, cut diamonds were Israel's largest export product, comprising 23.2% of all exports.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Israel is one of the world's major exporters of military equipment, accounting for 10% of the world total in 2007. Three Israeli companies were listed on the 2010 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute index of the world's top 100 arms-producing and military service companies: Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries and RAFAEL. The Defense industry in Israel is a strategically important sector and a large employer within the country. It is also a major player in the global arms market and is the 11th largest arms exporter in the world as of 2012. Total arms transfer agreements topped 12.9 billion between 2004 and 2011. There are over 150 active defense companies based in the country with combined revenues of more than US$3.5 billion annually. Israeli defense equipment exports have reached 7 billion U.S. dollars in 2012, making it a 20 percent increase from the amount of defense-related exports in 2011. Much of the exports are sold to the United States and Europe. Other major regions that purchase Israeli defense equipment include Southeast Asia and Latin America. India is also major country for Israeli arms exports and has remained Israel's largest arms market in the world. Israel is considered to be the leading UAV exporter in the world. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israeli defense companies were behind 41% of all drones exported in 2001–2011. Israel's defense exports in 2021 reached US$11.2 billion in sales. Exports to Arab countries that joined the Abraham Accords made up 7% of all Israeli defense exports.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Israel is a major tourist destination, especially for those of Jewish ancestry, with 4.55 million foreign tourists visiting the country in 2019 (about one tourist per two Israelis), yielding a 25% growth since 2016 and contributed ₪20 billion to the economy, making it an all-time record at that time. The most popular paid visited site is Masada.",
"title": "Sectors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 2016, Israeli goods exports totaled US$55.8 billion. It imported US$61.9 billion worth of goods in the same year. In 2017 total exports (goods and services) amounted to US$102.3 billion, while imports totaled $96.7 billion. Israel usually posts a modest trade deficit in goods. Its main goods imports consist of raw materials, crude oil, production inputs and finished consumer goods. Most of its exports are high-value-added items such as electronic components and other high-technology equipment, tools, and machinery, cut diamonds, refined petrochemicals, and pharmaceuticals. It normally posts a substantial trade surplus in services thanks to tourism and service industries such as software development, engineering services, and biomedical and scientific research and development. Therefore, overall external trade is positive, contributing to a significant current account surplus which as of 2017 stood at 4.7% of GDP.",
"title": "External trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The United States is Israel's largest trading partner, and Israel is the United States' 26th-largest trading partner; two-way trade totaled some $24.5 billion in 2010, up from $12.7 billion in 1997. The principal U.S. exports to Israel include computers, integrated circuits, aircraft parts and other defense equipment, wheat, and automobiles. Israel's chief exports to the U.S. include cut diamonds, jewelry, integrated circuits, printing machinery, and telecommunications equipment. The two countries signed a free trade agreement (FTA) in 1985 that progressively eliminated tariffs on most goods traded between the two countries over the following ten years. An agricultural trade accord was signed in November 1996, which addressed the remaining goods not covered in the FTA. Some non-tariff barriers and tariffs on goods remain, however. Israel also has trade and cooperation agreements in place with the European Union and Canada, and is seeking to conclude such agreements with a number of other countries, including Turkey, Jordan and several countries in Eastern Europe.",
"title": "External trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In regional terms, the European Union is the top destination for Israeli exports. In the four-month period between October 2011 and January 2012, Israel exported goods totalling $5 billion to the EU – amounting to 35% of Israel's overall exports. During the same period, Israeli exports to East Asia and the Far East totaled some $3.1 billion.",
"title": "External trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Until 1995, Israel's trade with the Arab world was minimal due to the Arab League boycott, which was begun against the Jewish community of Palestine in 1945. Arab nations not only refused to have direct trade with Israel (the primary boycott), but they also refused to do business with any corporation that operated in Israel (secondary boycott), or any corporation that did business with a corporation that did business with Israel (tertiary boycott).",
"title": "External trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 2013, commercial trade between Israel and the Palestinian territories were valued at US$20 billion annually.",
"title": "External trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In 2012, ten companies were responsible for 47.7% of Israel's exports. These companies were Intel Israel, Elbit Systems, Oil Refineries Ltd, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Iscar, Israel Chemicals, Makhteshim Agan, Paz Oil Company, Israel Aerospace Industries and the Indigo division of Hewlett-Packard. The Bank of Israel and Israel's Export Institute have warned that the country is too dependent on a small number of exporters.",
"title": "External trade"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Global Competitiveness Report of 2016 to 2017 ranked Israel as having the world's second most innovative economy. It was also ranked 19th among 189 world nations on the UN's Human Development Index. As of 2018, Israel ranks 20th out of 133 countries on the economic complexity index. The IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook of 2016 ranked Israel's economy as world 21st most competitive out of the 61 economies surveyed. The Israeli economy was ranked as the world's most durable economy in the face of crises, and was also ranked first in the rate research and development center investments. The Bank of Israel was ranked first among central banks for its efficient functioning, up from the 8th place in 2009. Israel was ranked first also in its supply of skilled manpower. Israeli companies, particularly in the high-tech area, have enjoyed considerable success raising money on Wall Street and other world financial markets: as of 2010 Israel ranked second among foreign countries in the number of its companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges.",
"title": "Rankings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Having moved away from the socialist economic model since the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Israel has made dramatic moves toward the free-market capitalist paradigm. As of 2020, Israel's economic freedom score is 74.0, making its economy the 26th freest in the 2020 Index of Economic Freedom. Israel ranks 35th on the World Bank's ease of doing business index. Israel's economic competitiveness is helped by strong protection of property rights, relatively low corruption levels, and high openness to global trade and investment. Income and corporate tax rates remain relatively high. As of 2020, Israel ranks 35th out of 179 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index. Bribery and other forms of corruption are illegal in Israel, which is a signatory to the OECD Bribery Convention since 2008.",
"title": "Rankings"
}
]
| The economy of Israel is a highly developed free-market economy. The prosperity of Israel's advanced economy allows the country to have a sophisticated welfare state, a powerful modern military said to possess a nuclear-weapons capability with a full nuclear triad, modern infrastructure rivaling many Western countries, and a high-technology sector competitively on par with Silicon Valley. It has the second-largest number of startup companies in the world after the United States, and the third-largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies after the U.S. and China. American companies, such as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple, built their first overseas research and development facilities in Israel. More than 400 high-tech multi-national corporations, such as IBM, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Facebook and Motorola have opened R&D centers throughout the country. The country's major economic sectors are high-technology and industrial manufacturing. The Israeli diamond industry is one of the world's centers for diamond cutting and polishing, amounting to 23.2% of all exports. As the country is relatively poor in natural resources, it consequently depends on imports of petroleum, raw materials, wheat, motor vehicles, uncut diamonds and production inputs. Nonetheless, the country's nearly total reliance on energy imports may change in the future as recent discoveries of natural gas reserves off its coast and the Israeli solar energy industry have taken a leading role in Israel's energy sector. Israel's quality higher education and the establishment of a highly motivated and educated populace is largely responsible for ushering in the country's high technology boom and rapid economic development by regional standards. The country has developed a strong educational infrastructure and a high-quality business startup incubation system for promoting cutting edge new ideas to create value-driven goods and services. These developments have allowed the country to create a high concentration of high-tech companies across the country's regions. These companies are financially backed by a strong venture capital industry. Its central high technology hub, the "Silicon Wadi", is considered second in importance only to its Californian counterpart. Numerous Israeli companies have been acquired by global multinational corporations for their profit-driven technologies in addition to their reliable and quality corporate personnel. In its early decades, the Israeli economy was largely state-controlled and shaped by social democratic ideas. In the 1970s and 1980s, the economy underwent a series of free-market reforms and was gradually liberalized. In the past three decades, the economy has grown considerably, though GDP per capita has increased faster than wages. Israel is the most developed and advanced country in West Asia, possessing the 17th largest foreign-exchange reserves in the world and the highest average wealth per adult in the Middle East. Israel is the 9th largest arm exporter in the world and has the highest number of billionaires in the Middle East, ranked 18th in the world. In recent years, Israel has had among the highest GDP growth rates within the developed world along with Ireland. The Economist ranked Israel as the 4th most successful economy among developed countries for 2022. The IMF estimated Israel's GDP at US$564 billion and its GDP per capita at US$58,270 in 2023, a figure comparable to other highly developed countries. Israel was invited to join the OECD in 2010. Israel has also signed free trade agreements with the European Union, the United States, the European Free Trade Association, Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Ukraine, Jordan, and Egypt. In 2007, Israel became the first non-Latin-American country to sign a free trade agreement with the Mercosur trade bloc. | 2001-05-05T02:57:27Z | 2023-12-31T23:26:21Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Israel |
14,696 | Israeli Declaration of Independence | The Israeli Declaration of Independence, formally the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (Hebrew: הכרזה על הקמת מדינת ישראל), was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 (5 Iyar 5708) by David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization, Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and soon to be first Prime Minister of Israel. It declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, which would come into effect on termination of the British Mandate at midnight that day. The event is celebrated annually in Israel as Independence Day, a national holiday on 5 Iyar of every year according to the Hebrew calendar.
The possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine had been a goal of Zionist organizations since the late 19th century. In 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour stated in a letter to British Jewish community leader Walter, Lord Rothschild that:
His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Through this letter, which became known as the Balfour Declaration, British government policy officially endorsed Zionism. After World War I, the United Kingdom was given a mandate for Palestine, which it had conquered from the Ottomans during the war. In 1937 the Peel Commission suggested partitioning Mandate Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, though the proposal was rejected as unworkable by the government and was at least partially to blame for the renewal of the 1936–39 Arab revolt.
In the face of increasing violence after World War II, the British handed the issue over to the recently established United Nations. The result was Resolution 181(II), a plan to partition Palestine into Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. The Jewish state was to receive around 56% of the land area of Mandate Palestine, encompassing 82% of the Jewish population, though it would be separated from Jerusalem. The plan was accepted by most of the Jewish population, but rejected by much of the Arab populace. On 29 November 1947, the resolution to recommend to the United Kingdom, as the mandatory Power for Palestine, and to all other Members of the United Nations the adoption and implementation, with regard to the future government of Palestine, of the Plan of Partition with Economic Union was put to a vote in the United Nations General Assembly.
The result was 33 to 13 in favour of the resolution, with 10 abstentions. Resolution 181(II): PART I: Future constitution and government of Palestine: A. TERMINATION OF MANDATE, PARTITION AND INDEPENDENCE: Clause 3 provides:
Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, ... shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948.
The Arab countries (all of which had opposed the plan) proposed to query the International Court of Justice on the competence of the General Assembly to partition a country, but the resolution was rejected.
The first draft of the declaration was made by Zvi Berenson, the legal advisor of the Histadrut trade union and later a Justice of the Supreme Court, at the request of Pinchas Rosen. A revised second draft was made by three lawyers, A. Beham, A. Hintzheimer and Z.E. Baker, and was framed by a committee including David Remez, Pinchas Rosen, Haim-Moshe Shapira, Moshe Sharett and Aharon Zisling. A second committee meeting, which included David Ben-Gurion, Yehuda Leib Maimon, Sharett and Zisling produced the final text.
On 12 May 1948, the Minhelet HaAm (Hebrew: מנהלת העם, lit. People's Administration) was convened to vote on declaring independence. Three of the thirteen members were missing, with Yehuda Leib Maimon and Yitzhak Gruenbaum being blocked in besieged Jerusalem, while Yitzhak-Meir Levin was in the United States.
The meeting started at 13:45 and ended after midnight. The decision was between accepting the American proposal for a truce, or declaring independence. The latter option was put to a vote, with six of the ten members present supporting it:
Chaim Weizmann, the Chairman of the World Zionist Organization, and soon to be first President of Israel, endorsed the decision, after reportedly asking "What are they waiting for, the idiots?"
The draft text was submitted for approval to a meeting of Moetzet HaAm at the JNF building in Tel Aviv on 14 May. The meeting started at 13:50 and ended at 15:00, an hour before the declaration was due to be made. Despite ongoing disagreements, members of the Council unanimously voted in favour of the final text. During the process, there were two major debates, centering on the issues of borders and religion.
The borders were not specified in the Declaration, although its 14th paragraph indicated a willingness to cooperate in the implementation of the UN Partition Plan. The original draft had declared that the borders would be decided by the UN partition plan. While this was supported by Rosen and Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, it was opposed by Ben-Gurion and Zisling, with Ben-Gurion stating, "We accepted the UN Resolution, but the Arabs did not. They are preparing to make war on us. If we defeat them and capture western Galilee or territory on both sides of the road to Jerusalem, these areas will become part of the state. Why should we obligate ourselves to accept boundaries that in any case the Arabs don't accept?" The inclusion of the designation of borders in the text was dropped after the provisional government of Israel, the Minhelet HaAm, voted 5–4 against it. The Revisionists, committed to a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River (that is, including Transjordan), wanted the phrase "within its historic borders" included, but were unsuccessful.
The second major issue was over the inclusion of God in the last section of the document, with the draft using the phrase "and placing our trust in the Almighty". The two rabbis, Shapira and Yehuda Leib Maimon, argued for its inclusion, saying that it could not be omitted, with Shapira supporting the wording "God of Israel" or "the Almighty and Redeemer of Israel". It was strongly opposed by Zisling, a member of the secularist Mapam. In the end the phrase "Rock of Israel" was used, which could be interpreted as either referring to God, or the land of Eretz Israel, Ben-Gurion saying "Each of us, in his own way, believes in the 'Rock of Israel' as he conceives it. I should like to make one request: Don't let me put this phrase to a vote." Although its use was still opposed by Zisling, the phrase was accepted without a vote.
The writers also had to decide on the name for the new state. Eretz Israel, Ever (from the name Eber), Judea, and Zion were all suggested, as were Ziona, Ivriya and Herzliya. Judea and Zion were rejected because, according to the partition plan, Jerusalem (Zion) and most of the Judaean Mountains would be outside the new state. Ben-Gurion put forward "Israel" and it passed by a vote of 6–3. Official documents released in April 2013 by the State Archive of Israel show that days before the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, officials were still debating about what the new country would be called in Arabic: Palestine (فلسطين, Filasṭīn), Zion (صهيون, Ṣahyūn) or Israel (إسرائيل, ’Isrā’īl). Two assumptions were made: "That an Arab state was about to be established alongside the Jewish one in keeping with the UN's partition resolution the year before, and that the Jewish state would include a large Arab minority whose feelings needed to be taken into account". In the end, the officials rejected the name Palestine because they thought that would be the name of the new Arab state and could cause confusion so they opted for the most straightforward option of Israel.
At the meeting on 14 May, several other members of Moetzet HaAm suggested additions to the document. Meir Vilner wanted it to denounce the British Mandate and military but Sharett said it was out of place. Meir Argov pushed to mention the Displaced Persons camps in Europe and to guarantee freedom of language. Ben-Gurion agreed with the latter but noted that Hebrew should be the main language of the state.
The debate over wording did not end completely even after the Declaration had been made. Declaration signer Meir David Loewenstein later claimed, "It ignored our sole right to Eretz Israel, which is based on the covenant of the Lord with Abraham, our father, and repeated promises in the Tanach. It ignored the aliya of the Ramban and the students of the Vilna Gaon and the Ba'al Shem Tov, and the [rights of] Jews who lived in the 'Old Yishuv'."
The ceremony was held in the Tel Aviv Museum (today known as Independence Hall) but was not widely publicised as it was feared that the British Authorities might attempt to prevent it or that the Arab armies might invade earlier than expected. An invitation was sent out by messenger on the morning of 14 May telling recipients to arrive at 15:30 and to keep the event a secret. The event started at 16:00 (a time chosen so as not to breach the sabbath) and was broadcast live as the first transmission of the new radio station Kol Yisrael.
The final draft of the declaration was typed at the Jewish National Fund building following its approval earlier in the day. Ze'ev Sherf, who stayed at the building in order to deliver the text, had forgotten to arrange transport for himself. Ultimately, he had to flag down a passing car and ask the driver (who was driving a borrowed car without a license) to take him to the ceremony. Sherf's request was initially refused but he managed to persuade the driver to take him. The car was stopped by a policeman for speeding while driving across the city though a ticket was not issued after it was explained that he was delaying the declaration of independence. Sherf arrived at the museum at 15:59.
At 16:00, Ben-Gurion opened the ceremony by banging his gavel on the table, prompting a spontaneous rendition of Hatikvah, soon to be Israel's national anthem, from the 250 guests. On the wall behind the podium hung a picture of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and two flags, later to become the official flag of Israel.
After telling the audience "I shall now read to you the scroll of the Establishment of the State, which has passed its first reading by the National Council", Ben-Gurion proceeded to read out the declaration, taking 16 minutes, ending with the words "Let us accept the Foundation Scroll of the Jewish State by rising" and calling on Rabbi Fishman to recite the Shehecheyanu blessing.
As leader of the Yishuv, David Ben-Gurion was the first person to sign. The declaration was due to be signed by all 37 members of Moetzet HaAm. However, twelve members could not attend, with eleven of them trapped in besieged Jerusalem and one abroad. The remaining 25 signatories present were called up in alphabetical order to sign, leaving spaces for those absent. Although a space was left for him between the signatures of Eliyahu Dobkin and Meir Vilner, Zerach Warhaftig signed at the top of the next column, leading to speculation that Vilner's name had been left alone to isolate him, or to stress that even a communist had agreed with the declaration. However, Warhaftig later denied this, stating that a space had been left for him (as he was one of the signatories trapped in Jerusalem) where a Hebraicised form of his name would have fitted alphabetically, but he insisted on signing under his actual name so as to honour his father's memory and so moved down two spaces. He and Vilner would be the last surviving signatories, and remained close for the rest of their lives. Of the signatories, two were women (Golda Meir and Rachel Cohen-Kagan).
When Herzl Rosenblum, a journalist, was called up to sign, Ben-Gurion instructed him to sign under the name Herzl Vardi, his pen name, as he wanted more Hebrew names on the document. Although Rosenblum acquiesced to Ben-Gurion's request and legally changed his name to Vardi, he later admitted to regretting not signing as Rosenblum. Several other signatories later Hebraised their names, including Meir Argov (Grabovsky), Peretz Bernstein (then Fritz Bernstein), Avraham Granot (Granovsky), Avraham Nissan (Katznelson), Moshe Kol (Kolodny), Yehuda Leib Maimon (Fishman), Golda Meir (Meyerson/Myerson), Pinchas Rosen (Felix Rosenblueth) and Moshe Sharett (Shertok). Other signatories added their own touches, including Saadia Kobashi who added the phrase "HaLevy", referring to the tribe of Levi.
After Sharett, the last of the signatories, had put his name to paper, the audience again stood and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra played "Hatikvah". Ben-Gurion concluded the event with the words "The State of Israel is established! This meeting is adjourned!"
The declaration was signed in the context of civil war between the Arab and Jewish populations of the Mandate that had started the day after the partition vote at the UN six months earlier. Neighbouring Arab states and the Arab League were opposed to the vote and had declared they would intervene to prevent its implementation. In a cablegram on 15 May 1948 to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States claimed that "the Arab states find themselves compelled to intervene in order to restore law and order and to check further bloodshed".
Over the next few days after the declaration, armies of Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Iraq, and Syria engaged Israeli troops inside the area of what had just ceased to be Mandatory Palestine, thereby starting the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. A truce began on 11 June, but fighting resumed on 8 July and stopped again on 18 July, before restarting in mid-October and finally ending on 24 July 1949 with the signing of the armistice agreement with Syria. By then Israel had retained its independence and increased its land area by almost 50% compared to the 1947 UN Partition Plan.
Following the declaration, Moetzet HaAm became the Provisional State Council, which acted as the legislative body for the new state until the first elections in January 1949.
Many of the signatories would play a prominent role in Israeli politics following independence; Moshe Sharett and Golda Meir both served as Prime Minister, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi became the country's second president in 1952, and several others served as ministers. David Remez was the first signatory to pass away, dying in May 1951, while Meir Vilner, the youngest signatory at just 29, was the longest living, serving in the Knesset until 1990 and dying in June 2003. Eliyahu Berligne, the oldest signatory at 82, died in 1959.
Eleven minutes after midnight, the United States de facto recognized the State of Israel. This was followed by Iran (which had voted against the UN partition plan), Guatemala, Iceland, Nicaragua, Romania, and Uruguay. The Soviet Union was the first nation to fully recognize Israel de jure on 17 May 1948, followed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ireland, and South Africa. The United States extended official recognition after the first Israeli election, as Truman had promised on 31 January 1949. By virtue of General Assembly Resolution 273 (III), Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations on 11 May 1949.
In the three years following the 1948 Palestine war, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, residing mainly along the borders and in former Arab lands. Around 136,000 were some of the 250,000 displaced Jews of World War II. And from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War until the early 1970s, 800,000–1,000,000 Jews left, fled, or were expelled from their homes in Arab countries; 260,000 of them reached Israel between 1948 and 1951; and 600,000 by 1972.
At the same time, a large number of Arabs left, fled or were expelled from, what became Israel. In the Report of the Technical Committee on Refugees (Submitted to the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine in Lausanne on 7 September 1949) – (A/1367/Rev.1), in paragraph 15, the estimate of the statistical expert, which the Committee believed to be as accurate as circumstances permitted, indicated that the number of refugees from Israel-controlled territory amounted to approximately 711,000.
Paragraph 13 of the Declaration provides that the State of Israel would be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex;. However, the Knesset maintains that the declaration is neither a law nor an ordinary legal document. The Supreme Court has ruled that the guarantees were merely guiding principles, and that the declaration is not a constitutional law making a practical ruling on the upholding or nullification of various ordinances and statutes.
In 1994 the Knesset amended two basic laws, Human Dignity and Liberty and Freedom of Occupation, introducing (among other changes) a statement saying "the fundamental human rights in Israel will be honored (...) in the spirit of the principles included in the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel."
Although Ben-Gurion had told the audience that he was reading from the scroll of independence, he was actually reading from handwritten notes because only the bottom part of the scroll had been finished by artist and calligrapher Otte Wallish by the time of the declaration (he did not complete the entire document until June). The scroll, which is bound together in three parts, is generally kept in the country's National Archives. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Israeli Declaration of Independence, formally the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (Hebrew: הכרזה על הקמת מדינת ישראל), was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 (5 Iyar 5708) by David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization, Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and soon to be first Prime Minister of Israel. It declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, which would come into effect on termination of the British Mandate at midnight that day. The event is celebrated annually in Israel as Independence Day, a national holiday on 5 Iyar of every year according to the Hebrew calendar.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine had been a goal of Zionist organizations since the late 19th century. In 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour stated in a letter to British Jewish community leader Walter, Lord Rothschild that:",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Through this letter, which became known as the Balfour Declaration, British government policy officially endorsed Zionism. After World War I, the United Kingdom was given a mandate for Palestine, which it had conquered from the Ottomans during the war. In 1937 the Peel Commission suggested partitioning Mandate Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, though the proposal was rejected as unworkable by the government and was at least partially to blame for the renewal of the 1936–39 Arab revolt.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the face of increasing violence after World War II, the British handed the issue over to the recently established United Nations. The result was Resolution 181(II), a plan to partition Palestine into Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. The Jewish state was to receive around 56% of the land area of Mandate Palestine, encompassing 82% of the Jewish population, though it would be separated from Jerusalem. The plan was accepted by most of the Jewish population, but rejected by much of the Arab populace. On 29 November 1947, the resolution to recommend to the United Kingdom, as the mandatory Power for Palestine, and to all other Members of the United Nations the adoption and implementation, with regard to the future government of Palestine, of the Plan of Partition with Economic Union was put to a vote in the United Nations General Assembly.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The result was 33 to 13 in favour of the resolution, with 10 abstentions. Resolution 181(II): PART I: Future constitution and government of Palestine: A. TERMINATION OF MANDATE, PARTITION AND INDEPENDENCE: Clause 3 provides:",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, ... shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Arab countries (all of which had opposed the plan) proposed to query the International Court of Justice on the competence of the General Assembly to partition a country, but the resolution was rejected.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The first draft of the declaration was made by Zvi Berenson, the legal advisor of the Histadrut trade union and later a Justice of the Supreme Court, at the request of Pinchas Rosen. A revised second draft was made by three lawyers, A. Beham, A. Hintzheimer and Z.E. Baker, and was framed by a committee including David Remez, Pinchas Rosen, Haim-Moshe Shapira, Moshe Sharett and Aharon Zisling. A second committee meeting, which included David Ben-Gurion, Yehuda Leib Maimon, Sharett and Zisling produced the final text.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On 12 May 1948, the Minhelet HaAm (Hebrew: מנהלת העם, lit. People's Administration) was convened to vote on declaring independence. Three of the thirteen members were missing, with Yehuda Leib Maimon and Yitzhak Gruenbaum being blocked in besieged Jerusalem, while Yitzhak-Meir Levin was in the United States.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The meeting started at 13:45 and ended after midnight. The decision was between accepting the American proposal for a truce, or declaring independence. The latter option was put to a vote, with six of the ten members present supporting it:",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Chaim Weizmann, the Chairman of the World Zionist Organization, and soon to be first President of Israel, endorsed the decision, after reportedly asking \"What are they waiting for, the idiots?\"",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The draft text was submitted for approval to a meeting of Moetzet HaAm at the JNF building in Tel Aviv on 14 May. The meeting started at 13:50 and ended at 15:00, an hour before the declaration was due to be made. Despite ongoing disagreements, members of the Council unanimously voted in favour of the final text. During the process, there were two major debates, centering on the issues of borders and religion.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The borders were not specified in the Declaration, although its 14th paragraph indicated a willingness to cooperate in the implementation of the UN Partition Plan. The original draft had declared that the borders would be decided by the UN partition plan. While this was supported by Rosen and Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, it was opposed by Ben-Gurion and Zisling, with Ben-Gurion stating, \"We accepted the UN Resolution, but the Arabs did not. They are preparing to make war on us. If we defeat them and capture western Galilee or territory on both sides of the road to Jerusalem, these areas will become part of the state. Why should we obligate ourselves to accept boundaries that in any case the Arabs don't accept?\" The inclusion of the designation of borders in the text was dropped after the provisional government of Israel, the Minhelet HaAm, voted 5–4 against it. The Revisionists, committed to a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River (that is, including Transjordan), wanted the phrase \"within its historic borders\" included, but were unsuccessful.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The second major issue was over the inclusion of God in the last section of the document, with the draft using the phrase \"and placing our trust in the Almighty\". The two rabbis, Shapira and Yehuda Leib Maimon, argued for its inclusion, saying that it could not be omitted, with Shapira supporting the wording \"God of Israel\" or \"the Almighty and Redeemer of Israel\". It was strongly opposed by Zisling, a member of the secularist Mapam. In the end the phrase \"Rock of Israel\" was used, which could be interpreted as either referring to God, or the land of Eretz Israel, Ben-Gurion saying \"Each of us, in his own way, believes in the 'Rock of Israel' as he conceives it. I should like to make one request: Don't let me put this phrase to a vote.\" Although its use was still opposed by Zisling, the phrase was accepted without a vote.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The writers also had to decide on the name for the new state. Eretz Israel, Ever (from the name Eber), Judea, and Zion were all suggested, as were Ziona, Ivriya and Herzliya. Judea and Zion were rejected because, according to the partition plan, Jerusalem (Zion) and most of the Judaean Mountains would be outside the new state. Ben-Gurion put forward \"Israel\" and it passed by a vote of 6–3. Official documents released in April 2013 by the State Archive of Israel show that days before the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, officials were still debating about what the new country would be called in Arabic: Palestine (فلسطين, Filasṭīn), Zion (صهيون, Ṣahyūn) or Israel (إسرائيل, ’Isrā’īl). Two assumptions were made: \"That an Arab state was about to be established alongside the Jewish one in keeping with the UN's partition resolution the year before, and that the Jewish state would include a large Arab minority whose feelings needed to be taken into account\". In the end, the officials rejected the name Palestine because they thought that would be the name of the new Arab state and could cause confusion so they opted for the most straightforward option of Israel.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "At the meeting on 14 May, several other members of Moetzet HaAm suggested additions to the document. Meir Vilner wanted it to denounce the British Mandate and military but Sharett said it was out of place. Meir Argov pushed to mention the Displaced Persons camps in Europe and to guarantee freedom of language. Ben-Gurion agreed with the latter but noted that Hebrew should be the main language of the state.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The debate over wording did not end completely even after the Declaration had been made. Declaration signer Meir David Loewenstein later claimed, \"It ignored our sole right to Eretz Israel, which is based on the covenant of the Lord with Abraham, our father, and repeated promises in the Tanach. It ignored the aliya of the Ramban and the students of the Vilna Gaon and the Ba'al Shem Tov, and the [rights of] Jews who lived in the 'Old Yishuv'.\"",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The ceremony was held in the Tel Aviv Museum (today known as Independence Hall) but was not widely publicised as it was feared that the British Authorities might attempt to prevent it or that the Arab armies might invade earlier than expected. An invitation was sent out by messenger on the morning of 14 May telling recipients to arrive at 15:30 and to keep the event a secret. The event started at 16:00 (a time chosen so as not to breach the sabbath) and was broadcast live as the first transmission of the new radio station Kol Yisrael.",
"title": "Declaration ceremony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The final draft of the declaration was typed at the Jewish National Fund building following its approval earlier in the day. Ze'ev Sherf, who stayed at the building in order to deliver the text, had forgotten to arrange transport for himself. Ultimately, he had to flag down a passing car and ask the driver (who was driving a borrowed car without a license) to take him to the ceremony. Sherf's request was initially refused but he managed to persuade the driver to take him. The car was stopped by a policeman for speeding while driving across the city though a ticket was not issued after it was explained that he was delaying the declaration of independence. Sherf arrived at the museum at 15:59.",
"title": "Declaration ceremony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "At 16:00, Ben-Gurion opened the ceremony by banging his gavel on the table, prompting a spontaneous rendition of Hatikvah, soon to be Israel's national anthem, from the 250 guests. On the wall behind the podium hung a picture of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and two flags, later to become the official flag of Israel.",
"title": "Declaration ceremony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "After telling the audience \"I shall now read to you the scroll of the Establishment of the State, which has passed its first reading by the National Council\", Ben-Gurion proceeded to read out the declaration, taking 16 minutes, ending with the words \"Let us accept the Foundation Scroll of the Jewish State by rising\" and calling on Rabbi Fishman to recite the Shehecheyanu blessing.",
"title": "Declaration ceremony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "As leader of the Yishuv, David Ben-Gurion was the first person to sign. The declaration was due to be signed by all 37 members of Moetzet HaAm. However, twelve members could not attend, with eleven of them trapped in besieged Jerusalem and one abroad. The remaining 25 signatories present were called up in alphabetical order to sign, leaving spaces for those absent. Although a space was left for him between the signatures of Eliyahu Dobkin and Meir Vilner, Zerach Warhaftig signed at the top of the next column, leading to speculation that Vilner's name had been left alone to isolate him, or to stress that even a communist had agreed with the declaration. However, Warhaftig later denied this, stating that a space had been left for him (as he was one of the signatories trapped in Jerusalem) where a Hebraicised form of his name would have fitted alphabetically, but he insisted on signing under his actual name so as to honour his father's memory and so moved down two spaces. He and Vilner would be the last surviving signatories, and remained close for the rest of their lives. Of the signatories, two were women (Golda Meir and Rachel Cohen-Kagan).",
"title": "Declaration ceremony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "When Herzl Rosenblum, a journalist, was called up to sign, Ben-Gurion instructed him to sign under the name Herzl Vardi, his pen name, as he wanted more Hebrew names on the document. Although Rosenblum acquiesced to Ben-Gurion's request and legally changed his name to Vardi, he later admitted to regretting not signing as Rosenblum. Several other signatories later Hebraised their names, including Meir Argov (Grabovsky), Peretz Bernstein (then Fritz Bernstein), Avraham Granot (Granovsky), Avraham Nissan (Katznelson), Moshe Kol (Kolodny), Yehuda Leib Maimon (Fishman), Golda Meir (Meyerson/Myerson), Pinchas Rosen (Felix Rosenblueth) and Moshe Sharett (Shertok). Other signatories added their own touches, including Saadia Kobashi who added the phrase \"HaLevy\", referring to the tribe of Levi.",
"title": "Declaration ceremony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "After Sharett, the last of the signatories, had put his name to paper, the audience again stood and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra played \"Hatikvah\". Ben-Gurion concluded the event with the words \"The State of Israel is established! This meeting is adjourned!\"",
"title": "Declaration ceremony"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The declaration was signed in the context of civil war between the Arab and Jewish populations of the Mandate that had started the day after the partition vote at the UN six months earlier. Neighbouring Arab states and the Arab League were opposed to the vote and had declared they would intervene to prevent its implementation. In a cablegram on 15 May 1948 to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States claimed that \"the Arab states find themselves compelled to intervene in order to restore law and order and to check further bloodshed\".",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Over the next few days after the declaration, armies of Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Iraq, and Syria engaged Israeli troops inside the area of what had just ceased to be Mandatory Palestine, thereby starting the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. A truce began on 11 June, but fighting resumed on 8 July and stopped again on 18 July, before restarting in mid-October and finally ending on 24 July 1949 with the signing of the armistice agreement with Syria. By then Israel had retained its independence and increased its land area by almost 50% compared to the 1947 UN Partition Plan.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Following the declaration, Moetzet HaAm became the Provisional State Council, which acted as the legislative body for the new state until the first elections in January 1949.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Many of the signatories would play a prominent role in Israeli politics following independence; Moshe Sharett and Golda Meir both served as Prime Minister, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi became the country's second president in 1952, and several others served as ministers. David Remez was the first signatory to pass away, dying in May 1951, while Meir Vilner, the youngest signatory at just 29, was the longest living, serving in the Knesset until 1990 and dying in June 2003. Eliyahu Berligne, the oldest signatory at 82, died in 1959.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Eleven minutes after midnight, the United States de facto recognized the State of Israel. This was followed by Iran (which had voted against the UN partition plan), Guatemala, Iceland, Nicaragua, Romania, and Uruguay. The Soviet Union was the first nation to fully recognize Israel de jure on 17 May 1948, followed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ireland, and South Africa. The United States extended official recognition after the first Israeli election, as Truman had promised on 31 January 1949. By virtue of General Assembly Resolution 273 (III), Israel was admitted to membership in the United Nations on 11 May 1949.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In the three years following the 1948 Palestine war, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, residing mainly along the borders and in former Arab lands. Around 136,000 were some of the 250,000 displaced Jews of World War II. And from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War until the early 1970s, 800,000–1,000,000 Jews left, fled, or were expelled from their homes in Arab countries; 260,000 of them reached Israel between 1948 and 1951; and 600,000 by 1972.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "At the same time, a large number of Arabs left, fled or were expelled from, what became Israel. In the Report of the Technical Committee on Refugees (Submitted to the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine in Lausanne on 7 September 1949) – (A/1367/Rev.1), in paragraph 15, the estimate of the statistical expert, which the Committee believed to be as accurate as circumstances permitted, indicated that the number of refugees from Israel-controlled territory amounted to approximately 711,000.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Paragraph 13 of the Declaration provides that the State of Israel would be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex;. However, the Knesset maintains that the declaration is neither a law nor an ordinary legal document. The Supreme Court has ruled that the guarantees were merely guiding principles, and that the declaration is not a constitutional law making a practical ruling on the upholding or nullification of various ordinances and statutes.",
"title": "Status in Israeli law"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 1994 the Knesset amended two basic laws, Human Dignity and Liberty and Freedom of Occupation, introducing (among other changes) a statement saying \"the fundamental human rights in Israel will be honored (...) in the spirit of the principles included in the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel.\"",
"title": "Status in Israeli law"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Although Ben-Gurion had told the audience that he was reading from the scroll of independence, he was actually reading from handwritten notes because only the bottom part of the scroll had been finished by artist and calligrapher Otte Wallish by the time of the declaration (he did not complete the entire document until June). The scroll, which is bound together in three parts, is generally kept in the country's National Archives.",
"title": "The scroll"
}
]
| The Israeli Declaration of Independence, formally the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, was proclaimed on 14 May 1948 by David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization, Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and soon to be first Prime Minister of Israel. It declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, which would come into effect on termination of the British Mandate at midnight that day. The event is celebrated annually in Israel as Independence Day, a national holiday on 5 Iyar of every year according to the Hebrew calendar. | 2002-02-25T15:51:15Z | 2023-12-30T12:02:09Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Declaration_of_Independence |
14,699 | Geography of Italy | The geography of Italy includes the description of all the physical geographical elements of Italy. Italy, whose territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical region, is located in southern Europe and comprises the long, boot-shaped Italian Peninsula crossed by the Apennines, the southern side of Alps, the large plain of the Po Valley and some islands including Sicily and Sardinia. Italy is part of the Northern Hemisphere. Two of the Pelagie Islands (Lampedusa and Lampione) are located on the African continent.
The total area of Italy is 301,230 km (116,310 sq mi), of which 294,020 km (113,520 sq mi) is land and 7,210 km (2,784 sq mi) is water. It lies between latitudes 35° and 47° N, and longitudes 6° and 19° E. Italy borders Switzerland (698 km or 434 mi), France (476 km or 296 mi), Austria (404 km or 251 mi) and Slovenia (218 km or 135 mi). San Marino (37 km or 23 mi) and Vatican City (3.4 km or 2.1 mi) are enclaves. The total border length is 1,836.4 km (1,141.1 mi). Including islands, Italy has a coastline of 7,900 km (4,900 mi) on the Adriatic Sea, Ionian Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Ligurian Sea, Sea of Sardinia and Strait of Sicily.
The Italian geographical region, in its traditional and most widely accepted extent, has an area of approximately 324,000 square kilometres (125,000 sq mi), which is greater than the area of the entire Italian Republic (301,230 square kilometres or 116,310 square miles). The Italian geographical region also includes territories that are sovereign parts of Croatia, France, Slovenia and Switzerland, as well as the four small independent states of the Principality of Monaco, the Republic of Malta, the Republic of San Marino and the Vatican City State (the Holy See).
Italy is joined to the central-western section of the European continent by the Alps. Due to its position, it constitutes a bridge between Europe and Africa. In particular, the Italian peninsula is located in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, between the Balkans and Hellenic peninsula to the east, the Iberian peninsula to the west, North Africa to the south and continental Europe to the north separated by the Alps.
Italy also separates the western basin of the Mediterranean Sea from the eastern basin — that is, the Tyrrhenian Sea from the Ionian Sea — extending towards the west with Calabria and Sicily, which together geologically form a peninsular extension. Only 140 km (87 mi) separate Sicily and Africa (the Tunisian peninsula), by the channel of Sicily.
To the east, Salento is 70 km (43 mi) from the Albanian coast, at the narrowest point of the Strait of Otranto. It is Capo d'Otranto (also called Punta Palascìa), located at 40° 7' north latitude and 18° 31' east longitude. To the north of Salento lies the long and narrow inlet of the Adriatic Sea.
The islands of Sardinia and Corsica then divide the Tyrrhenian Sea from the Sardinian Sea.
The coastal development of the Italian peninsula and islands is vast; about 8,000 kilometres (5,000 mi), which is much larger than that of the Iberian peninsula, but much less than that of the Balkans.
Italy has a prevalence of hilly areas (41.6% of the territory) compared to mountainous areas (35.2% of the territory), or flat areas (23.2%).
The Italian soil today is the result of anthropization and is partly mountainous, partly hilly, partly volcanic, partly endolagunar with bumps, polesine, islands, dried up by reclamation (Bonifiche Circeo, Ferraresi, Comacchio, Ostiense, Pisana and so on) with ever greater raising of embankments (for example the withdrawal of 1.7 billion cubic meters per year of fresh water, from 20 consortia from Veneto alone).
No inhabited center in Italy is more than 294 km (183 mi) from the sea and the Italian municipality farthest from the sea is Madesimo (province of Sondrio) which is 294 km (183 mi) from the Ligurian Sea.
Italy borders Switzerland (698 km or 434 mi), France (476 km or 296 mi), Austria (404 km or 251 mi) and Slovenia (218 km or 135 mi). San Marino (37 km or 23 mi) and Vatican City (3.4 km or 2.1 mi) are enclaves. The total border length is 1,836.4 km (1,141.1 mi). Including islands, Italy has a coastline of 7,900 km (4,900 mi) on the Adriatic Sea, Ionian Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Ligurian Sea, Sea of Sardinia and Strait of Sicily.
The distance that separates the Testa Gemella Occidentale from Punta Pesce Spada is 1,291 km (802 mi); the maximum distance between the eastern and western borders is about 600 km (370 mi). The municipalities at the ends of Italy are:
Although the Istituto Geografico Militare of Florence has repeatedly declared that it is impossible to uniquely determine the center of a non-geometric shape such as that of Italy, there are several locations that, depending on the measurement criteria adopted, compete for the primacy of the geographical centre of Italy:
The Italian geographical region, in its traditional and most widely accepted extent, has an area of approximately 324,000 square kilometres (125,000 sq mi), which is greater than the area of the entire Italian Republic (301,230 square kilometres or 116,310 square miles). The Italian geographical region also includes territories that are sovereign parts of Croatia, France, Slovenia and Switzerland, as well as the four small independent states of the Principality of Monaco, the Republic of Malta, the Republic of San Marino and the Vatican City State (the Holy See). Italy and the Italian geographical region are both divided into three parts, albeit with some differences.
Continental Italy defined as the southern side of the Alps, the Po Valley, Liguria and the portion of the Apennines bounded by the conventional line that connects La Spezia to Rimini. The region of Nice (corresponding to the historic County of Nice), Italian Switzerland, part of Julian March and other less extensive portions of territory such as Valle Stretta, Gondo and Val Monastero, are not part of the Italian Republic in its continental part but they are part of the Italian geographical region. Conversely, the Val di Lei, the Val di Livigno, the San Candido basin, the Rio Sesto valley and the Tarvisio basin, although part of the Italian Republic, are not included in the Italian geographical region.
By peninsular Italy we mean the entire southern part of the aforementioned line, up to Punta Melito in Calabria (which is the southernmost point of the peninsula) and Santa Maria di Leuca in Apulia. San Marino and the Vatican City are foreign territories, although included in the Italian geographical region.
The Italian peninsula occupies a median position between the three main peninsulas of southern Europe, emerging right in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, with large islands and some archipelagos.
Insular Italy is made up of Sardinia, Sicily and numerous smaller islands, scattered or grouped into archipelagos in the seas that bathe the coasts of the peninsula. Corsica is not politically included in insular Italy since it belongs to France, however, it is included in the Italian geographical region.
The five largest islands belonging to the Italian state are, in order of size:
Other islands belonging to Italy are grouped into the following archipelagos:
Almost 40% of the Italian territory is mountainous, with the Alps as the northern boundary and the Apennine Mountains forming the backbone of the peninsula and extending for 1,350 km (840 mi). The Alpine mountain range is linked with the Apennines with the Colle di Cadibona pass in the Ligurian Alps. Nineteen Italian regions are crossed by either the Alps or the Apennines, or their offshoots. Sardinia has mountains with their own characteristics and are included in the Sardinian-Corsican relief, since it also affects Corsica.
The Alps (formed during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic) surround the Po Valley to the north, east and west, and develop along the entire northern border of Italy (about 1,000 km or 620 mi), creating a natural border. The Alps contain the highest peak in the European Union, Mont Blanc, at 4,810 meters (15,780 ft) above sea level, located between the Aosta Valley and France.
The Apennines (formed during the Oligocene) rise south of the Po Valley and run from north to south throughout the Italian peninsula, from Liguria to Calabria and continue in northern Sicily ending in the Madonie, acting as a watershed between the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic-Ionian coast.
The highest peaks in Italy are found in the Western Alps, where there are numerous peaks that exceed 4,000 meters (13,000 ft) including Monte Rosa (4,634 meters or 15,203 feet), the Cervino (4,478 meters or 14,692 feet) and Mont Blanc which with its 4,810 meters (15,780 ft). The maximum height of the Apennines is the Gran Sasso d'Italia (2,912 meters or 9,554 feet).
Worldwide-known mountains in Italy are Monte Cervino (Matterhorn), Monte Rosa, Gran Paradiso in the West Alps, and Bernina, Stelvio and Dolomites along the eastern side of the Alps.
The hills cover most of the Italian territory. They are mainly located in the central-southern part of the peninsula, along the sides of the Apennine ridge, but also in the pre-Alpine area, close to the Alps.
The hilly reliefs, which alternate with hollows and valleys, have slight slopes and do not exceed 800 meters or 2,600 feet.
The first two hilly systems are the subalpine hills and the Preappennino, two hilly strips arranged between the Alps and the Po Valley and between the Apennines and the Adriatic coast respectively. The subalpine hills widen more in the western part of the Po Valley, where they form the hills of the Langhe and Montferrat. Two other hill systems are the Tyrrhenian Anti-Apennine, which extends from the Colline Metallifere of Tuscany to Vesuvius and the Beneventane Hills in Campania, and the Adriatic Anti-Apennine, present in Puglia with the Murge and Gargano hills.
The Italian hills have different origins:
The plains make up 23.2% of the Italian national territory. In between the two lies a large plain in the valley of the Po, the largest river in Italy, which flows 652 km (405 mi) eastward from the Cottian Alps to the Adriatic. The Po Valley is the largest plain in Italy, with 46,000 km (18,000 sq mi), and it represents over 70% of the total plain area in the country. The Po Valley is divided into two bands: the high plain, which borders the Alpine and Apennine hills, and the low plain located in the center and extended up to the Po delta.
In the peninsular part and in the islands there are only small plains often located along the coasts and at the mouth of the major rivers, near which they formed: this is the case, for example, of the Tavoliere delle Puglie, of the Campidano in Sardinia or the Maremma in Tuscany.
The Italian plains have different origins:
Italy is surrounded, except to the north, by the sea, and its territory has a rich reserve of inland waters (rivers and lakes). The southern regions, however, are drier than the northern ones, due to the scarcity of rains and the absence of glaciers that can feed the rivers.
Italian rivers are shorter than those of other European regions due to the Apennines that run along the entire length of the peninsula, dividing the waters into two opposite sides. They are numerous however, due to the relative abundance of rains in Italy in general, and to the presence of the Alpine chain, rich in snowfields and glaciers, in northern Italy.
The fundamental watershed follows the ridge of the Alps and the Apennines and defines five main slopes, corresponding to the seas into which the rivers flow: the Adriatic, Ionic, Tyrrhenian, Ligurian and Mediterranean sides. Italian rivers are categorized into two main groups: the Alpine-Po river rivers and the Apennine-island rivers.
The longest Italian river is the Po (652 km or 405 mi), which flows from the Monviso, runs through the entire Po Valley from west to east, and then flows, with a delta, into the Adriatic Sea. In addition to being the longest, it is also the river with the largest basin and the largest flow at its mouth. The second longest Italian river is the Adige (410 km or 250 mi), which originates near Lake Resia and flows into the Adriatic Sea, after having made a north-south route, near Chioggia. The third longest river in Italy is the Tiber (405 km or 252 mi), the second longest Italian river in terms of hydrographic basin; it was formed on Monte Fumaiolo (in Emilia-Romagna) and flows into the Tyrrhenian Sea after having crossed the center of Rome. After the Tiber, in order of length are the rivers Adda (313 km or 194 mi), Oglio (280 km or 170 mi), Tanaro (276 km or 171 mi) and Ticino (248 km (154 mi), of which 157 km (98 mi) is in Italy).
Most of Italy's rivers drain either into the Adriatic Sea (such as Po, Piave, Adige, Brenta, Tagliamento, Reno) or into the Tyrrhenian (like Arno, Tiber and Volturno), though the waters from some border municipalities drain into the Black Sea through the basin of the Drava (Innichen and Sexten in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, Tarvisio in Friuli-Venezia-Giulia) or the Inn (Livigno in Lombardy), both tributaries of the Danube, and the waters from the Lago di Lei in Lombardy drain into the North Sea through the basin of Rhine.
In Italy there are more than 1,000 lakes, mostly artificially created by the damming of river valleys.
In the north of the country are a number of subalpine moraine-dammed lakes (the Italian Lakes), including the largest in Italy, the Garda (370 km or 143 sq mi). Other well known of these subalpine lakes are Lake Maggiore (212.5 km or 82 sq mi), whose most northerly section is part of Switzerland, Como (which holds the record of depth in the Italian Republic, which amounts to 410 m or 1,350 ft) (146 km or 56 sq mi), Orta, Lugano, Iseo, Idro. These lakes occupy wide valleys carved by ancient glaciers.
In Italy there are also coastal lakes, such as Lake Lesina, separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land, and volcanic lakes (Lake Bolsena, Lake Vico, Lake Bracciano), which occupy the craters of extinct volcanoes. Lake Trasimeno, on the other hand, formed in a hollow in the territory. Other notable lakes in the Italian peninsula are Varano and Omodeo in Sardinia.
The swamps and ponds that in the past covered vast flat areas of Italy, in recent centuries have been largely dried up; the few remaining wetlands, such as the Valli di Comacchio in Emilia-Romagna or the Stagno di Cagliari in Sardinia, are protected as very precious natural environments.
Along the Italian coasts there are lagoons, among which the Venetian Lagoon, that of Grado Lagoon and that of Marano Lagoon in the northern Adriatic stand out for their size and importance, and the Orbetello Lagoon on the Tuscan coast.
The Italian peninsula overlooks the Mediterranean Sea, which around it is divided into various seas.
The Ligurian Sea bathes the coasts of Liguria and, according to the cartography of the Hydrographic Institute of the Navy, the northern Tuscan coasts to the south as far as the island of Elba.
The Tyrrhenian Sea bathes the western coasts of the peninsula south of the island of Elba (and therefore all the regions from Tuscany to Calabria), the northern coasts of Sicily and the eastern coasts of Sardinia.
The Adriatic Sea bathes the eastern coasts of the peninsula, from Friuli Venezia Giulia to the Cape of Santa Maria di Leuca, Apulia.
The Ionian Sea bathes the eastern coasts of Sicily and Calabria, the coast of Basilicata and the western coasts of Apulia.
To the south of Sicily lies the Strait of Sicily, while to the west of Sardinia lies the Sea of Sardinia.
Italy has a coastline of approximately 7,900 km (4,900 mi), with a great variety of shapes that depends both on the nature of the mainland and on the action of the sea.
The Adriatic coasts are quite straight, characterized to the north by the gulfs of Trieste and Venice, in the center by the Conero promontory, to the south by that of the Gargano, which forms the Gulf of Manfredonia. The Adriatic coasts are low and sandy, with lagoons in the northern section. Only in the Trieste area, in correspondence with the Gargano, the Conero and the lower eastern Salento (between Otranto and Santa Maria di Leuca) do rocky sections follow one another.
The Ionian coasts are mainly low and sandy and are characterized by the wide Gulf of Taranto, closed to the east by the Salento Peninsula (which divides it from the Adriatic) and to the west by the Calabrian peninsula (which divides it from the Tyrrhenian Sea).
The Strait of Messina connects the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian seas.
The Tyrrhenian coasts are very articulated, with rocky stretches alternating with sandy beaches, with numerous gulfs and headlands. Among the many gulfs include Naples, Salerno and Gaeta, between the peninsulas that of Sorrento and the promontories that of Circeo and that of Piombino. In the Tyrrhenian Sea, there are three important channels: between the island of Elba and the Tuscan coast the Strait of Piombino, between Elba and Corsica the Strait of Corsica, and between Sardinia and Corsica the Strait of Bonifacio.
The Ligurian Sea, which has the Gulf of Genoa at its center, has high and rocky coasts in the Riviera di Levante and mixed coasts in the Riviera di Ponente.
The underground thrusts that millions of years ago gave rise to the reliefs of Italy still continue: the earthquakes and the eruptive activity of volcanoes testify to this.
Squeezed between two plates, the African Plate and the Eurasian Plate, Italy is very subject to earthquakes, even intense ones, so much so that it holds the record in Europe. In particular, the areas at greatest seismic risk are the north and south-west of Sicily, the whole Apennines (but in particular the central-southern area), northern Apulia, almost all of Friuli Venezia Giulia and finally the north-west of Veneto. On the contrary, the areas with little or no seismic risk are the Alps (excluding the extreme western and eastern area), most of the Po Valley, the Tyrrhenian coasts up to Lazio, central-southern Apulia, Sardinia and central Sicily.
Italy is also known for the presence of numerous volcanoes, the most well-known being Vesuvius near Naples, Etna near Catania (which with its 3,343 m (10,968 ft) is the highest volcano in Europe), Stromboli and Vulcano, in the Aeolian Islands in the province of Messina, in addition to the large caldera formed by the Campi Flegrei in Campania.
The peninsula also has many extinct volcanoes, that is, which have ceased their eruptive activity, such as the Euganean Hills in the province of Padua, Mount Amiata in Tuscany, the Berici Hills in the province of Vicenza and the Castelli Romani area, where there are several lakes that occupy the craters of ancient volcanoes. The lakes of Bracciano, Vico and Bolsena in northern Lazio also had a similar origin.
In recent years, numerous studies have also been conducted to better understand the structure and destructive potential of the submarine volcano Marsili, located about 140 km (87 mi) north of Sicily and about 150 km (93 mi) west of Calabria. With its 70 km (43 mi) of length and 30 km (19 mi) of width (equal to 2,100 km (810 sq mi) of surface) the Marsili is one of the largest volcanoes in Europe.
Many elements of the Italian territory are of volcanic origin. Most of the small islands and archipelagos in the south, like Capraia, Ponza, Ischia, Eolie, Ustica and Pantelleria are volcanic islands.
This article incorporates public domain material from The World Factbook. CIA. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The geography of Italy includes the description of all the physical geographical elements of Italy. Italy, whose territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical region, is located in southern Europe and comprises the long, boot-shaped Italian Peninsula crossed by the Apennines, the southern side of Alps, the large plain of the Po Valley and some islands including Sicily and Sardinia. Italy is part of the Northern Hemisphere. Two of the Pelagie Islands (Lampedusa and Lampione) are located on the African continent.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The total area of Italy is 301,230 km (116,310 sq mi), of which 294,020 km (113,520 sq mi) is land and 7,210 km (2,784 sq mi) is water. It lies between latitudes 35° and 47° N, and longitudes 6° and 19° E. Italy borders Switzerland (698 km or 434 mi), France (476 km or 296 mi), Austria (404 km or 251 mi) and Slovenia (218 km or 135 mi). San Marino (37 km or 23 mi) and Vatican City (3.4 km or 2.1 mi) are enclaves. The total border length is 1,836.4 km (1,141.1 mi). Including islands, Italy has a coastline of 7,900 km (4,900 mi) on the Adriatic Sea, Ionian Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Ligurian Sea, Sea of Sardinia and Strait of Sicily.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Italian geographical region, in its traditional and most widely accepted extent, has an area of approximately 324,000 square kilometres (125,000 sq mi), which is greater than the area of the entire Italian Republic (301,230 square kilometres or 116,310 square miles). The Italian geographical region also includes territories that are sovereign parts of Croatia, France, Slovenia and Switzerland, as well as the four small independent states of the Principality of Monaco, the Republic of Malta, the Republic of San Marino and the Vatican City State (the Holy See).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Italy is joined to the central-western section of the European continent by the Alps. Due to its position, it constitutes a bridge between Europe and Africa. In particular, the Italian peninsula is located in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, between the Balkans and Hellenic peninsula to the east, the Iberian peninsula to the west, North Africa to the south and continental Europe to the north separated by the Alps.",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Italy also separates the western basin of the Mediterranean Sea from the eastern basin — that is, the Tyrrhenian Sea from the Ionian Sea — extending towards the west with Calabria and Sicily, which together geologically form a peninsular extension. Only 140 km (87 mi) separate Sicily and Africa (the Tunisian peninsula), by the channel of Sicily.",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "To the east, Salento is 70 km (43 mi) from the Albanian coast, at the narrowest point of the Strait of Otranto. It is Capo d'Otranto (also called Punta Palascìa), located at 40° 7' north latitude and 18° 31' east longitude. To the north of Salento lies the long and narrow inlet of the Adriatic Sea.",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The islands of Sardinia and Corsica then divide the Tyrrhenian Sea from the Sardinian Sea.",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The coastal development of the Italian peninsula and islands is vast; about 8,000 kilometres (5,000 mi), which is much larger than that of the Iberian peninsula, but much less than that of the Balkans.",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Italy has a prevalence of hilly areas (41.6% of the territory) compared to mountainous areas (35.2% of the territory), or flat areas (23.2%).",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Italian soil today is the result of anthropization and is partly mountainous, partly hilly, partly volcanic, partly endolagunar with bumps, polesine, islands, dried up by reclamation (Bonifiche Circeo, Ferraresi, Comacchio, Ostiense, Pisana and so on) with ever greater raising of embankments (for example the withdrawal of 1.7 billion cubic meters per year of fresh water, from 20 consortia from Veneto alone).",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "No inhabited center in Italy is more than 294 km (183 mi) from the sea and the Italian municipality farthest from the sea is Madesimo (province of Sondrio) which is 294 km (183 mi) from the Ligurian Sea.",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Italy borders Switzerland (698 km or 434 mi), France (476 km or 296 mi), Austria (404 km or 251 mi) and Slovenia (218 km or 135 mi). San Marino (37 km or 23 mi) and Vatican City (3.4 km or 2.1 mi) are enclaves. The total border length is 1,836.4 km (1,141.1 mi). Including islands, Italy has a coastline of 7,900 km (4,900 mi) on the Adriatic Sea, Ionian Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Ligurian Sea, Sea of Sardinia and Strait of Sicily.",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The distance that separates the Testa Gemella Occidentale from Punta Pesce Spada is 1,291 km (802 mi); the maximum distance between the eastern and western borders is about 600 km (370 mi). The municipalities at the ends of Italy are:",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Although the Istituto Geografico Militare of Florence has repeatedly declared that it is impossible to uniquely determine the center of a non-geometric shape such as that of Italy, there are several locations that, depending on the measurement criteria adopted, compete for the primacy of the geographical centre of Italy:",
"title": "General features"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "",
"title": "Land use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Italian geographical region, in its traditional and most widely accepted extent, has an area of approximately 324,000 square kilometres (125,000 sq mi), which is greater than the area of the entire Italian Republic (301,230 square kilometres or 116,310 square miles). The Italian geographical region also includes territories that are sovereign parts of Croatia, France, Slovenia and Switzerland, as well as the four small independent states of the Principality of Monaco, the Republic of Malta, the Republic of San Marino and the Vatican City State (the Holy See). Italy and the Italian geographical region are both divided into three parts, albeit with some differences.",
"title": "Divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Continental Italy defined as the southern side of the Alps, the Po Valley, Liguria and the portion of the Apennines bounded by the conventional line that connects La Spezia to Rimini. The region of Nice (corresponding to the historic County of Nice), Italian Switzerland, part of Julian March and other less extensive portions of territory such as Valle Stretta, Gondo and Val Monastero, are not part of the Italian Republic in its continental part but they are part of the Italian geographical region. Conversely, the Val di Lei, the Val di Livigno, the San Candido basin, the Rio Sesto valley and the Tarvisio basin, although part of the Italian Republic, are not included in the Italian geographical region.",
"title": "Divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "By peninsular Italy we mean the entire southern part of the aforementioned line, up to Punta Melito in Calabria (which is the southernmost point of the peninsula) and Santa Maria di Leuca in Apulia. San Marino and the Vatican City are foreign territories, although included in the Italian geographical region.",
"title": "Divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Italian peninsula occupies a median position between the three main peninsulas of southern Europe, emerging right in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, with large islands and some archipelagos.",
"title": "Divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Insular Italy is made up of Sardinia, Sicily and numerous smaller islands, scattered or grouped into archipelagos in the seas that bathe the coasts of the peninsula. Corsica is not politically included in insular Italy since it belongs to France, however, it is included in the Italian geographical region.",
"title": "Divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The five largest islands belonging to the Italian state are, in order of size:",
"title": "Divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Other islands belonging to Italy are grouped into the following archipelagos:",
"title": "Divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Almost 40% of the Italian territory is mountainous, with the Alps as the northern boundary and the Apennine Mountains forming the backbone of the peninsula and extending for 1,350 km (840 mi). The Alpine mountain range is linked with the Apennines with the Colle di Cadibona pass in the Ligurian Alps. Nineteen Italian regions are crossed by either the Alps or the Apennines, or their offshoots. Sardinia has mountains with their own characteristics and are included in the Sardinian-Corsican relief, since it also affects Corsica.",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Alps (formed during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic) surround the Po Valley to the north, east and west, and develop along the entire northern border of Italy (about 1,000 km or 620 mi), creating a natural border. The Alps contain the highest peak in the European Union, Mont Blanc, at 4,810 meters (15,780 ft) above sea level, located between the Aosta Valley and France.",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Apennines (formed during the Oligocene) rise south of the Po Valley and run from north to south throughout the Italian peninsula, from Liguria to Calabria and continue in northern Sicily ending in the Madonie, acting as a watershed between the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic-Ionian coast.",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The highest peaks in Italy are found in the Western Alps, where there are numerous peaks that exceed 4,000 meters (13,000 ft) including Monte Rosa (4,634 meters or 15,203 feet), the Cervino (4,478 meters or 14,692 feet) and Mont Blanc which with its 4,810 meters (15,780 ft). The maximum height of the Apennines is the Gran Sasso d'Italia (2,912 meters or 9,554 feet).",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Worldwide-known mountains in Italy are Monte Cervino (Matterhorn), Monte Rosa, Gran Paradiso in the West Alps, and Bernina, Stelvio and Dolomites along the eastern side of the Alps.",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The hills cover most of the Italian territory. They are mainly located in the central-southern part of the peninsula, along the sides of the Apennine ridge, but also in the pre-Alpine area, close to the Alps.",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The hilly reliefs, which alternate with hollows and valleys, have slight slopes and do not exceed 800 meters or 2,600 feet.",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The first two hilly systems are the subalpine hills and the Preappennino, two hilly strips arranged between the Alps and the Po Valley and between the Apennines and the Adriatic coast respectively. The subalpine hills widen more in the western part of the Po Valley, where they form the hills of the Langhe and Montferrat. Two other hill systems are the Tyrrhenian Anti-Apennine, which extends from the Colline Metallifere of Tuscany to Vesuvius and the Beneventane Hills in Campania, and the Adriatic Anti-Apennine, present in Puglia with the Murge and Gargano hills.",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Italian hills have different origins:",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The plains make up 23.2% of the Italian national territory. In between the two lies a large plain in the valley of the Po, the largest river in Italy, which flows 652 km (405 mi) eastward from the Cottian Alps to the Adriatic. The Po Valley is the largest plain in Italy, with 46,000 km (18,000 sq mi), and it represents over 70% of the total plain area in the country. The Po Valley is divided into two bands: the high plain, which borders the Alpine and Apennine hills, and the low plain located in the center and extended up to the Po delta.",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In the peninsular part and in the islands there are only small plains often located along the coasts and at the mouth of the major rivers, near which they formed: this is the case, for example, of the Tavoliere delle Puglie, of the Campidano in Sardinia or the Maremma in Tuscany.",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Italian plains have different origins:",
"title": "Orography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Italy is surrounded, except to the north, by the sea, and its territory has a rich reserve of inland waters (rivers and lakes). The southern regions, however, are drier than the northern ones, due to the scarcity of rains and the absence of glaciers that can feed the rivers.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Italian rivers are shorter than those of other European regions due to the Apennines that run along the entire length of the peninsula, dividing the waters into two opposite sides. They are numerous however, due to the relative abundance of rains in Italy in general, and to the presence of the Alpine chain, rich in snowfields and glaciers, in northern Italy.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The fundamental watershed follows the ridge of the Alps and the Apennines and defines five main slopes, corresponding to the seas into which the rivers flow: the Adriatic, Ionic, Tyrrhenian, Ligurian and Mediterranean sides. Italian rivers are categorized into two main groups: the Alpine-Po river rivers and the Apennine-island rivers.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The longest Italian river is the Po (652 km or 405 mi), which flows from the Monviso, runs through the entire Po Valley from west to east, and then flows, with a delta, into the Adriatic Sea. In addition to being the longest, it is also the river with the largest basin and the largest flow at its mouth. The second longest Italian river is the Adige (410 km or 250 mi), which originates near Lake Resia and flows into the Adriatic Sea, after having made a north-south route, near Chioggia. The third longest river in Italy is the Tiber (405 km or 252 mi), the second longest Italian river in terms of hydrographic basin; it was formed on Monte Fumaiolo (in Emilia-Romagna) and flows into the Tyrrhenian Sea after having crossed the center of Rome. After the Tiber, in order of length are the rivers Adda (313 km or 194 mi), Oglio (280 km or 170 mi), Tanaro (276 km or 171 mi) and Ticino (248 km (154 mi), of which 157 km (98 mi) is in Italy).",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Most of Italy's rivers drain either into the Adriatic Sea (such as Po, Piave, Adige, Brenta, Tagliamento, Reno) or into the Tyrrhenian (like Arno, Tiber and Volturno), though the waters from some border municipalities drain into the Black Sea through the basin of the Drava (Innichen and Sexten in Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, Tarvisio in Friuli-Venezia-Giulia) or the Inn (Livigno in Lombardy), both tributaries of the Danube, and the waters from the Lago di Lei in Lombardy drain into the North Sea through the basin of Rhine.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In Italy there are more than 1,000 lakes, mostly artificially created by the damming of river valleys.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In the north of the country are a number of subalpine moraine-dammed lakes (the Italian Lakes), including the largest in Italy, the Garda (370 km or 143 sq mi). Other well known of these subalpine lakes are Lake Maggiore (212.5 km or 82 sq mi), whose most northerly section is part of Switzerland, Como (which holds the record of depth in the Italian Republic, which amounts to 410 m or 1,350 ft) (146 km or 56 sq mi), Orta, Lugano, Iseo, Idro. These lakes occupy wide valleys carved by ancient glaciers.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In Italy there are also coastal lakes, such as Lake Lesina, separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land, and volcanic lakes (Lake Bolsena, Lake Vico, Lake Bracciano), which occupy the craters of extinct volcanoes. Lake Trasimeno, on the other hand, formed in a hollow in the territory. Other notable lakes in the Italian peninsula are Varano and Omodeo in Sardinia.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The swamps and ponds that in the past covered vast flat areas of Italy, in recent centuries have been largely dried up; the few remaining wetlands, such as the Valli di Comacchio in Emilia-Romagna or the Stagno di Cagliari in Sardinia, are protected as very precious natural environments.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Along the Italian coasts there are lagoons, among which the Venetian Lagoon, that of Grado Lagoon and that of Marano Lagoon in the northern Adriatic stand out for their size and importance, and the Orbetello Lagoon on the Tuscan coast.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Italian peninsula overlooks the Mediterranean Sea, which around it is divided into various seas.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Ligurian Sea bathes the coasts of Liguria and, according to the cartography of the Hydrographic Institute of the Navy, the northern Tuscan coasts to the south as far as the island of Elba.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Tyrrhenian Sea bathes the western coasts of the peninsula south of the island of Elba (and therefore all the regions from Tuscany to Calabria), the northern coasts of Sicily and the eastern coasts of Sardinia.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The Adriatic Sea bathes the eastern coasts of the peninsula, from Friuli Venezia Giulia to the Cape of Santa Maria di Leuca, Apulia.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Ionian Sea bathes the eastern coasts of Sicily and Calabria, the coast of Basilicata and the western coasts of Apulia.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "To the south of Sicily lies the Strait of Sicily, while to the west of Sardinia lies the Sea of Sardinia.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Italy has a coastline of approximately 7,900 km (4,900 mi), with a great variety of shapes that depends both on the nature of the mainland and on the action of the sea.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The Adriatic coasts are quite straight, characterized to the north by the gulfs of Trieste and Venice, in the center by the Conero promontory, to the south by that of the Gargano, which forms the Gulf of Manfredonia. The Adriatic coasts are low and sandy, with lagoons in the northern section. Only in the Trieste area, in correspondence with the Gargano, the Conero and the lower eastern Salento (between Otranto and Santa Maria di Leuca) do rocky sections follow one another.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The Ionian coasts are mainly low and sandy and are characterized by the wide Gulf of Taranto, closed to the east by the Salento Peninsula (which divides it from the Adriatic) and to the west by the Calabrian peninsula (which divides it from the Tyrrhenian Sea).",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The Strait of Messina connects the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian seas.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The Tyrrhenian coasts are very articulated, with rocky stretches alternating with sandy beaches, with numerous gulfs and headlands. Among the many gulfs include Naples, Salerno and Gaeta, between the peninsulas that of Sorrento and the promontories that of Circeo and that of Piombino. In the Tyrrhenian Sea, there are three important channels: between the island of Elba and the Tuscan coast the Strait of Piombino, between Elba and Corsica the Strait of Corsica, and between Sardinia and Corsica the Strait of Bonifacio.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Ligurian Sea, which has the Gulf of Genoa at its center, has high and rocky coasts in the Riviera di Levante and mixed coasts in the Riviera di Ponente.",
"title": "Hydrography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The underground thrusts that millions of years ago gave rise to the reliefs of Italy still continue: the earthquakes and the eruptive activity of volcanoes testify to this.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Squeezed between two plates, the African Plate and the Eurasian Plate, Italy is very subject to earthquakes, even intense ones, so much so that it holds the record in Europe. In particular, the areas at greatest seismic risk are the north and south-west of Sicily, the whole Apennines (but in particular the central-southern area), northern Apulia, almost all of Friuli Venezia Giulia and finally the north-west of Veneto. On the contrary, the areas with little or no seismic risk are the Alps (excluding the extreme western and eastern area), most of the Po Valley, the Tyrrhenian coasts up to Lazio, central-southern Apulia, Sardinia and central Sicily.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Italy is also known for the presence of numerous volcanoes, the most well-known being Vesuvius near Naples, Etna near Catania (which with its 3,343 m (10,968 ft) is the highest volcano in Europe), Stromboli and Vulcano, in the Aeolian Islands in the province of Messina, in addition to the large caldera formed by the Campi Flegrei in Campania.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The peninsula also has many extinct volcanoes, that is, which have ceased their eruptive activity, such as the Euganean Hills in the province of Padua, Mount Amiata in Tuscany, the Berici Hills in the province of Vicenza and the Castelli Romani area, where there are several lakes that occupy the craters of ancient volcanoes. The lakes of Bracciano, Vico and Bolsena in northern Lazio also had a similar origin.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In recent years, numerous studies have also been conducted to better understand the structure and destructive potential of the submarine volcano Marsili, located about 140 km (87 mi) north of Sicily and about 150 km (93 mi) west of Calabria. With its 70 km (43 mi) of length and 30 km (19 mi) of width (equal to 2,100 km (810 sq mi) of surface) the Marsili is one of the largest volcanoes in Europe.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Many elements of the Italian territory are of volcanic origin. Most of the small islands and archipelagos in the south, like Capraia, Ponza, Ischia, Eolie, Ustica and Pantelleria are volcanic islands.",
"title": "Geology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "This article incorporates public domain material from The World Factbook. CIA.",
"title": "References"
}
]
| The geography of Italy includes the description of all the physical geographical elements of Italy. Italy, whose territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical region, is located in southern Europe and comprises the long, boot-shaped Italian Peninsula crossed by the Apennines, the southern side of Alps, the large plain of the Po Valley and some islands including Sicily and Sardinia. Italy is part of the Northern Hemisphere. Two of the Pelagie Islands are located on the African continent. The total area of Italy is 301,230 km2 (116,310 sq mi), of which 294,020 km2 (113,520 sq mi) is land and 7,210 km2 (2,784 sq mi) is water. It lies between latitudes 35° and 47° N, and longitudes 6° and 19° E. Italy borders Switzerland, France, Austria and Slovenia. San Marino and Vatican City are enclaves. The total border length is 1,836.4 km (1,141.1 mi). Including islands, Italy has a coastline of 7,900 km (4,900 mi) on the Adriatic Sea, Ionian Sea, Tyrrhenian Sea, Ligurian Sea, Sea of Sardinia and Strait of Sicily. The Italian geographical region, in its traditional and most widely accepted extent, has an area of approximately 324,000 square kilometres (125,000 sq mi), which is greater than the area of the entire Italian Republic. The Italian geographical region also includes territories that are sovereign parts of Croatia, France, Slovenia and Switzerland, as well as the four small independent states of the Principality of Monaco, the Republic of Malta, the Republic of San Marino and the Vatican City State. | 2001-06-15T00:27:56Z | 2023-11-29T16:20:11Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Italy |
14,700 | Demographics of Italy | Demographic features of the population of Italy include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects.
At the beginning of 2022, Italy had an estimated population of 58,9 million. Its population density, at 197 inhabitants per square kilometre (510/sq mi), is higher than that of most Western European countries. However, the distribution of the population is widely uneven; the most densely populated areas are the Po Valley (which contains about a third of the country's population) in northern Italy and the metropolitan areas of Rome and Naples in central and southern Italy, while other vast areas are very sparsely populated, like the plateaus of Basilicata, the Alps and Apennines highlands, and the island of Sardinia.
The population of the country almost doubled during the twentieth century, but the pattern of growth was extremely uneven due to large-scale internal migration from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North, a phenomenon which happened as a consequence of the Italian economic miracle of the 1950–1960s. In addition, after centuries of net emigration, from the 1980s Italy has experienced large-scale immigration for the first time in modern history. Italian government data, in its annual report for 2019, estimated the amount of foreign nationals residing within Italy, including immigrants, to be at approximately 5.234 million people. Due to such large-scale immigration to the country, particularly from the early 2000s to 2014, the population peaked at 60.79 million. Since then, decreasing migration, a continuously falling birth rate, and continuous aging have led to a sharp decrease in the Italian population.
High fertility and birth rates persisted until the 1970s, after which they started to dramatically decline, leading to rapid population aging. At the end of the late 2000s, one in five Italians were over 65 years old. Italy has experienced a short growth in birth rates. The total fertility rate temporarily rose from an all-time low of 1.18 children per woman in 1995 to 1.46 in 2010. Since then, fertility rates continued to drop, to reach a low of 1.24 in 2020.
Since the revision of the Lateran Treaty in 1984, Italy has no official religion, although it continues to recognize the role the Catholic Church plays in Italian society. In 2017, 78% of the population identified as Catholic, 15% as non-believers or atheists, 2% as other Christians and 6% adhered to other religions.
From its unification in 1861 to the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, Italy has been a country of mass emigration. Between 1898 and 1914, the peak years of Italian diaspora, approximately 750,000 Italians emigrated each year. As a consequence, large numbers of people with full or significant Italian ancestry are found in Brazil (32 million Italian Brazilians), Argentina (25 million Italian Argentines), United States (18 million Italian Americans), France (5 million Italian French), Venezuela (5 million Italian Venezuelans), Paraguay (2.5 million Italian Paraguayans), Colombia (2 million Italian Colombians), Uruguay (1.5 million Italian Uruguayans), Peru (1.5 million Italian Peruvians), Canada (1.5 million Italian Canadians), Germany (1.2 million Italian Germans) and Australia (1 million Italian Australians). In addition, Italian communities once thrived in the former African colonies of Eritrea (nearly 100,000 at the beginning of World War II), Somalia and Libya (150,000 Italians settled in Libya, constituting about 18% of the total Libyan population).
After Tito's annexation of Istria, Kvarner, most of the Julian March as well as the Dalmatian city of Zara following the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947, up to 350,000 local ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) left communist Yugoslavia (Istrian–Dalmatian exodus). Furthermore, all of Libya's Italians were expelled after Muammar Gaddafi's takeover in 1970.
As a result of the profound economic and social changes brought by rapid postwar economic growth, including low birth rates, an aging population and thus a shrinking workforce, by the 1970s emigration had all but stopped and Italy started to have a positive net migration rate. The nation's immigrant population reached 5 million by 2015, making up some 8% of the total population. However, the long-lasting effects of the Eurozone crisis double-dip recession strongly slowed down immigration rates in Italy in the 2010s.
From January 2020 and December 2021 as a direct effect of COVID-19 pandemic and Deltacron hybrid variant, Italy has registered at least 178,000 excess deaths, a loss of about 1.4 years in the average life expectancy, a noticeable decrease in births rates and a marked decrease in immigration rates, the overall effect being a record natural population decline of 342,042 units in that year, the largest ever recorded since 1918 (at the time of World War I and Spanish flu pandemic). In 2022, Italy's birth rate declined to its lowest level on record since 1861, with fewer then 400,000 births recorded that year.
Demographic statistics according to the World Population Review in 2022.
Sources: Our World In Data and the United Nations. 1871–1950
1950–2020
Source: UN World Population Prospects
Newborns, in 2021, fell to 400,249 with a decrease of -25% compared to 2011, and if the phenomenon is not reversed, GDP growth and the social security sector will have a bad outcome. The reasons that Italian citizens say for not having children are economic costs, fear of losing job and lack of services for families, but these problems have ceased to exist in other countries such as Sweden or France and these Europeans continue to have children below the population replacement level which is 2.1.
The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman. It is based on fairly good data for the entire period. Sources: Our World in Data and Gapminder Foundation.
In 2021 this was 1.47 children born/woman.
Mother's mean age at first birth; 31.1 years (2017 est.)
Median age
70.4% of Italian population is classified as urban, a relatively low figure among developed countries. Italy's administrative boundaries have seen significant devolution in recent decades; the metropolitan area was created as a new administrative unit, and major cities and metro areas now have a provincial status.
According to OECD, the largest conurbations are:
Urbanization
In the year 2021 85,878 babies were born to at least one foreign parent which makes up 21.5% of all newborns in that year (20,628 or 5.2% were born to foreign fathers, 8,324 or 2.1% to foreign mothers and 56,926 or 14.2% to two foreign parents.
Obesity – adult prevalence rate
Unemployment, youth ages 15–24:
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and more recently, the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union, Italy received growing flows of migrants from the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe (especially Romania, Albania, Ukraine and Poland). The second most important area of immigration to Italy has always been the neighboring North Africa (especially Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria). Furthermore, in recent years, growing migration fluxes from the Far East (notably, China and the Philippines) and Latin America (Ecuador, Peru) have been recorded.
Italy does not collect data on ethnicity or race of the country, but does collect data on nationality of its residents.
In 2021, Istat estimated that 5,171,894 foreign citizens lived in Italy, representing about 8.7% of the total population. These figures do not include naturalized foreign-born residents (121,457 foreigners acquired Italian citizenship in 2021) as well as illegal immigrants, the so-called clandestini, whose numbers, difficult to determine, are thought to be at least 670,000. Romanians made up the largest community in the country (1,145,718; around 10% of them being ethnic Romani people), followed by Albanians (441,027) and Moroccans (422,980).
The fourth largest, but the fastest growing, community of foreign residents in Italy was represented by the Chinese. The majority of Chinese living in Italy are from the city of Wenzhou in the province of Zhejiang. Breaking down the foreign-born population by continent, in 2020 the figures were as follows: Europe (54%), Africa (22%), Asia (16%), the Americas (8%) and Oceania (0.06%). The distribution of immigrants is largely uneven in Italy: 83% of immigrants live in the northern and central parts of the country (the most economically developed areas), while only 17% live in the southern half of the peninsula.
There are, as of 2022, 5,030,716 Foreign-born residents, accounting for 8.5% of the total population.
Their distribution by country of origin was as follows:
Italy's official language is Italian; Ethnologue has estimated that there are about 55 million speakers of Italian in the country and a further 6.7 million outside of it, primarily in the neighboring countries and in the Italian diaspora worldwide. Italian, adopted by the central state after the unification of Italy, is a language based on the Florentine variety of Tuscan and is somewhat intermediate between the Italo-Dalmatian languages and the Gallo-Romance languages. Its development was also influenced by the Germanic languages of the post-Roman invaders. When Italy unified in 1861, only 3% of the population spoke Italian, even though an estimated 90% of Italians speak Italian as their L1 nowadays.
Italy is in fact one of the most linguistically diverse countries in Europe, as there are not only varieties of Italian specific to each cultural region, but also distinct regional and minority languages. The establishment of the national education system has led to the emergence of the former and a decrease in the use of the latter. The spread of Italian was further expanded in the 1950s and 1960s, because of the economic growth and the rise of mass media and television, with the state broadcaster (RAI) setting a colloquial variety of Italian to which the population would be exposed.
As a way to distance itself from the Italianization policies promoted because of nationalism, Italy recognized twelve languages as the Country's "historical linguistic minorities", which are promoted alongside Italian in their respective territories. French is co-official in the Aosta Valley as the province's prestige variety, under which the more commonly spoken Franco-Provencal dialects have been historically roofed. German has the same status in the province of South Tyrol as, in some parts of that province and in parts of the neighbouring Trentino, does Ladin. Slovene and Friulian are officially recognised in the provinces of Trieste, Gorizia and Udine in Venezia Giulia. In Sardinia, the Sardinian language has been the language traditionally spoken and is often regarded by linguists as constituting its own branch of Romance; in the 1990s, Sardinian has been recognized as "having equal dignity" with Italian, the introduction of which to the island officially started under the rule of the House of Savoy in the 18th century.
In these regions, official documents are either bilingual (trilingual in Ladin communities) in the co-official language(s) by default, or available as such upon request. Traffic signs are also multilingual, except in the Valle d'Aosta where French toponyms are generally used, with the exception of Aosta itself, which has retained its Latin form in Italian as well as English. Attempts to Italianize them, especially during the Fascist period, have been formally abandoned. Education is possible in minority languages where such schools are operating.
UNESCO and other authorities recognize a number of other languages which are not legally protected by Italian government: Piedmontese, Venetian, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian-Romagnolo, Neapolitan and Sicilian.
Religion in Italy according to the Eurobarometer survey, 2021
Roman Catholicism is by far the largest religion in the country, although the Catholic Church is no longer officially the state religion. In 2006, 87.8% of Italy's population self-identified as Roman Catholic, although only about one-third of these described themselves as active members (36.8%). In 2016, 71.1% of Italian citizens self-identified as Roman Catholic. This increased again to 78% in 2018.
Most Italians believe in God, or a form of a spiritual life force. According to a Eurobarometer Poll in 2005: 74% of Italian citizens responded that 'they believe there is a God', 16% answered that 'they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force' and 6% answered that 'they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force'. There are no data collected through census.
The Italian Catholic Church is part of the global Roman Catholic Church, under the leadership of the Pope, curia in Rome, and the Conference of Italian Bishops. In addition to Italy, two other sovereign nations are included in Italian-based dioceses, San Marino and Vatican City. There are 225 dioceses in the Italian Catholic Church, see further in this article and in the article List of the Roman Catholic dioceses in Italy. Even though by law Vatican City is not part of Italy, it is in Rome, and along with Latin, Italian is the most spoken and second language of the Roman Curia.
Italy has a rich Catholic culture, especially as numerous Catholic saints, martyrs and popes were Italian themselves. Roman Catholic art in Italy especially flourished during the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque periods, with numerous Italian artists, such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Caravaggio, Fra Angelico, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Sandro Botticelli, Tintoretto, Titian and Giotto. Roman Catholic architecture in Italy is equally as rich and impressive, with churches, basilicas and cathedrals such as St Peter's Basilica, Florence Cathedral and St Mark's Basilica. Roman Catholicism is the largest religion and denomination in Italy, with around 71.1% of Italians considering themselves Catholic. Italy is also home to the greatest number of cardinals in the world, and is the country with the greatest number of Roman Catholic churches per capita.
Even though the main Christian denomination in Italy is Roman Catholicism, there are some minorities of Protestant, Waldensian, Eastern Orthodox and other Christian churches.
Immigration from Western, Central, and Eastern Africa at the beginning of the 21st century has increased the size of Baptist, Anglican, Pentecostal and Evangelical communities in Italy, while immigration from Eastern Europe has produced large Eastern Orthodox communities.
In 2006, Protestants made up 2.1% of Italy's population, and members of Eastern Orthodox churches comprised 1.2% or more than 700,000 Eastern Orthodox Christians including 180,000 Greek Orthodox, 550,000 Pentecostals and Evangelists (0.8%), of whom 400,000 are members of the Assemblies of God, about 250,000 are Jehovah's Witnesses (0.4%), 30,000 Waldensians, 25,000 Seventh-day Adventists, 22,000 Mormons, 15,000 Baptists (plus some 5,000 Free Baptists), 7,000 Lutherans, 4,000 Methodists (affiliated with the Waldensian Church).
The longest-established religious faith in Italy is Judaism, Jews having been present in Ancient Rome before the birth of Christ. Italy has seen many influential Italian-Jews, such as prime minister Luigi Luzzatti, who took office in 1910, Ernesto Nathan served as mayor of Rome from 1907 to 1913 and Shabbethai Donnolo (died 982). During the Holocaust, Italy took in many Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. However, with the creation of the Nazi-backed puppet Italian Social Republic, about 15% of 48,000 Italian Jews were killed. This, together with the emigration that preceded and followed the Second World War, has left only a small community of around 45,000 Jews in Italy today.
Due to immigration from around the world, there has been an increase in non-Christian religions. As of 2009, there were 1.0 million Muslims in Italy forming 1.6 percent of population; independent estimates put the Islamic population in Italy anywhere from 0.8 million to 1.5 million. 50,000 Italian Muslims hold Italian citizenship.
There are more than 200,000 followers of faiths originating in the Indian subcontinent, including some 70,000 Sikhs with 22 gurdwaras across the country, 70,000 Hindus, and 50,000 Buddhists. There were an estimated 4,900 Bahá'ís in Italy in 2005.
Literacy
School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)
The genetic history of Italy is greatly influenced by geography and history. The ancestors of Italians are mostly Indo-European speakers (Italic peoples such as Latins, Umbrians, Samnites, Oscans, Sicels and Adriatic Veneti, as well as Celts, Iapygians and Greeks) and pre-Indo-European speakers (Etruscans, Ligures, Rhaetians and Camunni in mainland Italy, Sicani and Elymians in Sicily and the Nuragic people in Sardinia). During the imperial period of Ancient Rome, the city of Rome was also home to people from various regions throughout the Mediterranean basin, including Southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Based on DNA analysis, there is evidence of ancient regional genetic substructure and continuity within modern Italy dating to the pre-Roman and Roman periods.
Within the Italian population, there is enough cultural, linguistic, genetic and historical diversity for them to constitute several distinct groups throughout the peninsula. In this regard, peoples like the Friulians, the Ladins, the Sardinians and the South Tyroleans, who also happen to constitute recognized linguistic minorities, or even the Sicilians who are not, are cases in point, attesting to such internal diversity.
Linguistic minorities in Italy include Sardu-speakers 1 million, Tyrolese German-speakers 350,000, Albanians 70,000 – 100,000, Slovenes 60,000, Franco-Provençal-speakers 50,000 – 70,000, Occitans 20,000 – 40,000, Ladins 30,000, Catalans 15,000, Greek-speakers 12,000, Croatians 3,000 and Friulians 600,000. The Roma community is one of the largest ethnic minorities in Italy. Due to the lack of disaggregated data the size of the Italian Roma community remains unknown. The Council of Europe estimates that between 120,000 and 180,000 Roma live in Italy. A significant proportion of Roma in Italy don’t have Italian citizenship. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Demographic features of the population of Italy include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "At the beginning of 2022, Italy had an estimated population of 58,9 million. Its population density, at 197 inhabitants per square kilometre (510/sq mi), is higher than that of most Western European countries. However, the distribution of the population is widely uneven; the most densely populated areas are the Po Valley (which contains about a third of the country's population) in northern Italy and the metropolitan areas of Rome and Naples in central and southern Italy, while other vast areas are very sparsely populated, like the plateaus of Basilicata, the Alps and Apennines highlands, and the island of Sardinia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The population of the country almost doubled during the twentieth century, but the pattern of growth was extremely uneven due to large-scale internal migration from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North, a phenomenon which happened as a consequence of the Italian economic miracle of the 1950–1960s. In addition, after centuries of net emigration, from the 1980s Italy has experienced large-scale immigration for the first time in modern history. Italian government data, in its annual report for 2019, estimated the amount of foreign nationals residing within Italy, including immigrants, to be at approximately 5.234 million people. Due to such large-scale immigration to the country, particularly from the early 2000s to 2014, the population peaked at 60.79 million. Since then, decreasing migration, a continuously falling birth rate, and continuous aging have led to a sharp decrease in the Italian population.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "High fertility and birth rates persisted until the 1970s, after which they started to dramatically decline, leading to rapid population aging. At the end of the late 2000s, one in five Italians were over 65 years old. Italy has experienced a short growth in birth rates. The total fertility rate temporarily rose from an all-time low of 1.18 children per woman in 1995 to 1.46 in 2010. Since then, fertility rates continued to drop, to reach a low of 1.24 in 2020.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Since the revision of the Lateran Treaty in 1984, Italy has no official religion, although it continues to recognize the role the Catholic Church plays in Italian society. In 2017, 78% of the population identified as Catholic, 15% as non-believers or atheists, 2% as other Christians and 6% adhered to other religions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "From its unification in 1861 to the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, Italy has been a country of mass emigration. Between 1898 and 1914, the peak years of Italian diaspora, approximately 750,000 Italians emigrated each year. As a consequence, large numbers of people with full or significant Italian ancestry are found in Brazil (32 million Italian Brazilians), Argentina (25 million Italian Argentines), United States (18 million Italian Americans), France (5 million Italian French), Venezuela (5 million Italian Venezuelans), Paraguay (2.5 million Italian Paraguayans), Colombia (2 million Italian Colombians), Uruguay (1.5 million Italian Uruguayans), Peru (1.5 million Italian Peruvians), Canada (1.5 million Italian Canadians), Germany (1.2 million Italian Germans) and Australia (1 million Italian Australians). In addition, Italian communities once thrived in the former African colonies of Eritrea (nearly 100,000 at the beginning of World War II), Somalia and Libya (150,000 Italians settled in Libya, constituting about 18% of the total Libyan population).",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "After Tito's annexation of Istria, Kvarner, most of the Julian March as well as the Dalmatian city of Zara following the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947, up to 350,000 local ethnic Italians (Istrian Italians and Dalmatian Italians) left communist Yugoslavia (Istrian–Dalmatian exodus). Furthermore, all of Libya's Italians were expelled after Muammar Gaddafi's takeover in 1970.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "As a result of the profound economic and social changes brought by rapid postwar economic growth, including low birth rates, an aging population and thus a shrinking workforce, by the 1970s emigration had all but stopped and Italy started to have a positive net migration rate. The nation's immigrant population reached 5 million by 2015, making up some 8% of the total population. However, the long-lasting effects of the Eurozone crisis double-dip recession strongly slowed down immigration rates in Italy in the 2010s.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "From January 2020 and December 2021 as a direct effect of COVID-19 pandemic and Deltacron hybrid variant, Italy has registered at least 178,000 excess deaths, a loss of about 1.4 years in the average life expectancy, a noticeable decrease in births rates and a marked decrease in immigration rates, the overall effect being a record natural population decline of 342,042 units in that year, the largest ever recorded since 1918 (at the time of World War I and Spanish flu pandemic). In 2022, Italy's birth rate declined to its lowest level on record since 1861, with fewer then 400,000 births recorded that year.",
"title": "Historical overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Demographic statistics according to the World Population Review in 2022.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Sources: Our World In Data and the United Nations. 1871–1950",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "1950–2020",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Source: UN World Population Prospects",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Newborns, in 2021, fell to 400,249 with a decrease of -25% compared to 2011, and if the phenomenon is not reversed, GDP growth and the social security sector will have a bad outcome. The reasons that Italian citizens say for not having children are economic costs, fear of losing job and lack of services for families, but these problems have ceased to exist in other countries such as Sweden or France and these Europeans continue to have children below the population replacement level which is 2.1.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman. It is based on fairly good data for the entire period. Sources: Our World in Data and Gapminder Foundation.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 2021 this was 1.47 children born/woman.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Mother's mean age at first birth; 31.1 years (2017 est.)",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Median age",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "70.4% of Italian population is classified as urban, a relatively low figure among developed countries. Italy's administrative boundaries have seen significant devolution in recent decades; the metropolitan area was created as a new administrative unit, and major cities and metro areas now have a provincial status.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "According to OECD, the largest conurbations are:",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Urbanization",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In the year 2021 85,878 babies were born to at least one foreign parent which makes up 21.5% of all newborns in that year (20,628 or 5.2% were born to foreign fathers, 8,324 or 2.1% to foreign mothers and 56,926 or 14.2% to two foreign parents.",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "",
"title": "Vital statistics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Obesity – adult prevalence rate",
"title": "Health"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Unemployment, youth ages 15–24:",
"title": "Employment and income"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and more recently, the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union, Italy received growing flows of migrants from the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe (especially Romania, Albania, Ukraine and Poland). The second most important area of immigration to Italy has always been the neighboring North Africa (especially Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria). Furthermore, in recent years, growing migration fluxes from the Far East (notably, China and the Philippines) and Latin America (Ecuador, Peru) have been recorded.",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Italy does not collect data on ethnicity or race of the country, but does collect data on nationality of its residents.",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 2021, Istat estimated that 5,171,894 foreign citizens lived in Italy, representing about 8.7% of the total population. These figures do not include naturalized foreign-born residents (121,457 foreigners acquired Italian citizenship in 2021) as well as illegal immigrants, the so-called clandestini, whose numbers, difficult to determine, are thought to be at least 670,000. Romanians made up the largest community in the country (1,145,718; around 10% of them being ethnic Romani people), followed by Albanians (441,027) and Moroccans (422,980).",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The fourth largest, but the fastest growing, community of foreign residents in Italy was represented by the Chinese. The majority of Chinese living in Italy are from the city of Wenzhou in the province of Zhejiang. Breaking down the foreign-born population by continent, in 2020 the figures were as follows: Europe (54%), Africa (22%), Asia (16%), the Americas (8%) and Oceania (0.06%). The distribution of immigrants is largely uneven in Italy: 83% of immigrants live in the northern and central parts of the country (the most economically developed areas), while only 17% live in the southern half of the peninsula.",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "There are, as of 2022, 5,030,716 Foreign-born residents, accounting for 8.5% of the total population.",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Their distribution by country of origin was as follows:",
"title": "Immigration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Italy's official language is Italian; Ethnologue has estimated that there are about 55 million speakers of Italian in the country and a further 6.7 million outside of it, primarily in the neighboring countries and in the Italian diaspora worldwide. Italian, adopted by the central state after the unification of Italy, is a language based on the Florentine variety of Tuscan and is somewhat intermediate between the Italo-Dalmatian languages and the Gallo-Romance languages. Its development was also influenced by the Germanic languages of the post-Roman invaders. When Italy unified in 1861, only 3% of the population spoke Italian, even though an estimated 90% of Italians speak Italian as their L1 nowadays.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Italy is in fact one of the most linguistically diverse countries in Europe, as there are not only varieties of Italian specific to each cultural region, but also distinct regional and minority languages. The establishment of the national education system has led to the emergence of the former and a decrease in the use of the latter. The spread of Italian was further expanded in the 1950s and 1960s, because of the economic growth and the rise of mass media and television, with the state broadcaster (RAI) setting a colloquial variety of Italian to which the population would be exposed.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "As a way to distance itself from the Italianization policies promoted because of nationalism, Italy recognized twelve languages as the Country's \"historical linguistic minorities\", which are promoted alongside Italian in their respective territories. French is co-official in the Aosta Valley as the province's prestige variety, under which the more commonly spoken Franco-Provencal dialects have been historically roofed. German has the same status in the province of South Tyrol as, in some parts of that province and in parts of the neighbouring Trentino, does Ladin. Slovene and Friulian are officially recognised in the provinces of Trieste, Gorizia and Udine in Venezia Giulia. In Sardinia, the Sardinian language has been the language traditionally spoken and is often regarded by linguists as constituting its own branch of Romance; in the 1990s, Sardinian has been recognized as \"having equal dignity\" with Italian, the introduction of which to the island officially started under the rule of the House of Savoy in the 18th century.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In these regions, official documents are either bilingual (trilingual in Ladin communities) in the co-official language(s) by default, or available as such upon request. Traffic signs are also multilingual, except in the Valle d'Aosta where French toponyms are generally used, with the exception of Aosta itself, which has retained its Latin form in Italian as well as English. Attempts to Italianize them, especially during the Fascist period, have been formally abandoned. Education is possible in minority languages where such schools are operating.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "UNESCO and other authorities recognize a number of other languages which are not legally protected by Italian government: Piedmontese, Venetian, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian-Romagnolo, Neapolitan and Sicilian.",
"title": "Languages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Religion in Italy according to the Eurobarometer survey, 2021",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Roman Catholicism is by far the largest religion in the country, although the Catholic Church is no longer officially the state religion. In 2006, 87.8% of Italy's population self-identified as Roman Catholic, although only about one-third of these described themselves as active members (36.8%). In 2016, 71.1% of Italian citizens self-identified as Roman Catholic. This increased again to 78% in 2018.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Most Italians believe in God, or a form of a spiritual life force. According to a Eurobarometer Poll in 2005: 74% of Italian citizens responded that 'they believe there is a God', 16% answered that 'they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force' and 6% answered that 'they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force'. There are no data collected through census.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Italian Catholic Church is part of the global Roman Catholic Church, under the leadership of the Pope, curia in Rome, and the Conference of Italian Bishops. In addition to Italy, two other sovereign nations are included in Italian-based dioceses, San Marino and Vatican City. There are 225 dioceses in the Italian Catholic Church, see further in this article and in the article List of the Roman Catholic dioceses in Italy. Even though by law Vatican City is not part of Italy, it is in Rome, and along with Latin, Italian is the most spoken and second language of the Roman Curia.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Italy has a rich Catholic culture, especially as numerous Catholic saints, martyrs and popes were Italian themselves. Roman Catholic art in Italy especially flourished during the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque periods, with numerous Italian artists, such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Caravaggio, Fra Angelico, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Sandro Botticelli, Tintoretto, Titian and Giotto. Roman Catholic architecture in Italy is equally as rich and impressive, with churches, basilicas and cathedrals such as St Peter's Basilica, Florence Cathedral and St Mark's Basilica. Roman Catholicism is the largest religion and denomination in Italy, with around 71.1% of Italians considering themselves Catholic. Italy is also home to the greatest number of cardinals in the world, and is the country with the greatest number of Roman Catholic churches per capita.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Even though the main Christian denomination in Italy is Roman Catholicism, there are some minorities of Protestant, Waldensian, Eastern Orthodox and other Christian churches.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Immigration from Western, Central, and Eastern Africa at the beginning of the 21st century has increased the size of Baptist, Anglican, Pentecostal and Evangelical communities in Italy, while immigration from Eastern Europe has produced large Eastern Orthodox communities.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In 2006, Protestants made up 2.1% of Italy's population, and members of Eastern Orthodox churches comprised 1.2% or more than 700,000 Eastern Orthodox Christians including 180,000 Greek Orthodox, 550,000 Pentecostals and Evangelists (0.8%), of whom 400,000 are members of the Assemblies of God, about 250,000 are Jehovah's Witnesses (0.4%), 30,000 Waldensians, 25,000 Seventh-day Adventists, 22,000 Mormons, 15,000 Baptists (plus some 5,000 Free Baptists), 7,000 Lutherans, 4,000 Methodists (affiliated with the Waldensian Church).",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The longest-established religious faith in Italy is Judaism, Jews having been present in Ancient Rome before the birth of Christ. Italy has seen many influential Italian-Jews, such as prime minister Luigi Luzzatti, who took office in 1910, Ernesto Nathan served as mayor of Rome from 1907 to 1913 and Shabbethai Donnolo (died 982). During the Holocaust, Italy took in many Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. However, with the creation of the Nazi-backed puppet Italian Social Republic, about 15% of 48,000 Italian Jews were killed. This, together with the emigration that preceded and followed the Second World War, has left only a small community of around 45,000 Jews in Italy today.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Due to immigration from around the world, there has been an increase in non-Christian religions. As of 2009, there were 1.0 million Muslims in Italy forming 1.6 percent of population; independent estimates put the Islamic population in Italy anywhere from 0.8 million to 1.5 million. 50,000 Italian Muslims hold Italian citizenship.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "There are more than 200,000 followers of faiths originating in the Indian subcontinent, including some 70,000 Sikhs with 22 gurdwaras across the country, 70,000 Hindus, and 50,000 Buddhists. There were an estimated 4,900 Bahá'ís in Italy in 2005.",
"title": "Religion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Literacy",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "School life expectancy (primary to tertiary education)",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The genetic history of Italy is greatly influenced by geography and history. The ancestors of Italians are mostly Indo-European speakers (Italic peoples such as Latins, Umbrians, Samnites, Oscans, Sicels and Adriatic Veneti, as well as Celts, Iapygians and Greeks) and pre-Indo-European speakers (Etruscans, Ligures, Rhaetians and Camunni in mainland Italy, Sicani and Elymians in Sicily and the Nuragic people in Sardinia). During the imperial period of Ancient Rome, the city of Rome was also home to people from various regions throughout the Mediterranean basin, including Southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Based on DNA analysis, there is evidence of ancient regional genetic substructure and continuity within modern Italy dating to the pre-Roman and Roman periods.",
"title": "Genetics and ethnic groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Within the Italian population, there is enough cultural, linguistic, genetic and historical diversity for them to constitute several distinct groups throughout the peninsula. In this regard, peoples like the Friulians, the Ladins, the Sardinians and the South Tyroleans, who also happen to constitute recognized linguistic minorities, or even the Sicilians who are not, are cases in point, attesting to such internal diversity.",
"title": "Genetics and ethnic groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Linguistic minorities in Italy include Sardu-speakers 1 million, Tyrolese German-speakers 350,000, Albanians 70,000 – 100,000, Slovenes 60,000, Franco-Provençal-speakers 50,000 – 70,000, Occitans 20,000 – 40,000, Ladins 30,000, Catalans 15,000, Greek-speakers 12,000, Croatians 3,000 and Friulians 600,000. The Roma community is one of the largest ethnic minorities in Italy. Due to the lack of disaggregated data the size of the Italian Roma community remains unknown. The Council of Europe estimates that between 120,000 and 180,000 Roma live in Italy. A significant proportion of Roma in Italy don’t have Italian citizenship.",
"title": "Genetics and ethnic groups"
}
]
| Demographic features of the population of Italy include population density, ethnicity, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects. At the beginning of 2022, Italy had an estimated population of 58,9 million. Its population density, at 197 inhabitants per square kilometre (510/sq mi), is higher than that of most Western European countries. However, the distribution of the population is widely uneven; the most densely populated areas are the Po Valley in northern Italy and the metropolitan areas of Rome and Naples in central and southern Italy, while other vast areas are very sparsely populated, like the plateaus of Basilicata, the Alps and Apennines highlands, and the island of Sardinia. The population of the country almost doubled during the twentieth century, but the pattern of growth was extremely uneven due to large-scale internal migration from the rural South to the industrial cities of the North, a phenomenon which happened as a consequence of the Italian economic miracle of the 1950–1960s. In addition, after centuries of net emigration, from the 1980s Italy has experienced large-scale immigration for the first time in modern history. Italian government data, in its annual report for 2019, estimated the amount of foreign nationals residing within Italy, including immigrants, to be at approximately 5.234 million people. Due to such large-scale immigration to the country, particularly from the early 2000s to 2014, the population peaked at 60.79 million. Since then, decreasing migration, a continuously falling birth rate, and continuous aging have led to a sharp decrease in the Italian population. High fertility and birth rates persisted until the 1970s, after which they started to dramatically decline, leading to rapid population aging. At the end of the late 2000s, one in five Italians were over 65 years old. Italy has experienced a short growth in birth rates. The total fertility rate temporarily rose from an all-time low of 1.18 children per woman in 1995 to 1.46 in 2010. Since then, fertility rates continued to drop, to reach a low of 1.24 in 2020. Since the revision of the Lateran Treaty in 1984, Italy has no official religion, although it continues to recognize the role the Catholic Church plays in Italian society. In 2017, 78% of the population identified as Catholic, 15% as non-believers or atheists, 2% as other Christians and 6% adhered to other religions. | 2001-09-15T16:37:17Z | 2023-12-28T14:05:40Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy |
14,701 | Politics of Italy | The politics of Italy are conducted through a parliamentary republic with a multi-party system. Italy has been a democratic republic since 2 June 1946, when the monarchy was abolished by popular referendum and a constituent assembly was elected to draft a constitution, which was promulgated on 1 January 1948.
Executive power is exercised by the Council of Ministers, which is led by the Prime Minister, officially referred to as "President of the Council" (Presidente del Consiglio). Legislative power is vested primarily in the two houses of Parliament and secondarily in the Council of Ministers, which can introduce bills and holds the majority in both houses. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislative branches. It is headed by the High Council of the Judiciary, a body presided over by the President, who is the head of state, though this position is separate from all branches. The current president is Sergio Mattarella, and the current prime minister is Giorgia Meloni.
The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Italy as a "flawed democracy" in 2019. A high degree of fragmentation and instability, leading to often short-lived coalition governments, is characteristic of Italian politics. Since the end of World War II in 1945, Italy has had 69 governments, at an average of one every 1.11 years.
The Italian constitution is the result of the work of the Constituent Assembly, which was formed by the representatives of all the anti-fascist forces that contributed to the defeat of Nazi and Fascist forces during the Italian Civil War. Article 1 of the Italian constitution states:
Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on labour. Sovereignty belongs to the people and is exercised by the people in the forms and within the limits of the Constitution
By stating that Italy is a democratic republic, the article solemnly declares the results of the constitutional referendum which took place on 1 June 1946. The State is not a hereditary property of the ruling monarch, but it is instead a Res Publica, belonging to everyone.
The people who are called to temporarily administer the republic are not owners, but servants; and the governed are not subjects, but citizens. And the sovereignty, that is the power to make choices that involve the entire community, belongs to the people, in accordance with the concept of a democracy, from the Greek demos (people) and kratìa (power). However, this power is not to be exercised arbitrarily, but in the forms and within the limits established by the rule of law.
As the head of state, the President of Italy, officially denoted as President of the Italian Republic, represents national unity, and guarantees that Italian politics comply with the Constitution. These duties previously were given to the King of Italy. The President of Italy is the commander-in-chief of the Italian Armed Forces and chairs the High Council of the Judiciary. A president's term of office lasts for seven years.
The President of Italy is elected by an electoral college of about 1,000 members (1,009 in the 2022 election). It comprises both chambers of the Italian Parliament—the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic—meeting in joint session, combined with 58 special electors appointed by the regional councils of the 20 regions of Italy. Three representatives come from each region (save for the Aosta Valley, which due to its small size only appoints one), so as to guarantee representation for localities and minorities.
With article 48 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to vote, the people exercise their power through their elected representatives in the Parliament. The Parliament has a bicameral system, and consists of the Chamber of deputies and the Senate, elected every five years. The two houses together form a perfect bicameral system, meaning they perform identical functions, but do so separately.
The Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the bicameral Italian Parliament, has 400 members, of which 392 are elected from Italian constituencies and 8 from Italian citizens living abroad. Members of the Chamber of Deputies are styled The Honourable (Italian: Onorevole) and meet at Palazzo Montecitorio in Rome.
The Senate of the Republic, the upper house of the bicameral Italian Parliament, has 200 members, of which 196 are elected from Italian constituencies and 4 from Italian citizens living abroad. In addition, there is a variable number (currently 6) of senators for life (senatori a vita), either appointed by the President of the Republic or rightfully so as former Presidents of the Republic. Members of the Senate are styled Senator or The Honourable Senator (Italian: Onorevole Senatore) and meet at Palazzo Madama in Rome.
The Constitution establishes the Government of Italy as composed of the president of the council (Prime Minister of Italy) and ministers. The President of Italy appoints the prime minister and, on their proposal, the ministers that form its cabinet.
The Prime Minister of Italy, officially the President of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic, is the head of government of the Italian Republic. The Prime Minister of Italy must have the confidence of the Italian Parliament to stay in office. The Prime Minister of Italy is the president of the Council of Ministers which holds executive power and the position is similar to those in most other parliamentary systems. The formal Italian order of precedence lists the office as being, ceremonially, the fourth-highest Italian state office after the president and the heads of the legislative chambers.
The Council of Ministers is the principal executive organ of the Government of Italy. It comprises the President of the council (the Prime Minister of Italy), all the ministers, and the undersecretary to the President of the council. Deputy ministers (Italian: viceministri) and junior ministers (Italian: sottosegretari) are part of the government, but are not members of the Council of Ministers.
The law of Italy has a plurality of sources of production. These are arranged in a hierarchical scale, under which the rule of a lower source cannot conflict with the rule of an upper source (hierarchy of sources). The Constitution of 1948 is the main source.
The Constitution states that justice is administered in the name of the people and that judges are subject only to the law. So the judiciary is a branch that is completely autonomous and independent of all other branches of power, even though the Minister of Justice is responsible for the organization and functioning of those services involved with justice and has the power to originate disciplinary actions against judges, which are then administered by the High Council of the Judiciary, presided over by the President.
The judiciary of Italy is based on Roman law, the Napoleonic code and later statutes. It is based on a mix of the adversarial and inquisitorial civil law systems, although the adversarial system was adopted in the Appeal Courts in 1988. Appeals are treated almost as new trials, and three degrees of trial are present. The third is a legitimating trial.
In November 2014, Italy accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.
Before 2021, the minimum voting age for all elections was 18 years old, aside for Senate elections, where the minimum voting age was 25 years old. Following the approval of Constitutional Law No. 1/2021, the minimum voting age for the Senate of the Republic became the same as for the Chamber of Deputies (18 years old and no longer 25). The 2022 Italian general election was the first one in which both chambers had identical electoral bodies.
Italy's dramatic self-renewal transformed the political landscape between 1992 and 1997. Scandal investigations touched thousands of politicians, administrators and businessmen; the shift from a proportional to an Additional Member System (with the requirement to obtain a minimum of 4% of the national vote to obtain representation) also altered the political landscape. Party changes were sweeping. The Christian Democratic party dissolved; the Italian People's Party and the Christian Democratic Center emerged. Other major parties, such as the Socialists, saw support plummet. A new liberal movement, Forza Italia, gained wide support among moderate voters. The National Alliance broke from the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). A trend toward two large coalitions (one on the center-left and the other on the center-right) emerged from the April 1995 regional elections. For the 1996 national elections, the center-left parties created the Olive Tree coalition while the center-right united again under the House of Freedoms. These coalitions continued into the 2001 and 2007 national elections.
This emerging bipolarity represents a major break from the fragmented, multi-party political landscape of the postwar era, although it appears to have reached a plateau since efforts via referendums to further curtail the influence of small parties were defeated in 1999, 2000 and 2009.
Five regions (Aosta Valley, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sardinia, Sicily and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol) have special charters granting them varying degrees of autonomy. The raisons d'être of these charters is in most cases the presence of significant linguistic and cultural minorities, but in the case of Sicily it was to calm down separatist movements. The other 15 regions were in practice established in 1970, even if their ideation had been a much earlier idea.
There have been frequent government turnovers since 1945, indeed there have been 66 governments in this time. The dominance of the Christian Democratic party (DC) during much of the post-war period lent continuity and comparative stability to Italy's political situation, mainly dominated by the attempt of keeping the Italian Communist Party (PCI) out of power in order to maintain Cold War equilibrium in the region (see May 1947 crisis).
The Italian Communists were in the government only in the national unity governments before 1948, in which their party's secretary Palmiro Togliatti was minister of Justice. After the first democratic elections with universal suffrage in 1948 in which the Christian Democracy and their allies won against the popular front of the Italian Communist and Socialist (PSI) parties, the Italian Communist Party never returned in the government.
The system had been nicknamed the "imperfect bipolarism", referring to more proper bipolarism in other Western countries (such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States) where right-wing and left-wing parties alternated in government. Meanwhile, rising post-war tensions between right-wing and left-wing parties in Italy brought to the radicalization and proliferation of numerous far-left and far-right terrorist organizations throughout the country.
The main event in the First Republic in the 1960s was the inclusion of the Italian Socialist Party in the government after the reducing edge of the Christian Democracy (DC) had forced them to accept this alliance. In 1960, attempts to incorporate the Italian Social Movement (MSI) within the Tambroni Cabinet, a neo-fascist far-right party and the only surviving political remnant of the Republican Fascist Party that was disbanded in the aftermath of the Italian Civil War (1943–1945), led to short-lived riots in the summer of the same year; as a consequence, Fernando Tambroni was eventually replaced by the Christian Democrat politician Amintore Fanfani as Prime Minister of Italy.
Aldo Moro, a relatively left-leaning Christian Democrat, inspired the alliance between the Christian Democracy and the Italian Socialist Party. He would later try to include the Italian Communist Party as well with a deal called the "historic compromise". However, this attempt at compromise was stopped by the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978 by the Red Brigades (BR), an extremist left-wing terrorist organization.
The Italian Communist Party was at this point the largest communist party in Western Europe, and remained such for the rest of its existence. Their ability to attract members was largely due to their pragmatic stance, especially their rejection of political extremism and to their growing independence from the Soviet Union (see Eurocommunism). The Italian Communist Party was especially strong in regions like Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, where communists had been elected to stable government positions. This practical political experience may have contributed to their taking a more pragmatic approach to politics.
On 12 December 1969, a roughly decade-long period of extremist left- and right-wing political terrorism, known as The Years of Lead (as in the metal of bullets, Italian: anni di piombo), began with the Piazza Fontana bombing in the center of Milan. Neofascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra later declared the bombing to be an attempt to push the Italian state to declare a state of emergency in order to lead to a more authoritative state. A bomb left in a bank killed about twenty and was initially blamed on anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli. This accusation was hotly contested by left-wing circles, especially the Maoist Student Movement, which had support in those years from some students of Milan's universities and who considered the bombing to have all the marks of a fascist operation. Their guess proved correct, but only after many years of difficult investigations.
The strategy of tension attempted to blame the left for bombings carried out by right-wing terrorists. Fascist "black terrorists", such as Ordine Nuovo and the Avanguardia Nazionale, were in the 1980s and 1990s found to be responsible for several terrorist attacks. On the other extreme of the political spectrum, the leftist Red Brigades carried out assassinations against specific persons, but were not responsible for any blind bombings. The Red Brigades killed socialist journalist Walter Tobagi and in their most famous operation kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democracy, who was trying to involve the Communist Party in the government through the compromesso storico ("historic compromise"), to which the radical left as well as Washington were opposed.
The last and largest of the bombings, known as the Bologna massacre, destroyed the city's railway station in 1980. This was found to be a neofascist bombing, in which Propaganda Due was involved. On 24 October 1990, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (DC) revealed to the Parliament the existence of Gladio, NATO's secret "stay-behind" networks which stocked weapons in order to facilitate an armed resistance in case of a communist coup. In 2000, a Parliament Commission report from the Olive Tree (centre-left) coalition concluded that the strategy of tension followed by Gladio had been supported by the United States to "stop the PCI and, to a certain degree, the PSI [Italian Socialist Party] from reaching executive power in the country".
With the end of the lead years, the Communist Party gradually increased their votes under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer. The Italian Socialist Party, led by Bettino Craxi, became more and more critical of the communists and of the Soviet Union; Craxi himself pushed in favor of Ronald Reagan's positioning of Pershing II missiles in Italy, a move many communists strongly disapproved of.
As the Socialist Party moved to more moderate positions, it attracted many reformists, some of whom were irritated by the failure of the communists to modernize. Increasingly, many on the left began to see the communists as old and out of fashion while Craxi and the socialists seemed to represent a new liberal socialism. The Communist Party surpassed the Christian Democrats only in the European elections of 1984, held barely two days after Berlinguer's death, a passing that likely drew sympathy from many voters. The election of 1984 was to be the only time the Christian Democrats did not emerge as the largest party in a nationwide election in which they participated.
In 1987, one year after the Chernobyl disaster following a referendum in that year, a nuclear phase-out was commenced. Italy's four nuclear power plants were closed down, the last in 1990. A moratorium on the construction of new plants, originally in effect from 1987 until 1993, has since been extended indefinitely.
In these years, corruption began to be more extensive, a development that would be exposed in the early 1990s and nicknamed Tangentopoli. With the mani pulite investigation, starting just one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the whole power structure faltered and seemingly indestructible parties, such as the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party, disbanded whereas the Communist Party changed its name to the Democratic Party of the Left and took the role of the Socialist Party as the main social democratic party in Italy. What was to follow was then called the transition to the Second Republic.
From 1992 to 1997, Italy faced significant challenges as voters, disenchanted with past political paralysis, massive government debt, extensive corruption and organized crime's considerable influence, collectively called Tangentopoli after being uncovered by mani pulite, demanded political, economic and ethical reforms.
In the Italian referendums of 1993, voters approved substantial changes, including moving from a proportional to an Additional Member System, which is largely dominated by a majoritarian electoral system and the abolition of some ministries, some of which have been reintroduced with only partly modified names, such as the Ministry of Agriculture reincarnated as the Ministry of Agricultural Resources.
Major political parties, beset by scandal and loss of voter confidence, underwent far-reaching changes. New political forces and new alignments of power emerged in the March 1994 national elections. This election saw a major turnover in the new parliament, with 452 out of 630 deputies and 213 out of 315 senators elected for the first time.
The 1994 elections also swept media magnate Silvio Berlusconi (leader of Pole of Freedoms coalition) into office as prime minister. However, Berlusconi was forced to step down in December 1994 when the Northern League withdrew support. The Berlusconi government was succeeded by a technical government headed by Prime Minister Lamberto Dini, which left office in early 1996.
A series of center-left coalitions dominated Italy's political landscape between 1996 and 2001. In April 1996, national elections led to the victory of a center-left coalition, The Olive Tree, under the leadership of Romano Prodi. Prodi's government became the third-longest to stay in power before he narrowly lost a vote of confidence, by three votes, in October 1998.
In May 1999, the Parliament selected Carlo Azeglio Ciampi as the President of the Republic. Ciampi, a former prime minister and Minister of the Treasury and before entering the government also the governor of the Bank of Italy, was elected on the first ballot by a comfortable margin over the required two-thirds of the votes.
A new government was formed by the Democrats of the Left leader and former communist Massimo D'Alema, but in April 2000 he resigned following poor performance by his coalition in regional elections.
The succeeding center-left government, including most of the same parties, was headed by Giuliano Amato, a social democrat, who had previously served as prime minister in 1992–1993 and had at the time sworn never to return to active politics.
National elections held on 13 May 2001 returned Berlusconi to power at the head of the five-party center-right House of Freedoms coalition, comprising the Prime Minister's own party, Forza Italia, the National Alliance, the Northern League, the Christian Democratic Centre and the United Christian Democrats.
Between 17 May 2006 and 21 February 2007, Romano Prodi served as prime minister of Italy following the narrow victory of his The Union coalition over the House of Freedoms led by Silvio Berlusconi in the April 2006 Italian elections. Following a government crisis, Prodi submitted his resignation on 21 February 2007. Three days later, he was asked by President Giorgio Napolitano to stay on as prime minister and he agreed to do so. On 28 February 2007, Prodi narrowly survived a senate no confidence vote.
On 24 January 2008, the Prodi II Cabinet went through a new crisis because Minister of Justice Clemente Mastella retracted his support to the Cabinet. Consequently, the Prodi Cabinet lost the vote of confidence and the President Giorgio Napolitano called a new general election.
The election set against two new parties, the Democratic Party (founded in October 2007 by the union of the Democrats of the Left and The Daisy) led by Walter Veltroni: and The People of Freedom (federation of Forza Italia, National Alliance and other parties) led by Silvio Berlusconi. The Democratic Party was in alliance with Italy of Values while The People of Freedom forged an alliance with the Northern League and the Movement for Autonomy. The coalition led by Berlusconi won the election and the leader of the centre-right created the Berlusconi IV Cabinet.
The Monti government had the highest average age in the western world (64 years), with its youngest members being 57. The previous Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti is 70, his predecessor Silvio Berlusconi was 75 at the time of resignation (2011), the previous head of the government Romano Prodi was 70 when he stepped down (2008), the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano is 88 and his predecessor Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was 86. In 2013, the youngest among the candidates for prime minister (Pier Luigi Bersani) is 62, the others being 70 and 78. The current average age of Italian university professors is 63, of bank directors and CEOs 67, of members of parliament 56 and of labor union representatives 59.
The new Italian government headed by Enrico Letta took two months to form and made international news when Luigi Preiti shot at policemen near the building where they were swearing in the new government on Sunday 28 April 2013.
Former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi became the youngest prime minister at 39 years and his government had the youngest average age in Europe.
At different times since his entering the Italian Parliament, Silvio Berlusconi, leader of the centre-right, had repeatedly vowed to stop the "communists", while leftist parties had insisted that they would oust Berlusconi. Thus, despite the fact that the executive branch bears responsibility toward the Parliament, the governments led by Mario Monti (since 2011) and by Enrico Letta (since 2013) were called "unelected governments" because they won a vote of confidence by a Parliament coalition formed by centre-right and left-right parties that had in turn obtained parliamentary seats by taking part in the elections as competitors, rather than allies. While formally complying with law and procedures, the creation of these governments did not comply with the decision made by people through the election.
Meanwhile, in 2013, a ruling by the Constitutional Court of Italy established that the Italian electoral system employed to elect the Parliament breached a number of Constitutional requirements. Notably, the Court observed the following four facts: 1) "such a legislation deprives the elector of any margin of choice of its representatives"; 2) "all of the elected parliamentarians, with no exception, lack the support of a personal designation by the citizens"; 3) the electoral law has regulations which "exclude any ability on the part of the elector to have an influence on the election of his/her representatives"; 4) and contains conditions such that "they alter the representative relationship between electors and elected people...they coerce the electors' freedom of choice in the election of their representatives to the Parliament...and consequently they are at odds with the democratic principle, by affecting the very freedom of vote provided for by art. 48 of the Constitution". This implies that, despite being called – and acting as – a legitimate "parliament", the legislative assembly of Italy was chosen with a vote system by which the right to vote was not exercised according to the Italian fundamental chart of citizen's rights and duties. The issue was a major one, to the extent that the Constitutional Court itself ruled that the Italian Parliament should remain in charge only to reform the electoral system and then should be dissolved.
The new government led by Matteo Renzi proposed a new electoral law. The so-called Italicum was approved in 2015 and came into force on 1 July 2016.
Renzi resigned after losing a constitutional referendum in December 2016, and was succeeded by Paolo Gentiloni. The centre-left cabinets were plagued by the aftermath of the European debt crisis and the European migrant crisis, that fueled support for populist and right-wing parties. In 2017, the so-called Italicum was replaced by a new electoral law, which uses a parallel voting system to assign seats.
The 2018 general election produced once again a hung parliament that resulted in the birth of an unlikely populist government between the anti-system Five Star Movement (M5S) and Salvini's League, led by Giuseppe Conte. After fourteen months, the League withdrew its support to Conte, who subsequently allied with the Democratic Party and other smaller left-wing parties to form a new cabinet.
In 2020, Italy was severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. From March to May, Conte's government imposed a national quarantine as a measure to limit the spread of the pandemic. The measures, despite being widely approved by public opinion, were also described as the largest suppression of constitutional rights in the history of the republic. With more than 100,000 confirmed victims, Italy was one of the countries with the highest total number of deaths in the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic caused also a severe economic disruption, which resulted in Italy being one of the most affected countries. In February 2021, these extraordinary circumstances brought to the formation of a national coalition government led by former president of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi, following IV's decision to withdraw its support to the second Conte cabinet. On 13 February 2021, Draghi was sworn in as Italy's new prime minister. The Draghi Cabinet had support across the broad political spectrum. In January 2022, Italian President Sergio Mattarella was re-elected to serve a second consecutive seven-year term.
On 21 July 2022, following a government crisis which ended with FI, League and the M5S deciding to withdraw their support to the government, Prime Minister Draghi resigned. President Sergio Mattarella consequently dissolved the Parliament and called a snap election, which resulted in the centre-right coalition, led by Giorgia Meloni, gaining an absolute majority of seats. Meloni was formally sworn in as Italy's first female Prime Minister on 22 October 2022. | [
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The politics of Italy are conducted through a parliamentary republic with a multi-party system. Italy has been a democratic republic since 2 June 1946, when the monarchy was abolished by popular referendum and a constituent assembly was elected to draft a constitution, which was promulgated on 1 January 1948.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Executive power is exercised by the Council of Ministers, which is led by the Prime Minister, officially referred to as \"President of the Council\" (Presidente del Consiglio). Legislative power is vested primarily in the two houses of Parliament and secondarily in the Council of Ministers, which can introduce bills and holds the majority in both houses. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislative branches. It is headed by the High Council of the Judiciary, a body presided over by the President, who is the head of state, though this position is separate from all branches. The current president is Sergio Mattarella, and the current prime minister is Giorgia Meloni.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Italy as a \"flawed democracy\" in 2019. A high degree of fragmentation and instability, leading to often short-lived coalition governments, is characteristic of Italian politics. Since the end of World War II in 1945, Italy has had 69 governments, at an average of one every 1.11 years.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Italian constitution is the result of the work of the Constituent Assembly, which was formed by the representatives of all the anti-fascist forces that contributed to the defeat of Nazi and Fascist forces during the Italian Civil War. Article 1 of the Italian constitution states:",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on labour. Sovereignty belongs to the people and is exercised by the people in the forms and within the limits of the Constitution",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "By stating that Italy is a democratic republic, the article solemnly declares the results of the constitutional referendum which took place on 1 June 1946. The State is not a hereditary property of the ruling monarch, but it is instead a Res Publica, belonging to everyone.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The people who are called to temporarily administer the republic are not owners, but servants; and the governed are not subjects, but citizens. And the sovereignty, that is the power to make choices that involve the entire community, belongs to the people, in accordance with the concept of a democracy, from the Greek demos (people) and kratìa (power). However, this power is not to be exercised arbitrarily, but in the forms and within the limits established by the rule of law.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "As the head of state, the President of Italy, officially denoted as President of the Italian Republic, represents national unity, and guarantees that Italian politics comply with the Constitution. These duties previously were given to the King of Italy. The President of Italy is the commander-in-chief of the Italian Armed Forces and chairs the High Council of the Judiciary. A president's term of office lasts for seven years.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The President of Italy is elected by an electoral college of about 1,000 members (1,009 in the 2022 election). It comprises both chambers of the Italian Parliament—the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic—meeting in joint session, combined with 58 special electors appointed by the regional councils of the 20 regions of Italy. Three representatives come from each region (save for the Aosta Valley, which due to its small size only appoints one), so as to guarantee representation for localities and minorities.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "With article 48 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to vote, the people exercise their power through their elected representatives in the Parliament. The Parliament has a bicameral system, and consists of the Chamber of deputies and the Senate, elected every five years. The two houses together form a perfect bicameral system, meaning they perform identical functions, but do so separately.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the bicameral Italian Parliament, has 400 members, of which 392 are elected from Italian constituencies and 8 from Italian citizens living abroad. Members of the Chamber of Deputies are styled The Honourable (Italian: Onorevole) and meet at Palazzo Montecitorio in Rome.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Senate of the Republic, the upper house of the bicameral Italian Parliament, has 200 members, of which 196 are elected from Italian constituencies and 4 from Italian citizens living abroad. In addition, there is a variable number (currently 6) of senators for life (senatori a vita), either appointed by the President of the Republic or rightfully so as former Presidents of the Republic. Members of the Senate are styled Senator or The Honourable Senator (Italian: Onorevole Senatore) and meet at Palazzo Madama in Rome.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Constitution establishes the Government of Italy as composed of the president of the council (Prime Minister of Italy) and ministers. The President of Italy appoints the prime minister and, on their proposal, the ministers that form its cabinet.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Prime Minister of Italy, officially the President of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic, is the head of government of the Italian Republic. The Prime Minister of Italy must have the confidence of the Italian Parliament to stay in office. The Prime Minister of Italy is the president of the Council of Ministers which holds executive power and the position is similar to those in most other parliamentary systems. The formal Italian order of precedence lists the office as being, ceremonially, the fourth-highest Italian state office after the president and the heads of the legislative chambers.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Council of Ministers is the principal executive organ of the Government of Italy. It comprises the President of the council (the Prime Minister of Italy), all the ministers, and the undersecretary to the President of the council. Deputy ministers (Italian: viceministri) and junior ministers (Italian: sottosegretari) are part of the government, but are not members of the Council of Ministers.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The law of Italy has a plurality of sources of production. These are arranged in a hierarchical scale, under which the rule of a lower source cannot conflict with the rule of an upper source (hierarchy of sources). The Constitution of 1948 is the main source.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Constitution states that justice is administered in the name of the people and that judges are subject only to the law. So the judiciary is a branch that is completely autonomous and independent of all other branches of power, even though the Minister of Justice is responsible for the organization and functioning of those services involved with justice and has the power to originate disciplinary actions against judges, which are then administered by the High Council of the Judiciary, presided over by the President.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The judiciary of Italy is based on Roman law, the Napoleonic code and later statutes. It is based on a mix of the adversarial and inquisitorial civil law systems, although the adversarial system was adopted in the Appeal Courts in 1988. Appeals are treated almost as new trials, and three degrees of trial are present. The third is a legitimating trial.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In November 2014, Italy accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.",
"title": "Government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Before 2021, the minimum voting age for all elections was 18 years old, aside for Senate elections, where the minimum voting age was 25 years old. Following the approval of Constitutional Law No. 1/2021, the minimum voting age for the Senate of the Republic became the same as for the Chamber of Deputies (18 years old and no longer 25). The 2022 Italian general election was the first one in which both chambers had identical electoral bodies.",
"title": "Political parties and elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Italy's dramatic self-renewal transformed the political landscape between 1992 and 1997. Scandal investigations touched thousands of politicians, administrators and businessmen; the shift from a proportional to an Additional Member System (with the requirement to obtain a minimum of 4% of the national vote to obtain representation) also altered the political landscape. Party changes were sweeping. The Christian Democratic party dissolved; the Italian People's Party and the Christian Democratic Center emerged. Other major parties, such as the Socialists, saw support plummet. A new liberal movement, Forza Italia, gained wide support among moderate voters. The National Alliance broke from the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). A trend toward two large coalitions (one on the center-left and the other on the center-right) emerged from the April 1995 regional elections. For the 1996 national elections, the center-left parties created the Olive Tree coalition while the center-right united again under the House of Freedoms. These coalitions continued into the 2001 and 2007 national elections.",
"title": "Political parties and elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "This emerging bipolarity represents a major break from the fragmented, multi-party political landscape of the postwar era, although it appears to have reached a plateau since efforts via referendums to further curtail the influence of small parties were defeated in 1999, 2000 and 2009.",
"title": "Political parties and elections"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Five regions (Aosta Valley, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Sardinia, Sicily and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol) have special charters granting them varying degrees of autonomy. The raisons d'être of these charters is in most cases the presence of significant linguistic and cultural minorities, but in the case of Sicily it was to calm down separatist movements. The other 15 regions were in practice established in 1970, even if their ideation had been a much earlier idea.",
"title": "Regional governments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "There have been frequent government turnovers since 1945, indeed there have been 66 governments in this time. The dominance of the Christian Democratic party (DC) during much of the post-war period lent continuity and comparative stability to Italy's political situation, mainly dominated by the attempt of keeping the Italian Communist Party (PCI) out of power in order to maintain Cold War equilibrium in the region (see May 1947 crisis).",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Italian Communists were in the government only in the national unity governments before 1948, in which their party's secretary Palmiro Togliatti was minister of Justice. After the first democratic elections with universal suffrage in 1948 in which the Christian Democracy and their allies won against the popular front of the Italian Communist and Socialist (PSI) parties, the Italian Communist Party never returned in the government.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The system had been nicknamed the \"imperfect bipolarism\", referring to more proper bipolarism in other Western countries (such as France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States) where right-wing and left-wing parties alternated in government. Meanwhile, rising post-war tensions between right-wing and left-wing parties in Italy brought to the radicalization and proliferation of numerous far-left and far-right terrorist organizations throughout the country.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The main event in the First Republic in the 1960s was the inclusion of the Italian Socialist Party in the government after the reducing edge of the Christian Democracy (DC) had forced them to accept this alliance. In 1960, attempts to incorporate the Italian Social Movement (MSI) within the Tambroni Cabinet, a neo-fascist far-right party and the only surviving political remnant of the Republican Fascist Party that was disbanded in the aftermath of the Italian Civil War (1943–1945), led to short-lived riots in the summer of the same year; as a consequence, Fernando Tambroni was eventually replaced by the Christian Democrat politician Amintore Fanfani as Prime Minister of Italy.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Aldo Moro, a relatively left-leaning Christian Democrat, inspired the alliance between the Christian Democracy and the Italian Socialist Party. He would later try to include the Italian Communist Party as well with a deal called the \"historic compromise\". However, this attempt at compromise was stopped by the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in 1978 by the Red Brigades (BR), an extremist left-wing terrorist organization.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Italian Communist Party was at this point the largest communist party in Western Europe, and remained such for the rest of its existence. Their ability to attract members was largely due to their pragmatic stance, especially their rejection of political extremism and to their growing independence from the Soviet Union (see Eurocommunism). The Italian Communist Party was especially strong in regions like Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, where communists had been elected to stable government positions. This practical political experience may have contributed to their taking a more pragmatic approach to politics.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "On 12 December 1969, a roughly decade-long period of extremist left- and right-wing political terrorism, known as The Years of Lead (as in the metal of bullets, Italian: anni di piombo), began with the Piazza Fontana bombing in the center of Milan. Neofascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra later declared the bombing to be an attempt to push the Italian state to declare a state of emergency in order to lead to a more authoritative state. A bomb left in a bank killed about twenty and was initially blamed on anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli. This accusation was hotly contested by left-wing circles, especially the Maoist Student Movement, which had support in those years from some students of Milan's universities and who considered the bombing to have all the marks of a fascist operation. Their guess proved correct, but only after many years of difficult investigations.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The strategy of tension attempted to blame the left for bombings carried out by right-wing terrorists. Fascist \"black terrorists\", such as Ordine Nuovo and the Avanguardia Nazionale, were in the 1980s and 1990s found to be responsible for several terrorist attacks. On the other extreme of the political spectrum, the leftist Red Brigades carried out assassinations against specific persons, but were not responsible for any blind bombings. The Red Brigades killed socialist journalist Walter Tobagi and in their most famous operation kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democracy, who was trying to involve the Communist Party in the government through the compromesso storico (\"historic compromise\"), to which the radical left as well as Washington were opposed.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The last and largest of the bombings, known as the Bologna massacre, destroyed the city's railway station in 1980. This was found to be a neofascist bombing, in which Propaganda Due was involved. On 24 October 1990, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (DC) revealed to the Parliament the existence of Gladio, NATO's secret \"stay-behind\" networks which stocked weapons in order to facilitate an armed resistance in case of a communist coup. In 2000, a Parliament Commission report from the Olive Tree (centre-left) coalition concluded that the strategy of tension followed by Gladio had been supported by the United States to \"stop the PCI and, to a certain degree, the PSI [Italian Socialist Party] from reaching executive power in the country\".",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "With the end of the lead years, the Communist Party gradually increased their votes under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer. The Italian Socialist Party, led by Bettino Craxi, became more and more critical of the communists and of the Soviet Union; Craxi himself pushed in favor of Ronald Reagan's positioning of Pershing II missiles in Italy, a move many communists strongly disapproved of.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "As the Socialist Party moved to more moderate positions, it attracted many reformists, some of whom were irritated by the failure of the communists to modernize. Increasingly, many on the left began to see the communists as old and out of fashion while Craxi and the socialists seemed to represent a new liberal socialism. The Communist Party surpassed the Christian Democrats only in the European elections of 1984, held barely two days after Berlinguer's death, a passing that likely drew sympathy from many voters. The election of 1984 was to be the only time the Christian Democrats did not emerge as the largest party in a nationwide election in which they participated.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1987, one year after the Chernobyl disaster following a referendum in that year, a nuclear phase-out was commenced. Italy's four nuclear power plants were closed down, the last in 1990. A moratorium on the construction of new plants, originally in effect from 1987 until 1993, has since been extended indefinitely.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In these years, corruption began to be more extensive, a development that would be exposed in the early 1990s and nicknamed Tangentopoli. With the mani pulite investigation, starting just one year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the whole power structure faltered and seemingly indestructible parties, such as the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party, disbanded whereas the Communist Party changed its name to the Democratic Party of the Left and took the role of the Socialist Party as the main social democratic party in Italy. What was to follow was then called the transition to the Second Republic.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "From 1992 to 1997, Italy faced significant challenges as voters, disenchanted with past political paralysis, massive government debt, extensive corruption and organized crime's considerable influence, collectively called Tangentopoli after being uncovered by mani pulite, demanded political, economic and ethical reforms.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In the Italian referendums of 1993, voters approved substantial changes, including moving from a proportional to an Additional Member System, which is largely dominated by a majoritarian electoral system and the abolition of some ministries, some of which have been reintroduced with only partly modified names, such as the Ministry of Agriculture reincarnated as the Ministry of Agricultural Resources.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Major political parties, beset by scandal and loss of voter confidence, underwent far-reaching changes. New political forces and new alignments of power emerged in the March 1994 national elections. This election saw a major turnover in the new parliament, with 452 out of 630 deputies and 213 out of 315 senators elected for the first time.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The 1994 elections also swept media magnate Silvio Berlusconi (leader of Pole of Freedoms coalition) into office as prime minister. However, Berlusconi was forced to step down in December 1994 when the Northern League withdrew support. The Berlusconi government was succeeded by a technical government headed by Prime Minister Lamberto Dini, which left office in early 1996.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "A series of center-left coalitions dominated Italy's political landscape between 1996 and 2001. In April 1996, national elections led to the victory of a center-left coalition, The Olive Tree, under the leadership of Romano Prodi. Prodi's government became the third-longest to stay in power before he narrowly lost a vote of confidence, by three votes, in October 1998.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In May 1999, the Parliament selected Carlo Azeglio Ciampi as the President of the Republic. Ciampi, a former prime minister and Minister of the Treasury and before entering the government also the governor of the Bank of Italy, was elected on the first ballot by a comfortable margin over the required two-thirds of the votes.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "A new government was formed by the Democrats of the Left leader and former communist Massimo D'Alema, but in April 2000 he resigned following poor performance by his coalition in regional elections.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The succeeding center-left government, including most of the same parties, was headed by Giuliano Amato, a social democrat, who had previously served as prime minister in 1992–1993 and had at the time sworn never to return to active politics.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "National elections held on 13 May 2001 returned Berlusconi to power at the head of the five-party center-right House of Freedoms coalition, comprising the Prime Minister's own party, Forza Italia, the National Alliance, the Northern League, the Christian Democratic Centre and the United Christian Democrats.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Between 17 May 2006 and 21 February 2007, Romano Prodi served as prime minister of Italy following the narrow victory of his The Union coalition over the House of Freedoms led by Silvio Berlusconi in the April 2006 Italian elections. Following a government crisis, Prodi submitted his resignation on 21 February 2007. Three days later, he was asked by President Giorgio Napolitano to stay on as prime minister and he agreed to do so. On 28 February 2007, Prodi narrowly survived a senate no confidence vote.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "On 24 January 2008, the Prodi II Cabinet went through a new crisis because Minister of Justice Clemente Mastella retracted his support to the Cabinet. Consequently, the Prodi Cabinet lost the vote of confidence and the President Giorgio Napolitano called a new general election.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The election set against two new parties, the Democratic Party (founded in October 2007 by the union of the Democrats of the Left and The Daisy) led by Walter Veltroni: and The People of Freedom (federation of Forza Italia, National Alliance and other parties) led by Silvio Berlusconi. The Democratic Party was in alliance with Italy of Values while The People of Freedom forged an alliance with the Northern League and the Movement for Autonomy. The coalition led by Berlusconi won the election and the leader of the centre-right created the Berlusconi IV Cabinet.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Monti government had the highest average age in the western world (64 years), with its youngest members being 57. The previous Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti is 70, his predecessor Silvio Berlusconi was 75 at the time of resignation (2011), the previous head of the government Romano Prodi was 70 when he stepped down (2008), the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano is 88 and his predecessor Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was 86. In 2013, the youngest among the candidates for prime minister (Pier Luigi Bersani) is 62, the others being 70 and 78. The current average age of Italian university professors is 63, of bank directors and CEOs 67, of members of parliament 56 and of labor union representatives 59.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The new Italian government headed by Enrico Letta took two months to form and made international news when Luigi Preiti shot at policemen near the building where they were swearing in the new government on Sunday 28 April 2013.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi became the youngest prime minister at 39 years and his government had the youngest average age in Europe.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "At different times since his entering the Italian Parliament, Silvio Berlusconi, leader of the centre-right, had repeatedly vowed to stop the \"communists\", while leftist parties had insisted that they would oust Berlusconi. Thus, despite the fact that the executive branch bears responsibility toward the Parliament, the governments led by Mario Monti (since 2011) and by Enrico Letta (since 2013) were called \"unelected governments\" because they won a vote of confidence by a Parliament coalition formed by centre-right and left-right parties that had in turn obtained parliamentary seats by taking part in the elections as competitors, rather than allies. While formally complying with law and procedures, the creation of these governments did not comply with the decision made by people through the election.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Meanwhile, in 2013, a ruling by the Constitutional Court of Italy established that the Italian electoral system employed to elect the Parliament breached a number of Constitutional requirements. Notably, the Court observed the following four facts: 1) \"such a legislation deprives the elector of any margin of choice of its representatives\"; 2) \"all of the elected parliamentarians, with no exception, lack the support of a personal designation by the citizens\"; 3) the electoral law has regulations which \"exclude any ability on the part of the elector to have an influence on the election of his/her representatives\"; 4) and contains conditions such that \"they alter the representative relationship between electors and elected people...they coerce the electors' freedom of choice in the election of their representatives to the Parliament...and consequently they are at odds with the democratic principle, by affecting the very freedom of vote provided for by art. 48 of the Constitution\". This implies that, despite being called – and acting as – a legitimate \"parliament\", the legislative assembly of Italy was chosen with a vote system by which the right to vote was not exercised according to the Italian fundamental chart of citizen's rights and duties. The issue was a major one, to the extent that the Constitutional Court itself ruled that the Italian Parliament should remain in charge only to reform the electoral system and then should be dissolved.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The new government led by Matteo Renzi proposed a new electoral law. The so-called Italicum was approved in 2015 and came into force on 1 July 2016.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Renzi resigned after losing a constitutional referendum in December 2016, and was succeeded by Paolo Gentiloni. The centre-left cabinets were plagued by the aftermath of the European debt crisis and the European migrant crisis, that fueled support for populist and right-wing parties. In 2017, the so-called Italicum was replaced by a new electoral law, which uses a parallel voting system to assign seats.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The 2018 general election produced once again a hung parliament that resulted in the birth of an unlikely populist government between the anti-system Five Star Movement (M5S) and Salvini's League, led by Giuseppe Conte. After fourteen months, the League withdrew its support to Conte, who subsequently allied with the Democratic Party and other smaller left-wing parties to form a new cabinet.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In 2020, Italy was severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. From March to May, Conte's government imposed a national quarantine as a measure to limit the spread of the pandemic. The measures, despite being widely approved by public opinion, were also described as the largest suppression of constitutional rights in the history of the republic. With more than 100,000 confirmed victims, Italy was one of the countries with the highest total number of deaths in the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic caused also a severe economic disruption, which resulted in Italy being one of the most affected countries. In February 2021, these extraordinary circumstances brought to the formation of a national coalition government led by former president of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi, following IV's decision to withdraw its support to the second Conte cabinet. On 13 February 2021, Draghi was sworn in as Italy's new prime minister. The Draghi Cabinet had support across the broad political spectrum. In January 2022, Italian President Sergio Mattarella was re-elected to serve a second consecutive seven-year term.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "On 21 July 2022, following a government crisis which ended with FI, League and the M5S deciding to withdraw their support to the government, Prime Minister Draghi resigned. President Sergio Mattarella consequently dissolved the Parliament and called a snap election, which resulted in the centre-right coalition, led by Giorgia Meloni, gaining an absolute majority of seats. Meloni was formally sworn in as Italy's first female Prime Minister on 22 October 2022.",
"title": "History of the post-war political landscape"
}
]
| The politics of Italy are conducted through a parliamentary republic with a multi-party system. Italy has been a democratic republic since 2 June 1946, when the monarchy was abolished by popular referendum and a constituent assembly was elected to draft a constitution, which was promulgated on 1 January 1948. Executive power is exercised by the Council of Ministers, which is led by the Prime Minister, officially referred to as "President of the Council". Legislative power is vested primarily in the two houses of Parliament and secondarily in the Council of Ministers, which can introduce bills and holds the majority in both houses. The judiciary is independent of the executive and the legislative branches. It is headed by the High Council of the Judiciary, a body presided over by the President, who is the head of state, though this position is separate from all branches. The current president is Sergio Mattarella, and the current prime minister is Giorgia Meloni. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Italy as a "flawed democracy" in 2019. A high degree of fragmentation and instability, leading to often short-lived coalition governments, is characteristic of Italian politics. Since the end of World War II in 1945, Italy has had 69 governments, at an average of one every 1.11 years. | 2001-05-05T03:00:33Z | 2023-12-26T19:33:11Z | [
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Italy |
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